[SW] Brutal Assault, Sweeping Slash and Wrist Slash tweaks.

[lefze]

You can go ahead and just read the solutions listed, but I will provide some limited wall of text just to shorten the argumentation and back and forth required otherwise to establish the facts about certain things. Tldr will be added at the end. Assault is kinda in a good spot right now, but I think most people would agree that the gameplay is lacking. Futhermore there is a lot of whine about Wrist Slash, and I personally agree that it has some serious consistency issues. This proposal will be aimed at giving ASW more defined gameplay, aswell as fixing the spammability and ease at which you apply your main debuff and also make the debuff consistently good while removing the infinite potential it has when not countered.



Wrist Slash

Problem

The tactic is currently an aditional 80 initiative debuff on top of any other initiative debuff. This makes a SW+SM ini debuff a potential 100% inc crit debuff. Unbuffed, at 200 initiative this makes wrist slash on its own a 70% debuff. In contrast, against a target with 250 initiative and a zealot buff on top the aditional 80 initiative debuff is roughly a 9% debuff. If the target also has initiative statsteal from BO, the 80 initiative debuff on a target becomes a 4.7% debuff. And the effect diminishes severely the more initiative the target has, and is completely useless against classes such as WE, sorc, shammy and others that have high base initiative and big bonuses on gear.

The tactic is also tied to Grim Slash, which means there is nothing you can do to effectively get rid of it during pressure. It also makes the gameplay of the ASW extremely bland.

Solution

Keep the tactic as it is, but reduce duration to 15 seconds and change only the initiative debuff to a flat 10% incoming crit debuff. Make Brutal Assault apply it instead of Grim Slash.


Sweeping Slash and Brutal Assault

Problem

ASW consists mainly of just spamming Grim Slash and Brutal Assault mindlessly. Sweeiping Slash on the other hand isn't even worth speccing, as the range is lower than tooltip, and the damage is also pretty much just the same as Grim Slash. In conjunction with Sweeping Slash being made relevant and Wrist Slash being tied to Brutal Assault, I would also make some changes to Brutal Assault to introduce a little bit more room for error for Wrist Slash.

Solution

Sweeping Slash

Made singletarget. Damage increased to be closer to Brutal Assault. Cooldown decreased to 5 seconds. Applies a 5 second 1000ish armor debuff. (Debuff part is up for discussion, but as it stands the armor debuff would help keep SM relevant in the party instead of leaving IB as the top choice. If you have any cool ideas I'm all ears).

Brutal Assault

With Brutal Assault applying Wrist Slash and Sweeping Slash introduced to the rotation, I would increase the cooldown of Brutal Assault to 10 seconds. Seeing as the skill can only be used from behind unless on Vengeance, this introduces room for error and makes it possible to get downtime on Wrist Slash with properly timed CC and cleanses by the enemy.


"stance dancing", spammable ranged attacks in Assault

Problem

While the spec suffers major drawbacks compared to other melee dps in the form of lack of confusing movements, snare breaker, charge and aoe detaunt, the changes listed would bring it more in line with true melee dps. To compensate for this, I would look at the skillsets of the other trees which assault also has access to, which might be considered unfair. Especially the two spammable dots, one of which is a healdebuff might be seen as an issue with the proposed changes in mind. Also having free access to a spammable 65ft filler without even having to switch stance has previously been brought up as an issue. Cutting off access completely to any of the mentioned abilities would probably break the class, so I have a reasonable solution in mind.

Solution

While in assault stance, any ranged attack used is put on a 5 (/10) second cooldown. This limits uptime on the dots while engaged in melee combat, and also prevents the healdebuff from having a 100% uptime even through constant target switches. Further it makes switching to skirmish a necessity when engaged in non-melee combat. Added upside to these changes is that the build would require even more critical thinking, which it is severely lacking in its current state.


Tl;dr: Wrist Slash: 10% inc crit debuff, 15 sec uptime, applied by Brutal assault. Sweeping Slash: Singletarget, increased damage, 5 second cooldown, armor debuff. Brutal Assault: 10 second cooldown, applies Wrist Slash. Assault stance puts any ranged attack used on a 5/10 second cooldown.

[peterthepan3]

Sweeping Slash does high AoE damage, and many classes are plagued with monotonous rotations - which doesn't necessarily make them nonviable. It is the team's view that Wrist Slash is fine as is, and so, I'm declining.