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WL improvement iterations

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Mausini
Posts: 78

WL improvement iterations

Post#1 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 11:14 am

Hi all,

there are still some issues open regarding WL that need some polish up.
From my point of view that are:

1) The pet/no pet issue and how to implement it.

2) The Woodman/Monstro AOE skill integration

3) Smaller tweaks

Aza already stated, that bigger changes might not come in the future because of the community being skeptical regarding more changes. That's why I think there should be smaller iterations and my thoughts are set in a way to implement smaller solutions one after another.

1) Pet/no pet
Problem: Using tactics for the pet/no pet handling hurts WL a lot right now.
First step solution: Implement a core ability similar to the RP "Harbringer of Doom" switch for toggling between the Loner and the Trained for War effects.
Maybe change the "Trained for War" effect: Strip off the Str and give the Pet a minor speedboost (10-15%)

Thougt's: That's not the perfect solution but will definitely be a Improvement.

2) Woodman/Monstro aoe and defensive options
Problem:
a) The WL selfheal is rather weak, needs a tactic and works bad in both, skirmish and WB play. In WB play, the heal is inferior to pure tankyness in skirmish the hot is to weak. The stance buff is comparable weaker than the Mara one too.

b) The option to switch Woodman skills to spirit damage has zero synergy to the armor debuff. The debuff is also single target and there is no way to improve your aoe damage like the Mara does with his armor ignore tactic leading to a imbalance in WB play witch was one of the reasons to introduce the new Woodman tree.

First Step solution:
a) Copying the Mara Monstro spec is the easiest solution but somehow not flavorful. That's why I would give WL immunity to crit in Woodman stance. If WL in woodman would have been crited but is prevented a hot selfheal is applied. So Mara counters WS stats and WL counters crit stats.

b) Let Ethereal Transferal change the damage to spirit and give it a spirit resist strike through. Like that there are 2 major ways to go for WL. The armor debuff Axeman Hunter way or a Woodman Axeman build with Fey Illusion and Lions Fury as heavy hitting single target abilities. Its still not as consistent as the Marauder armor strike trough way with all abilities do physical damage but its easy to implement and by definition a improvement.

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lefze
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Posts: 863

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#2 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 11:46 am

The following is only about woodsman/monstro.

Mara selfheal and any other selfheal (except healthpots of course) is largely irrelevant outside of niche solo specs. Both woodsman and monstro are AoE trees, shouldn't the focus be first and foremost on bombing in a warband?

I would suggest ignoring the mara implementation when looking at WL. WL lacks the same utility a mara can have, and also deals less damage than it should when taking that into account. I would rather have the Woodsman proc be an offensive one.

Having to take a tactic to convert abilities to spirit is the first obvious roadblock I saw when building the WL. You need Loner, you need +crit damage, you need the spirit conversion, you need moraledrain and you also need +mainstat. So what do you drop? Taking every tactic besides moraledrain, and you are still kinda short of mara in damage. Swap out any tactic for moraledrain, and you aren't comparable to the typical Mara anymore. At that point you compare more to a Mara which completely forgoes middle tree in favor Exhaustive Strikes, but the WL obsiously only gets moraledrain as opposed to morale+AP.

Basically the fact that Mara doesn't need to slot loner and as such has an additional tacticslot is the real imbalance I see. As such I would incorporate Spirit Strike into Woodsmans craft, and additionally add a proc which deals damage and grants +% spirit resist bypass for x seconds.
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Azarael
Posts: 5332

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#3 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:10 pm

In response to comments regarding WL damage not being high enough, I negated the requirement for the tactic in order to give the pet its skills, which leaves Loner as a poor tactic because it was reimplemented in an attempt to allow the WL to play without a pet at all. There is an additional way of handling that problem outside of using a timed buff, which is to send Loner as a tome or renown tactic, as it is a playstyle shifter tactic first and foremost - Mythic in general used tactics to implement "cannot/should not be changed in combat" skills. I have an issue in general with playstyle shifter / rebalancer tactics consuming slots that can be used on empowerment tactics.

On crit immunity with guarded crits causing a proc: I don't have a problem with that. I think I can work the implementation with the current handlers and crit resistance fits lore-wise.

On changing Ethereal Transferral: I'm not quite following you. Are you talking about adding a Spirit resistance debuff as a tertiary effect of the tactic?

On incorporating Spirit Strike into Woodsman's Craft: Will you always want to be dealing Spirit damage from Woodsman's Craft? Is there any conceivable situation in which you wish to inflict physical damage with Woodsman's Craft?

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Fallenkezef
Posts: 1483

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#4 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:27 pm

My first thought is to remove the pet altogether, does not fit the lore and is a pretty daft mechanic for this kind of game to be honest.

Pets work ok for rdps concepts but end up becoming a mess for mdps. Mythic screwed up when it mirrowed the mechanics for SW/Mara and WL/SH. Should of been SW/SH (give SW a hawk or something) and WL/Mara.

So that's my tuppence. Bin the pet and be done with it, solves all the problems
Alea iacta est

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Fallenkezef
Posts: 1483

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#5 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:29 pm

My first thought is to remove the pet altogether, does not fit the lore and is a pretty daft mechanic for this kind of game to be honest.

Pets work ok for rdps concepts but end up becoming a mess for mdps. Mythic screwed up when it mirrowed the mechanics for SW/Mara and WL/SH. Should of been SW/SH (give SW a hawk or something) and WL/Mara.

So that's my tuppence. Bin the pet and be done with it, solves all the problems.

Give WL a unique lion mount and ger on with balancing
Alea iacta est

Mausini
Posts: 78

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#6 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:38 pm

Azarael wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:10 pm In response to comments regarding WL damage not being high enough, I negated the requirement for the tactic in order to give the pet its skills, which leaves Loner as a poor tactic because it was reimplemented in an attempt to allow the WL to play without a pet at all. There is an additional way of handling that problem outside of using a timed buff, which is to send Loner as a tome or renown tactic, as it is a playstyle shifter tactic first and foremost - Mythic in general used tactics to implement "cannot/should not be changed in combat" skills. I have an issue in general with playstyle shifter / rebalancer tactics consuming slots that can be used on empowerment tactics.

On crit immunity with guarded crits causing a proc: I don't have a problem with that. I think I can work the implementation with the current handlers and crit resistance fits lore-wise.

On changing Ethereal Transferral: I'm not quite following you. Are you talking about adding a Spirit resistance debuff as a tertiary effect of the tactic?

On incorporating Spirit Strike into Woodsman's Craft: Will you always want to be dealing Spirit damage from Woodsman's Craft? Is there any conceivable situation in which you wish to inflict physical damage with Woodsman's Craft?
Regarding your Loner problems: I do agree. It shouldn't take a tactic slot no matter how it is done. A tome solution would be cool too, especially if you are going to implement a small quest where you need to kill a White Lion to get the tome tactic. But that's just a niffy lore idea.

Regarding Ethereal Transferal: Yes, that was the idea. So why using a tactic for that. First of all, Marauder needs to invest a tactic too for getting the strike through.
And I do think, that there are some situations where WL want to have for example Slashing Blade as physical damage when they are Axe Hunter specced and do have a high WS setup.
More interesting is the question if the spirit strike through do work outside of Woodman too in a way that all spirit damage has strike through. That would give Woodman some synergy with Fey Illusion and Lions Fury as a compensation that not all damage skills benefit from the strike through.

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lefze
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Posts: 863

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#7 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:53 pm

Azarael wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:10 pm
On incorporating Spirit Strike into Woodsman's Craft: Will you always want to be dealing Spirit damage from Woodsman's Craft? Is there any conceivable situation in which you wish to inflict physical damage with Woodsman's Craft?
Depends on how you see it, for singletarget there is obvious value in being able to benefit from double armor debuffs. But woodsman is first and foremost a warband AoE spec I hope, and as such spirit>physical for order. This is also something I see certain people ignoring, they want it to work for soloing and whatnot, and I beg that you ignore any such concerns.

To be honest, at first I found the whole spirit damage thing kinda absurd. But it's actually a lot more unique than simply slapping a 50% armor pen tactic on WL aswell, and giving order an AoE armor debuff like the one destro has. If you can figure something out, I much prefer keeping the spirit damage in. But it won't necessarily work unless WL gains a proc of some sort or a small damage increase on Slashing Blade. The damage simply isn't cutting it at the moment.
Rip Phalanx

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Fallenkezef
Posts: 1483

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#8 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:55 pm

lefze wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:53 pm
Azarael wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:10 pm
On incorporating Spirit Strike into Woodsman's Craft: Will you always want to be dealing Spirit damage from Woodsman's Craft? Is there any conceivable situation in which you wish to inflict physical damage with Woodsman's Craft?
Depends on how you see it, for singletarget there is obvious value in being able to benefit from double armor debuffs. But woodsman is first and foremost a warband AoE spec I hope, and as such spirit>physical for order. This is also something I see certain people ignoring, they want it to work for soloing and whatnot, and I beg that you ignore any such concerns.

To be honest, at first I found the whole spirit damage thing kinda absurd. But it's actually a lot more unique than simply slapping a 50% armor pen tactic on WL aswell, and giving order an AoE armor debuff like the one destro has. If you can figure something out, I much prefer keeping the spirit damage in. But it won't necessarily work unless WL gains a proc of some sort or a small damage increase on Slashing Blade. The damage simply isn't cutting it at the moment.
It also works alongside SM to create a spirit damage "theme" for HE melee damage.
Alea iacta est

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lefze
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Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#9 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 1:03 pm

Fallenkezef wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:55 pm
lefze wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:53 pm
Azarael wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:10 pm
On incorporating Spirit Strike into Woodsman's Craft: Will you always want to be dealing Spirit damage from Woodsman's Craft? Is there any conceivable situation in which you wish to inflict physical damage with Woodsman's Craft?
Depends on how you see it, for singletarget there is obvious value in being able to benefit from double armor debuffs. But woodsman is first and foremost a warband AoE spec I hope, and as such spirit>physical for order. This is also something I see certain people ignoring, they want it to work for soloing and whatnot, and I beg that you ignore any such concerns.

To be honest, at first I found the whole spirit damage thing kinda absurd. But it's actually a lot more unique than simply slapping a 50% armor pen tactic on WL aswell, and giving order an AoE armor debuff like the one destro has. If you can figure something out, I much prefer keeping the spirit damage in. But it won't necessarily work unless WL gains a proc of some sort or a small damage increase on Slashing Blade. The damage simply isn't cutting it at the moment.
It also works alongside SM to create a spirit damage "theme" for HE melee damage.
Yep, the synergies are there to make WL dealing spirit damage potentially work. It's just not quite there yet.
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Fallenkezef
Posts: 1483

Re: WL improvement iterations

Post#10 » Sun Sep 02, 2018 1:42 pm

lefze wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 1:03 pm
Fallenkezef wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:55 pm
lefze wrote: Sun Sep 02, 2018 12:53 pm

Depends on how you see it, for singletarget there is obvious value in being able to benefit from double armor debuffs. But woodsman is first and foremost a warband AoE spec I hope, and as such spirit>physical for order. This is also something I see certain people ignoring, they want it to work for soloing and whatnot, and I beg that you ignore any such concerns.

To be honest, at first I found the whole spirit damage thing kinda absurd. But it's actually a lot more unique than simply slapping a 50% armor pen tactic on WL aswell, and giving order an AoE armor debuff like the one destro has. If you can figure something out, I much prefer keeping the spirit damage in. But it won't necessarily work unless WL gains a proc of some sort or a small damage increase on Slashing Blade. The damage simply isn't cutting it at the moment.
It also works alongside SM to create a spirit damage "theme" for HE melee damage.
Yep, the synergies are there to make WL dealing spirit damage potentially work. It's just not quite there yet.
Goes back to the pet holding the class back. Remove the pet and a tactic to toggle spirit/normal damage is more useable.
Alea iacta est

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