So like what exactly can we discuss here? Like how to improve Engineer? Would removing the costs of some of their attacks be a fix the players are looking for?
So like what exactly can we discuss here? Like how to improve Engineer? Would removing the costs of some of their attacks be a fix the players are looking for?
The costs are an issue for newer people, but it has literally nothing to do with their ability to actually perform in combat.
So like what exactly can we discuss here? Like how to improve Engineer? Would removing the costs of some of their attacks be a fix the players are looking for?
How engineer can be balanced better to be viable as a class overall. This would likely involve revamping one or more of their skills to provide more survivability and more offense. right now they are bottom of both scales
Engineer is broken beyond the scope of classleads, imo. Any bandaids to fix it from even a handful of classleads won't address the issues.
Gonna be spamming some DK classleads. Otherwise, only big things for me this round are reflections and fighting to keep the horde of Defiler classleads from neutering it.
Dk needs some additional tools for sure, the problem is most of its secondaries are around limbs which doesn't easily combine with bleed primary. Likely a similar retooling to templar with a secondary shallow killpath would do the trick, but I never worked it out to differentiate it enough from the other 2. Not sold on summoner actually being that weak, could maybe stand some small stuff though. Shaman should maybe get some slight nerds, and templar and RW too. Not super significant ones though. Would be good to
I'm curious on the relationship of bard and defiler.
Both seem to have the same amount of burst except bard can aff pressure much worse than a defiler. Defiler has some trade-offs in being a bit more tankier, but in the end it seems these classes are very similar in what they desire to get accomplished. With the exception that bard seems to be able to fire faster and have quicker aff route to trip up their foe.
I understand the need to bring Defiler down some. Blackvines preventing flight should not exist. Entropy lasting for a full minute needs to be adjusted. Edit: Spam-able entangle
I just don't think we can objectively look at the Defiler kit in terms of it's burst damage without considering bard. If in fact that is a route classleads are going.
Here is below an example of what a bard can do.
Damage Taken: 114 magickal (raw damage: 100)
Damage Taken: 187 magickal (raw damage: 164)
Damage Taken: 96 magickal (raw damage: 85)
397 damage total with 49% magickal resistance Defiler
^an example of bard damage, but in my opinion a little more intense than that of a Defiler due to the pile of afflictions also on their foe.
Defiler Bellow damage:
I believe my damage as a Defiler with bellow/ravage with treant skin active against a Renegade and psysap|activated did 419 in @Galt's hate post.
Against Galt's Renegade with treant skin and psysap:
77 blunt, physical (raw damage: 165)
Damage Taken: 342 psychic (raw damage: 300)
419 damage total
Against Eochaid's Defiler without treant skin activated and psysap it did
259 psychic (raw damage: 289)
101 blunt, physical (raw damage: 161)
360 damage total
I am not sure what treant skin provides in terms of damage, but that is a hard factor in an equation as you'd need a corpse to achieve that damage at all times on your treant.
I just don't see how we can tune Bellow and not adjust bard by a decent amount. It would be similar to a Defiler having their current kit and being able to provide 3-4 afflictions per attack leading to germ/bellow. I've long been a fan of bard and how they're actually ok because their damage is backend versus front end. I still believe in not over-tuning classes that they quickly dive into the stage of "DK or Predator". I don't think Defiler burst or even Bard burst needs adjusted. It's the smaller things that the classes do that are awful such as Defiler's entropy/blackvines/entangle or the afflict rate of a bard(maybe their equilibrum times need to be increased to match that of a defiler).
One last edit as brought up by @Ohm. There are no artifacts that avoid afflictions that you can buy, but there are ways to prevent damage through artifacts. Something that benefits a bard ten fold.
You can look at them differently because Defiler has so much that Bard doesn't that it is ridiculous to compare the damage of the two.
Defiler has significantly better ability to handle damage, afflictions, to escape, to hinder, better damage in the buildup, entropy doesn't decay for 60 seconds and the buildup doesn't have any limitations to it.
A class that is timebomb to burst needs limitations, like being fragile, lacking escapes, poor holding and a limited window for that burst - All of these things are true of bard. If I screw up my burst, my offense is reset, and I have to begin again.
So, before you can compare the two, you'd need to do the following, at a minimum:
- Remove project. - Make entropy decay constantly, forcing you to continually attack to have any chance to even maintain it. - Drop Defiler to ringmail, remove a large chunk of their tanking ability. - Remove whirlpool, woodheart, heartblood, treant entangle, block - Drastically reduce the per-combo damage in the buildup to the finisher
You have a choice, balance wise: You get to be a big timebomb burst class that's fragile and has strict limitations in other ways, or you get to be a resilient class with lots of survival tricks and escape and tank.
The problem with Defiler is that it is both a big damage timebomb class and has a huge number of ways to survive.
Edit: A good way to highlight my point... as a bard, I have 37% magick resist, with all the available artifacts for such. You, as a Defiler, have 49% magick resist, a significantly higher amount. I know that your other resists - across the board - Are also higher, in the case of the physical ones, by an even wider margin.
In addition to this, that combo you're showing as typical of Bard damage happened during a team fight. You were being hit by 3-4 people, and very likely had sensitivity amongst other things that would impact the damage. Conversely, you've chosen favourable conditions for your Defiler combos - I've seen you combo for in excess of 450, without any extra bonuses, vs someone with a max of 550~ health. This is notable because Bard damage scales strongly to max health, so for a Bard to pull that off, you'd effectively have to be sat with autocuring off and sensitivity stuck.
Defiler outdamages bard in the buildup to burst, it outdamages bard in the actual finisher burst, it's harder to avoid defiler burst because of the way entropy functions, defiler is tankier to both damage and afflictions, is better at holding, escaping and it's far, far better in team fights because it can flood, block, waterwalk and avoid death using woodheart. On top of all this, the damage type Defiler uses is harder to resist and they get a skill to drastically reduce resists to it. Even without factoring in psysap and the difficulty in getting psychic resists, Defiler tops bard by every possible metric except for "Has a songbird".
I mean, if you're willing to give up all those things and have your damage tweaked down a bit, then hey - Maybe you can compare the two!
I understand you're choosing to focus solely on Defiler and it's advantages, most of which I already brought up: on entropy not lasting for a minute(20 seconds seems like the sweet spot) spammable entangle and blackvines causing flight issues....thank you for noticing. Most classes have advantages in place as well. Let me list some bard perks since we are just listing random perks of classes.....since we are creating diversions away from the topic I posted. Which was: Since Defiler is well known to be a bit on the stronger end and is expected to lose blackvines utility, entangle, and entropy tics lasting for a full minute. With the topic of bellow being discussed for review, I felt it was natural to bring up the fact that a bard creates similar issues. Anyways onto randomly stating class benefits:
Bard:
songbird
befuddle
therapeutics
sketches
song buffs +1 all stats among other variety of buffs
contortionism
Artistry Circle balancing
edit: since this is new
Ability to sing a song continually for teammates and yourself*
then we can go with the adjustments as you did for defiler above:
drastically reduce the affliction output leading to the bard finisher
drastically reduce the equilibrium recovery of attacks to be less overwhelming.
Increasing* sketch attack speed to allow less attacks
I mean there are certainly ways to completely neuter a class that we as a player are struggling with. I could point out that group fights are silly and most the time being "tanky" is often trumped by out front damage. Alvetta's Druid provides 116 damage up front versus my Defiler at 80. Or the fact that Knights can pull off 160-180 damage combos from the start. There are a variety of balance issues that Imperian has, but a complete murder of a class shouldn't be one of them.
Personally, I'd rather focus as a community on fixing large balance items such as:
Reflections
Bronze Tome
Artifact Twist Ring
Veil and Diadem
You do an excellent job attempting to ignore things for your own personal crusade. I applaud your ability to do so, but I mean well you said it yourself....at 49% magick resist a bard does 397 damage....lord I'd hate to see what it does against a class that has 37%.
Edit: Since you decided to edit in there, I figured I'd point out the fact that a bard can *do* this type of damage with and without the help of a group. To bring that up, is just silly. The affliction rate of a bard will help empower their damage. Come on man.....
Defiler has better damage in the buildup, a better burst finisher, better tanking of both affs and damage, better team utility and more kill routes than bard.
If you're going to just reel off bard skills, state why they're powerful. You cite songbird, therapeutics - Yet Defiler has better aff handling than those. You cite befuddle and songs, yet Defiler has better resists by a large margin. You have better bonus regen than songs, better aff handling, you get to shrug toxins with not just one but two skills.
You list 5 or so skills that add to bards ability to survive, but you completely ignore that Defiler does all of those things better than Bard. You do 100 to 180 per combo in your buildup, straight out of the gate. The only thing that's even close to similar across the two classes is the burst damage, and guess what? Bard burst is lower, it's easier to avoid, and they rely heavily on one damage type.
As an experiment - Post your full RESISTS, please?
Damage Type Armour Resists
Cutting 30% 48%
Blunt 30% 48%
Magickal 0% 37%
Fire 0% 40%
Cold 0% 33%
Poison 0% 40%
Asphyxiation 0% 25%
Electricity 0% 25%
Psychic 0% 33%
That's mine. I have resist rings, miniskills, level 3 shield, arti armour, all my bard defs up. My guess is that all your resists are higher, and not by a small margin.
People hate bards in team fights. I know I did. I haven't been on the wrong side of one since the nerfs over the course of a couple classlead rounds. Maybe I would still hate them. They were pretty easy to hate. But anyway, it just might be reasonable to hate defiler even more. For the holding/escape alone (they can escape but you can't teehee), but they are also shockingly hard to kill, even unartied, and the damage they put out... They are genuine tank killers. I say that as one of the most artifacted knights, a Runeguard with -vitality-.
Magick as a circle has a hard time hindering/holding people in a team fight, and basically, every circle needs to have somewhat weaker holding (although, not what amounts to no holding or Septus will never die, ever), or every circle needs to have very hard holds that practically turn Imperian into a cage fight (but a cage fight for everyone, still not a game I'd probably relish, but at least then everyone can realize how much being on the wrong end of a cage fight sucks).
For the sake of being interested, @Galt, you seem to know everything about the defiler class. Have you even played it? Or are you going off you being attacked/killed by our Defilers?
You don't have to play a class to be able to comment on it or, thankfully, file reports for it. I thought we were past that gatekeeping nonsense by now.
Bard and Defiler classes are very strong right now. Both have good anti movement effects, decent-good affliction output and both have great damage.
Bard has exceptionally high burst that can be achieved very quickly, but is less tanky than Defiler. I think Bard should be able to burst faster than defiler but its no fun in groups when they can pull the 400+ health combo in such a quick time, it just floors people.
You can pull the 400 damage combo solo as well. You've hit me with it as a defiler with our high resistances before Galt. I can only imagine how much worse it is for the non tanky classes to fight a bard.
Entropy should have a quicker decay time or be changed to work in a different manner.
Bards up front group burst could do with being addressed. As could the entropy not decaying in an age issue.
Class leads should be addressing both aspects as well as buffing up the weaker classes like Summoner, Mage Pred and Deathknight that need some love.
----
For entropy I was thinking what if you kept it essentially the same but made eatting ginger(or some other herb cure) cure 3-5% entropy. That way with a bit of hindering you could lower your entroy or by running and not being hit you could cure it much quicker. 10 seconds of not being hit would let you cure 25% entropy. The defiler would have to maintain a decent level of offense to build the entropy.
I know I issued on this and was told it was "working as intended", but the help file is a little confusing and yeah I mean 30 is overkill....here is the bit from the ab shards beacons
It is important to note that the sentries perform the actual attacking, the citizens' task is to protect the sentries while they do the job. The speed of this process depends on the sentries available, capped at 10. Syntax: BEACON ATTACK.
gud logik, much thinks. You guys rode the sentry offense somehow blasting through defender sentries to clearing out the W Celidon. That and shit like going to attack Krys because I whipped your ass are why I'm 100% done treating you with respect.
E: Man, it's truly baffling how someone can defend "fight the giant clot!" because it's working to their advantage right now.
It is not a bug that you can have more than 10. That has been clarified repeatedly. When a beacon is attacked, it calls all available sentries, but the speed of the attack caps at 10 sentries worth.
Also:
[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.756]: --- Beneath the Sycamore trees -- -1:-6:0 ---<br>[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.759]: The stars twinkle in the clear night sky. A dense crown of small branches and twigs tops the thin trunk of a sweet-smelling crab apple tree. A quartz beacon is here, bearing the flag of the City of Kinsarmar. An icewall is here, blocking passage to the northwest. A small wooden elephant carving rests on the ground. Floating in the air is a fiery portal. A red-headed, leather clad fairy hovers here, emitting a vaguely audible tick. There are 11 corpses of a sentry of Khandava here. There are 21 sentries of Khandava here. There are 2 sentries of Khandava here, sleeping soundly. There are 28 corpses of a sentry of Kinsarmar here. Its body shuddering in anticipation, this twisted treant warps the very land about it here. High Priestess Caitryn Aertsen, The Primordial Embrace is here, giving off a truly ghastly stench. is here. She wields an iron-tipped whip in her left hand. Kabaal Lynne, the Petulant Peacock is here, giving off a truly ghastly stench. is here, hidden. He wields a black ophidian shield of articulated plates in his left hand and a metallic desublimator in his right. Villain Eochaid Xianfu is here, giving off a truly ghastly stench. is here, wreathed in a cloud of bile. She wields a Darkwood flail in her left hand and a lunar shield in her right.<br>[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.759]: You see a single exit leading northwest.<br>[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.760]: You sense Vaughn has entered your location.
That's when I began using larger groups of sentries - Because someone did it to us, first.
That's a pile of crap. We did one beacon attack, and we lost about expected numbers, going from 40 to 20 with 4 beacons v 2 beacons. Still silly, but it was literally our first attack ever, so waahhhhmbulance. Then you guys spammed out 5 beacons, which didn't seem imminently threatening even if it was a strain on our ability to call to avoid cd, since the expectation was it'd end at about 10 sentries. But hey, 50 v 40 somehow ended with 40 on your side. Repeat ad nauseum while admin go 'hey this looks like a good mechanic.'
If it's 'Working As Intended', the intent is awful. Just stick to posting Defiler nerfs instead of arguing for a long-term snowball utilizing some of IRE's worst mechanics and posting laughably bad opinions about Summoner's state right now.
You don't have to play a class to be able to comment on it or, thankfully, file reports for it. I thought we were past that gatekeeping nonsense by now.
I was asking because you have all of these comments and ideas on it - but I haven't seen you in that profession. You don't have to add snarky comments to answer my question.
As to summoner it takes Meris 45 seconds of free casting to damage me down when I'm undefed and with non of my artifacts.
She has the level 2 collar, diadem and level 1 +1 int sash.
She spec'd her demons for pure damage, which dramatically reduces her tankyness. That's fourty seconds of straight damage at her fastest speed.
When I use my artifacts. Using ring of magic bane and the resistance rings, sip ring level 2 and level 2 regeneration. She can't do enough damage to outdamage me at all. I can afk tank her.
Summer damage isn't bad for simple build/afflicting damage but they lack any oomph to finish the fight. They could do with some strong burst.
Buffing Incinerates damage or causing it to tick faster could give them the extra finishing moves they need to go for damage kills.
Right now you can't really expect 45 seconds of free casting to be required for a kill. I could shield once or twice and never die to a summoner right now without defs or artifacts.
Summoner damage was really high and impossible to survive for long enough to mount an offense prior to the flash change and the flash change only adjusted the damage down somewhat, it wasn't a huge nerf and the rest of the skills were untouched.
If a Summoner can't kill people right now the problem isn't the profession, it's the Summoner.
Comments
Gonna be spamming some DK classleads. Otherwise, only big things for me this round are reflections and fighting to keep the horde of Defiler classleads from neutering it.
Damage Taken: 187 magickal (raw damage: 164)
Damage Taken: 96 magickal (raw damage: 85)
One last edit as brought up by @Ohm. There are no artifacts that avoid afflictions that you can buy, but there are ways to prevent damage through artifacts. Something that benefits a bard ten fold.
Defiler has significantly better ability to handle damage, afflictions, to escape, to hinder, better damage in the buildup, entropy doesn't decay for 60 seconds and the buildup doesn't have any limitations to it.
A class that is timebomb to burst needs limitations, like being fragile, lacking escapes, poor holding and a limited window for that burst - All of these things are true of bard. If I screw up my burst, my offense is reset, and I have to begin again.
So, before you can compare the two, you'd need to do the following, at a minimum:
- Remove project.
- Make entropy decay constantly, forcing you to continually attack to have any chance to even maintain it.
- Drop Defiler to ringmail, remove a large chunk of their tanking ability.
- Remove whirlpool, woodheart, heartblood, treant entangle, block
- Drastically reduce the per-combo damage in the buildup to the finisher
You have a choice, balance wise: You get to be a big timebomb burst class that's fragile and has strict limitations in other ways, or you get to be a resilient class with lots of survival tricks and escape and tank.
The problem with Defiler is that it is both a big damage timebomb class and has a huge number of ways to survive.
Edit: A good way to highlight my point... as a bard, I have 37% magick resist, with all the available artifacts for such. You, as a Defiler, have 49% magick resist, a significantly higher amount. I know that your other resists - across the board - Are also higher, in the case of the physical ones, by an even wider margin.
In addition to this, that combo you're showing as typical of Bard damage happened during a team fight. You were being hit by 3-4 people, and very likely had sensitivity amongst other things that would impact the damage. Conversely, you've chosen favourable conditions for your Defiler combos - I've seen you combo for in excess of 450, without any extra bonuses, vs someone with a max of 550~ health. This is notable because Bard damage scales strongly to max health, so for a Bard to pull that off, you'd effectively have to be sat with autocuring off and sensitivity stuck.
Defiler outdamages bard in the buildup to burst, it outdamages bard in the actual finisher burst, it's harder to avoid defiler burst because of the way entropy functions, defiler is tankier to both damage and afflictions, is better at holding, escaping and it's far, far better in team fights because it can flood, block, waterwalk and avoid death using woodheart. On top of all this, the damage type Defiler uses is harder to resist and they get a skill to drastically reduce resists to it. Even without factoring in psysap and the difficulty in getting psychic resists, Defiler tops bard by every possible metric except for "Has a songbird".
I mean, if you're willing to give up all those things and have your damage tweaked down a bit, then hey - Maybe you can compare the two!
Defiler has better damage in the buildup, a better burst finisher, better tanking of both affs and damage, better team utility and more kill routes than bard.
If you're going to just reel off bard skills, state why they're powerful. You cite songbird, therapeutics - Yet Defiler has better aff handling than those. You cite befuddle and songs, yet Defiler has better resists by a large margin. You have better bonus regen than songs, better aff handling, you get to shrug toxins with not just one but two skills.
You list 5 or so skills that add to bards ability to survive, but you completely ignore that Defiler does all of those things better than Bard. You do 100 to 180 per combo in your buildup, straight out of the gate. The only thing that's even close to similar across the two classes is the burst damage, and guess what? Bard burst is lower, it's easier to avoid, and they rely heavily on one damage type.
As an experiment - Post your full RESISTS, please?
That's mine. I have resist rings, miniskills, level 3 shield, arti armour, all my bard defs up. My guess is that all your resists are higher, and not by a small margin.
Magick as a circle has a hard time hindering/holding people in a team fight, and basically, every circle needs to have somewhat weaker holding (although, not what amounts to no holding or Septus will never die, ever), or every circle needs to have very hard holds that practically turn Imperian into a cage fight (but a cage fight for everyone, still not a game I'd probably relish, but at least then everyone can realize how much being on the wrong end of a cage fight sucks).
Yes, Defiler has better team utility.
protect the sentries while they do the job. The speed of this process depends on the
sentries available, capped at 10. Syntax: BEACON ATTACK.
The flash nerf was necessary and did exactly what it was intended to.
As for sentries... You don't walk into city guards then complain they killed you. Don't walk into clots of sentries.
E: Man, it's truly baffling how someone can defend "fight the giant clot!" because it's working to their advantage right now.
Also:
[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.756]: --- Beneath the Sycamore trees -- -1:-6:0 ---<br>[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.759]: The stars twinkle in the clear night sky. A dense crown of small branches and twigs tops the thin trunk of a sweet-smelling crab apple tree. A quartz beacon is here, bearing the flag of the City of Kinsarmar. An icewall is here, blocking passage to the northwest. A small wooden elephant carving rests on the ground. Floating in the air is a fiery portal. A red-headed, leather clad fairy hovers here, emitting a vaguely audible tick. There are 11 corpses of a sentry of Khandava here. There are 21 sentries of Khandava here. There are 2 sentries of Khandava here, sleeping soundly. There are 28 corpses of a sentry of Kinsarmar here. Its body shuddering in anticipation, this twisted treant warps the very land about it here. High Priestess Caitryn Aertsen, The Primordial Embrace is here, giving off a truly ghastly stench. is here. She wields an iron-tipped whip in her left hand. Kabaal Lynne, the Petulant Peacock is here, giving off a truly ghastly stench. is here, hidden. He wields a black ophidian shield of articulated plates in his left hand and a metallic desublimator in his right. Villain Eochaid Xianfu is here, giving off a truly ghastly stench. is here, wreathed in a cloud of bile. She wields a Darkwood flail in her left hand and a lunar shield in her right.<br>[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.759]: You see a single exit leading northwest.<br>[12/09/2018 - 23:28:57.760]: You sense Vaughn has entered your location.That's when I began using larger groups of sentries - Because someone did it to us, first.
If it's 'Working As Intended', the intent is awful. Just stick to posting Defiler nerfs instead of arguing for a long-term snowball utilizing some of IRE's worst mechanics and posting laughably bad opinions about Summoner's state right now.
If a Summoner can't kill people right now the problem isn't the profession, it's the Summoner.