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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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...
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eagle Eye - Give this ability a better ballistic scaling.
Projectile Speeds
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