White Lion Changes (8/25/2018)

[Bregon]

Jeez you made the WL hard work now. Yeah with some buffhead, nerfed buttons and aura shenanigans its doable. But damn you really sucked the fun out of the class.

- The abilities just aren't there when you need them. Need to switch targets and drop a quick Cull the Weak to assist, sorry no wait 4 seconds on that stance CD
- The over lap of stance change animation and ability animation means its hard to get the visual tells of when an ability has fired. PArticularly annoying when swapping stances straight into a Coordinated strike
- The amount of stance swapping is excessive. Like every 2 abilities and its time to swap stances.

An all round frustrating experience.

I completely missed this post in all the bull this thread has become, this is pretty much how i feel.

[altharion1]

Its hard to explain. Playing the WL just doesnt "feel" right. The fluidity is gone. I don't get the theory behind the change. Its still easy AF to insta kill scrubs just pounce, FO, stance swap, CS, CtW = Dead. You've just made it harder/frustrating to play efficiently in competitive or high pressure situations. The same situations the WL has always suffered in, as killing the pet was always an option. Now there's still the pet issues but you have to deal with the abilities you need being 2 or 3 seconds behind when you need access to them. So pugs will still complain about being 1 shot and competitive players will still whine about the pet dying too easily in competitive/high risk situations/6vX. What's been improved?

In 6v6 all MDPS have have some way for the opponent to counter pressure to stop you from just going all out 24/7. For WL its killing the pet. Slayers/choppas have to dump rage. Mara has to go monstro. WE/WH have to declare anthema to get out. Dont get too hung up making the pet survive in 6v6, the pet dying makes sense if you consider the above, and good pet management is part of the class. WL was viable in 6v6 even with the pet being easily killed. Its only in ORVR when the pet becomes an issue being dead all the time. There's lots of things you could do to fix that.

Will wait to see what happens in tomorrow's patch before I write too much.

[catholicism198]

More changes/fixes coming later tonight/tomorrow.... at least that's what has been said on here.

[Telen]

Why not mirror the Guardian tree to SH pouncetank tree. At the moment Order lacks this new archetype, a class with wl mobility and tank levels of survivability and cc.

[soliticks]

Bug: Cull the Weak doesn't light up when enemy target is below 50%. Pack Assault seems to not be usable as well.

Hunter: Cool change to Hack. Rotation and stance switching is much smoother with x3 stack. It's pretty much a Savagery Marauder rotation-wise.

Axeman: Pretty much the same as the last iteration, except Primal Fury (intense focus) was returned with its base 25% boost. That's a nice change. Pretty much a Brutality Marauder

Woodsman: It was better before. With Brute Force, Keen Edge, and either Loner or Trained for War being mandatory tactics, this leaves one slot for 40 White Lions. To do any damage, Spirit Strike is also a mandatory slot. This basically makes the new survivability tactic (Ethereal Transferral) completely unusable. Additionally, taking away the 50% parry/dodge/disrupt during the Whirling Axe channel basically leaves us with ZERO survivability outs while in this AOE warband spec. Baking the 50% parry into Whirling Axe and getting rid of this "Choose between Loner or Trained for War" standard would make the spec solid. It would do fairly decent aoe damage while maintaining some survivability with Ethereal Transferral, and a little further boost every 13 seconds
for 3 seconds during our Whirling Axe spin.

Point: We asked to NOT be a Marauder.

(09/01/2018)

[CountTalabecland]

Why not mirror the Guardian tree to SH pouncetank tree. At the moment Order lacks this new archetype, a class with wl mobility and tank levels of survivability and cc.

Agreed, if pounce is so damn good that both sides needed it to have balance, then it should operate the same for both sides. AoE tank/pet White Lion ftw!

[soliticks]

I asked for SH mirror as well.

[Foomy44]

Why not mirror the Guardian tree to SH pouncetank tree. At the moment Order lacks this new archetype, a class with wl mobility and tank levels of survivability and cc.

Just like Destro has lacked a mirror of the old guardian WL for about a decade? Don't recall many order complaining that destro needed a Guardian mirror back then to make things fair.

You guys are aware SH has to give up his entire ranged kit to use melee stuff right? WL getting SH tree while still retaining all their other stuff (charge, aoe detaunt, bypass defenses, pet heal, 50% crit damage tactic lol, brute force, every core melee attack, being able to actually use abilities from other trees while in "guardian form", etc.) doesn't really seem balanced to me, not to mention your stance mechanic is on half the CD SH is on which makes a HUGE difference in what abilities you can use mid fight and makes the concept of trying to balance a guardian bouncin tree against SH bouncin tree by "tying stuff to a stance" a lot less applicable. Are all you people claiming a SH tree mirror would be fair just conveniently choosing to ignore all this stuff?

[Mausini]

I don't think that I will proceed playing WL in this form. While the change itself is ok, WL feels like the poors man Marauder to me.

My problems are:
The pet/no pet thing is still half baked and until this issue is solved I can't see where this class is going to. Loner/Trained for War is a total no go and is limiting all build massively.

The self heal and the tankiness in Woodsman is much much worse than the one of the marauder. The existing pet mechanic is not compensating that.

The mix of armor debuff and spirit damage in Woodman don't give you the possibility to minmax your stats, in comparison to Piercing Bite of the Marauder. If there is no way of debuffing spirit resists, the mix damage in combination with the armor debuff fells quiet lacklustering. Even then, the Marauder solution looks much more streamlined.

The heal debuff is much more expensive to skill compared to Tainted Claw. The 25% healing 33% healing thing doe's not make it much better.

Oak Toppler in combination with the new Hack makes you feel like you hit like a wet noodle. The duration for the debuff is to short especially because you need to apply it at least 2 times to make it even to the Marauder version but then you have 7 seconds to actually do a hard burst rotation. That didn't work for me.
If you are specing a lot into Hunter, the most powerful thing you can do is to armor debuff and spam Hack. In general, that's nice and quiet effective but boring.

If you go deeper into Hack and Oak Toppler you will start thinking about doing a DoT heavy spec but this don't work well because a lot of your Dots are Spirit damage and do not play together very well with the armor debuff.

I need to do more testing but for me the mixed damage, the problems of minmaxing because of that and the missing survivability in combination with the unsolved pet thing are the points that do annoy me the most.

I am with you with WL needing changes but there is a lot of polishing to do. And please don't stick the healing/survivability to a DoT that can be parried, blocked, reduced in effectiveness by stacking resists, cleaned? and so on. The Marauder version is much more consistent.

[soliticks]

Why not mirror the Guardian tree to SH pouncetank tree. At the moment Order lacks this new archetype, a class with wl mobility and tank levels of survivability and cc.

Just like Destro has lacked a mirror of the old guardian WL for about a decade? Don't recall many order complaining that destro needed a Guardian mirror back then to make things fair.

You guys are aware SH has to give up his entire ranged kit to use melee stuff right? WL getting SH tree while still retaining all their other stuff (charge, aoe detaunt, bypass defenses, pet heal, 50% crit damage tactic lol, brute force, every core melee attack, being able to actually use abilities from other trees while in "guardian form", etc.) doesn't really seem balanced to me, not to mention your stance mechanic is on half the CD SH is on which makes a HUGE difference in what abilities you can use mid fight and makes the concept of trying to balance a guardian bouncin tree against SH bouncin tree by "tying stuff to a stance" a lot less applicable. Are all you people claiming a SH tree mirror would be fair just conveniently choosing to ignore all this stuff?

1. I don't recall anybody asking to be a SH + everything in our toolkit. What I personally wanted was a spec with a similar rotation and similar output to the current Bouncin' Squig Herder.

2. Btw, you don't have an amazing charge? We do not have a pet heal. We do not have a "guardian form" unless you mean +80 toughness without being able to use any of our abilities.

3. Here's why many White Lions wanted to be more like the melee SH after the Guardian butchering: At least triple our survivability, very fun rotation, aoe capabilities, great group utility, and respectable damage.