BioWare - Why does Vengeance / Vigilance AoE still lack conventional limits found on other disciplines?

[DarthEndonae]

Cut to Pieces Tactical

When a bleed / burn tick critically hits, it reduces the cooldown of Vengeful Slam / Vigilant Thrust by 1s.

There's no rate limit to the cooldown reduction to Vengeful Slam / Vigilant Thrust and it has the ability to trigger across 3 DoTs. Since Vengeful Slam / Vigilant Thrust is used in the single-target rotation and is stronger than a filler while being cheaper to use, it becomes a single-target DPS increase over Hemophilic Slash when you can consistently hit 2 targets while offering gargantuan amounts of AoE potential. It's exceedingly rare for AoE tacticals to offer any sort of single-target DPS increase at all, let alone ever be stronger in terms of single-target DPS compared to the single-target tactical.

What's the rationale behind Cut to Pieces being multiple leagues better than any other AoE tactical in the game? Why don't we have some sort of rate limit and/or perhaps make it so the cooldown reduction only triggers off of Shatter / Plasma Brand?

Bloodbound / Critical Conditions Ability Tree Buff

Critically hitting with a bleed effect reduces the cooldown of your Bloodrage / Burning Focus by 1s. Bloodrage / Burning Focus purges movement-impairing effects and heals you for 2% of your maximum health for each bleed / burn effect it triggers, up to 20%.

Just like Cut to Pieces, there's no rate limit on Bloodbound / Critical Conditions, allowing it to be spammed sometimes as fast as you can activate it if there are enough targets, allowing players to surpass 100k DPS (yes, you read that right) in certain circumstances. Beyond damage output, the player effectively becomes immortal to everything but and immune to movement-impairing effects while having 100% uptime on the Champion's Precision implant that helps make this state even easier to maintain. 

Shatter Burst / Branding Burst Ability Tree Buff

Killing a target with direct bleed / burn damage while affected by Shatter, causes it to explode, hitting nearby targets. 

First of all, direct bleed / burn damage isn't even a thing; all of the discipline's bleed / burn damage is periodic, except I guess maybe the Shatter Burst / Branding Burst itself, but it gets worse. The effect seems to trigger whenever a target dies while it is affected by Shatter / Plasma Brand, so you don't even have to be the one to kill them. If Shatter Burst / Branding Burst worked as described, except for the nonsensical direct damage part, I don't think it would make much of a difference because Shatter Burst / Branding Burst + Bloodrage / Burning Focus would likely consistently make you the killer anyway.  

Most other AoE ability tree buffs, especially ones that have exponential damage potential where each target can affect many other targets, only have a chance to trigger their damage typically on up to 4 targets at a time. For example, the Eruptive Flames and Eternal Torment / Center Point ability tree buffs make singular DoT ticks have a 30% chance to deal damage to up to 4 additional targets within 5m. The only thing resembling a limit for Shatter Burst / Branding Burst is the fact that it only occurs on death, but this is hardly a limit when adds spawn continuously throughout the fight.

The Whistling Birds / Primed Det Packs ability tree buff from Pyrotech PT / Plasmatech VG is perhaps the most similar ability tree buff in existence and features the following effect:

Incendiary Missile / Incendiary Round applies Whistling Birds / Primed Det Packs to up to 4 additional enemies within 5m of the primary target, dealing a small amount of damage on application and detonating if the target takes damage from Searing Wave / Ion Wave in the next 10s. 

Whistling Birds / Primed Det Packs features an arguably overly restrictive application mechanism with a built-in 15s rate limit and 8 target limit on detonation that isn't even capable of dealing exponential damage because each instance of damage doesn't affect other enemies and competes with a much stronger exclusively single-target ability tree buff: the beefy Rail Shot / High Impact Bolt DoT. Even the existence of Explosive Fuel / Battle Focus isn't enough to make Pyrotech / Plasmatech surpass Vengeance / Vigilance in terms of AoE damage.

To me, it would make more sense for both abilities to be on even footing where both Shatter Burst / Branding Burst and Whistling Birds / Primed Det Packs each deal damage to 4 targets at a time. This would also make them a lot more in line with the capabilities of Eruptive Flames and Eternal Torment / Center Point along with the other ability tree buff options for Incendiary Missile / Incendiary Round and Shatter / Plasma Brand without hurting their power in solo content. 

Projected Scream / Blade Burst Ability Tree Buff

Force Scream / Blade Storm deals damage to targets in a cone [originating from the primary target] and slows affected targets by 50% for 6s.

This ability tree buff is actually balanced well because Juggs / Guardians have to give up Sweeping Slash / Cyclone Slash, but I wanted to bring it up because we're talking about AoE. The conal should originate from the player, not the primary target, because that's how screaming works. The current version is ridiculously unintuitive and doesn't make physical sense for Force Scream while both approaches work fine for Blade Storm. 

The end result of these busted AoE boosts is that players will go out of their way to bring Vengeance / Vigilance to fights with adds because they can not only deal with the adds way faster than anyone else, but almost always also convert that to massive amounts of additional damage to the boss. Cut to Pieces didn't play by the same rules even in 6.0 either, why does this continue to be the case?

[ZUHFB]

I mean... who does it really hurt that juggernaut is really strong on aoe? It's just really fun to do and we are all playing to have fun.... so in my opinion it should remain in the game since it's fun.

[DarthEndonae]

It makes some fights far easier than intended, greatly diminishes the AoE utility provided by other DoT specs, and causes some players to feel less obligated to play it when they otherwise wouldn't want to. None of those things are fun. 

None of the changes that would be required to bring Vengeance/Vigilance down to earth would really impact them in solo content or even a lot of group content. They just can't be allowed to do 40% more DPS than any other discipline. That's ridiculous.

[ZUHFB]

Ridiculously much fun ya.

[DeannaVoyager]

14 hours ago, DarthEndonae said:

It makes some fights far easier than intended, greatly diminishes the AoE utility provided by other DoT specs, and causes some players to feel less obligated to play it when they otherwise wouldn't want to. None of those things are fun. 

None of the changes that would be required to bring Vengeance/Vigilance down to earth would really impact them in solo content or even a lot of group content. They just can't be allowed to do 40% more DPS than any other discipline. That's ridiculous.

So because vengeance is better than other dot specs in some fights (with a lot of adds), you want it nerfed so that no-one would want to play it anymore? I'm curious - why? Do you maybe happen to main some other class that doesn't parse that well in aoe heavy fights or what? 

[AdjeYo]

If we then buff Vengeance's single target damage to be competitive with Hatred and Fury, sure. Otherwise why not leave Vengeance its one niche. 

It's not like stuff is not clearable without a Vengeance Jugg, it just becomes easier with one. Just like a lot fights get easier when you bring a PT, and a lot of fights get easier when you bring a Mara or mostly ranged dps, or classes with many self cleanses etc. 

[DarthEndonae]

Even if Vengeance / Vigilance's AoE potential were literally halved, it would still have the best (or maybe second best) AoE in the game, and a massive part of the problem is that Vengeance is also able to translate that into astronomical amounts of single-target DPS. Vengeance / Vigilance has been one of the most popular disciplines in the game for a long time, even before they had busted AoE in 6.0 and 7.0 and a lot of it has to do with their place in the story and straightforward rotation, not AoE.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with them still offering the strongest AoE given their burst potential is some of the worst in the game, but they can still do that while being bound by the conventional restrictions placed onto literally every other discipline in the game. It's ridiculous for anyone to advocate for a spec being nerfed to the extent that no one should play it anymore and I certainly never advocated for anything like that.

I'm not advocating for reasonable nerfs like this in a vacuum either. Sonic Rebounder is busted too and should have the reflect or damage absorption component removed. Hatred's top parsing build right now is becoming invalidated with 7.1.1, though contend that it's never been as good in actual fights anyway. Fury is in a similar boat, I've never seen anyone pull numbers representative of dummy performance in an actual fight, though if it is possible, it shouldn't be. Annihilation offers too much group healing on top of everything else while at the same time not providing enough AoE to be competitive as a DoT spec.  

[AdjeYo]

If you nerf its AoE, you have to bring up its single target. It's incredibly subpar right now. It's the worst melee spec when it comes to single target damage, both sustained and especially burst. Hatred will outdamage Vengeance on single target without even using its (soon to be nerfed) new 7.0 rotation. I'm fine with nerfing some of its AoE tools. Hell you could delete Shatter Burst for all I care. But Vengeance would need a single target buff to bring it in line with other melee sustained specs.

[DarthEndonae]

Again, you can nerf Vengeance / Vigilance's AoE potential by half and they'd still be one of the best AoE specs in the game, tens of thousands of DPS beyond many of the DoT specs. People would absolutely bring them for that reason and they still offer good raid utility as a DWT and AoE armor debuff. Furthermore, unless they completely redesign the AoE buffs for Vengeance / Vigilance in general, they will still have some substantial capacity to gain single-target DPS from AoE because they're pretty inherent to the base effects. Unlike most rDPS specs, Vengeance / Vigilance isn't facing viability issues either, even if their single-target DPS is theoretically lower than some of the other mDPS on the dummy. 

I'd like to see how things shake out before giving them a single-target buff unless it's on Hemophilic Slash or one of the non-AoE ability tree buffs because their performance in raids even on single-target fights is still comparable to what most others are actually doing in raids.

[AdjeYo]

Vengeance is subpar in single target fights, with mediocre sustained and terrible burst. That's sort of made up for right now by Vengeance increasing its single target damage in AoE phases. If you remove that, what's the point of ever bringing Vengeance? 

It's not like you'll be hurting for AoE dps if you bring Pyro or Hatred instead. And crucially, you'll be doing more dps on the boss that way. Having a taunt and an armour debuff is nice, but let's be real here. Ate you ever bringing a jugg for the taunt if you could bring a PT, which has reactive damage to actually benefit from tanking and Rebounder. And AoE debuffs are so widespread right now, it's hardly raid utility. That was a nice argument back when it was just Arsenal and Juggs. Now that it comes from specs like AP and Carnage, not so much. 

I'd be fine for the AoE to get nerfed, but definitely increase sustained. Especially if you rate limit Bloudbound, which is also important for single target dps (works with Hemophilic getting high uptime on all dots). 

It's pretty simple, just boost Hemophilic Slash or Ravage itself to do some actual damage, and have at it with nerfing Cut to Pieces and Shatter Burst. Imo Shatter Burst seems like it was intended to be more of a solo choice anyway. 

[DarthEndonae]

The point of ever bringing Vengeance is that its AoE is stronger than most, even when nerfed, so you'd bring in the same situations where you'd want to bring Hatred. I was referring to being able to apply the armor debuff to multiple targets at the same time, Vengeance doesn't apply the AoE debuff at all. MM and Arsenal are the only other disciplines that can do that and both must sacrifice single-target damage to do so. 

I totally agree that Vengeance should have the strongest AoE because its burst is so lackluster. Hatred would be its only real sustained competitor because that spec also lacks any burst. Pyro's AoE is far more limited, it can only compete at Hatred's level when Explosive Fuel is active and in the grand scheme of things, it's quite rare for AoE to be that important. There are a lot of fights where AoE is valuable the entire time, like Grob'thokk, Red, Draxus, Dash'roode, both Dxun encounters (though PT is still good there), etc.

I'm not opposed to Vengeance getting a small sustained DPS boost either, I'm just not sure it would be necessary because the goal of these changes would be to lower the ceiling without touching the floor. For example, Bloodbound would likely need to be changed to have a larger cooldown reduction on an actual rate limit, like 3s cooldown reduction every 2s or something (just an example, I didn't actually use math). Unless these buffs were completely redesigned, Vengeance would still gain some single-target DPS in AoE situations and it's more difficult to calculate, which is why I'm concerned about buffing their single-target at the same time. 

Perhaps part of the solution does involve buffing single-target boosts anyway like Hemophilic Slash and Blood Rites so that the AoE boosts only become a single-target DPS increase when enough targets are present. Buffs to those could happen at the same time.