June 27 Balance Update Preview

[BadLuck.8456]

This is Scourge feedback.

As a primarily PvE player I won't comment on the WvW targeted changes to less boon corruption except to say that if this is WvW targeted than make the changes only for the WvW mode.

 

Since we've now defined PvE roles as DPS, Boon DPS, and Boon Heals with Boon meaning quickness or alacrity it makes sense for each class to have some way of fulfilling each of these roles (though Warrior and Mesmer are still missing viable Heal builds). If you don't fill one of those roles or some kind of meme niche like heal scourge on boneskinner then you don't get invited to instanced content. That sucks. I want to play support scourge, I have since it came out. If you try to play support scourge however you will hear "We aren't a training run." or even on training runs "I don't want to teach people to rely on a crutch." That's because current support scourge is a meme niche revive bot.

 

So, why is Scourge a meme? Because it can't do the things a Boon Heal is expected to do. First, it has no boon. Second, it doesn't do a lot of healing. It looks like Anet is trying to change that and make Scourge a viable Boon Heal. Great. And since we also don't like for an elite spec to be ONLY a Boon Heal (see trying to add a dps spec to druid) we need to maintain a viable DPS spec, which is also going to lead us to potentially a Boon DPS.

 

So we have some design goals now.

1. Scourge should have some traits and utilities that are supportive.
2. Scourge should have a trait that grants alacrity and competes with a significant DPS trait.
3. DPS and Boon DPS Scourge should not provide much barrier or healing without sacrificing dps.
4. DPS Scourge should not be affected by the addition of another playstyle.
5. Traited Scourge should provide alacrity in a way that is not tied to specific utility skills or capable of targeting more than itself and 4 others.
6. Scourge should provide some healing.

 

Scourge should have some traits and utilities that are supportive

This is being somewhat addressed in the preview! Scourge will have an aegis utility and a stability utility which is very desirable in a Boon Healer. Scourge has lots of cleanse from skills and barrier application. Scourge will have decent might and fury uptime (also desirable in a Boon Healer.) Then you combine this with the supportive Blood traitline and you have what looks to be a pretty viable Boon Healer.

Scourge should have a trait that grants alacrity and competes with a significant DPS trait

So Anet is right, this probably needs to be a GM trait to compete with Demonic Lore. Feed from Corruption seems like a PvP/WvW trait so we'll ignore it for this discussion.

DPS and Boon DPS Scourge should not provide much barrier or healing without sacrificing dps

Scourge being too good as a DPS/Support hybrid is what caused a lot of problems in the first place. While we can give the shared barrier skills very low base barrier and high healing power scaling, that could cause some issues in PvP where stats are lower. Many other Boon Heals get significant healing effectiveness from a trait, runes, and a sigil to solve this issue. Perhaps we should have another set of competing traits to separate Heal Scrouge from DPS Scourge? Perhaps Abrasive Grit could additionally let %Healing increases apply to barrier generation?

DPS Scourge should not be affected by the addition of another playstyle

This should be obvious and is the main reason why the preview changes need revision. If you want to rework scourge to use a single shade than do it for all of scourge and give back power to balance what you are taking away. We can't change a core aspect of the specialization to meet a rule for one playstyle design and ignore the impact it will have on every other playstyle of the specialization.

Traited Scourge should provide alacrity in a way that is not tied to specific utility skills or capable of targeting more than itself and 4 others

Preview almost works again. Alacrity on barrier is a pretty decent idea except that Scrouge was originally designed to target 12 people with its skills (3 shades + 1 scourge with 3 targets each). WvW already had issues with this. Even the bad idea of limiting alac scourge to one shade allows for targeting 6. Sand Savant is already a trait which changes targeting cap, though IIRC it's still 5 for shade and 5 for scourge. This gets even harder to balance between Boon Heal and Boon DPS if Sand Savant isn't used. Maybe it should just be that the scourge does a pulse of Alacrity on any barrier granting skill? Or, just on shade skills in general? We don't want to spam skills for alac but scourge already has to regularly use shade skills for dps/healing and can't spam them too much because it's controlled by lifeforce generation. More radical ideas would be something like making Sand Savant baseline and having shade skills only fire from the shade and not the scourge.

Scourge should provide some healing

Scourge, unlike other Boon Healers, does not have a healing weapon. Necro does not have a healing weapon or healing utility (aside from Well of Blood) to fall back on. The intention seems to be for Regen and the Blood trait line to fill that gap. Lets look. Mark of Evasion, more regen. Ritual of Life is good but only triggers if picking someone up. Blood Bond could be cool if it wasn't limited to 5 charges on a 16 ICD. Vampiric, self only. Life From Death, going to be mandatory with 10% healing increase and is otherwise a ~2k heal on you every 16 with alacrity if you spam Desert Shroud. Last Rites, some healing power. Transfusion, obviously great for the body pull and pretty decent healing centered on the scourge. So realistically we're over capping regen with staff if we want to use regen for out healing, making adding regen to Well of Blood pointless and Sand Flare the superior healing skill, more so after the revive % gets reduced. So barrier and regen with a couple direct heals on longer cooldowns. If this is the plan should we have a trait to increase regen effectiveness? The preview is not showing any increase to scourge healing and most likely an overall reduction in barrier even for Boon Heal scrouge. It may not have enough healing to put the Heal in Boon Heal. Radical ideas are something like a trait to turn half of applied barrier into healing.

 

So the preview ideas are bad for several reasons.

1. Scourge traits and design exist around maintaining maximum shades. Forcing us down to one shade guts the entire spec. Our barrier generation gets cut in half. Our shade based damage application and boon rip gets cut in half. We lose stats and 10% damage reduction the spec was designed around. Don't do this unless you are dead set on scourge having one shade for some reason and then just make Sand Savant baseline. Also, summoning shades already sucks as it's a waste of time unless using Desert Empowerment. Being forced to do it more is... I'd rather be forced to spam punishment skills on cooldown.
2. Speaking of Desert Empowerment, either it or Sand Savant need to go or be merged. With Herald of Sorrow pulsing barrier (I like this btw) that becomes the Support choice for master trait. If Desert Empowerment moves to GM then Sand Savant will never see the light of day because DPS needs Demonic Lore and support would need Desert Empowerment.
3. Changing transfusion pull to the first pulse only. This sucks. It's a huge QoL loss for no reason. If you don't like a body being pulled more than once, increase the ICD. Being just out of range (no indicator btw) or 1 second too soon or too late on using this isn't skill expression, it's just annoying.

 

On the note of revive being nerfed.

Current revive is 7%x5 from Ritual of Life and 2%x9 from Transfusion for a total of 53% over 5 seconds. If they aren't taking too much damage, this is enough to revive someone all on it's own. 88% if you want to blow Well of Blood. Realistically you weren't getting the 10% from leaving shroud with Life From Death. Heck, most people were probably taking Banshee's Wail for the healing% or Vampiric Presence for more minor group sustain.

New revive is 2%x5 and 1%x9 for a total of 19% over 5 seconds. 29% if you blow Well of Blood.

That's significant BUT

1. It should never be taking you 5 seconds to get someone up.
2. People should be swarming to rez downs.
3. If you want to power rez then Runes of Mercy and Signet of Undeath still exist. 
4. This is a 5 target ability meaning it currently contributes up to 265% total rez percentage. New version will be up to 95%.
5. This could technically be done by Reaper or Harbinger with 0 healing power as well. I'd say I'm surprised I don't see that more but it basically boils down to, you don't see Blood trat line much outside of boneskinner. Harb is even more OP because Voracious Arc has a lower CD and you can easily use the 10% from Life from Death though the wiki says you lose some heal/revive pulses by ending shroud. 

Should the game allow for a single character to revive an entire party by themselves on a 12-20 second cooldown? Probably not. This has already been gutted in competitive. Maybe we'd be better off asking for Signet of Undeath to go back up to a 3 target cap.

[Crey.5263]

On 6/8/2023 at 5:12 PM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

. With scourge support likely becoming more viable in general use, we felt that its reviving power was just a bit too high and have made some adjustments to bring it more in line. We'll be keeping a very close eye on alacrity scourge's performance and will follow up as needed.

These changes make healscourge unplayable.  It is already the the lowest outgoing healing class, these "balances" were completely unnecessary.  If this is the cost of gaining alacrity, I (and hopefully the community agrees) would like to politely decline.  The added boons aren't worth it to take away what makes it a fun and unique class.

[Dark Red Killian.3946]

I for one am less interested in reworking quickness on Scrapper. I mean don’t get me wrong, I think it will be a little refreshing to play it differently. However, to me quickness wasn’t the issue. For one, in fractals you never see healer scrappers. It’s always LF HB. It seems like you are making things more involved in having scrapper give quickness. Where HB is still spamming their quickness buttons. Why not make them do a finisher blast too? They are still too easy and people will always prefer HB in fractals. Instead of reworking quickness, allow scrapper more ways of providing utility, like aegis or stability. Scrapper gets 3 stacks stability with dome at once with large cd. Can we get more stab on demand? Give maybe hammer some utility when speced with certain traits to make hammer more appealing for heal quickness scrappers. 

 

[Mhina.1827]

Thief

Make Sword Viable in PvE. Please. This obsession with staff and rifle being pushed as the only truly viable weapon options for power has got to stop. Sword is incredibly fun to play, but it takes too long to kill anything to make it objectively worthwhile. My sword skins are going to waste xD

[Presler.2561]

Really not a fan of these "balance" changes where prettymuch every class is getting access to either Quickness or Alacrity and making such drastic changes to classes to make them feel more bland and more like other classes. What is even worse is we get a lot of power and boons but utilities for classes seem to get ignored more and more making all classes feel more and more the same.

You contradict yourself so much and class identity is getting blended with others which is a bad direction for the game and its players. Making changes is perfectly acceptable if they make sense and don't power creep to much but right now this feels like everyone is pulling an Oprah kind of move, you get a car, you get a car to! aka quickness and alacrity and it increases the dps output again without making the encounters more balanced for it.

I hope these changes get tweaked or get pulled from putting into live, the game right now is pretty well balanced and now like last year, June is another meme year for balance, what the heck!

[Marxx.5021]

56 minutes ago, soul.9651 said:

I can understand people beeing upset about dps scourge beeing nerfed, and anet probably gonna adjust those numbers if needed. But do people seriously think beeing a ressing bot as a heal scourge is the identity of the spec....? Beeing able to ignore mechanics shouldnt be considered as a spec "identity"

Boon corrupt is the identity of necro that gets ripped away piece by piece.

[Myror.7521]

@ZEUStiger.3590 the i do not rly get your standpoint at all. It is better in PvP. It will flow better in PvE instanced (GS Rotation will be 5 Seconds instead of 7 Seconds). Its just one big AoE skill that goes around you still instead of 3 small ones with big Cast time. So tell me in what sentence is it any real worse than Just "its visualy not that cool". 

[ZEUStiger.3590]

5 minutes ago, Myror.7521 said:

@ZEUStiger.3590 the i do not rly get your standpoint at all. It is better in PvP. It will flow better in PvE instanced (GS Rotation will be 5 Seconds instead of 7 Seconds). Its just one big AoE skill that goes around you still instead of 3 small ones with big Cast time. So tell me in what sentence is it any real worse than Just "its visualy not that cool". 

Reread my long post on page 6 that you, presumably, initially responded to. I'm not spending any more time chewing it down for someone who's already made up their mind and is determined to disprove everything I say.

Edited June 10, 2023 by ZEUStiger.3590

[Afrodutchman.7492]

After going through this post multiple times and watching a few Youtube videos on the change, I can safely say these changes will hurt gameplay and not help gameplay for the most part. As an engi main, I can see what you are trying to do with the blast and leap finishers, but as some stated earlier, targeting with hammer three will be a nightmare in raids and other pve content. If you want this change to work, rework the other weapon and utilities skills to give us more leap or blast finishers. For example, Hammer has both a combo field and a leap (technically three cause it's three leaps) finisher on it, but Rifle only has one leap finisher. 

Along the same lines, I understand what you are trying to do with the mechanist. Still, rather than just penalizing us for our going out of range, why don't you give us a visual cue (only the mech can see) that warns us of the distance change? That way, we can manage our mech better rather than try to guess the distance. Further, we need more information regarding how this penalty will work. Will it reset or go away when we get close to mech, or will it stay as a penalty till the ability is off cooldown?

Now to the elephant in the room, the Scourge. I don't understand why you are punishing Scourge for being a unique playing style; the idea that a necromancer was good at resurrecting people from the dead was awesome. Now you are just forcing it to look like all other alac/quick classes. I know you think you will see more alac scourge, but you won't because there are so many alternatives that do that so much better.  Rather I say keep the heal Scourge as is, maybe tweak the effects but not to such an extreme degree as to render the class useless. I don't even play Scourge, and I understand the significant damage this patch will do to that class. 

Lastly, I get that you are trying to homogenize all the classes so they all have the ability to be support or DPS. Still, I think the response to this post makes it pretty evident we don't like the idea of homogenizing the classes. One of the biggest selling points of the game was the unique trait each class had, for example, necros resurrecting ability. I think it would be much more effective to lean into the unique aspects of each class and reduce alac and quickness to classes that make sense or remove them these boons altogether. Overall, I think much of the balance issue stems from the bizarre obsession with alac and quickness, but honestly, we don't want more need this much alac and quickness in the game.  

[Legionnaire.9478]

Guardian Balance: 

Firebrand: 

"Weighty Terms: This trait no longer reduces the mantra charge-recovery times. Increased pages granted from 1 to 2."

Please do not touch this trait at all. Why are you still going after the corpse of Firebrand. This basically kills off support firebrand (QDPS/HB), as it severely cripples our ability to keep quickness up, and slows our ability to use our mantras, we already got forced out of using mantra of liberation in order to use Feel my Wrath for quickness uptime, unless we need to swap in liberation in certain fights to help with the group stunbreak, or more stab. Now you wanna kill off more of our ability to generate quickness and keep it up. What's the purpose of giving us a page increase, so we can proc our tomes faster, page costs are already absurd currently with the past changes. Certain Tomes like Tome of Virtue are proc during heavy hitting boss effects. That's a not a good tradeoff to lose the ability to reduce the cooldown of our mantras, mantras are extremely core skill for most Firebrand builds, taking away our ability to reduce the CD and not even adjusting the CD will make mantra way worse than they already are. You already ruined our mantras by making it so we have to precast them to activate them now you're going to slow our ability to recharge them and force us to proc our mantras more. Leave Firebrand and our mantras alone. We may not be as powerful as we once were and basically corpse of what we were, we don't need any more changes to harm support firebrand. We're in an okay spot, please don't kill off more of the class. 

 

Willbender:

Oh wow no changes to Willbender at all, so alacbender remains in its bad spot. Can you stop going after firebrand and instead fix Willbender? Support Willbender is not in a good spot. 

Scourge Changes:

No Scourge asked to have alac given to them. You are basically killing off an entire class just to give them a little alac boost. Honestly this change to scourge is just awful. Not every class needs to give every single boon anet. Alac Scourge will just be in a bad spot like Alac willbender is.

 

Ranger: 

"Spirits have been reworked. A spirit will now grant an initial effect when summoned, slam the ground for a secondary effect, and then grant boons to nearby allies for a period of time."

So basically, you're killing off spirits and making them useless by taking away their alac, and going back to how exactly they were but this time instead of earth spirit generating periodic protection like it was before the change, it's just gonna give protection when you summon it and then activate its effect. There's so many ways to generate protection, might etcs that spirits give, taking away alac just makes spirits utterly useless. 

 

Druid: 

"Grace of the Land: This trait now grants alacrity instead of might."

Please no, do not tie the ability for druid to give alac to our CA form. That is not what a Healing Support class should be. CA is already takes a little time to fully max out, now you're gonna force druids to jump in and out of CA to keep uptime of alac which is an awful change especially in heavy hittings fights like Sloth/VG etc. Like we jump into CA during those time to offset the massive damage from the explosions, and the hard hitting conditions when Sloth shakes among other bosses. This in turn is gonna make our alac time even worse. 

If you want Druid to be a primary healing class and be in a better position, why not move Alac to our glyph as boons or instead keep it on spirits. I get you wanna make Druid a better healing class, but tying our ability to give alac to CA is just a bad decision imo. And harms us more than it helps us, I rather have my alac tied to glyphs. Or left on spirits. 

 

Specter: 

"Traversing Dusk: This trait no longer grants alacrity to allies when using a well skill"

Are you taking alac off specter's completely? If so, you just killed Alac Specter for no reason. Can you elaborate if alac is gonna be moved elsewhere?

"Shadestep: This trait has been reworked. It now spreads the beneficial effects of your shadow shroud skills to allies around your tethered target, and it additionally grants boons to yourself and those allies when you use a shadow shroud skill"

Ya how bout leave this alone. Most classes have an ability to instant rez a down ally, and this skill carries hard. And can help save a group from being wiped or not being wiped.

Deadye:

Getting quickness is a letdown. Like it just feels like you are just handing out quickness and alac to every class just so they have it. once again not every class needs to do every boon, each class shoudl be unique.

Berserker/Bladesworn: 

I don't understand why you once again tieing the ability to give quickness and alac to an Elites special action skill. I just don't understand the logic in this at all. You removed quickness from base warrior with the banner change, and now you want to give Berserker quickness and Bladesworn Alac, but base it's on their special action. Why not give Spellbreaker Quickness or Alac, I feel like overall it makes more sense. 

Herald: 

 

  

15 hours ago, Otter.3841 said:

Moving Herald Quickness to Elevated Compassion is a terrible idea. If the goal was to move boon support off utility skills, this doesn't do that at all. And it makes Draconic Echo worthless. Additionally, the Upkeep cost of 6+ to get boons including Quickness is terrible. Forcing Quick Heralds into giving a little healing in exchange for forcing us to use our energy should not be a thing. Anyone who just wants to be a Quick DPS Herald gets screwed over by this. Flicking facets on and off for Quickness is WAY more practical and doesn't harm anything. Revert these changes please and leave Herald alone. It's in a great place right now and doesn't need any of this deconstructive attention.

IMO 100% this. Leave Quick Herald alone. 

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by Legionnaire.9478

[Myror.7521]

@ZEUStiger.3590 okay i mean U seem to be pissed just for the shake of been pissed If you want it that way its just okaish^^. Indeed I never want to disproof anyone or make someone angry. I only Just want to say the trueth about it. And the trueth is simply nothing will Change. Only Changes are in the Skill itself does lower dmg. But over all its Like this:

The instanced PvE rotation flows better cause of no after Cast.

The PvE instanced GS Rotation will be slightly faster and will over all Deal the same amount of DPS.

Its just one big hit instead of three lower ones means its better to control and use

I mean i dont see any negative point here not even a single one! 

[XECOR.2814]

༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ UNSUMMON PATCH NOTES ༼ つ ◕◕ ༽つ

[kawaiiboy.2685]

The radius of some heal skills and boons are still a problem. Like revenant's ventari skills radius and mantras of firebrand. In PvE only make them all 600 radius. 

RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS RADIUS CMC

[Gendalfs.7521]

10 minutes ago, kawaiiboy.2685 said:

Like revenant's ventari skills radius and mantras of firebrand. In PvE only make them all 600 radius.

Make all boons and heals from all classes 600 radius. Mech genius also.

I have said that many times, seems that is not an option for some reason.

Edited June 10, 2023 by Gendalfs.7521
wrong word

[Powerfat.7294]

8 second shades is going to make it impossible to get any value out of Sand Sage. Also, not running Sand Savant on heal scourge, and only having a single 180 radius  shade to produce barrier from is going to be borderline unplayable.

Also, punishing players for your bad pet ai is not a good balance philosophy.

[BTB.3018]

Those scrapper changes...

So my favorite heal spec is dead now, thanks anet.

[Varon.2564]

This has probably been said, but the changes to scourge are quite severe, it seems like it will be really difficult to play, more shade management (can't sub in big shade for alacrity) and even less DPS. Taking a spec that was nice to have but did very little dps, to not worth considering as there will probably be better alternatives for "alacrity" that will do higher dps and are easier to play.

[BigFish.3042]

 

On 6/9/2023 at 5:12 AM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Bladeturn Requiem:

Why do you have to go EX girlfriend /wife on Virtuoso ? Isn't taking all the block ability away from it going too FAR? I meant it is called Bladeturn Requiem NOT Bladeturn Bluffing, right?

How about reduce the blocking time or at least give it the ability to reflect projectiles or super speed instead of making it completely useless?

Please think it through. I mean It is yout game I get it, but hey, U dun want to kill a class~ U just want to alter it.

 

[Glott.7239]

Generally i like most of the changes in this update the point that's obviously sticking out it the very harsh nerf to Scourge. While the res-power nerfs look very hard on at first glance i can understand why they are in there. However i would have targeted the CD of Ritual of Life rather than nerfing it's revive percentage this hard. What makes Healscourge so problematic is not how fast it can res people but how often it can do it. I'm convinced it will still be very strong after this patch just no longer godlike OP as before.

The far bigger issue is DPS Scourge and the nerf to Sand Shade duration, the real issue here however isn't the duration itself, arguably this even leads to more interesting gameplay by making shade management more of a requirement and is better design in the grander scheme of things, but the effect this has to the two minor traits Sand Sage and Blood as Sand. With only one Shade being maintainable this leads to a 10% nerf in condition and boon duration from Sand Sage and, probability even more important, a loss of 10% damage reduction from Blood as Sand. The Condition duration loss can be compensated for by slotting Sigil of Demons, as Bleeding overcaps with Nightmare Runes anyway, and it can be argued that the sustain nerf has been warranted but all these nerfs to utility have not been compensated by an increase in damage, quit the opposite damage will most likely go down a little after loosing Sigil of Torment, all on a DPS build that's already at the bottem of the chart. All these issues will also hamper the upcoming alacrity build greatly. I understand that some of the nerfs have been necessary to prevent the Alac build from becoming totally overpowered but i feel like some of this wastly overshot and DPS scorge got caught in the crossfire. I'm not advocating for huge Damage on Scourge, Harbinger already has that coverd, what made Scourge so good and interesting is the utility it can provide with still pretty respectable DPS, after this Patch i'm afrait both of this will be mostly gone.

Please reconsider the changes to Scourge or, even if it's a but of a clunky solution, tie the Shade duration reduction only to taking the new Version of Desert Empowerment until a better solution can be found.

As a side note: A 180 radius for Alac application seems a bit small imo. Maybe put Alac on Sand Savant instead? That’s kinda what i was expecting to happen anyway.

[MoonMoon.3826]

On 6/9/2023 at 12:12 AM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

We'll be keeping a very close eye on alacrity scourge's performance and will follow up as needed.

There is no mention about dps scourge and yet you are nerfing it's already bottom tier damage even further? Why must dps scourge die for the sins of healscourge/alacscourge? If wvw or alac scourge have a design flaw, dont punish pve dps scourge for it, there is no need to remove corruption from it which has niche play in raid fights like qadim the peerless.

It is now losing 10% damage mitigation, 150 concentration/expertise, 2k group barrier, and most importantly instead of getting a quality of life update on its shades, now its shades need to be used off cooldown making scourge rotation even more putrid. Why should scourge have even less cleave when virtuoso has more and is most requested for OLC and KO cm? Why should scourge provide even less barrier when spectre and catalyst are fine? I dont see scourge provide barrier for sniper shot on KO cm. QTP kite? Just get deadeye for more dps, more cc, and is also tankier.

I am not even here asking for a buff...I am here begging you to NOT NERF. Not the shades, not the corruption, NOTHING! Now dps scourge will have nothing unique about it and will have nothing it can do better than any another class/spec.

It feels like scourge being a dps class was never even considered, let alone desired.

 

Edited June 10, 2023 by MoonMoon.3826

[RowenMK.2819]

I hate this patch, what in the world is this killing the necro on this way its horrible the trade of taking everything what makes necro a good class away just for a alac build that no one in the ask for it its terrible.

The scrapper change its the worst even wrost scrapper already spam gyros to make dps anyway whats the point of taken out and change it for combo finishers that make the quick completely inconsistent in a lot of situation, i already can imagine my self flying away from a boss because the s**t a*s hammer 3 leap.

i like the specter alac change but that means u cannot revive people with your siphon???? what in the hell its that, reviving people with siphon its the coolest thing on the class and they're killing it, what is this nightmare what a horrible patch.

Edited June 10, 2023 by RowenMK.2819

[Dovahkiin from HighRock.46]

Something funny : Ranger cannot have invuln reskinned tablets (spirits) but Rev has invuln reskinned spirits (tablets) 🙂

[LichOverlord.6329]

10 hours ago, Eddie.9143 said:

Mirage dodge should teleport you 450 range backwards, reflect projectiles, and activate ambush spells.

On the off-chance that you're somehow not joking, I feel like I should remind you that the original identity of the Mirage is as a melee-focused class.

Yes, even though staff/staff is somehow meta (which is stupid imo and needs to be addressed), having a core mechanic risk taking you out of melee range goes against the class identity.

[Plushie Knight.4209]

I haven't read the whole thread, so I'm not sure if anyone has done this math.

As a quickness scrapper main, I'm...hesitantly interested in the change from applying quickness on Superspeed to applying it on leap/blast finishers. My biggest question right now is whether the scaling on how much quickness is applied will remain the same. If it does remain the same, I think that this will provide an interesting way to apply the boon, and more importantly leave space for variance in folks' builds- what armor or utilities or weapons they bring, and whether they're using abilities on cooldown or when the mechanics demand.

My current daily driver build applies 5 instances of group superspeed, granting 0.533 seconds of quickness per second of cooldown (before alacrity and concentration).

Comparing a similar setup- rifle remaining as weapon, two utilities, Function Gyro, and healing skill on cooldown- the change grants 0.555 seconds of quickness per second of cooldown, if the quickness per application granted by Kinetic Accelerators remains the same.

If the scaling does remain the same, and this is true, I'm interested in what this change brings, and hopeful that it could breathe a novel mechanic in while promoting build diversity.

Attached is an image of the spreadsheet I whipped up.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/464954155027529732/1117113742434521128/image.png

Edited June 10, 2023 by Plushie Knight.4209
Link clarification

[LichOverlord.6329]

6 hours ago, Roxtorf.9623 said:

Thanks for totally killing my scourge 😞

Boon corrupt - class-defining for Necro --> GONE

Rezz of downed players - class defining for Necro --> GONE

Barrier --> class defining for scourges (before it got butchered into other classes) --> almost gone

Alacrity? WTF no one asked for that.

 

STOP making all classes do everything! Make each class do the thing it does really good so there is a difference between them! Not every class has to be able to do everything. Druid is a great healer. Why add condi dmg? You can play sth else if you want to play cdps. Necro was a great support dps with some unique specialties, perfect, why add alac and take away everything else it got going for it? This is just the worst patch preview ever... Hope it never sees the day of light.

 

Remember when they spent significant amounts of time talking about "holes in roles"?

What the heck happened to that?