Gunlinger wrote: Thu Dec 25, 2025 10:49 pm
Slayer before the patch was in a strange place already. After the patch it is still in the same strange place, with the addition of a more over complicated playstyle.
The core of the old Rage mechanic was clear.
- green rage: your damage is below operating value, like an engineer without the turret buff stacks.
- yellow rage: you have your damage buffed to normal state. +25% dmg to all your abilities. 75% dmg to exhaustive attacks. NO DEBUFF!
- red rage: you overextend your damage bonus to +50% to all abilities but you pay a price for it. Exhaustive attacks only deal +50% damage.
Your Armor and Resistances are lowered by 50% too.
The original Slayer mechanic once involved a tactic that would grand 3 stacks of accumulated rage to be consumed on using an exhaustive blow in the 2H build.
With that you played the safe route, stayed in yellow and had no debuff.
The unsafe build involved the Power Through tactic that kept you in red, flattened the bonus damage to 50% and required harder support.
Now you are unsafe as soon as you enter yellow rage. -25% armor and resistances for 25% dmg bonus. The joke here is that this 25% dmg bonus is considered the Slayers NORMAL DAMAGE! That is not buffed 25%. The 50% dmg plus from red rage is in truth the 25% bonus value.
So YES, -25% armor and resistances in YELLOW is a big mistake.
The NEW NEW mechanic now introduced variations in the rage costs of Exhaustive blows. It kinda feels like the balance team tried to turn the Slayer mechanic now into something similar of the Warrior Priest mechanic. But there is a big problem to it.
- The Slayer has no influence on the generation of rage, since rage is gained passive over time.
- Basic Slayer attack abilities lack a rage point generation value.
- Exhaustive attacks already COST ACTION POINTS.
You are already limited by the AP costs of Exhaustive attacks. Now you have to deal with their different rage costs on top of it.
If this system is supposed to work, Exhaustive attacks would need to have no AP costs. And basic attacks would need to build rage points
dependent on their AP costs.
So much to that.
Rampage was put back onto the gcd, depletes rage now and it's avoidance bonus that is listed as 100%, is just misleading, since you can not ignore more that 50% of the block and parry value, that the target has.
Rampage can now run for 20 sec. But considering that you now reset your rage back by 50 points when you use it, makes this change come with a sour taste.
And the biggest impact the Change has, is that it takes you now even longer to reach red rage and be in your max dmg range where Retribution does its full potential dmg and where you be able to Incapacitate.
Inevitable Doom, the Slayers's unique skill that was considered its ICONIC skill, was double hit. Short temper has no more use to it and the damage it does is now way to low. It's random run time and AP cost always limited ID to be placed to only 2 or 3 targets at best.
Over all the changes to Slayer have a negative impact.
If i had to put into words what happened i would compare it to a modern game release.
They have build the changes for the Chopper and then just poorly ported them over to the Slayer.
There have been so many good ideas for slayer before the patch. Many people tried to reach out to the balance team before and especially during the time the changes went onto the PTS. Those tries all got ignored.
And now we are in a state where the warband AOE build is kinda like before, just that it now does even less damage and that you are over all weaker.
And then they say BUT YOU GOT A NEW STRONG 2H BUILD.
The ''new strong 2H build'' has an overcomplicated play style. You can not even concentrate on what happens around you, because you have to focus on the Rage bar at all time to not mess up your timings.
After this patch i really hope that the range dps patch will not come THAT FAST. Because i fear the day when they ravage the Engineer too.
