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[Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

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Structured class balance suggestions belong in the Balance Proposal subforum. Class-related discussion in this section are considered as ongoing debates and ARE NOT reviewed for balance changes.
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Arthem
Posts: 253

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#11 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 10:21 am

Revert heal debuff from 9 points to 6 points for squig and sw, add monstro proc to skirmish, add brute proc to assault, add savagery proc to scout :), get rid of shadowstep all together its too OP :))
Last edited by Arthem on Wed Apr 15, 2020 10:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Arthem
Posts: 253

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#12 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 10:30 am

saupreusse wrote: Tue Apr 14, 2020 12:13 pm [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Short introduction:

I played a SW on live and mained it on RoR for about 3 years. I put the elf on the shelf about a year ago because the ranged specs just can't compete in most encounters.
RSW is really not that great for warband or smallscale play, and even not as good for pve dungeons which left me a lot of times without dungeon/city invites simply because im an RSW.
In warbands it lacks AOE dmg like BW or even Engi and doesnt bring much to the party. In smallscale it can't put out enough pressure because its dmg is too low, while every premade is stacking armor into oblivion. On top of that the ranged specs are outshined by the ASW spec, which was the only SW spec that experienced buffs on RoR.
Where at least the skirmish spec shines is roaming around the lakes in kiting parties. the 100ft knockdown and ranged slow are just awesome tools to prepare kills for the "real dps" in your party.
so, here are my suggestions to improve the ranged specs and give SW a little love after all the nerfs to the class in the past.



Tactics:

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Powerful draw - Remove the Tactic, merge its range increase with skirmish stance. This way, skirmish SW will have a free tactic slot to play around with. Replace it with a new tactic that lets you ignore 25% of the targets armor after a critical hit on all bow attacks. Move this new Tactic down to 7 points in Skirm and put Keen Arrowheads up to 11 points in skirm. This way, a Rank 40 Scout SW can make use of the new Armor ignore tactic aswell.

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Split Arrows - Remove the damage penalty to give it more AOE dmg. As it stands, SFAs tooltip value is already not great, further reducing its dmg output and pressure makes no sense at all, and renders the tactic completely useless. I would rather see a max players hit cap being installed or a 20% dmg reduction to all arrows after the first 3 enemies hit.

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Smoldering Arrows - Remove the Tactic and simply buff the dmg of Flame Arrow. Right now Scout SW have to take 2 tactics to make this ability worth something. This is ofc too much. My proposal would free a tactic slot for Scout SW to play around with. I wrote more about Flame Arrow down below.



Stances:

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Scout Stance - replace the initiative bonus with weaponskill and increase the range buff from 10% to 15%. Scout stance should provide safety through distance, because you have to stand still just like engie and mage. SW can switch stance though, so the range buff should not be as great as Engis and Magus. Initiative is a useless stat for Scout Stance. You will be far in the backline and should be dealing good dmg, so replacing it with weaponskill will help to further increase the dmg output.

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Skirmish Stance - replace the toughness bonus with a 50% range increase on all skirmish abilities. As stated above, powerful draws range increase should be incorporated into the skirmish stance to free a tactic slot. Toughness is a really bad stat for skirm since you will likely be running "instictive Aim" tactic which reduces your toughness.



Morale:

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Rain of Steel - the dmg is low. It's lower than Hail of dooms dmg and the radius sucks hard. Instant morale dmg is of much higher value for RvR warbands, so I recommend reworking rain of steel to deal 1600dmg instantly to your target and all targets within 30ft of it. This will give Scout a powerful M4 burst instead of a warm summer rain which rain of steel is atm...

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Hail of Doom - Its not bad - Its better than Rain of Steel - Its radius sucks though. I suggest increasing the radius to 30ft. everyone who has casted the ability will agree with me. often times you won't hit more than 3 ppl over the whole cast time simply because the radius is so bad.



Abilities:

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Steady Aim /Hunters Fervor - Steady Aim is a bad ability - period. Hunters Fervor isn't bad in itself, but is it worth disrupting your dmg spam and wasting a global cooldown on a 20% ap increase? I think not. So my suggestion is to remove both abilities all together and incorporate their effects in VoN:
Make VoN increase your crit chance by 25% on all bow abilities, and increase your party members AP regen by 20% for its duration. Toss the buildup time penalty of steady aim in the trash completely (bye bye). I would also suggest to increase your party members chance to crit by 5% (in the comments it was suggested to increase this value to 7% to bring it back on par with the old leading shots tactic) while VoN is active. This may sound like a huge buff but let me explain the idea behind it: SW used to have leading shots tactic which increased your party members chance to crit by 15% whenever you critically hit. The Tactic was nerfed hard down to 8%. This is one of the reasons why SW lost its place in Warbands and Parties, because it no longer was best at something and had to surrender to BW and engi. giving back a 5% crit chance for your party members plus the 8% from leading shots tactic + the 20% ap regen from hunters fervor will give SW back its place in the crit buffing spot it used to be. With my proposed changes to VoN, Steady Aim, and Hunters fervor, RSW will give the party a big buff and awesome pushing utility and increase its own dmg pressure all in one global cooldown instead of wasting 3 global cooldowns on 3 different abilities of which 2 are lackluster on its own. It will cache the nerf to leading shots and the removal of SWs 2nd dmg morale "unshakeable focus" 2 years back. By only increasing your crit chance on bow abilities, ASW wont be buffed in the same way, the spec is already strong enough as is.

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Acid Arrow - make it available in scout and skirmish stance instead of scout and assault. Make it castable on the move. ASW here was reworked so hard that it just doesnt make any sense for it to still have access to the armor debuff while Skirmish does not. Skirmish lacks dmg and you cant be arsed to stand still to cast the armor debuff, which you really need to ramp up the SFA spam dmg.

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Whirling Pin - This ability is the most ridiculous clunk fest i have ever seen in any game i have ever played. I simply dont know why but it has a HUGE delay between pressing the button and actually being catapulted away which the squig counterpart does not have. To make it worse this delay will result in you being slowed to death by destro melees already before you are out of range. To make this ability of any use and make RSW harder to catch i recommend following changes: Increase the self punt distance by 20ft and make it cleanse you from all snares. RSW really needs a good reliable movement tool. Squigger has run away and a less clunky self punt, so i recommend these changes to give RSW more of a chance to actually get away when using whirling pin. the snare removal will give you not the same, but a similar mobility as squig.

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Flame Arrow - I Imagine scout becoming a viable aoe bomb. Remove the Dot and turn it into instant dmg. Make it a 2 second cast time and remove the cooldown. This way Scout will have a cool, reliable aoe dmg paired with the enchanted arrows tactic. Install a Player Cap on targets hit. With the above proposed changes to split arrows RSW will have nice AOE dmg and be of more use in large scale RvR.

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Eagle Eye - Give this ability a better ballistic scaling.



Projectile Speeds

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I would like to once more point out that the Projectile speed of the SW abilities "Broadhead Arrow" and "Shadow Sting" is horribly low. This is a problem because you must have Broadhead Arrow applied before you can apply shadow sting. Its giving you unneccessary downtime because you have to wait for Broadhead Arrow to arrive at your target before you can cast again. I made a proposal about this some time ago which was ready to be reviewed by the balance team back then. I suggest to speed them up for squig herder aswell, since he suffers the same.
Link to Proposal: viewtopic.php?f=102&t=22372&hilit=flight+times

Click here to watch on YouTube
A lot of the changes would make us very similar to Engy which I consider OP after the buffs, not that there's anything wrong with that since a lot of classes are ridiculous. At this point it would take less work to just buff SW's than bring down other classes. Personally I don't really want to become an Engy playstyle wise though.

In terms of morales, I think its better to just give us back a good M2 drop. Ambush is nice and situational but an M2 DD like our old one Outrider Patrol would be better for most situations.

I agree with the areas you have pinpointed as weakness such as Steady Aim and Hunter's Fervor and lack of range on BHA and SS without a tactic. I would like to see something done to those. Another big area of weakness is warband utility / aoe dmg. We bring neither to the table. Expert Skirmisher should not require a target to lower cast times since our only spammable aoe is 2sec cast.

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teiloh
Posts: 691

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#13 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:04 am

Powerful Draw - agree that Skirm (and Scout) could use some buffs, but taking out powerful draw limits Scout options and also precludes the opportunity to get Skirmish something that's very unique. IMO, have it grant a 25% chance on being hit to increase run speed by 30% for 5 seconds, replenishing 5 AP per second. This would be more in line with the design philosophy of Monstro Mara, although not nearly as powerful, while helping the Skirm SW perform in a role as a skirmisher.S

Split Arrows - might be worth reviewing after other changes are put in to get a better feel of how the class performs in the end.

Smoldering Arrows - imo this is more than fair, even with two tactics the damage is largely fluff. Also agree that range should match Explodin' Arrer's. My take on this - and damage should be tweaked accordingly - is that FA and EA should debuff elemental resist. This will add a bit of WB utility to SW because they can now debuff for BW at range, like Magus can debuff for Sorc at range.

Scout Stance - 15% is a good number. In fact, maybe go one further and say +15 range. This would get you 80 vs. 71 range on 65 foot abilities imo. As for the stats, Initiative is quite useful in general but I agree somewhat on your point that the Scout is a backliner and is less likely to be hit. You still probably will be hit though. Maybe bump up the values on both a bit?

Rain of Steel - agree that this morale is really bad. It doesn't do any more damage than Hail of Doom, right? (Never bothered testing). My opinion: differentiate it from HOD and other range M4 by keeping the duration but increasing the radius to 45 and making it FnF on a ground target, making it a high pressure/disrupt M4.

Hail of Doom - imo, it's good for what it is.

Steady Aim - agree that it's very niche, and doesn't do what it sounds like it should do. But then again, it is a "free" core ability with no GCD. IMO, maybe change the build time increase to +1 to make it more manageable.

Hunter's Fervor - agreed its not very good. IMO, increase its duration to 20s, and reduce its cost to 15. If sticking with an AP gain buff have it affect all sources of AP again instead of just regen (unless I'm understanding the ability incorrectly). I'd propose a new effect: group 20% anti-snare, reducing the potency of snares by 20%. A temporary answer to perma Covenant snare.

Acid Arrow - imo, the trade-off of stance dancing into Skirm after an AA is worth it depending on the situation. It's a generally good skill - maybe up the TT value slightly.

Whirling Pin - agreed on the delay; there should be a trade off here.

Flame Arrow - I think AOE options should be focused in Skirm, having a spammable FA would make the playstyle a bit too similar to spamming FB for Wizards.

EE - wasn't the tooltip value for this on live a little higher? I remember it being 399 on the builder vs. 352 here, but that may result from a number of issues.

Projectile Speeds on BHA/SS - agree.

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teiloh
Posts: 691

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#14 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:23 am

Some (maybe crazy) other ideas:

Glass Arrow/Shrapnel - have the arrow also explode in a 15 foot area around target for 5 seconds, dropping shards on the ground. Any enemy walking through this take (85-135?) barb damage every .5 seconds. Trivial for single targets to escape, but can do some damage to blobs. A kind of CC-neutral AOE, anti-blob damage

Barrage - this is not a great skill at all. Make it a channel that damages a number of random targets in the area each tick and place it back at 13x in Skirm.

Eyeshot - back to core with original VON interaction. Considering SH gets both a core melee KD and a pet KD, this is more than fine imo.

Add in two more tiers of armor intermediate between Light and Med and Med and Heavy.

SW/SH bumped up to new Tier2 armor, but Assault Stance/Squig Armor buffs are downshifted to equalize their armor.

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zulnam
Posts: 760

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#15 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 12:18 pm

Powerful Draw may be unique, but so's a rusty spoon in an otherwise pristine set.

There is no value for SW to have half their abilities at a below-100 range. Engi has that yes, and does have a tactic to increase grenadier abilities; but engi also has a viable aoe, armor tactic + buff and generally more survivability.

A lot of suggestions in the OP are valid and could be handpicked; perhaps not all but certainly some.

Increasing ranges overall (for skirm abilities at least).
Tweaking SfA and SA.
Adding a different tactic instead of Powerful Draw. Perhaps an aoe enhancer/utility.
Adding the Flaming Arrow dmg increase tactic to the base and making it usable in Skirm.
SW, Kotbs, IB, Slayer, WP, WL, SM, Mara, SH, BG

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Arthem
Posts: 253

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#16 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:16 pm

Looks like they solved the projectile speed according to the patch notes which is good.

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Manatikik
Posts: 1249

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#17 » Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:46 pm

Arthem wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:16 pm Looks like they solved the projectile speed according to the patch notes which is good.
At 65 ft you have .1s lead time for SS from BHA. Don't think you'll notice a big difference on Aussie internet and won't change too much for ASW. Didn't test with PD but still won't be quite quick enough i don't think - but still better.
<Montague><Capulet>

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Darks63
Posts: 651

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#18 » Thu Apr 16, 2020 12:43 am

Manatikik wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:46 pm
Arthem wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:16 pm Looks like they solved the projectile speed according to the patch notes which is good.
At 65 ft you have .1s lead time for SS from BHA. Don't think you'll notice a big difference on Aussie internet and won't change too much for ASW. Didn't test with PD but still won't be quite quick enough i don't think - but still better.
Is it easier to land BH and SS back to back or is there still a delay between when you can apply SS?
Tourist SW 40/50+<Zaxxed> Discotec 40/40+<IRONIC>

Former Pragg/Badlands Destro Iron Rock/Badlands Order player.

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Arthem
Posts: 253

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#19 » Thu Apr 16, 2020 6:48 am

Manatikik wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:46 pm
Arthem wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:16 pm Looks like they solved the projectile speed according to the patch notes which is good.
At 65 ft you have .1s lead time for SS from BHA. Don't think you'll notice a big difference on Aussie internet and won't change too much for ASW. Didn't test with PD but still won't be quite quick enough i don't think - but still better.
I definitely won't lul

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Arthem
Posts: 253

Re: [Shadow Warrior] - Ranged Proposal

Post#20 » Thu Apr 16, 2020 6:50 am

Darks63 wrote: Thu Apr 16, 2020 12:43 am
Manatikik wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:46 pm
Arthem wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:16 pm Looks like they solved the projectile speed according to the patch notes which is good.
At 65 ft you have .1s lead time for SS from BHA. Don't think you'll notice a big difference on Aussie internet and won't change too much for ASW. Didn't test with PD but still won't be quite quick enough i don't think - but still better.
Is it easier to land BH and SS back to back or is there still a delay between when you can apply SS?
It should be slightly improved especially for EU ping demons.

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