Berjiz
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Posts posted by Berjiz
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The average player doesn't play anything to their fullest nor comes even close. With the proposed changes from Bioware in 2.5, any player playing at the low level will be most effective on the Assassin/Shadow while having no weakness and having a strong set of defensive cooldowns as well. Assuming such a player just uses Dark Ward, Wither, Discharge, and Shock on cooldown while waiting for 3 HS stacks for Force Lightning and fills in the gaps with Thrash and/or Saber Strike, they will still have better mean mitigation than any other tank (but especially Juggernaughts/Guardians). They will be able to afford to wait up to 18 seconds to maintain their 4% damage reduction as well.
Right now, you want to get in as many 3 HS stacked Force Lightnings as possible to regain health. This is a skill element that is going to completely dumbed down as you can currently do this roughly every 12 seconds (even less with optimal conditions). That means you will have 50% more time to press random keys or run around without doing anything while losing none of your survivability. The loss in Dark Bulwark stacks is a minor loss in survivability and as stated before, you'd be able to completely ignore this skill element by spamming Dark Ward on cooldown and still have better mean mitigation than any other tank.
You forget that the selfhealing is better than the 4% dr unless you have incoming dps like the old hms or higher. There aren't any signficant spikes either until that content. So it's clearly a nerf to the players that are just doing sms or lower. Shadows/Assasins already are the best tanks for that stuff even if you mess up a bit, however most of that content isn't exactly hard so which tank you have matters little.
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KBN, could you post the code that generated the graph? Would like to test some things but would perfer not having to write my own code from scratch.
Is it just or are there very few Vanguards / Powertechs in the tank discussions? They always feel so focused on Shadows and Guardians.
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Tanks dont have worse comm gear guys. At least not in my opinion. Here's why:
Tanks:
- mod
alltough not BiS its better than 72 gear (you lose about 1 or 2 absorb or defense per piece but gain endurence)
- enhancements
you will lose absorb but gain shield and endurence. According to my own calculations I would lose about 2%-point absorb while gaining about 1,5% shield. Count the endurence gain and I don't think the enhancements are that bad.
DPS/Healers
- mod
BiS
- enhancement
No reason what so ever to take them
Basicly the way how I see it is that comm gear for tanks is the best around if compared against dps and healers.
About the accuracy gain. That one is bad indeed. Alltough those that advocate using critrating should think twice. You critrating might make you crit a bit more often. Accuracy will make your attacks miss less often. As a tank I assume out of the top of my head that having accuracy improve DPS/TPS the most.
But then again, I'm not about to place either in my gear. I value mitigation more than dps.
So having no bis mods for tanks(so you have to replace them all later) and bis mods for dps/healers is not worse com gear? Also you forget that bis pow/alacrity is obtainable with comms.
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Not only tanks.... I've to buy two pieces of gear to actually gear up the healer. The "Force healer" equipment having critical on mods and enhancements, and crit is as useful as sandals on arctica.
Yeah but it's still possible, and you can get the good alacrity/power enhancments. And you get the good mods.
My suggestion is to remove belts and bracers from the loot tables and change the tank mods to unlettered mods.
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Posted these ideas in KBNs new thread but posting it here to so Eric hopefully sees it.
-Change to the new 3 stack force lightning so it works the same way as Kinetic Ward / Dark Ward, if you refresh it you loose all current stacks. So if you don't get all 4 ticks of you will lose damage reduction. Lower the duration of the stacks from 18 seconds to 15.
-Add a talent at the bottom of the tank tree that gives 4 stacks when exiting stealth, the same way as Shadow Respite / Dark Embrace works.
-Allow phase walk to be remotely place with 10-15 meter range but with disabled teleport as a talent so you can skip it if you want. Alternatively allow teleport but remove the remote placing in PvP. Instead of a talent it could be added as a four set PvE tank bonus. If phase walk was easier to place it would have a higher uptime and therefore easier to included in theorycrafting and overall utility. It's just not reliable enough atm.
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Those numbers seem too high. Right now, we're sitting at a death risk of 20-50% higher than other tanks with 5% less healing. Clearly that's too much. I think it would be fair to be closer to 8-10% more likely to die for 3-5% less healing. It's really hard to say though. It varies from content piece to content piece, and some of the new content really emphasizes spike damage (most notably: Raptus).
Thought it was a bigger difference than in healing currently. But sticking around 5% is probably good then, the current spikiness is clearly not worth the lesser healing atm.
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I agree with you entirely but specifically want to deal with the changes to Juggernauts. I think the biggest issue facing Juggernauts is purely threat generation. Its a joke on my Assassin to get threat and even to an extent get it back without a taunt but in terms of building initial aggro my Juggernaut is extremely difficult to start with unless I taunt fluff. We have one high threat ability that hits for ~2.7k versus a Sin that has two high threat abilities one of which hits for 3-4k with a chance of a second hit and the other which hits for ~2k on top of Pull which is an immediate 8500 threat.
Yeah they have to do something about the threat, it's good that not all tanks have the same threat but juggernauts have to low threat, especially aoe. Single target threat aren't that much of a problem except sometimes for the initial threat. The initial threat will probably be more of a problem when everyone got optimized 78s.
Tanking trash with a juggernaut compared to an Assassin is so much worse. Aoe taunt+saber reflect works great but having to relay on them for each trash pull is not good enough and it's not fun at all either. The problem I had is that as I mentioned before that you can't start with saber throw+force charge because you won't get much initial aggro because of the dps will start before you get smash of. Saber throw+force charge+smash is 3 gcds while an Assassin starts of with wither+force speed or just wither. In 3 gcds and an Assassin gets off wither + force pull + discharge/shock which is much more threat.
Knockbacks and stuns are much more annoying to, it is annoying on Assassins due to interrupted force lightnings but beyond that it affects very little since all the important stuff is 10 meters. So many of the trash pulls in flashpoints with my jugg ends up with me jumping in and getting stunned straight away or knockbacked while pressing smash so it hits nothing but air. Most knokbacks in fps are just to short for a force charge straight away to. Sometimes dpses that have started off with heavy aoe have gotten killed because I just lost aggro of everything and they got oneshotted. I usually have to focus on a few strong and elite mobs and let the rest run free while on my assassin I can pick up all of them without much trouble. Assasins are frustrating because of rng deaths while juggernaut trash tanking is either boring(aoe taunt+saber reflect) or frustrating because so little stays on you.
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To balance the tanks properly I think BW first needs to decided what they want to do with damage profiles and mechanics. KBN mentioned this in some other post suggesting a single f/t ratio for all the bosses. They also need to decide on how high damage attacks are handled, lots of small hits or one big hit and to some extent what mechanics should be cheeseable and not(bigest possible problem here is the assassin/shadow stealth). For instance cheesing the adds on TWH is probably to much while being able to reset medpack is more reasonable.
I haven't gotten that far into the new HMs so far but they seem to have gone with that high dmgs attacks being around 6-7 hits like heavy slash and chest laser from Corruptor. Does anyone know if there are any single high dmg attacks in the new ops?
Without defining the content more it's hard to create good balance. For instance there are very good arguments to keep all bosses near a single damage ratio. The tanks differences also needs to be defined but the community as well as the developers seems to be reasonably close to each other here, even if the numbers are quantified.
I think it might be a good idea to think more about how the content works, how much damage a spike possibly should deal depending on circumstances, mechanics behind high damage attacks and so on and not only about the mechanics around the tanks. But also what the numbers should between for the differences in healing, spikiness and so on. What do you think are acceptable numbers? 6-8% healing difference between Shadow / Assasin and Guardian / Juggernaut for 10% higher spikes?
Big predictable attacks seems to be handled well atm, BW seems to have started more again with splitting them and it's easy to use cooldowns for all of them unless you run out due to emergency like a dead healer. The problem that makes we want shelve my Assassin sometimes is that either all or some of the bosses standard attacks from high damages bosses can deal as much damage as their predictable attacks. The predictable attacks have higher possible maximum damage but since they are split in several hits the probability is fairly low, especially with a cooldown. The standard attacks however hit their max much more often, usually 3-5 times per fight depending on length of the fight. This forces Shadows / Assassins to constantly be much higher on health because if you get one of those spikes at the wrong place you are dead. It's very frustrating to dip low for a while after a heavy predictable attack and then get killed by even bigger hit from a standard attack. My point here is that if the standard attacks would have a smaller possible damage or reduced probability the spikiness of Shadows / Assasins might be fine as it is.
KBNs suggestions are interesting but they need to more refined more because they bring the tanks even closer to each other in terms of spikiness and uniqueness. Partially there is also the problem of m/r versus f/t. Shield / absorb is easier to boost than defense because it's value is more universal than defense. Also it might be dangerous to lower all tanks healing to much since the content is balanced around it. I do agree with 10%/20% armor on the talent instead of 20%/40%.
Here are some thoughts and suggestions. I haven't played my juggernaut that much yet haven't played VG/PT at all so it's mostly focused on Shadow / Assassin.
Shadow / Assassin
-Don't nerf Kinetic Ward / Dark Ward more than maybe 5%. The gain from it should be quiet high to maintain the playstyle and importance of keeping it up.
-Change to the new 3 stack force lightning so it works the same way as Kinetic Ward / Dark Ward, if you refresh it you loose all current stacks. So if you don't get all 4 ticks of you will lose damage reduction. Lower the duration of the stacks from 18 seconds to 15. Add a talent at the bottom of the tank tree gives 4 stacks when exiting stealth, the same way as Shadow Respite / Dark Embrace works.
-Allow phase walk to be remotely place with 10-15 meter range but with disabled teleport as a talent so you can skip it if you want. Alternatively allow teleport but remove the remote placing in PvP. Instead of a talent it could be added as a four set PvE tank bonus. If phase walk was easier to place it would have a higher uptime and therefore easier to included i calculations and overall utility.
Guardian / Juggernaut
-Talent that makes Saber Throw apply armor debuff and makes it high threat. This allows the application of the armor debuff even if the tank is not on the target. Making it high threat is to counter the fact that it's hard to start most fights with it because it delays your threat. Most dps will start after X seconds and saber throw delays your big threat generation by 1 gcd, there is a high risk that you will lose threat before your force charge has landed.
-Change warding call and Force Scream / Blade Storm so that it scales with incoming damage.
Vanguard / Powertech
-Add a new cooldown against f/t. For instance 100% shield for 5 sec, 1 min cd or similar. Stable and different from the other ones but a bit less powerful.
-Change shoulder cannon heal to something that scales with incoming damage.
I expect that BW won't change much though and that in the end there is a really big risk of them breaking things even more.
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Hoping it's a madness sage or shadow.
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This is really good to keep being bumped. Bioware needs to be made aware of this issue and correct it as soon as possible. The dual random loot drops is not acceptable in any manner at all.
First - Even with a single guaranteed implant drop, IE... Titan 6 in S&V, it takes 16 kills to outfit your entire raid with token gear. This is entirely too long to actually farm content. The problem would be a little less exasperated if Hard Mode and Nightmare modes shared separate lockout timers. While I know these are coming they are not coming any time soon and due to this, loot distribution in current content should be based on the current lockout mechanics. This is game design 101.
To me they have two major glaring issues. While implants are the greatest problem the gloves/legs from Grob'thok is just as much an issue because this is a token set piece. In my opinion, make the Dread Forge Belt/Bracer purchasable by comms, have Nefra drop two implants in 8m and 4 implants in 16m. Grob'thok should drop just one token piece, gloves or legs. Bestia needs to drop just the earpiece. So we still have one missing loot piece! That's the gloves or legs, depending upon which Grob'thok actually drops. The simple solution would be to add an instanced world boss on Oriconian that offers the final set piece. Do not randomize this like Toborro's Courtyard. Loot wasn't an issue with 2.0 and TFB and S&V due to the amount of raid bosses. This is not okay in the current content. Without doing dual drops for Implants and relics we will still have to farm for 16 weeks just to try and get both relics and Implants. Quite honestly I know both tanks in my progression team, I'm one of them, gave up on getting underworld relics and we prioritized giving them the Underworld Implants because the comms gear was just that bad.
The second alternative would be to improve the comms gear on non-set token pieces. IE, Implants and Earpieces. Don't give worthless stats like high endurance. Maybe they are not on par with the token pieces but at least make them close enough that progression is possible without min/maxing.
Lets keep this thread moving for the sake of the quality of life in the game!
As a dps/heal you can atleast get decent implants for comm gear, it's not BIS but the difference isn't super huge either. The biger problem and you mention this a bit, is that tanks can't do it because of the accuracy on the gear. And the implant/ears are split with belt/bracers which removes a lot of the mods tanks use but it's not an huge issue since you need two extra pieces to replace the crap enhancments anyway.
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One thing that you might want to add is that Qucik savant (bis power/alacrity enhancment)is in the foestopper leggings comm gear.
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min absorb for shadow should be 220 (2 implants)
Thanks, forgot that for some numbers. Shield values was also to low for all classes. Fixed it and updated the first post.
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Implant and ears numbers for the minimum of sheild, abs and defense possible. Asssuming that you don't want any accuracy so those options are not included for the min numbers at the bottom.
This is lacking the oricon mk-2 implant/ear if they exist, so if anyone know the numbers for them that would be useful.
Assassin
Oricon Ear 76 defense 88 shield
Oricon Implant 76 absorb 88 accuracy
Dread Forged Ear 94 shield 110 defense
Dread Forged implant V 94 accuracy 110 defense
Dread Forged implant X 94 shield 110 absorb
Juggernaut
Oricon Ear 76 defense 88 shield
Oricon Implant 88 accuracy 76 absorb
Dread Forged Ear 94 shield 110 absorb
Dread Forged implant V 94 accuracy 110 absorb
Dread Forged implant X 94 shield 110 defense
Powertech
Oricon Ear 76 defense 88 shield
Oricon Implant 76 absorb 88 accuracy
Dread Forged Ear 94 shield 110 defense
Dread Forged implant V 94 accuracy 110 defense
Dread Forged implant X 94 shield 110 defense
Total min numbers, including stim, no accuracy
Defense
Assasin: Possible min: 146 Dreadforged only: 180
Jugger: Possible min: 290 Dreadforged only: 290
Powertech: Possible min: 366 Dreadforged only: 396
Shield
Assasin: Possible min: 276 Dreadforged only: 282
Jugger: Possible min: 276 Dreadforged only: 282
Powertech: Possible min: 276 Dreadforged only: 282
Absorb
Assasin: Possible min: 220 Dreadforged only: 220
Jugger: Possible min: 0 Dreadforged only: 0
Powertech: Possible min: 0 Dreadforged only: 0
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Way more trouble than it's worth. We just pop them one at a time and delay the last for the healers. I can see the argument in favor, but it doesn't seem like it would be universal. Also, shadows don't have much that they can do in this department. Slow Time doesn't slow them enough, and the knockback only works on one pack.
Force speed works pretty well, let the range dps pick of the last health or use shock/wither. We drag all of the first wave in to the middle for aoe and when most of them start to get low I force speed out, some gets killed by the aoe and the rest gets killed one by one. For the later waves it's not as imporant that they are far away but force speed or overload usually works well.
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Have you seen the endurance on the new 78 gear? My jugg gained 3k hp from a few mods and armorings. Its clear they've decided to go with the silly amounts of health route which was one of the reasons I grew to hate WoW. When your tank has 80k hp and you're healing for 40k its just silly. I had thought they'd sone a decent job of scaling but they broke it with this new gear :/
But isn't that because it's the heavy endurance stuff and 6 item levels? I haven't looked at the drops yet but the comm gear has a lot of endurance compered to 72 unlettered.
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It just doesn't make any sense to me. Honestly, its like having a flat tire and rather than simply changing that tire, they move the bad tire to a different wheel and then replace the other three. It doesn't change the fact that you still have a flat tire. Just like rebuffing sins armor won't change the fact that the tank balance in this game is ridiculously off. The better solution? Change the encounters. Adjust spike damage down across the board, lower healing across the board instead of throwing out buffs and nerfs trying to catch every single problem that stems from how ridiculous the damage and healing output are right now.
Exactly the damage output and healing is so high now compered to the health of the tanks that it's hard to challenge healing outputwise without creating spikes and risk oneshotting the tanks if a few unlucky hits occur. They can either reduce healing and damage or increase the health of the tanks.
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For reference, the current math based on current encounters and gear suggest that after applying these changes Sin tanks will be light years ahead of juggs and pts in dtps and overall mitigation. Now, obviously there are huge flaws with this given that we have no idea if there will be a new tier of gear in 2.5, what the fights might look like etc but at the moment its all we have.
So pre2.0 sins were OP because they had recently high armor, high mitigation, self heals and because the encounters were designed around dealing consistent damage with avoidable spikes. BW then took away a large chunk of that armor in response AND designed fights that relied heavily on unavoidable, sometimes unpredictable spikes if damage. Subsequently, the end result is that Sins now take too much spike damage compared to other tanks. As a first fix to this issue they altered several of those very large attacks and made them many small attacks that hit simultaneously. In those encounters, this worked wonderfully. Then rather than alter their future encounter design, they simply buffed sins mitigation up past where it was pre2.0 and removed the healing. Does anyone else see a silly pattern? They fix one thing, then break another. Its like all these different teams have no communication at all and are all making design decisions independently. Its just ridiculous.
Yeah this might become a big problem. And it will most likely bring back the old reason the armor was nerfed in the first place, pvp tank sins in dps gear.
BW really has a strange way of doing things, it's like the content and balance team doesn't discuss things at all with each other, and it will mostly affect tanks. The spikes/healing required needs to be balanced together with the tanks else they have a big risk of breaking something.
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I still prefer the variable (range bounded) shield rating approach, rather than picking a single static value, since the shield rating does increase with stat budget. With that said, the fact that I use that approach and you stick with static values gives us a nice way to cross-check our results.
I'll be updating my tanking stat distributions post as soon as we have numbers for HM DP/DF, and I'll probably include separate sections for each. Preliminary results seem to indicate DF is fairly close to SV in terms of M/R vs F/T, while DP is much more F/T heavy (closer to TfB). I really wish Bioware would settle on a single ratio goal, just for the sake of tank sanity everywhere.
Near a single ratio would probably make tank balance a lot easier to since you know what value defence has versus shield/absorb.
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Im really unhappy about losing the self heals. what was wrong with my suggestion of a cheat death style mechanic? thats been successful in wow and other mmos. making madness dots uncleansable isnt the right move either, you dont want anything to become "uncounterable", thats just bad for the game. Instead maybe reduce its dependancy on dots? By boosting thrash/force ligthing damage.
Overall ye really unhappy about this. I'll see how it all works out when it goes live, but I was enjoying my sin!!! I dont want to have to go back to my troopy and bhunter. Im going to miss playing her.
The problem is that it would be hard to balance and depend even more than today how the content is. If the cd on the cheat death is lower than the frequency of the spikes it would possibly to good, if it's much higher than it wouldn't help. The timing of the spikes are also largely random, you might get 2 close proximity or you might get one at start and one at the end. The only reliable and easy to balance way to fix spikiness is to raise pure dr.
However this is different from the issue with selfhealing. The core of the selfhealing issues is that it doesn't scale, so it's always too good for easy and solo content and bad for harder content. And it might be tricky to scale it in a good way. It's conected to the spike issue a bit because reactive migation is always worse then active migation.
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They could probably add it straigthaway, it's not like sins have huge aoe or that many skills. I had to add a lot of new keybinds when I made my mara for instance.
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Checked mine (ud defense), it says 20 and lasts 20. Looks like a undocumented nerf....
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This started happening maybe 2-3 weeks ago. Sometimes when you get teleported/moved in ops you can't stop moving, sometimes it's forwards sometimes it's strafe+forward or just strafe. Sorc pull stops it and sometimes it stops by itself after a while.
It has happend both on my juggernatu and my maurder but never on my assasin. Several guildmates(mostly mauarders) have had the same thing happen. I have had it happen in SV dash'rode when lost, and styrak when fightning the companion. I know guildmates have had it on dash'rode. Always 8 man hardmodes.
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Easy solution to the first/last tick will refresh thing. Force ligtning with 3 stacks will remove all current stacks so you start again. Even if you have 4 stacks up and only get 1 tick of you will only have 1 stack instead of 4.
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This whole argument about solo play is rather confusing to me. The heal from TkT replaces health that is lost fighting mobs. The changes will mean that I won't lose that health. In 2.4 say I would lose 5k health and heal for 2.5k, leaving me 2.5k down. With the changes I will lose 2.5k and heal for 0 across the same fight. Thus I am 2.5k down in the current system and in the change. At the end of that fight, nothing is different.
That is the point the devs are making in this. It shouldn't change the overall mitigation, just how the mitigation is handled. The heals are dependent on fighting so you have to lose health to gain it back. By changing it we don't lose nearly as much health. Why do you think this will cause a massive shift in solo play?
That depends on the incoming dps, the new changes are equal to the current stuff around 4-5k incoming dps. So if the incoming dps is lower than that the new changes are a nerf.
Shadow/Assassin Tanks in 2.5 (attn Combat Team)
in Combat Styles
Posted
That problem is easily fixed with shorter duration(like 15 sec or so) on the stacks and have the stacks reset when refreshed like Dark Ward.