SM tweek ideas

[Razid1987]

http://waronlinebuilder.org/#career=bo;
well black orc is better than sword master, buff up debuffs to enemy also healing and da greenest. black orc mayby lack some styff what chosen / bg have.
swordmaster is weakest tank with selfish not group based abilities ;-(

Overall? Maybe. But there are clear examples like Perfect Defenses and Eagle's Flight, where SM are flatout better than BOs. And how does SMs not have Da Greenest? What would you call Nature's Blade then?

And SMs have a lot of group abilities, not just solo. They might not have as much as other tanks, but there's no reason to exaggerate.

People made a suggestion thread for BOs a while back. If BOs are fine, how come they did that?

[Azarael]

great wall of text

While I admire your passion, you're going far, far, beyond the scope of what we're able to do. Complete ability reworks are entirely off the table, as we can't modify the client - making a number of modifications impossible. We also won't go too far from the tooltip description of a given ability.

Oh, and a note on shields: They stack on RoR. I hope nobody's going to now cry blue murder over this, because shields are bad enough as it is.

[Aquilon]

...as we can't modify the client...

May this be reconsidered in the future?

[Druin]

Since Black Orcs are mainly mirrored by Swordmasters, are you going to make sure similar changes are being made to them, as well?

No...

Spoiler:

Order Biased

[Luth]

Oh, and a note on shields: They stack on RoR. I hope nobody's going to now cry blue murder over this, because shields are bad enough as it is.

Dis bias...

Edit: tweeks

[Zealote]

I don't really want to get into an argument about it but what was the reasoning/motivation behind changing it to make shields stack?

I'm not really bothered about the change itself but...it's seems like a change to quite a basic combat mechanic so I don't see why it would just be implemented without any kind of discussion (unless I missed it, if so I'll apologise).

Obv at the end of the day it's the prerogative of all of the devs to change things as they see fit but if those changes affect pvp (in particular), I'd personally like to be expressly told (rather than just by chance, I mean) since it can change the way you play, and maybe how you played for years on live. E.g. as a healer not really needing to wait anymore till someone else's bubble's broken before casting yours.

As I said, I don't think the actual change bothers me, I just don't like the idea of playing one way/using certain strategies etc that don't apply here on RoR anymore cos you don't know combat calculations/mechanics etc have changed. It's a bit like the current dot dmg calculation system (which I know is a bug, not an intentional change, so not complaining ): it makes it mostly pointless to buff a teammates defences or reduce enemy's offensive stats once teammate's been focused and got a million dots on them since the DoT ticks aren't affected. But if you don't know that and play how you always did on live, you're at a disadvantage.

Hopefully that makes sense and doesn't come across as a scream of bias since that's not how it's intended.

[Azarael]

There was no motivation to change anything; until today I didn't even know anything was wrong. It just seemed like utter simple logic that if you have multiple shielding effects on you, and shields are just temporary health with a boatload of drawbacks that make them worse than that, then they should layer up and absorb damage sequentially.

If anything, I resent the existence of all these stupid and unintuitive special rules to the game because they mean I have to go back and fix things.

[Luth]

Seriously, there is no need to change the bubbles. They offer the worst protection, cause all hits go through them almost unmitigated.
Atm they just got some promotion from "crap" to "less crap than before"...

[Zealote]

Ah fair enough, it sounded to me like it was deliberate and the intention was to leave it working as it is, from your comment about not crying blue murder/shields being bad enough

@Luth I hopefully made it clear my main concern wasn't this specific change. But even if shields are *relatively* crap compared to other types of defence, I don't see why that automatically means they should be buffed without question.

[Greatwarden]

great wall of text

While I admire your passion, you're going far, far, beyond the scope of what we're able to do. Complete ability reworks are entirely off the table, as we can't modify the client - making a number of modifications impossible. We also won't go too far from the tooltip description of a given ability.

Thank you for giving me a better idea of what's possible and what's not. It was actually a lot of fun to think up suggestions when there's a least some chance that they'd be heard and I admit that I did get carried away.

Our bubbles potentially (if you spec for them) stacking is certainly encouraging news.

What scope is there to modify the Plan/Balance mechanic? I fear that even if all the SM/BO abilities were exactly the same as Chosen/KotBS, they would still lag behind due to a fundamental hobble like a detrimental mechanic.