diedrake wrote: ↑Thu May 28, 2020 3:38 am
Stupid question but... Cant an asw still use thier bow to apply a slow and other debuffs on the target by switching stances? I admit i dont play a sw but occationally i play my mara. What i mean is just like a mara, cant the asw also stance dance a little to help with thier weaknesses in assault stance by switching to one of thier other stances and applying debuffs again such as the slow?
Imo asw is more of an advanced class as its not what the initial overall class was designed to be. So instead of playing an asw as a true melee, play them as a med to close ranged fighter.
I play a sh but i have my own gripes with the msh as its too overloaded but thats another topic all together.
Yes, I covered this. You technically can switch to Skirmish stance to use the ranged slow skill Takedown, however as mentioned this locks you out of Assault Stance for 5 seconds(like you'll have on your Marauder with mutations). This is a big issue because ASW's ability to have its melee skills actually deal damage comes from the fact that Assault Stance converts ballistics/ranged crit to strength/melee crit and gives an armor bonus - Without it you're running around with 300 strength, 0 crit chance and 1600 armor. With how quickly damage needs to be applied to kill anything in this game, there's simply no way to work a 5 second lock out to 30% of regular damage into a reasonable rotation.
An alternative would be to make Takedown usable in Assault as well, however I feel that giving a ranged slow to a mostly melee spec could be too powerful and has no precedent on other classes(aside from the ranged slow via DoK Covenant, but that's only 20%). All these proposed changes have precedents on existing comparable classes and have been demonstrated to be reasonably balanced.
The issue with considering it as a medium to close ranged fighter as you've suggested is there are few ranged skills that are actually available in Assault and none of them do a significant level of damage, and as mentioned swapping out of Assault produces significant issues. 2 of the skills are slowish dots and one has a fairly long cast time that you need to stand still for. The remaining spammable one does about as much damage as the ranged spammable attack from a DPS DoK/WP, so enough to maybe run a straggler down but not enough to kill in a group setting. So basically your melee skills are the only ones that deal any real amount of damage.
anarchypark wrote: ↑Thu May 28, 2020 3:21 am
maybe it's not mdps.
maybe It's rdps with melee tree.
The same could be said about melee SH, and yet it's accepted the way it is. These modifications simply bring ASW in line with what melee SH is able to do in terms of maintaining melee range and do not fundamentally change its damage output, utility or play style