qZerk: Heat The Soul needs less ICD or more base duration to be viable, or viable 2nd group quick skill to cover

[Radjan Majere.4208]

First: I accept the design premise that boon dps builds should require some boon duration dps tradeoffs. 

However, with 3.5s base on a 5s ICD, combined with the fact that you can't perfectly time your burst skills to the ICD and it can be several seconds before you next one if you "just miss" the ICD -- before even accounting for the times you're out of berserk mode -- the result requires WAY too much boon duration to be a reliable 100% quickness for a group. It takes almost 50% boon duration just to get to theoretical possibility of 100% uptime (>5s off the burst) , and then in practical terms you need a lot more cover to fill the gaps. 100% quickness duration gets you to just 7seconds, which sounds like a lot on a 5S ICD but it means you get less than 2 seconds after an invisible cooldown to land another burst skill - and heaven help you out of berserk mode.

 

Meanwhile, qDPS Deadeye can put 0 concentration and get full uptime? AlacSworn is in much better shape, too. qDPS deadeye probably needs to be toned down to fit the design intent, but the current state of Berserker is broken (on the bad side) even if you accept that they're not SUPPOSED to be as broken (to the good side) as Deadeye. 

Easy solutions: 

1. Lower the ICD, offering more flexibility to account for the required gaps between burst skills.

2. Raise the base duration to at least 4.5s (I get you don't want it at 5s, but even at 5s you're going to have big gaps in uptime with 0 boondur, so the design intent is met.)

3. Add another group quick source that's viable to fill the gaps, which then increases the value of your investment in boon duration. Warhorn is interesting because it forces another DPS tradeoff and brings some variety, but the base duration is too pitiful to act as a gap filler right now. 

 

[GigityCat.7529]

Imo it should just be 4s so it works with Discipline + Primal Bursts.

[Jzaku.9765]

I suggested to simply have different durations per burst skill: 

The entire reason this has an icd in the first place is almost purely because of Decapitate having no effective cd. This would give them many levers to tweak for any build they want to push.

 

Also in the end the boon duration you need is balanced by the dps the build puts out. Alac Bladesworn doesn't need any boon duration because they take a trait that brutally nerfs their dps without actually saying it in the tool tip.

[rainhelm.3827]

I see all this as a growing pain for the playstyle. Getting rid of banners and getting quickness out of something we already do instead is a good thing and its a lot more fun and flexible for the class, just some work on numbers is needed to get it into a viable state.

Similarly the buffs to sword are nice aswell even though they do not matter in the grand scheme of things and condizerk dps mostly comes from longbow. I still appreciate good QoL changes to base warrior weapon abilities, as they need it so badly.

The elephant in the room though is that condizerk was always a spec that needed to be in combat to function, it always looked better than it actually was because it looks amazing on a parse dummy, you pumped good numbers, uptime was good etc, but it would struggle to keep up adrenaline and keep up dps as good in actual fights.

This problem will now be elevated even further as our quickness is now tied to burst usage. I think this will have to be adressed in some way.

 

Edited July 18, 2023 by rainhelm.3827

[dukefx.9730]

Well, we got the increased duration. Now it's half a second longer. The ICD is still there still causing desyncs. You'd need like 100% boon duration for that kind of error margin. Meanwhile there are classes that can provide 100% quickness uptime while being AFK. I haven't seen a single berserker in strikes in the role of qdps ever since they removed quickness from banners. Way to go anet, way to go.

[FShoppe.6572]

it literally just needs a 4s icd instead of 5. -- To match up with Discipline burst cd reduction like EVERYONE HAS BEEN SAYING. But apparently that's too complicated for the new balance team to understand.