[Magus] Shocking Jolt -> Strenghten Thrall?

[Orontes]

The new Strengthen Thrall's cooldown is too long. It should be charged from 20 to a 5 second cooldown.

[Starx]

Now what I want for xmas is a heal debuff at 50%.

That's an insane suggestion. You craze!

Something more reasonable would be:
1. Making Pet more durable
2. Lowering the Cooldown on Pet Resummoning from 20 secs to 10 seconds.
3. Extending the Pet Bonuses to the other masteries (e.g. Flamer makes all Abilities Mobile Havok and Daemonology too).
4. Fix Underperforming Tactics Like "Endless Pandemonium" and "Infernal Pain" (both of which are mediocre in any setting or Tier).

Id rather just see a transfer of importance/power from the pet back to the player.

A magus without a pet is lacking 40% of their damage from the buff alone, and then either losing range or mobility/AoE, on top of the only way to debuff elemental resistance. And some small amount of raw dmg in the form of pet AA/Abilities. This is too much of a classes power tied into a very clunky mechanic, while you can point to classes like BW/Sorc or Slayer/Choppa and say that similary if they were to play without using their mechanic their damage would be effected in about the same way, its laughable to compare the ease of use of rage mechanics built into almost all their abilities to what engineer and magus have to go through with turret style pet management which is just idk the word anti fun?

Remove the damage buff, keep the cool flavor buffs each pet has, give the flamer and blue horror meaningful abilities like the pink horror has. Make the pets themselves do more damage, and most importantly roll the 40% dmg buff in some way back into the magus itself so while it does still need to manage pets for certain buffs/debuffs it isn't totally beholden to clunky immovable pet mechanics to actually function at a passable level. And this doesn't necessarily mean just a flat 40% increase in damage, some abilities dont need that much to be viable, and for some even with 40% boost in base damage would still be near unusable. All engineer/magus abilities need a balance pass for modifiers and base damage now, and even more so if the damage buff is removed from the game.

[Schweedy]

Spoiler:

Id rather just see a transfer of importance/power from the pet back to the player.

A magus without a pet is lacking 40% of their damage from the buff alone, and then either losing range or mobility/AoE, on top of the only way to debuff elemental resistance. And some small amount of raw dmg in the form of pet AA/Abilities. This is too much of a classes power tied into a very clunky mechanic, while you can point to classes like BW/Sorc or Slayer/Choppa and say that similary if they were to play without using their mechanic their damage would be effected in about the same way, its laughable to compare the ease of use of rage mechanics built into almost all their abilities to what engineer and magus have to go through with turret style pet management which is just idk the word anti fun?

Remove the damage buff, keep the cool flavor buffs each pet has, give the flamer and blue horror meaningful abilities like the pink horror has. Make the pets themselves do more damage, and most importantly roll the 40% dmg buff in some way back into the magus itself so while it does still need to manage pets for certain buffs/debuffs it isn't totally beholden to clunky immovable pet mechanics to actually function at a passable level. And this doesn't necessarily mean just a flat 40% increase in damage, some abilities dont need that much to be viable, and for some even with 40% boost in base damage would still be near unusable. All engineer/magus abilities need a balance pass for modifiers and base damage now, and even more so if the damage buff is removed from the game.

Not sure I dig it, but I feel like we are on the same page.

Engi/Magus are extremely unique due to their pet dependacies and synergies. Pets are their strength and their liability. Just as a White Lion and a Squig Herder lose out on some features when they choose to go "Loner" spec so too should certain controls and comforts be disabled by completely ignoring pet dependancies/synergies. Though perhaps not to the same degree as WL/SH since they have access to heal debuff among other nifty tools unique to them (?).

This extreme damage dependency may always have been intended from a design perspective. I don't know, but what I do know is that good Magus/Engineers should always be able to manage the pets to fit all the PvP encounters this game has to offer, even extremely competitive close range encounters if properly prepared and anticipated (ala Eternal Citadel, Shrine of Isha), otherwise why make a class that limits you to only Keep/Forts or scenarios with open fields?

Perhaps increase player damage on abilities and lower the damage increase from pet buffs, while refurbishing or introducing new tactics that can do more than +Damage%, like providing necessary party CC, which they did with the new Flashbang tactic.

[neutrino]

Now what I want for xmas is a heal debuff at 50%.

That's an insane suggestion. You craze!

Something more reasonable would be:
1. Making Pet more durable
2. Lowering the Cooldown on Pet Resummoning from 20 secs to 10 seconds.
3. Extending the Pet Bonuses to the other masteries (e.g. Flamer makes all Abilities Mobile Havok and Daemonology too).
4. Fix Underperforming Tactics Like "Endless Pandemonium" and "Infernal Pain" (both of which are mediocre in any setting or Tier).

It was tongue in cheek. It's no more insane than a pet healing ability. Try 25% heal debuff for 10 sec or range kd

[catholicism198]

I’d prefer it if they brought back
Swat Aside (strafing run, very fun skill)
40 Action Points 5 ft range Instant cast 30s cooldown
Summons a great wing to swat your target, dealing 75 damage and knocking them back a short distance. Monsters will be knocked down.
And moved/reworked Tzeentch's Firestorm to mirror the BWs fireball barrage. No destro class currently has the mirror for that ability.
The old Perils Of The Warp was fun too. Had a nice storm cloud VFX.

[Przepraszam]

Btw who's gonna be wasting time casting this heal on a pet??, defenitely not me...the thing that concerns me more is why engee got tactic that reduces cast time on gun blast and snipe and magus didnt...

[Starx]

I’d prefer it if they brought back
Swat Aside (strafing run, very fun skill)
40 Action Points 5 ft range Instant cast 30s cooldown
Summons a great wing to swat your target, dealing 75 damage and knocking them back a short distance. Monsters will be knocked down.
And moved/reworked Tzeentch's Firestorm to mirror the BWs fireball barrage. No destro class currently has the mirror for that ability.
The old Perils Of The Warp was fun too. Had a nice storm cloud VFX.

Strafing run while a fun skill is terrible bc of CC immunities, ive said it a billion times here for years but the CC immunities patch just took magus and engineer and dumpstered them so hard theres a crater still there. No other class in the game had as much CC as engineer/magus and the massive big brains working on the game at the time thought that those 2 classes weren't going to need any major adjustments after that. We only got a 20% dmg boost idk how long after the fact, which the staff here doubled to 40% then tacked on new mechanics, made skills even better than before like firestorm and the class still is in a bad spot.

Imagine for a second everytime you pushed rift it always pulled people in, you could chain KD ppl and spam punts on them, stagger them forever. Then one day thats all gone and you got nothing to make up for it.

30 second CC immunity timers were always an over reaction, I've never seen a game with immunities that long. I would of much rather seen something like the RR escape ability become baseline and 60 second cooldown and immunities reduced by half, and certain abilities like rift/pull (ie class or spec defining abilities) run on their own separate immunities.

[paperclipdog]

Magus doesn't have to nuke himself 35% of the time or reduce his defensive values by 50%... Keep that in mind when you talk about the "ease" at which other classes use their mechanics.

That being said in small 6v6 Magus is definitely struggleing massively, but not only because of their pet.

As for the new pet-heal, it is sadly completely useless. If your pet is in a position where it takes any damage you will have to reposition it as it can't take even survive very "passive" aoe dmg from anything, so healing it is not a viable option. Making the pet a bit tankier vs aoe dmg could however mesh well with the heal and make it so there are some instances where you would want to use heal over reposition/resummoning the pet.

Btw who's gonna be wasting time casting this heal on a pet??, defenitely not me...the thing that concerns me more is why engee got tactic that reduces cast time on gun blast and snipe and magus didnt...

That's because magus gets 15% crit from those mastery slots whereas engi used to get 33% ap cost reduction. You can see which one might have need a change.

[Starx]

Magus doesn't have to nuke himself 35% of the time or reduce his defensive values by 50%... Keep that in mind when you talk about the "ease" at which other classes use their mechanics.

That being said in small 6v6 Magus is definitely struggleing massively, but not only because of their pet.

BW "mechanic" is a joke and has almost zero downside in a proper group with 2 healers and a tank that can guard them, it's only really a problem in 6v6 where that extra dmg they do to themselves and being a caster means the other 6 man can just sit on them all match and they lose to greater pressure, same thing with magus really as sitting on them and constantly killing their pet makes them do no damage and you win through more pressure. Honestly thats also a RDPS in general problem, and why RDPS was only ran in 3-2-1 groups years ago wen it was somewhat popular.

Good slayers have good rage management and wont be sitting in red when they are in a bad situation, ie they tank gets punted out etc...

The main theme is here these 2 classes can just do something in a short time span to stop taking damage, dropping out of red with 1 ability, bw just stops casting for a bit and uses def gcds, then they can easily ramp back up. magus on the other hand is in some hellish cycle of watching their pet die over and over again to random AoE's and then having a much greater ramp time that also requires them to stay in a rather small circle in a game where fights are pretty mobile and constantly moving.

[catholicism198]

Strafing Run is actually a very useful skill because of its delayed nature and it being an instance cast.
It only counts as "free immunity" in 6vX with a solo engineer interrupting the 6-man's flow, but that can be said about any solo with cc.
I honestly don't understand why the Magus does not have one anymore.

The "new" Firestorm is only marginally better because of the small snare that was added, but it did not add anything new, fun or exciting to an otherwise boring skill.

*By X I mean 1-9 players. 6-man group tend to flee otherwise