Damage has been consistently high over the past year, with big struggles if targets are in Champion Challenge (ChCh) and being tunneled. However, in this whole equation, I don't understand why Sorc and BW are getting the nerf hammer. They might (I'm not an ORvR player) have a semi decent damage in AoE spec, but their role has mostly remained as a buffing class for the other AoE DPS in the party. Now, having played solo and group ranked for ages, this change seems to me flatly unfair. Both classes in competitive small-scale play are:
- 1) Nearly unplayable against gap-closing DPS like WL and Mara as they can pick you up even if you are using Focused Mind.
- 2) Entirely unplayable against Squig and SW as they will make sure you are in constant range applied snare (in which even cleansing is mostly pointless because they will cover it).
- 3) Have a hard time dealing with stealthers,
- 4) Have a very hard time with defensive Tanks applying Challenge on you (Hence your spike damage becomes pretty much forgetable)
- 5) And have to kite in any other scenario with ChCh, so they can't properly rotate unless the enemy decides to go after the other DPS.
- 6) Can always be range staggered and ChCh'ed to end the kiting without any counterplay left after that as you don't have unlike SW and Squig a "buff armor option" so people practically hit a target nearly 0 armor if armor debuff is applied and also after being caught you do not have any ability to escape aside of M2 - Focused Mind which is available every 60 secs, meanwhile a stagger gives you 30 secs immunity, ChCh can be effectively applied every 20 secs
Since
certain people have been complaining about range comps and their damage, Sorc and BW are the least of the actual threats here. Especially from the perspective of a healer and Sorc/BW player, I can tell you that the moment the
enemy healer finds the cleanse button is the moment your game is over. And again, if there's no frontline in a scenario, you'll most likely have zero time windows where you can really rotate anything unless you want to be caught in chain snares and CC.
Instead of nerfing a class that barely ever worked in small scale, I don't understand why the context around it isn't being considered, which seemingly gives the class this strength:
- b) Damage calculation to Spike abilities of Squig and SW abilities*
- c) Survivability changes to MDPS
* I think abilities need some grounded ruleset. There are far too many abilities that have quite different scaling such as Fell the Weak for SW which does around 3k Damage - it's an instant - meanwhile there is not a single ability on a caster be it sorc, bw, magus that would do that portion of damage - not without talon- and not without requiring a stationary casttime of 3 secs -> my point here is we have to come up with basic rules how much an instant should do compared to abilities that have a casttime, and take into consideration that casttime requires a stationary position and setback.