Curse

Lady Lozza · Feb 27, 2006, 02:24 PM // 14:24

It happens that, far too often, the only players left standing are those who DID NOT take res sig because they "absolutely had to have" all their skills. My guild works on the basis of monks not having to take any res at all because they are almost always the first members of the team down, and on the basis that if they are ressing they are not healing. Nonetheless most monks will take res sig with them into HA because if (on the odd chance) they are the last one standing, they can still get their team up to continue playing, and the simple knowledge that the one or two pugs in the team will probably lie about having res with them.

SaintGreg · Feb 27, 2006, 03:19 PM // 15:19

I agree with Ensign that pet skills need a serious looking into. The only decent pet attacks are ferocious strike and disrupting lunge, there really isn't any other reason to use another pet attack except for maiming strike. I don't think nerfing disrupting lunge would help, but buffing other pet attacks would help increase the overall attractiveness of the line more. If anything nerfing disrupting lunge would simply make pets never be taken, because dirupting lunge is really the only saving grace of beast mastery.

Disrupting lunge is the standard because it has good damage, low cost, and has a fast recharge time. Currently the pet attacks at 12 BM, damage is one of either +25, +17, +12, +10; some pet attacks have conditions for doing extra damage. This damage is pretty low compared to and axe which has +34 and +17 to its main attack skills eviscerate/executioners and penetrating blow. The damage from pets is not only less, but it is more difficult to inflict because it requires 2 extra skills to be on your bar to work effectively, with a bare minimum of one, and you have less control over your pet than you do yourself. Common sense would have it that pet attacks would do more damage, or at least equal damage, compared to a warrior because of the aditional disavantages of using pets compared to the warrior.

Raise the damage a considerable amount and beast mastery would be more useful. The conditional damage should also be raised. If pets were to at least have a niche role, with high damage, albeit conditional, they would also be more useful. Take for instance brutal strike: +17, with additional +17 if target is below 50% health. If this were to be raised to something like +17/+34 or even higher to maybe +25/+34, this skill might be considered. It would basically be like the pet equivalent of final thrust, slightly less damage, but a good finishing spike nonetheless. Melandru's Assault is a similar skill to melandru's arrows, attacks that hit an enchanted foe do additional damage. Melandru's arrows is elite, but considering the less viable nature of the pet attack, the additional damage from each of these should be approximately equal, at 12 attribute, +24 damage. Remove feral lunge and combine it with melandru's assault. Feral lunge is low damage, not spammable, and causes bleeding on exactly the person you don't particularly care about - attacking foes. If the damage from melandru's assault was buffed and bleeding added in, 10 energy, 10 recharge would be completely appropriate. As it is now it is too costly and not spammable enough to do anything useful.

As it is now, the variety of pet attacks seems about right. They encompass most of the things a warrior should be able to do - interrupt, cripple, hit hard, etc. The main thing that needs to be added into beast mastery is an attack that causes deep wound; every warrior attack line has a skill to cause deep wound (axe has two), and since pets are basically warriors, they should have somewhat comparable skills to do comparable things. Since this is a topic about existing skills though, I'll leave that out for now. The only other thing that a warrior can do that a pet can't is spike, which a pet will never be able to do unless the base attack speed is raised a good amount. There are plenty of arguments for raising the base pet attack speed, and plenty for not raising it. Raising the pet attack speed would increase the viability of the line in general though, even without touching skills so it is something to look into.

The main problem in using a pet over using a warrior is that the pet attacks to perform some function are underpowered compared to comparable warrior skills. Maiming strike for instance requires you to hit a moving foe, hamstring simply requires you to hit. That really isn't a good tradeoff even with the lower recharge time and additional damage of maiming strike. If you wanted damage, you wouldn't use maiming strike, you only use if for crippling the target, and it does a poor job at that now.

Disrupting lunge is the lowest damage of the pet line at +10 unconditional, which makes sense because of the additional powerful effect of interrupting and disabling for 20 seconds. If the recharge and energy cost of other "damage" pet attacks were improved disrupting lunge wouldn't be as powerful because as it is now it is pretty difficult to actually hit an interrupt with it. One of the main reason people use disrupting lunge is that it is a cheap spammable pet attack, which makes it better than any other pet attack simply for that reason. Raise the damage and improve the characteristics of the pet line, and then disrupting lunge would be more balanced compared to the other pet attacks.

sh4ft3d · Feb 27, 2006, 06:43 PM // 18:43

Yes, in response to the above^^^^^^^ post. I havent been gvging too much lately, so im not sure about the current usage. I have been using it in TA though, and it is fun to use, but it hasnt been abused as it apparently has in gvg.

Eet GnomeSmasher · Feb 27, 2006, 09:20 PM // 21:20

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Originally Posted by Soul Shaker

Mend ailment-No. It's powerful, yes, but that's no reason to nerf it. Mend condition is it's brother. So, it'll just make monks softer in that respect, cos mend condition is target other ally, but has a heal for a condition removed. Maybe take down the heal bonus a little? I'd rather not touch it.

I don't see your point at all. Half of your argument was about Mend Condition and not about Mend Ailment.

Mend Ailment as it is now, makes condition use a joke. And condition stacking? Forget about it. You're just giving the monk more healing. For only 5 energy and only a 2 second recharge, it can make conditions useless. Monks can and do spam it all the time. With a 5 second recharge, it's still a really useful heal but it won't make it a no brainer to remove conditions.

reboot · Feb 27, 2006, 11:52 PM // 23:52

Only really really bad monks res in pvp, If the PvE community was smart they wouldn't demand that monks res either. Monks need to protect and heal, if you have them stop doing that to res, OMG, other people will die... So if monks job is heal/prot not ressing, then why do you even mention monks, when talking about res sig?

Anyway, res sig 1/2 health is good, and would help nerf IWAY with out nerfing the war class to uselessness.

Symbol · Feb 28, 2006, 12:26 AM // 00:26

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Originally Posted by Ensign

I'm with you on the math, but I'm not getting that 13.35. 15*.81 = 12.15. Add .25 to that and you get a 12.4 second recycle time for 1.29 energy per second maximized.

It isn't terribly important though, even idealized models are only rough approximations of what actually happens in game.

No, you're right, and it's important to be precise when small relative changes can make a big difference in the outcome. I've been using 13.35 seconds in my calculations for some retarded reason. 12.4 sec and 1.29E/sec is correct.

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Oh, it's not a problem from a power standpoint, no question. The problem it creates is more subtle really. When a skill is effectively unconditional and good at what it does it ends up all over the place. Other options don't get used because they're conditional or less wieldly, so you end up with this environment that isn't overpowered per se, but everything ends up looking the same.

Yeah, I understand the rationale. I know that you're not interested in talking about buffs, but the same effect could be achieved by improving the (more) conditional energy management skills to the point where they are better than offering when the conditions are met.

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Hence if you want a more diverse game skills either need to have conditions under which their effectiveness fluctuates, or if a skill is going to be unconditional it needs to be rather weak. I don't think the complaint about Offering has anything to do with necros, and everything to do with monks and other classes. If you want energy you just take Offering because it doesn't have any sort of condition, it's just push button get energy. If it had some sort of condition people would at least have to weigh that. A raised health sacrifice is ideal because a blood guy has so much incidental self-healing coming in that paying a bit more there really doesn't matter, but for other professions taking the health hit becomes something to think about.

I don't think a blood necro would really be hurt too badly by a 17% sacrifice. But a curses or illusion spec degen spammer would be. And honestly, I think that if I'm going to sacrifice my elite and have to make liberal use of 10E+ life steals to keep up with the sac from offering I should at least be able to cast constantly, which is certainly not the case currently.

And more importantly would a monk with their insanely efficient heals feel it either?

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Well one of the problems is that they can't improve non-elite energy management much because there are so few non-elite emanagement skills. But I agree that good non-elite energy options are crucial to the health of the game in the long run. Casters need to manage their energy somehow, and straight efficiency (ala Word) usually isn't enough. Having to run to your elite slot to make your energy work really puts a big crimp on the kinds of characters you can run, some non-elite options would really open up the game and the kinds of characters we could play.

I think the problem is not so much the lack of energy management, but the fact that the bulk of it is in the inspiration line and comes tied to ancilliary effects, so you're limited in how you can improve them (take skills like drain enchant/inspired hex/inspired enchant). Maybe if elementalists glyphs weren't designed to work with the elementalist's huge skill costs...

Another option I've toyed with is to use arcane echo to duplicate your existing energy management option. Unfortunately AE's ridiculous 15E cost makes this pretty unpalatable.

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What I mean is not comparing the effects of one energy management skill to another, but comparing what an emanagement skill does compared to having a non-energy elite. If you're playing an ele or necro and take that energy elite off your bar you're going to be hurting the vast majority of the time. You can kludge around it with some gimmicks (see the old rifts build) but it isn't pretty.

No disagreement here, but this doesn't have much to do with offering per se. It's a more general problem of casters having overly expensive spells and crap non-elite energy management.

Ensign · Feb 28, 2006, 01:27 AM // 01:27

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Originally Posted by Lady Lozza

Why? Because all other resurrection spells take too long and are too easily interrupted, unless you have a resmer and then you will have players building teams around one single character.

Honestly I'm over the resmer. The hard resses all take so long to cast and bring the person back in terrible condition, it takes forever for them to get back into the fight. It's in no way a replacement for lots of ressigs, so it turns into just an emergency option...it has its place in some metagames, but for the most part I'd rather just stick another sig on that guy.

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Originally Posted by Lady Lozza

If people are that worried about it, they should be thinking along the lines of buffing all the other res spells before worrying about nerfing res sig.

Oh all the other res spells (except Rebirth, PvE etc) do need a buff, no question, because they're worthless as is. I don't think that really affects Ressig too much, though, because the complaint I have with Ressig isn't that it's the best Res in PvP (it should be), but that it's one of the best skills in PvP, period.

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Originally Posted by SaintGreg

I agree with Ensign that pet skills need a serious looking into. The only decent pet attacks are ferocious strike and disrupting lunge, there really isn't any other reason to use another pet attack except for maiming strike.

Pets have a couple of systematic problems that keep 'em from being terribly viable.

First off is the AI. You have a lot of conditional or tricky pet skills but you can't time them yourself, you have to rely on a pet to land it on the right target and, well, I'm not terribly impressed by pet AI. Thus the only skills that you'd really want to use are those that you don't care who they hit, or even if they hit, you just spam them and hope for the best.

The other, and perhaps even a bigger problem, is the investment of skill space you need to use before you can even consider Disrupting Lunge. Charm Animal is a given, and if you just want a body to clog things up that's enough. The second skill has to be Comfort Animal though, with few exceptions - you just can't afford not to have a pet res on your bar if you're going to start devoting more slots to pet skills. The third could be any of Ferocious Strike, Disrupting Lunge, and Call of Haste. I can't imagine using any of the damage ones over Call of Haste under any circumstances. Which means that even if you didn't want Disrupting Lunge of Ferocious Strike, you're looking at half your skill bar invested in a pet just to get a single attack skill in. That's a huge hit to utility, and makes it really hard to make the main character (remember him?) worthwhile with so little skill space.

So yeah the other pet skills could use a buff. But there are bigger issues than their power level that keep them from getting played, and those need to be addressed before anything else.

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