Fey wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 12:09 am
This is the ultimate <grab popcorn> thread. I just love the spammable earthshatter at 100 grudge idea. Spammable point-blank, not cone, aoe snare. I can hear Secrets blood pressure rising from here.
Hey Fey! Thanks for your comment. I would agree, at this point if I am understanding the Earthshatter proposal, not only would it be OP but it would also be extremely annoying to play against. However, the example I provided was merely for my understanding, so lets see what Gryyw has to say! At this point, it would not be something I'd include in the official proposal on the balance forums.
But just to reiterate, this is not an official proposal. We are gathering ideas, many of which will not be included when we make our balance proposal. The goal is to blurt out anything you can think of, crazy or otherwise, because it may lead someone else to come up with something they hadn't thought before. We want to improve IBs in warband play, and specifically cities. In my opinion Knights and SMs can serve as good enough guardbots across the board, because of the other things they bring, that it doesn't warrant bringing many, if any IBs to a city right now.
Path of stone sucks eh? Just like a dozen other trees spread among a dozen other classes. A spammable initiative/parry buff is, um, really good at 5 pts. Spam that mess on your sundry city mdps and profit. Also effective for floating tank that falls to backline to assist healers under duress from melee. You are not just a good guard-bot, you are THE guard-bot. If that doesn't appeal to you then sorry mate, you've just got to play a knight.
Path of Stone is an IB's mainline tree and what is supposed to make it the best guardbot in the game. Based on that, I'd disagree with your assessment that many classes suffer from this problem. Many classes are in possession of a **** tree, but few classes have a **** mainline tree. BGs suffer a similar problem. All of their good debuffs are in Path of Malice but require them to bring a 2h to the city. So as I've stated multiple times in this thread, knowing that, it is not surprising that IBs/BGs generally only have 1 spot in premade wbs.
IBs as you say are supposed to be able to make themselves and one other player (preferably a slayer) super tanky, but outside of Oathbound, there aren't really any other tools to do that. Copying this from a previous reply:
Vengful Strike (toughness) - Toughness in general has been nerfed on this server, but if a Knight runs Stand Strong! (which to me is silly) they will probably overwrite your single target toughness buff for the entire party.
Watch An' Learn (WS and AP) - You get WS and your oathfriend gets AP. Has a 20s cooldown. Most Knights typically run To Glory! anyways, so this buff honestly is only a marginal improvement with a really long cooldown, while Knights have 100% up-time with theirs proccing every 5 seconds. This buff is great for giving your Oathfriend loads of AP in a 10 second window.
Guarded Attack - This buff is nullified by armor pots.
Inspiring Attack (str, willpower) - This buff is decent but is overshadowed by ancestors fury. You'll be using this ability as often as possible in a city/wb situation for the heal debuff, not so much for the strength buff. Another downside is it does not stack with ancestors fury.
Runic Shield (magic absorb) - This is the same story as the others. It is marginally better than SMs protection of the hoeth, but the difference is, protection of the hoeth applies to your entire group.
Avenging The Debt - Straight up garbage
Oathstone - Straight up garbage
So what I hope this illustrates is that the buffs that could be used to make our mdps guard a god, either get overwritten by AoE Buffs, are equivalent in strength to the AoE buffs (again no point in using them), or are nearly equivalent to pots. A simple improvement to the baseline strength of some of these buffs would go a long way, without even fixing the Stone Tree. As I've said many times, AoE buffs should not be as strong as single target buffs, just like AoE damage will not put out as high of numbers on a single tick as single target damage. So what that means is, either auras need to be nerfed, or single target buffs need to be buffed.
IB is an insanely fun and effective tank. Your role in city WB is to make your Melee MA unstoppable. I would sell my right testicle if I could guard Chopmaster in a city WB on IB, because the result would be disgusting.
For anyone who gives a crap my IB is 40/50 and my favorite class to play. Flame away Dawi.
We can definitely agree on something, of all the classes I've played between Live and RoR, IB is still my favorite. In small scale it can be an absolute badass and in wb/rvr play there is a lot to manage (single target buffs, debuffs) which makes it far more challenging but in my opinion also more rewarded than any of the other Order tanks.