Feedback talk:User/Artisan Archer/Major PvP Skill Rebalance

Regarding your objectives: Flaggers have always, and will always, be defensive characters. Even when they brought snares, that was for mainly defensive reasons (slow down ganks or their flagger). Flaggers will always remain defensive characters unless splitting is nerfed to the point of no longer being viable. You can't afford to split off one of your two healers to deal with one or two people, but they will wipe your base if you ignore them. There's also the issue of the flagger getting ganked while away from the team.

You also aim to promote the use of energy management, but you're going about it all wrong. In order for a monk to consider not using a stance, they have to have confidence they'll survive without one. With all the powercreep, this is almost impossible. Small-prots have been slowly but steadily nerfed while physical damage has been steadily buffed. It's no longer possible for a monk to survive on prots, so stances are absolutely needed. Making higher energy skills more effective or reducing the effectiveness of low-cost heals won't change this fact. It will just make monks even less capable in the current meta. If you want to promote non-stance monks, you have to do one of the following: 1) Nerf physical damage as a whole so that small-prots are effective 2) Buff small-prots (guardian, etc.) enough so a monk will be reasonably sure he can survive without a stance 3) Give monks an in-class stance or similarly functioning skill so they aren't restricted to warrior secondary, and can utilize secondaries with energy management or 4) Give monks an in-class, useful energy management skill. Skills with more than 30s of cooldown don't make for good e-management, no matter how effective. If they're disabled or stripped, you (and your team) are dead.

They currently have 3 skills that aren't completely and utterly worthless compared to other e-management. Defender's Zeal, which requires you to stop healing to find an appropriate target, and is also an elite. Blessed signet... which is only useful on a bonder. And divine spirit, which has a 60s cooldown and will be immediately stripped if anyone sees you use it. To recap: hard to use, conditional, and bad. And those are the three best they have to choose from. Every other class in the game has better energy management.

Also, I used to think the same thing about dervish damage-type changes, but not having it means you could throw in orders or conjure to up these DPS-beasts even more. --Atanna Charta 21:57, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

1. I understand flaggers are defensive and I don't mean to take that away, but right now they are just a third healer. That's what I ment by move away from flaggers as purely defensive characters and give them more offensive options, either by bringing snares and gole (old rt/e for ex.), or bringing damage & energy management.

2. I see your point and I see where you're coming from (2005-2006 meta), but my aim was not to completely remove stances from monks, by no means, the game has changed too much and tbf I don't see prot monks dropping some sort of stance ever untill something really drastic happens. I just wanted to give teams the options to bring more powerful party healing spells on their heal monk, in the form of heal party, extinquish or even shield guardian. It would be very feasible to drop your stance for an energy management skill on your heal monk in order to afford high energy spells like those. (Eremite's Zeal comes to mind)

3. I suggested conjures being nerfed partly because of this and partly of their abuse by assassins, so they should not be a problem. Dervishes having basically armor ignoring damage modifier's is ridicilous and needs to go.Break Fu 22:56, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Regarding the nerfs, although I mostly agree, I have some questions. Why not nerf Blinding Surge? No, not make it useless but, if that skill is considered overpowered, and if Blinding Flash went from fine to OP when its cost was decreased to 10 (thus why this feedback suggests it to come back to its previous stage, which I STRONGLY favor), why not make BS cost 15 energy as well? Still powerful, but not mindless spammable, right? And I would say the same for IL and Chain. Remove their no-enchantment drawback (feels very clunky to me), and up their energy to 15. They would still be powerful, but spikes would need to be well coordenaded instead of being simply spammed from great results. Regarding the conjures, would simply making them sensible to armor a bad idea? Up the damage a little bit if so, and improve Ward Against Elements (is that the name?) to give +40 armor (make its duration last the same as Ward Against Melee and the like, aka, some 10 seconds more). 217.129.113.149 01:47, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

And as we are talking about a pvp rebalance, what about some slight buffs to sword warriors as well. Make Hamstring useful (as much as Dervishes creepling attack skills), slightly buff Final Thrust (and maybe slightly nerf Sun & Moon Slash), improve slightly Quivering Blade for an aditional elite option, and it should be enough, I think. I don't know about high end pvp, but in low end, earth elementalists are also weak. Their main builds revolve around weakness/ KD spam, which is very linear and boring to play with and play against. Some slight changes to that earth chain (make it more difficult to use and more rewarding) would place earth elementalists alongside fire/ air in low-end pvp. I think overall this would bring interesting and underused builds back to life without making pvp less fun. For even more diversity. 217.129.113.149 01:50, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Atanna. Also, your suggestions to nerf is terrible, not being able to pump out as much as they currently and not being able to maintain 2 skills Dshotted at the same time will completely remove the Ranger -one of the only skillful professions- from play. Overall, all these nerfs will favor the lame trip frontline more which is already lame enough as it is. Note: dual hammer can run Enraged Smashed instead. Zencow 03:53, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Possibly the ranger rupt nerfs are over the top. I actually had alot more changes, and the nerfs to dshot/savage/magebane would fit in with those changes in mind, but considering the stage of the game, maybe it's better to leave them the way they are.

Considering Bsurge; It's an elite skill that deals very little damage and the main thing to adress at this point is the fact Eles can bring BOTH strong defense and offense. Bringing Bsurge severly limits your offensive capabilities. Maybe a recharge increase to 4s would make sense, but I tried to keep this update as small as possible while still adressing all the major issues and I don't think Bsurge is part of the bigger problem. I also think Ward Against Elements is flawed skill. The strenght of elemental damage is it's AoE, a ward is a tiny space. Making people ball in AoE to get more armor seems counter intuitive and not particularly skill-promoting gameplay.

Regarding Enraged Smash; it's alot more unreliable to use and quite tough to land in Flail, so I don't see how 2 Enraged Smash warrior would pump the same amount of pressure as 2 hammer warriors with 2 guaranteed knock downs. (Unless people eat every single one, in which case they deserve to lose)

thats why you take frenzy on enraged smash. Being able to spam enraged, regardless of whether of whether it hits, and hammer bash or heavy blow would be superior to using the proposed nerf to enraging charge Zencow 21:04, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I think the problem with ranger rupts is that they have three, while they were more balanced with two before. Two low-recharge rupts always made them respectable strong, but having a bonus one that is unblockable is too much, even for good players that try to counter them with stances and skill canceling. This is especially broken and unfun against rez-canceling in low-level (Random Arenas). In my opinion, a solution should be found to incentivate players to only take two rupts. Or maybe nerf Magebane Shot, which I find it to be too strong when compared to most other of their elites. Make it only work on spell casting, or give a condition to the unblockable aspect, or something. Or increase its recharge, considering this skill is so reliable. Savage Shot should NOT be nerfed, IMO. It's an iconic skill that has been strongly fine except in triple-rupt rangers. A ranger is perfeclty balanced with two-rupts and a different elite, and a nerf to savage will only incentivate them to bring THREE rupts; It's the redudancy of MB Shot (doing more of the same than other skills already do) that make rangers rupts too spammable. It's MB shot that really needs to be nerfed, IMO. A complete change of function wouldn't even be a bad idea because of that. Have a different way to affect spellcasters, you know? (Conditional daze? Spike damage to foes casting spells?) Regardless, even simply a higher rechage would be fine. 217.129.113.149 16:33, 13 August 2011 (UTC)