[Review] [SW] Steady Aim

[Ugle]

It's not like bullseye crit is for free. Costs a tactic slot and have a huge risk attached.

[Aceboltz]

lol, try having it on a melee class to know what 'a huge risk' means... It's not a 'huge' risk on a backline damage dealer.

[daniilpb]

Yeah, it's very cool to have those ~50% crit rates in your mind but you are missing one thing : defenses. You can get those numbers with full or partly RR crit and bullseye. How many defensive stats will you have then w/o those RR points and bullseye on you? Around 10% dodge/disrupt, 30-50% chance to be critically hit. I thought that we are balancing around serious gameplay where you should always have close 0% chance to be critically hit and as much dodge/disrupt/parry rates as you can get.
Yeah, that's might be very cool to go full glass cannon and kill poor 31 sorcs because with that build you most likely gonna die in the first 5 seconds of marauder's root or right after the Word of pain tick.

[Ugle]

Actually I don't use it on neither skirm nor assault specc because its not worth it

[carmine3161]

Why not make steady aim almost identical to Gut Ripper from the marauder? my counter suggestion is to make steady aim guarantee the next single target damaging ability in the next 6s automatically crit. Gut Ripper requires the gift of Savagery so Steady Aim should be restricted to Scout and Skirmish stance or one of them.

Stances

Spoiler:

-Restricting it to Skirmish stance would create stance dancing and also give some more life to the Scout stance and tree, for Scout stance it would be used to a similar effect, as a whole this ability will increase the usage and viability of steady aim by giving a small boost to damage for Skirmish stance and reviving the dead Festering Arrow build after the unshakable focus morale removal. Having guaranteed chance to crit for Festering Arrow will definitely give life to the Scout stance and encourage some stance dancing.

Cooldowns

Spoiler:

-The cooldown for steady aim is 30s, its hard to say what the right cooldown should be, being to low creates a lot of spamming festering arrow and more damage in skirmish. Having the cooldown too high will make the ability a primarily fester bombing only ability which might be okay. Any suggested cooldowns will probably need some testing, but for now i would say something in between, 15-20s i think would be enough to provide useful to Skirmish and create some Festering Arrow action.

-For balance reasons Steady Aim should be limited to ranged single target damaging abilities, allowing the ability to be used with Lileath's arrow might be to strong, it would give a huge aoe boost with also little risk.

These are my balanced suggestions, i feel with all the current DOT changes our damage is consistent and annoying. It can be devastating in the right situation but we do lack burst.

Like Saupreusse was saying though some crit multiplier would definitely be a welcomed change to the shadow warriors current poor burst damage in the Skirmish and Scout stance.

Crit Multiplier

Spoiler:

-My suggestion for a Crit multiplier would be something like 25% to 50% damage boost but be a double edged sword, Shadow Warriors have a very low HP pool so why not make the ability decrease our wounds? maybe 200-300, making something this crazy but so worth it would also require some investing our renown into the wounds tree, making this a very dangerous and expensive skill with worthwhile gains? (this shouldnt stack with other wound debuffs cause then things would be a little to crazy but if you're getting wounds debuffed by melee you're probably already dead with this ability active) also just kinda throwing numbers out there but lets say you make this ability provide the multiplier for 10s make the wounds debuff last double.

EDIT: fixed wall of text, sorry about that.

[Manatikik]

Spoiler:

Do people not believe that even a 25% increase in crit damage and an easily attainable 70% crit would preform almost exactly like 2 piece doom flayer respectively.

The damage would be a little less as you aren't a range power/stat god but still that's very close in design to a very broken set.

70% is one hell of an exaggeration.. But yea, I think crit damage might be too much of a bump and give too much more power to Skirmish (which I'd ideally like to bump it's ST burst a little more, but not over the top and focus on a solution that helps Scout more while still being useful to Skirmish/Assault). I still believe that straight crit chance is the most effective way to do this due to the fact that Scout's skills have higher base damage so the Crit's affect it in a more positive way and providing burst (in specific time windows) through even stronger FS on demand as a finisher and making it equal (if not better than) FtW.

I mean not really an exaggeration. Without any futile strikes a mara can easily break 45% with an initiative debuff on him even with 3 lots of it he will still reach 30% trivialy.

Add bulls eye and you have between 65% and 50% crit without counting any crit in gear or spec that the sw may have(or things like knights).

My numbers are not exaggerated they are if anything conservative.

Since we are supposed to be discussing for coordinated group play and not... whatever the hell scenario you find yourself in with those numbers, we can ignore the whole outrageous crit numbers.

200-300 wounds debuff seems ridiculously high for one guaranteed crit to me... But changing SA into something like next 3 attacks will always critically hit isn't a bad idea. Skirmish can use it for FS + GA and get decent burst and Scout can use it for FA + GA + FtW and get decent burst right there.

[carmine3161]

200-300 wounds debuff seems ridiculously high for one guaranteed crit to me... But changing SA into something like next 3 attacks will always critically hit isn't a bad idea. Skirmish can use it for FS + GA and get decent burst and Scout can use it for FA + GA + FtW and get decent burst right there.

The wounds Debuffs is not for the guaranteed crit, my first suggestion is seperate from the Crit damage multiplier one.

[lefze]

Three guaranteed crits is a really bad idea, it will be a buff for skirmish, make assault burst go through the roof and still not fix the core issue of scout. So a buff for the stuff that doesn't need it while still leaving scout in a bad place.

[daniilpb]

I can't understand why 3 crits idea is bad.

Scout tree? Steady Aim -> FA -> double Eagle Eye or FtW -> profit. 3 crits buff should have a logical duration limit because of long casts of the scout tree skills and projectile speed. It also would help with counterplay : SW pops up SA -> stagger/punt/shatter.

Assault tree? I know what you are afraid of @lefze, we've played with you and I want to remind you that when we met an organized enemy group, your BA+SA with armor penetration wasn't "over the roof". WE/WH have the same access to spammable armor ignore skill and it doesn't make them OP. If you want to say that something is OP, you should test it in competitive environment, against proper setup. <400 crits are maximum what you can get with BA+SA on guarded target. And it's no where close to be OP for me. Since melee SW lacks defensive options like aoe-detaunt and snare breakers, you should gain defense through items which logically leads to lower damage values. Mara+WE just won't let you deal "over the roof" damage while being glass cannon. Btw never underestimate good enemy healers, they usually are very tough. So bad enemies will suffer anyway, it's basically their l2p issue tbh. Also melee range opens you to enemy CCs and hard debuffs much more than in the case of Scout. Buff head monitoring -> be ready for counterplay -> profit. Assault tree is supposed to be bursty and SA changes can help with it.

Skirmism tree? It won't be anywhere close to UF damage values. Also I want to remind the basics of ORvR tactics : moral bombing. You always should be afraid of moral bombs in 24/24 environment and not 3 chain LA crits which can happen even without SA. If your tanks got killed by moral bombs, it's 95% lost team fight and LA is just an instrument of harassment and finishing down enemy's backlines which deaths are just a matter of time if frontline is already dead.

[saupreusse]

Danii why would we need even more crit? Even if the target has put rr points into crit reduction, 50% are easily achievable for sw with bullseye.