Debate about why Order is how it is.

[Omegus]

First off if destro is having such a hard time, then why is it 7-8 times out of 10 that it is destro pushing city. That doesnt sound like you are at a big disadvantage.

Destro has a population advantage, meaning it is often pushing city. It's often bouncing off forts and getting pushed back to the middle zone as well . I tried to look at how many times each city has been sieged recently but our alliance discord is missing some scoreboard captures (we generally don't post the stomps vs pugs) so I don't know who's been getting sieged the most recently. All the city sieges blur into one after a while...

[Greenbeast]

No destro premades run any pumps on DPS or Healers except WE these days. Letting your shamans run a morale pump is reducing their survivability and healing output. Making your warband an easy pray for order melee train.
You can play with morales as win condition but you will be kited and order win late morale game because of SF and BH.

Every premade run at least two to three two- handers and snb chosens run M2 rotation it leaves you with 4 tanks with a morale pump and an offensive morale. Then you run a choppa and a squig that don't have any useful morale. So yes if morale drop isn't perfectly synchronized it will denied by syphons.
After 1 min Info a fight everybody have morales.

I love how you just conveniently leave marauders moral drain out of this....

Do you mean the ability in the middle tree? Nobody runs it. It gimps the damage and you have to stance dance. Most of marauders don't use morale drain anymore. Only way of s reliable morale drain on both sides are WH and WE, SOV ability and SF/BH + BO M4
The moral stop tactic didn't work last time we tested it.

[teiloh]

ASW: nice SH rant. ASW the only class with an initiative debuff tactic, which means it stacks with initiative debuff abilities. The conversion from initiative to chance to be crit is non-linear and as someone's initiative gets closer to zero their chance to be crit absolutely skyrockets. As it's an initiative debuff on a spammable ability the entire warband benefits from it. The tactic also comes with other useful buffs. Being able to trivially stack Weapon Skill from 3 100+ buffs (Assault Stance, Wrist Slash and Instinctive Aim give 360?) not only increases your overall physical damage but also increases your defenses (which are further increased via other means as well). The initiative debuff (more crit) combines with the other crit bonuses the class gets, giving it high crit chance and far higher single target damage than most people expect. Being able to spec into a ranged outgoing heal debuff with no CD at the same time is extra nice. I'm trying to find 2 ASWs to test whether the tactic will stack with itself.

IB: Nice Blackguard rant. BTW most debuffs in the game don't stack; with very few exceptions anything from an ability doesn't stack with other abilities, but it will stack with tactics (which is why the ASW's init debuff tactic is good). I didn't say all of the buffs were amazing - I sadly mained an IB on live and know all too well of my ST buffs getting beaten by better AOE buffs. Fortunately there are some gems in there which aren't easily available from other sources, e.g. +25% parry (vs a destro melee zerg...). Much like the BG it also gets access to a -20% crit ability, and this affects heal crit as well as offensive crits. Most healers stack heal crit as their main source of increasing outgoing heals due to it scaling much better with high tooltip values and being able to cut off the vast majority of this drops healing output dramatically and also slows down the procs healers get on crit (crying in Zealot tears). Taking off two-thirds of my heal crit and then reducing what healing is left by 50%. Due to the popularity of BOs, BGs usually have to fight for their space in a WB and it seems the majority of WB leaders want one BG at the most. The same does not exist on order with SMs so IBs are not exactly fighting for spots. You pair them up with MDPS and go for the backlines.

WH: Again, I didn't compare it to WE, but if you insist: WH have a tactic in the right tree that gives them a 25% chance to remove 250 points of morale whenever they hit an opponent in the back. WE do not have this tactic (the mirror version is/was on the Marauder instead). Yes WH have a harder time applying it to multiple targets, but the big combo is with Dragon Gun. Fire it from behind and you're potentially hitting people up to 78ft away (48ft radius plus 30ft basic range - yes I know the initial target needs to be within 30ft). Some will lose 125 morale, some will lose 350 morale. It's not a full drain by any means but the effectiveness of it comes from forcing destro to hold off on the morale drop until everyone is there as partial drops are worthless. The longer you can hold off the drop the easier it is to get kills on key targets which drops their morale to zero (this part is always forgotten about). It's the best morale drain order have and you can usually justify a slot for 1 WH doing this. Outside of Dragon Gun I believe the idea is to use the Razor Strike to try and drain 3 people at once but I'm not 100% sure on this.

AM: Nice Shaman rant. All I'm saying is that good morale pumping AMs are wanted in some order WBs and they have a hard time getting them. The Shaman one allows you to pump a party quicker it's true, but in order to do so the Shaman is losing a GCD every 10s to cast it (5s if you combo it with a Choppa or BO) and for the people in the group to be actively hitting people. The main benefit of the AM pump is that it has a 150 ft range and you can choose who is pumped in the warband. There's always a little bit of back and forth before the 2 warbands actually fight in city and during this time the AMs should be in combat (heal something that has gotten tagged by destro) and then pre-pumping morale ready for the push. I am not saying it's better or worse than the Shaman one, I am - much like the rest of this - just explaining how it should be used in cities.


You're right, I don't play order on ROR and never have done (as above I played them on live), so I don't know what mental blocks there are that discourage players from speccing for the above. I can only assume they start frothing at the mouth thinking about what the mirror does that they don't rather than looking at what they can do (don't worry, it happens all the time on destro when you mention WPs, Knights, Slayers and WLs to people). The experience I do have though is playing in an unholy amount of cities with an organised premade and seeing what order tactics work well and what doesn't. And the well played melee train by order does VERY well. Is it harder to coordinate than an AOE blob of BW and Slayers? Without a doubt.

I remember laughing at the proespect of people stacking WLs in the city... and then *that* happened

Initiative scaling was reduced if I'm not mistaken. Not only that but Grim Slash takes a tactic slot and only affects one person, is on a weak melee ability. You can translate that +% chance to be crit to raw DPS vs the typical target with -% chance to be hit and 300+ init and it's not all the impressive. Good luck getting the stars to align with either an AM/WH debuffing initiative or a random SM proc going off, especially as you're discounting SMs later.

IB: Without SMs Order doesn't have CD reducer. It's not Destro where CD reducers were handed out like candy and buffed all over the place. You need a SM in every single group if you want to barely match Destro's capabilities. This matters because your Sham and WE analysis doesn't consider CD reducers, which means WE have twice the amount of OYKs as WH Dragun Gun and Shaman twice as many morale pumps.

WH: that tactic is 11x in the single target line and there are no synergies with the AOE/DG line. Sure at rank 70 you can sacrifice a ton of damage to morale drain a particular target with an ass spec, but a Marauder and WE with CD reducer will get far higher numbers than you. If you say run with a SM, that means you don't have an IB. Unless you're saying every Order WB needs an exact setup with exactly 1 niche WH, 1 niche ASW, and 1 niche IB on top of 3x Knight 4x WP and 3x SM to pull off whatever you're describing ... yeah, that's highly unrealistic and pure fringe theorycraft.

AM: "losing a GCD to cast it" is a bit disingenuous. You can precast the ability before a fight where you're not doing anything but pre-hotting. You can cast it when there's a lull in damage. A Shaman with CD reducer and just one tactic can pre-cast, cast at 0 seconds, and cast again at 5 seconds to get an entire group to M2 in by the 5-6th seconds of combat. An AM on the other hand needs to plant and cast, wasting 2 seconds to overheal someone. It's trash except in extremely rare cases where it barely treads water wrt to the Shaman pump, and for that you have to spec in it. Switch the ability to Healing Energy and maybe we can begin to discuss their relative merits.

[teiloh]

I've played against good order premades like TUP and Simtex crew or Sophia and her Knights of Order. It's quite hard to kill these premades with only morales because you usually don't survive to full morale drop.
Even VII Legion learned with time to bring an AM and kite for burning heads + SF.

Please don't tell me that you play DoK/WP as a backline healers because you don't. These classes has a cross group healing that and medium armour plus aoe detaunt. In a target priority of an MA WP/DoK won't be in a first place. Bouth classes have clear risk Vs reward mechanics that punish them for a bad positioning or reward them for a risky play.

No destro premades run any pumps on DPS or Healers except WE these days. Letting your shamans run a morale pump is reducing their survivability and healing output. Making your warband an easy pray for order melee train.
You can play with morales as win condition but you will be kited and order win late morale game because of SF and BH.

Every premade run at least two to three two- handers and snb chosens run M2 rotation it leaves you with 4 tanks with a morale pump and an offensive morale. Then you run a choppa and a squig that don't have any useful morale. So yes if morale drop isn't perfectly synchronized it will denied by syphons.
After 1 min Info a fight everybody have morales.

Morales alone aren't going to kill decent premades. But they're just one advantage stacked on top of many, like CD decreasers/increasers, group synergy, resist debuffs, superior heal debuffs, superior AOE, superior utility/survivability

DoK/WP aren't backliners but there is a cost to getting so far into the fight that ED is proccing constantly. It's not Order's fault Destro wants to tickle WPs and trigger their ED before they actually intend to kill them. If you're right in the middle of the Destro AOE blob as a WP you will be setback/interrupted like crazy and the returns for getting ED up slim down significantly.

Claiming Shamans lose survivability/healing output with their pump is silly when AMs literally have to sit still as a statue and twirl their stick around to use theirs. AM is the game's squishiest and most easily targeted class, vs. a realm which generally does far more damage than Order.

"Squig doesn't have any useful morale" M2 snare, M4 2400 damage point blank aoe, M3 Squig beast, Big Shootin' M4 2400 AOE at 110 range with Gas Squig. SH has some of the best morales in the game. If you want to claim Burning Head Wiz, which is imo one of the stronger Order setups, Destro can easily claim Lots of Shootin' Squigs with Morale Builder + Shaman Morales and run circles around the BH BWs.

[Manatikik]

No offense but you have no idea what you're talking about and it's clear you've never played Order to even a medium rank.

Your entire post is making counter points to arguments and comparisons that I didn't make. When looking at what you can bring to cities, look at what you can bring to cities. Order cannot bring a MSH to do MSH things, but it can bring an ASW to do ASW things. When looking at what outgoing heal debuffs your order warband can bring, the Blackguard having an ability with a 0s cooldown doesn't change what you bring as you can't bring a Blackguard anyway.

But to give you a few points on how those classes can be very useful in an order warband:

ASW: nice SH rant. ASW the only class with an initiative debuff tactic, which means it stacks with initiative debuff abilities. The conversion from initiative to chance to be crit is non-linear and as someone's initiative gets closer to zero their chance to be crit absolutely skyrockets. As it's an initiative debuff on a spammable ability the entire warband benefits from it. The tactic also comes with other useful buffs. Being able to trivially stack Weapon Skill from 3 100+ buffs (Assault Stance, Wrist Slash and Instinctive Aim give 360?) not only increases your overall physical damage but also increases your defenses (which are further increased via other means as well). The initiative debuff (more crit) combines with the other crit bonuses the class gets, giving it high crit chance and far higher single target damage than most people expect. Being able to spec into a ranged outgoing heal debuff with no CD at the same time is extra nice. I'm trying to find 2 ASWs to test whether the tactic will stack with itself.

IB: Nice Blackguard rant. BTW most debuffs in the game don't stack; with very few exceptions anything from an ability doesn't stack with other abilities, but it will stack with tactics (which is why the ASW's init debuff tactic is good). I didn't say all of the buffs were amazing - I sadly mained an IB on live and know all too well of my ST buffs getting beaten by better AOE buffs. Fortunately there are some gems in there which aren't easily available from other sources, e.g. +25% parry (vs a destro melee zerg...). Much like the BG it also gets access to a -20% crit ability, and this affects heal crit as well as offensive crits. Most healers stack heal crit as their main source of increasing outgoing heals due to it scaling much better with high tooltip values and being able to cut off the vast majority of this drops healing output dramatically and also slows down the procs healers get on crit (crying in Zealot tears). Taking off two-thirds of my heal crit and then reducing what healing is left by 50%. Due to the popularity of BOs, BGs usually have to fight for their space in a WB and it seems the majority of WB leaders want one BG at the most. The same does not exist on order with SMs so IBs are not exactly fighting for spots. You pair them up with MDPS and go for the backlines.

WH: Again, I didn't compare it to WE, but if you insist: WH have a tactic in the right tree that gives them a 25% chance to remove 250 points of morale whenever they hit an opponent in the back. WE do not have this tactic (the mirror version is/was on the Marauder instead). Yes WH have a harder time applying it to multiple targets, but the big combo is with Dragon Gun. Fire it from behind and you're potentially hitting people up to 78ft away (48ft radius plus 30ft basic range - yes I know the initial target needs to be within 30ft). Some will lose 125 morale, some will lose 350 morale. It's not a full drain by any means but the effectiveness of it comes from forcing destro to hold off on the morale drop until everyone is there as partial drops are worthless. The longer you can hold off the drop the easier it is to get kills on key targets which drops their morale to zero (this part is always forgotten about). It's the best morale drain order have and you can usually justify a slot for 1 WH doing this. Outside of Dragon Gun I believe the idea is to use the Razor Strike to try and drain 3 people at once but I'm not 100% sure on this. edit: I've been told Dragon Gun can also throw out an outgoing heal debuff on everyone hit as everyone also gets hit by the WH's bullet, and that WE don't have access to this as kisses have an internal cooldown as they can proc on any attack.

AM: Nice Shaman rant. All I'm saying is that good morale pumping AMs are wanted in some order WBs and they have a hard time getting them. The Shaman one allows you to pump a party quicker it's true, but in order to do so the Shaman is losing a GCD every 10s to cast it (5s if you combo it with a Choppa or BO) and for the people in the group to be actively hitting people. The main benefit of the AM pump is that it has a 150 ft range and you can choose who is pumped in the warband. There's always a little bit of back and forth before the 2 warbands actually fight in city and during this time the AMs should be in combat (heal something that has gotten tagged by destro) and then pre-pumping morale ready for the push. I am not saying it's better or worse than the Shaman one, I am - much like the rest of this - just explaining how it should be used in cities.


You're right, I don't play order on ROR and never have done (as above I played them on live), so I don't know what mental blocks there are that discourage players from speccing for the above. I can only assume they start frothing at the mouth thinking about what the mirror does that they don't rather than looking at what they can do (don't worry, it happens all the time on destro when you mention WPs, Knights, Slayers and WLs to people). The experience I do have though is playing in an unholy amount of cities with an organised premade and seeing what order tactics work well and what doesn't. And the well played melee train by order does VERY well. Is it harder to coordinate than an AOE blob of BW and Slayers? Without a doubt.

I remember laughing at the proespect of people stacking WLs in the city... and then *that* happened

WS doesnt stack with any other iniative debuff in the game since October 2018; also the formula was reworked at that time so you can never have like a 50%+ (i forget the exact number) CTBC off of Initiative alone. Didn't read the rest but yea just saw that in passing and thought i'd let you know the OP initiative days are well behind us (or ASW would still be the best 6v6 class, which it is not).

[zakgrin]

No offense but you have no idea what you're talking about and it's clear you've never played Order to even a medium rank.

IB: Nice Blackguard rant. BTW most debuffs in the game don't stack; with very few exceptions anything from an ability doesn't stack with other abilities, but it will stack with tactics (which is why the ASW's init debuff tactic is good). I didn't say all of the buffs were amazing - I sadly mained an IB on live and know all too well of my ST buffs getting beaten by better AOE buffs. Fortunately there are some gems in there which aren't easily available from other sources, e.g. +25% parry (vs a destro melee zerg...). Much like the BG it also gets access to a -20% crit ability, and this affects heal crit as well as offensive crits. Most healers stack heal crit as their main source of increasing outgoing heals due to it scaling much better with high tooltip values and being able to cut off the vast majority of this drops healing output dramatically and also slows down the procs healers get on crit (crying in Zealot tears). Taking off two-thirds of my heal crit and then reducing what healing is left by 50%. Due to the popularity of BOs, BGs usually have to fight for their space in a WB and it seems the majority of WB leaders want one BG at the most. The same does not exist on order with SMs so IBs are not exactly fighting for spots. You pair them up with MDPS and go for the backlines.

Order doesn't have enough tanks in general, so no, IBs aren't fighting for spots in pugs, but they most definitely are in premades. IBs would suffer the same fate as BGs, if not worse, if order had more SMs (even with the recent nerf to Crushing Advance). So I'm not sure it is fair to say IBs don't have problems because it is easier for them to find a warband than a BG. My guild's premade only takes 1 IB unless we can't find enough Knights/SMs.

I will agree with you that PK + Kneecapper makes for a pretty strong combination, but I think you are over exaggerating its impact in cities when you are fighting a utility battle against Knights and SMs, and a cleansing battle against the opposing realm. Oathbound and Ancestors Fury are super strong buffs as well, but with a 10s uptime on each, you'll honestly be lucky if you can keep those buffs up 100% of the time on 2 of the 24 players in your wb. If you are able to pull off that feat, you'll have a matter of seconds to use one or two of PK, Kneecapper, FR, etc. before you have to start buffing again. The abilities you and I mentioned are great for 6v6, but far less effective in large scale. The fact is that aoe is king in cities and RvR, and frankly IB has less aoe than any other tank in the game. We actually don't have a single aoe buff or debuff, unless you count Oath of Vengeance (toughness tactic that doesn't even work), or the Told Ya So! (AP buff) tactic which only procs off of critically hitting someone (imagine that...) on an S&B tank xD.

If you look at the remaining single target buffs in our arsenal, it gets even more disappointing. Our armor buff is not much better than a pot (same for BG). Our toughness buff will get overwritten by a Knight running Stand Strong! for the entire group (same for BG). Our corp buff is really not all that useful (outside of the occasional AA haste + WaL for AP pumping Oath Friend) because it won't come close to the resists buff you can get from a healer/Knight. Then you have Runic Shield, which is probably the strongest magic bubble on Order side, but again its single target and not significantly better than SMs group bubble. Finally you have Inspiring Attack which is a solid strength/willpower buff but again will suffer the same fate as the others if you happen to have a 2H Knight in your group running Press The Attack!... So outside of Inspiring Attack, all the other default buffs won't have much of a place in your rotation, and if they do you won't actually be using them that often. Not to mention, it actually takes skill to use our buffs correctly, whereas Knights/Chosen can just walk around and look pretty.

IBs and BGs could really use some love. Go take a look at each of their middle trees. Both are geared towards pve, which was okay on live because cities had a pretty important pve component but is the exact opposite on RoR. IBs middle tree in particular is a wasteland of useless abilities and tactics where Oathbound and Furious Reprisal are generally the only thing you'd ever consider speccing for city-wise. Shield Mastery is okay (poor BGs), but when you consider BOs get a free 10% block tactic, and that'd you'd have to lose something significant from your already lacking utility toolbox to even take it, it really makes you go WTF.

[Omegus]

WS doesnt stack with any other iniative debuff in the game since October 2018; also the formula was reworked at that time so you can never have like a 50%+ (i forget the exact number) CTBC off of Initiative alone. Didn't read the rest but yea just saw that in passing and thought i'd let you know the OP initiative days are well behind us (or ASW would still be the best 6v6 class, which it is not).

Thank you for the correction.

Trying to keep track of random changes in this game (especially arbitary ones like one specific tactic not stacking with abilities) is getting f**king tiresome. The forum posts say one thing, the patch notes another (or nothing at all), the wiki says another (or nothing past a certain date), the career builder says another, in-game says another and the actual implementation does something else. No wonder people get confused, much like the rediscovery recently that the Blackguard's anti-crit tactic is multiplicative rather than additive thus making it virtually useless compared to what people thought it should do.

I give up.

[Mordd]

No destro premades run any pumps on DPS or Healers except WE these days. Letting your shamans run a morale pump is reducing their survivability and healing output. Making your warband an easy pray for order melee train.
You can play with morales as win condition but you will be kited and order win late morale game because of SF and BH.

Every premade run at least two to three two- handers and snb chosens run M2 rotation it leaves you with 4 tanks with a morale pump and an offensive morale. Then you run a choppa and a squig that don't have any useful morale. So yes if morale drop isn't perfectly synchronized it will denied by syphons.
After 1 min Info a fight everybody have morales.

I love how you just conveniently leave marauders moral drain out of this....

Do you mean the ability in the middle tree? Nobody runs it. It gimps the damage and you have to stance dance. Most of marauders don't use morale drain anymore. Only way of s reliable morale drain on both sides are WH and WE, SOV ability and SF/BH + BO M4
The moral stop tactic didn't work last time we tested it.

Im hit with the moral drain pretty much every city Ive been in.
if the moral drain is so useless you would be good with changing it to something else or give it to order then.

[Manatikik]

WS doesnt stack with any other iniative debuff in the game since October 2018; also the formula was reworked at that time so you can never have like a 50%+ (i forget the exact number) CTBC off of Initiative alone. Didn't read the rest but yea just saw that in passing and thought i'd let you know the OP initiative days are well behind us (or ASW would still be the best 6v6 class, which it is not).

Thank you for the correction.

Trying to keep track of random changes in this game (especially arbitary ones like one specific tactic not stacking with abilities) is getting f**king tiresome. The forum posts say one thing, the patch notes another (or nothing at all), the wiki says another (or nothing past a certain date), the career builder says another, in-game says another and the actual implementation does something else. No wonder people get confused, much like the rediscovery recently that the Blackguard's anti-crit tactic is multiplicative rather than additive thus making it virtually useless compared to what people thought it should do.

I give up.

Yup the inconsistencies are annoying (even if this change made total sense from a balance perspective). I keep up with SW changes pretty closely for obvious reasons

[RORquest]

just make IB/bg dps debuff class

does a 5 sec cooldown really make a meta? also what the hell does ''1'' ib bring to a warband what unique skill does it bring