Curse

timmyw29 · Sep 05, 2006, 12:50 AM // 00:50

One thing to note about most of the primary attributes in the game is:
The primary attribute's effect is not restricted by the profession of skills being used by a given character.

Expertise affects all "skills" and "attacks" and "stances" etc in the game, no matter what profession the skill/attack/stance comes from.

Energy Storage innately increases the energy pool available, regardless of the secondary profession.

Strength gives armor penetration bonuses to attack skills, regardless of what profession the attack skill is from.

Fast Casting affects the cast speed of all spells, ALSO regardless of profession... I'm just goign to leave this "regardless..." bit off in the rest of these.

Soul Reaping gives benefits no matter what profession/creature/thing dies.

Critical Strikes benefits all critical hits.

I'm led to believe that the Ritualist primary attribute (though I forget what it's called) affects minions and ranger spirits, also.

The only primary attribute that doesn't seem to give benefits to other professions: Divine Favor. Why? Monks are essential to any high-level PvP build, at least in the current metagame. Hopefully people agree with me on this.

Basically, Expertise is only barely overpowered in serious PvP. The pressure provided by thumpers is great, yes, and dangerous. I would not go so far as to say it's overpowered compared to a hammer warrior. Thumpers have lower armor than warriors, and therefore are easier to kill. They're subject to many of the same limitations as all melee-based dd's (blind, cripple...).
It all comes down to playing the right tactics with what you have in your offence. Thumpers sacrifice armor-based defence for offensive pressure. Warriors balance the two a bit more, and thus can overextend a little more to compensate.

Trying to get back on track here >_<
Yes Expertise is a powerful primary attribute, but there just isn't enough in the game to warrant a serious nerf to it. The only thing I can think of as a way to fix touchers and thumpers, really, if it MUST be done:
Expertise wields only half its total benefit to non-ranger skills.

Master Fuhon · Sep 05, 2006, 01:01 AM // 01:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR-

I don't honestly yet know how you could tweak thumpers to be more balanced, without hurting Hammer Warriors or Beastmastery as a whole. It's a tricky problem, with no simple solution. The best I have yet to think of up to now would be making Tigers Fury black out adrenaline skills aswell. This has the interesting side effect of being a pretty big hit on IWAY, which I personally don't mind.

I'm going to agree on the change you made to Tiger's Fury, but it might warrant an energy cost reduction down to 5. A/R with beastmastery and W/R with energy skills would certainly not be overpowered. The only question is whether this would be balanced with Flurry's 25% damage reduction because of the non-attack skill shutdown and the 10 second cooldown. Tiger's Stance and Berserker's Stance still look bad because they are.

But I'm adding that Irresistable Blow is something that needs to be looked at more. Given the current penalties on knockdowns (Shock, Gale, Shove), this skill is easily overpowered. It's a conditional skill, but it always hits or it always knocks someone down. This skill makes just about every blocking self defense skill (warrior stances, elementalist enchants, etc) look absolutely pathetic when you consider that a caster fears the hammer more than anything else. Unlike Swift Chop/Seeking Blade, knockdown is a condition that stacks. It also makes Warrior's Cunning/Way of the Fox skills look bad if these types of skills can be spammed.

I think everyone notes the point about the Thumper's repeated knockdowns and ability to negate self defenses being the most overpowered aspect of the build.

Byron · Sep 05, 2006, 04:02 PM // 16:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by shardfenix

How do you figure this?

Knockdown, deep wound, IAS. You also overlooked the consistency of normal attacks, normal pet attacks, and pet attack skills. Expertise means skills can be spammed on top of consistent damage from hammer and pet attacks.

Quote:

To be as good as a toucher, IB's damage has to be pumped up to +100 or so and costed slightly more than double its current cost.

On a basic mathematical skill to skill comparison, perhaps. But then again, I could compare healing breeze to gift of health and get simlar results.

latbec · Sep 06, 2006, 12:38 AM // 00:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by shardfenix

Damage and health wise, touchers are 12 times better than thumpers. The only downside to a toucher is that it runs out of energy after killing 2-3 people. I will say that touchers are crap in organized play, but in Random Arenas and Alliance Battles, which I sometimes play because HA and GVG suck, touchers own every other build except cripshot and snare mesmers, which nobody plays because they're too busy trying to add variety to this very stale game.

Your assumptions are false and probably based on damage on a dummy target. Good kiting and movement will always own touch rangers and reduce their damage to near negligeable. That's the main reason why they can't do crap in HA or GvG and that it's mostly a bad cookie cutter to own newbies in RA or alliance battles. I think people ought to stop using RA and alliance battles as examples of unbalance in expertise. The main reason is these battles mostly consist of 2-3 min squirmishs, besides the fact that they are basically filled with people who don't have much clue about organized PvP. Go in a serious organized PvP setting like GvG and measure the total damage inflicted by a thumper in a long time frame, like 30 min, and you will see that there is a clear unbalance regarding thumpers.

Tiger's fury (TF) is obviously the source of the problem, not expertise. A similar warrior stance, tiger's stance recharge every 20 sec and gets immediately canceled if you fail to hit. An elite, battle rage, does a similar job but makes the warrior lose all his adrenaline when it ends. Berserker stance, another 33% increased attack elite, has a 30 sec recharge and ends if you use a skill. Flurry does something similar but cuts your damage, Frenzy does the same but you take double damage.

On the other hand, TF can be kept up 90% of the time and only backout non-attack skills as a consequence. Every time you use one of the warrior skills that increase the attack's rate, there are some major drawbacks or serious consequence to it. There's something obviously wrong there. TF has been overpowered since the release of the game and this skill should have been hitten by the nerf bat a long time ago. Nerf TF to hell, increase the energy cost, make its recharge longer, force the thumpers to use one of the warrior stance to increase their attack rate and then you're going to see a good difference in their effectiveness.

Thom Bangalter · Sep 06, 2006, 12:57 AM // 00:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by latbec

Your assumptions are false and probably based on damage on a dummy target. Good kiting and movement will always own touch rangers and reduce their damage to near negligeable. That's the main reason why they can't do crap in HA or GvG and that it's mostly a bad cookie cutter to own newbies in RA or alliance battles. I think people ought to stop using RA and alliance battles as examples of unbalance in expertise. The main reason is these battles mostly consist of 2-3 min squirmishs, besides the fact that they are basically filled with people who don't have much clue about organized PvP. Go in a serious organized PvP setting like GvG and measure the total damage inflicted by a thumper in a long time frame, like 30 min, and you will see that there is a clear unbalance regarding thumpers.

Tiger's fury (TF) is obviously the source of the problem, not expertise. A similar warrior stance, tiger's stance recharge every 20 sec and gets immediately canceled if you fail to hit. An elite, battle rage, does a similar job but makes the warrior lose all his adrenaline when it ends. Berserker stance, another 33% increased attack elite, has a 30 sec recharge and ends if you use a skill. Flurry does something similar but cuts your damage, Frenzy does the same but you take double damage.

On the other hand, TF can be kept up 90% of the time and only backout non-attack skills as a consequence. Every time you use one of the warrior skills that increase the attack's rate, there are some major drawbacks or serious consequence to it. There's something obviously wrong there. TF has been overpowered since the release of the game and this skill should have been hitten by the nerf bat a long time ago. Nerf TF to hell, increase the energy cost, make its recharge longer, force the thumpers to use one of the warrior stance to increase their attack rate and then you're going to see a good difference in their effectiveness.

but then you have bunny thumpers being an effectively dead build; this takes a crap all over the idea of cross-class playing they implemented as a draw to the game. Nerfing TF "to hell" kills this particular cross class combo, which is sad. I don't mind a balance to skills, but not making the skill completely worthless.

ChildeOfMalkav · Sep 06, 2006, 01:15 AM // 01:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by latbec

Tiger's fury (TF) is obviously the source of the problem, not expertise.

Finally, people are talking sense here. It's going to be tough trying to tweak TF without completely making it useless though.

As for Irresistable Blow....let's just say there's changes coming...

warriorsmiley · Sep 06, 2006, 08:44 AM // 08:44

If they change Irresistable Blow they have to remember that it cant be to harsh because then it would hurt hammer warriors in general. Its bad enough there heavily energy based seeing as a hammer warriors deep wound cost 5 energy I pray the change isnt to harsh.

stueyman2099 · Sep 06, 2006, 08:48 AM // 08:48

They could lengthen the recharge on IB to 8 seconds and most Hammer Warriors wouldn't even notice.

JR · Sep 06, 2006, 08:52 AM // 08:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by stueyman2099

They could lengthen the recharge on IB to 8 seconds and most Hammer Warriors wouldn't even notice.

Neither would Thumpers.

stueyman2099 · Sep 06, 2006, 09:56 AM // 09:56

I would very much notice it as a thumper.

Cirian · Sep 06, 2006, 10:13 AM // 10:13

Since Tiger's Fury has a duplicate, I suppose the cooldown could be made the same as Tiger Stance (20s) and thus offer a reason to take Bestial Fury on the same bar..? That way a thumper has the option of IAS for half the time, whch they turn on when they really need it, OR they sacrifice a skill for 2xIAS and spam IAS as they do now. Or it could all just be left alone

I quite like the thumper as a cross-class. It does have amazing offence, but at the expence of defence I thought it was a fair trade already

JR · Sep 06, 2006, 10:53 AM // 10:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by stueyman2099

I would very much notice it as a thumper.

What I meant was it wouldn't necessarily hurt the Thumper build all that much.

Evilsod · Sep 06, 2006, 12:18 PM // 12:18

Tigers Fury is meant to be expensive to maintain and it is expensive to maintain. You talk of Tigers Fury having no drawbacks. Tiger Stance ends if you miss, Berserkers has a long cooldown, Frenzy has double damage, Flurry deals less... Tigers Fury costs 10 energy and needs skill points in an otherwise practically useless attribute line. Sure a Bunny Thumper using the attributes 12HM 14BM 9 Exp gets it down to 6 energy for 11 seconds and can gain 10 from Ferocious... but once you dp the pet out Ferocious becomes next to impossible to use, specially against Vimway... with almost no method of gaining energy (Comfort costs energy too) you can't spam Tigers Fury for long.
A bunny thumper (using the standard build) has absolutely no defensive skills or self healing at all, this is a big trade off for there damage output. Yet IWAY warriors can have IWAY up for 40 seconds with a downtime of 5... for 5 energy + regen. Just because it needs dead pets to activate doesn't mean its any less powerful. Try keeping TF up for 40 seconds constantly on any other build... without a zealous bow you'll have no energy left extremely quickly.

Changing TF to blackout adren skills would be utterly retarded... it could be easily worked round anyway... if the skill was given 'Lose all adrenaline' you'd use it... build up adren... use Hammer Bash then activate it again for Crushing Blow, so you'd be back to square one, it'd just require a little more thought.

Kyune · Sep 06, 2006, 03:07 PM // 15:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evilsod

Tigers Fury costs 10 energy and needs skill points in an otherwise practically useless attribute line. Sure a Bunny Thumper using the attributes 12HM 14BM 9 Exp gets it down to 6 energy for 11 seconds and can gain 10 from Ferocious... but once you dp the pet out Ferocious becomes next to impossible to use, specially against Vimway... with almost no method of gaining energy (Comfort costs energy too) you can't spam Tigers Fury for long.

As far as i can tell Thumpers are the primary reason people are complaining about TF. The energy needed to power it comes from Ferocious Strike from the most part, so I would sooner lower the energy gain from ferocious strike, since it's basically a mini-boon every 12 seconds. That would also affect the build's perceived Irresistible Blow spam issue also by giving the player less energy to use. But even then that could be overstepping as a solution; in my experience I haven't really heard of any any other viable GvG Ferocious Strike builds out there.

Admittedly I don't see any need to weaken either IB or TF, but ideas for 'fixes' follow:

For irresistible blow I would say increase the damage X given by the Hammer Mastery attribute, and then increase the recharge time proportionally. It might give it more of a spike potential, but it should slow down the guaranteed hit-or-KD spam without hurting its damage output.

For Tiger's Fury/Bestial Fury...perhaps make it so that adrenaline gain is slowed by some amount (33 to 50% less). Doesn't hurt rangers, but that would definitely make it less appealing to Warriors and eventually Paragons.

JR · Sep 06, 2006, 03:54 PM // 15:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Evilsod

Changing TF to blackout adren skills would be utterly retarded... it could be easily worked round anyway... if the skill was given 'Lose all adrenaline' you'd use it... build up adren... use Hammer Bash then activate it again for Crushing Blow, so you'd be back to square one, it'd just require a little more thought.

You wouldn't be able to use TF to build up Hammer Bash, so you would be waiting longer between KDs. The main benefit of spamming TF on a thumper is how rapidly it allows you to build up, without that it isn't nearly as potent.

Kyune gave me an interesting and possibly more viable idea though... what if Expertise didn't effect stances?

Kyune · Sep 06, 2006, 04:30 PM // 16:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR-

what if Expertise didn't effect stances?

I had thought about that--neverminding other build/cross class implications it's got value as a meaningful solution since it does considerably reduce the spamming potential.

But given 9-10 as useful in expertise, the dirty translation of what it does in general is "Rangers now pay 2/3rds more energy for their stances." It would be taking a sledgehammer to solve a screwdriver's problem, I think.

If energy is the problem we're attacking, then what about an energy drawback:

"Each time you use an attack skill, Lose 1 energy."

Two energy might be too much energy loss, keeping in mind that Ferocious Strike is essentially elite-based energy management and two energy negates 10 expertise on 5 energy skills. But it might also be just right. Moreover, as a side effect it's making adrenal skills cost 1 energy.

Just another thought.

ChildeOfMalkav · Sep 06, 2006, 05:25 PM // 17:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kyune

"Each time you use an attack skill, Lose 1 energy."

What about pet and bow attack skills then? I guess it's easy enough to have those differently distinguished from all other non ranger attack skills but I just think things will get too messy as more and more distinctions are made.

It would look something like this: Expertise. For each rank of Expertise the energy cost of non-spell skills are lowered by 4% except for non-ranger attack skills in which case you lose 1 energy.

xcutioner · Sep 06, 2006, 06:17 PM // 18:17

My focus is expertise and impact on thumpers, not touch rangers since they are a 1 trick pony and not worth worrying about.

Changing tf is somewhat attractive if u think thumpers are a problem, but I think there are counter balances builtin to the ranger class, that offsets this expertise/tf argument. Even if expertise or tf was nerfed fero strike, would need to be addressed as well to some extent. NOTE: I love tf so I'm not going to suggest it be nerfed of course.

IB nerfing would be completely over the top, since as the skill stands now, it's not all that great on a thumper. Even with 14 expertise, spamming tf,ib, and crushing, will drain you out of energy. Admittedly the up front pressure can be brutal, but unless done correctly the ranger's energy bottoms out and hits an equilibruim mode where the pressure eases off.

The ranger pays for this spam pressure(aka expertise bonus) in 2 ways:
1) lower AL vs non-elemental dmg
2) 3pip energy regen

Rangers also pay a "skill slot" cost if they want to bring a pet, since charm animal is a given, and comfort animal is a necessity if you are bringing any pet skills whatsoever. Pets now acquire dp, which even further makes running with a pet more problematic, since after a few deaths your pet will die immediately under the slightest pressure from the other team futher advancing it's dp. Not a happy place to be...

So rangers get expertise and thereby near constant greater attack speed(via tf), but they pay for it with lower attack dmg(12 weapon), lower armor vs non-elemental, lower energy regen, and with pets, dp and less skill slot utility.

To me these negatives balance out the class fairly well.

With that said, I think that classes that derive energy bonuses, either thru ranger expertise usage on skills, necro soul reaping energy from death, and most likely dervish enchantment removal energy, will always be used to try to "power" certain combos of classes.

What I would really like to see is buffs to skills that never see the light of day, due to the fact that they are completely useless(double dragon anyone?) rather than discussions of skills needing a nerf.

Can't we turn this around and suggest buffs? For example...
Have guardian be prolonged 1-3 seconds whenever a foe hits thru it while using a stance.

Thom Bangalter · Sep 06, 2006, 06:21 PM // 18:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by xcutioner

My focus is expertise and impact on thumpers, not touch rangers since they are a 1 trick pony and not worth worrying about.

Changing tf is somewhat attractive if u think thumpers are a problem, but I think there are counter balances builtin to the ranger class, that offsets this expertise/tf argument. Even if expertise or tf was nerfed fero strike, would need to be addressed as well to some extent. NOTE: I love tf so I'm not going to suggest it be nerfed of course.

IB nerfing would be completely over the top, since as the skill stands now, it's not all that great on a thumper. Even with 14 expertise, spamming tf,ib, and crushing, will drain you out of energy. Admittedly the up front pressure can be brutal, but unless done correctly the ranger's energy bottoms out and hits an equilibruim mode where the pressure eases off.

The ranger pays for this spam pressure(aka expertise bonus) in 2 ways:
1) lower AL vs non-elemental dmg
2) 3pip energy regen

Rangers also pay a "skill slot" cost if they want to bring a pet, since charm animal is a given, and comfort animal is a necessity if you are bringing any pet skills whatsoever. Pets now acquire dp, which even further makes running with a pet more problematic, since after a few deaths your pet will die immediately under the slightest pressure from the other team futher advancing it's dp. Not a happy place to be...

So rangers get expertise and thereby near constant greater attack speed(via tf), but they pay for it with lower attack dmg(12 weapon), lower armor vs non-elemental, lower energy regen, and with pets, dp and less skill slot utility.

To me these negatives balance out the class fairly well.

With that said, I think that classes that derive energy bonuses, either thru ranger expertise usage on skills, necro soul reaping energy from death, and most likely dervish enchantment removal energy, will always be used to try to "power" certain combos of classes.

What I would really like to see is buffs to skills that never see the light of day, due to the fact that they are completely useless(double dragon anyone?) rather than discussions of skills needing a nerf.

Can't we turn this around and suggest buffs? For example...
Have guardian be prolonged 1-3 seconds whenever a foe hits thru it while using a stance.

guardian doesn't really need a buff, it's already pretty awesome. and the whole point of IB is to get through something like guardian or aegis or defensive stances.

I think this thread, like so many others on "balance" or "nerfing" is really just a matter of people not bringing the correct responses to particular builds and getting a loss because they didn't prepare.

I should also add that you should wand and/or kill pets as much as possible...blacking out rangers without blackout is pretty awesome, and if you get the pet to 60dp% (degen is a good way to score some kills) then the pet is near useless; additionally if you can keep wanding the pet or putting poison on it or SOMETHING, anything, the ranger has to stop attacking to heal it back up, taking away from it's dps.

furthermore, the majority of thumpers have no speed buff...just don't let him catch up to you, and make him pay for overextending to get to you.

phoenixtech · Sep 06, 2006, 11:06 PM // 23:06

Thumpers have been around for HOW long? Just because a "fun" season was infested by thumpway we now want to nerf it?