Generally it only takes one person to highlight issues. I'm not going to get into the argument about whether there are in fact issues, but that's actually usually how this tends to work: somethings considered fine until one person comes along and proves otherwise.
I would kind of like to give all unhidden affs a 3p, especially toxins. Clan aff calls are so icky, and I can never get people on board with the coding necessary to make in-line calling a thing (but it is technically feasible without any changes).
While it seems good in theory to make everything ez-mode, I think this would likely upset the tenuous balance on affliction heavy teams and finisher skills.
Plus, any class that really needs it, generally already has a 3P diagnose skill.
Just out of curiosity, are there people regularly and actively fighting as assassin other than Kabaal (with 10+ years of dedicated play in that class + artifacts?)
The sample size seems a little skewed for this discussion.
I played renegade in the era of fast. I haven't been back to it since that change. I haven't been back around enough to form an opinion on either prof. But generally, if people are flocking to it or players are suddenly good at pk where they used to flail, something maybe needs looked at.
I think there are probably a number of reasons assassin/renegade are low in numbers: higher entry level skill, less utility/viability in team fights, non-neutral class, subpar bashing, lack of tutors, etc.
I would kind of like to give all unhidden affs a 3p, especially toxins. Clan aff calls are so icky, and I can never get people on board with the coding necessary to make in-line calling a thing (but it is technically feasible without any changes).
While it seems good in theory to make everything ez-mode, I think this would likely upset the tenuous balance on affliction heavy teams and finisher skills.
Plus, any class that really needs it, generally already has a 3P diagnose skill.
@Cassius No real surge in assassin/renegade for ages (We have Darwi and Raisin in Demonic now, neither doing tons of PK yet but potentially interested). Team viability is actually there in a few ways, even if the basic aff/hyp stack is a waste of time. The bashing has gotten improvements with trioxin/freeze, but I wouldn't call it great out of the box still. I try to always offer to help assassins (I'm lazy/distractable), and I don't really have qualms helping a renegade (OOCly).
E: And please jeebus make it neutral. Then maybe they'll prio the affinity wormhole cancellation that has made it even harder to keep up a relevant network
The 3p thing is just a pet thing of mine Like I said, it's technically feasible already, but it's slightly more complicated of a coding task (I don't think it's hard, but the amount of O.O I got when trying to push the idea...)
I would kind of like to give all unhidden affs a 3p, especially toxins. Clan aff calls are so icky, and I can never get people on board with the coding necessary to make in-line calling a thing (but it is technically feasible without any changes).
While it seems good in theory to make everything ez-mode, I think this would likely upset the tenuous balance on affliction heavy teams and finisher skills.
Plus, any class that really needs it, generally already has a 3P diagnose skill.
I think experience fighting them over 10+ years throughout their gradual evolution would give plenty of players a good handle on their strengths. Knowing how to play the class is not a necessity to make judgment calls on if something is or is not powerful.
On the topic of Aff 3ps, I am really leery of the idea of providing more information. The tracking of not so obvious factors is what differentiates skillful aff class players from not so skillful. This also is intrinsically linked to a couple other outside skills, I.e coding acumen, but every class is ultimately going to reach that issue. I would not be opposed to some more 3p info, but not a full sweep across the game. Is there an aff or list of affs in particular you would like this for?
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Just out of curiosity, are there people regularly and actively fighting as assassin other than Kabaal (with 10+ years of dedicated play in that class + artifacts?)
The sample size seems a little skewed for this discussion.
I played renegade in the era of fast. I haven't been back to it since that change. I haven't been back around enough to form an opinion on either prof. But generally, if people are flocking to it or players are suddenly good at pk where they used to flail, something maybe needs looked at.
Bloodlet at 0 bleed did 9 from Oz (longsword and serrated had no effect, he was using a scimi), whole combo does 18 with one aff. Damage was awful, like 75-80 raw phys a combo on me. He literally never had a chance to haemo with active clotting, and toadstool covered the mana usage. The aff-heavy hybrid route is 91 raw cutting/blunt, so 32 a combo on me. The aps is enough for a hybrid class (1.03), but the damage (even with the occasional claymore thwack from eviscerate) barely stresses health even with sensitivity frequently up.
Cae's lacerate with a L1 (not sure if it impacts bleed) was 9 bleed as well, with 11 from teeth procs every other combo. That makes double lacerate ~95 raw phys minus her L1 damage, 18 bleed (29 every other), and two toxins. Lac/shred is 9 bleed, haemo+aff or 2 affs, and marginally less damage (from 56 to 54 raw on the shred hit). And even that was just pressuring down my mana slowly against my clot to zero. Granted, Caelya manuals her affs and there's a .15 aps difference, so there's more room for me to clear haemo versus her.
A potential 45% health instakill (90% out of mana%+health%) does make it a bit harder to throw too much power, though. At the very least, bloodlet should have its initial surge improved to not be exactly equal to lacerate. You could also maybe scale the burst off of number of physical affs, creating a way for Berserker to hit their haemo threshold and a clear progression of aff stack -> alternate burst bleed with aff/aff/pierce -> shatter. Since there's no bleed-> aff, disorient could do a double dose at a bleeding threshold. It won't cause too bad of a feedback loop with mentals not on the bloodlet scale + no impatience.
Bloodlet at 0 bleed did 9 from Oz (longsword and serrated had no effect, he was using a scimi), whole combo does 18 with one aff. Damage was awful, like 75-80 raw phys a combo on me. He literally never had a chance to haemo with active clotting, and toadstool covered the mana usage. The aff-heavy hybrid route is 91 raw cutting/blunt, so 32 a combo on me. The aps is enough for a hybrid class (1.03), but the damage (even with the occasional claymore thwack from eviscerate) barely stresses health even with sensitivity frequently up.
Cae's lacerate with a L1 (not sure if it impacts bleed) was 9 bleed as well, with 11 from teeth procs every other combo. That makes double lacerate ~95 raw phys minus her L1 damage, 18 bleed (29 every other), and two toxins. Lac/shred is 9 bleed, haemo+aff or 2 affs, and marginally less damage (from 56 to 54 raw on the shred hit). And even that was just pressuring down my mana slowly against my clot to zero. Granted, Caelya manuals her affs and there's a .15 aps difference, so there's more room for me to clear haemo versus her.
A potential 45% health instakill (90% out of mana%+health%) does make it a bit harder to throw too much power, though. At the very least, bloodlet should have its initial surge improved to not be exactly equal to lacerate. You could also maybe scale the burst off of number of physical affs, creating a way for Berserker to hit their haemo threshold and a clear progression of aff stack -> alternate burst bleed with aff/aff/pierce -> shatter. Since there's no bleed-> aff, disorient could do a double dose at a bleeding threshold. It won't cause too bad of a feedback loop with mentals not on the bloodlet scale + no impatience.
I'm actually questioning the idea of pushing the bleeding theme lately. I think we would need to ask for 'too many' changes to really pursue that line of play in a satisfactory manner. I do believe the 'scale bleed to phys affs' idea has a lot of merit, though. I would even go further and push Bloodlet to have a 'closer' style effect like Slam, Smash, etc if they meet certain conditions. The 'closer' style riders seem to be an underlying theme of the class and I could see it being a good place to focus on building a path to solo viability.
Is Impatience too dangerous of an ask when the class has access to hemo, etc? If not - a possible way to go might be to push for a new Shield skill - 'Shield Addle', 'Shield Thwack', whatever you wanna call it. Aff pool would probably be a few off of Warchant Disorient plus Impatience. Of course, the 'closer' effect is also unknown, unsure what we could provide here that might give them an advantage to leverage.
How about dryblood somewhere? I'm unsure how strong it would be, but my gut says pretty good if they could get an otherwise decent nightshade stack going off of hemotoxin, haemophilia (if bloodflow ever worked on the target..) etc.
@Ozreas also mentioned to me his thoughts on Rampage dances and the Rage benefits, but I'm not going to put words in his mouth there.
On a side note, if Shatter is truly too strong that it really limits our design space or power budget, what is stopping us from also tweaking Shatter in exchange for more power elsewhere? I feel like Berserker has an abundance of closing tools on paper, but no way to get to a sufficient point in a fight where those tools are ever particularly relevant. The class wants somebody else doing their work for them.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
I am currently travelling, but will share a more developed version of the thoughts @Sarrius mentions when I get access to something other than my phone. In summary though, Berserker is a bit of an anomaly and needs help.
This is something I've fought about a fair bit when trying to make longswords less bad against good curing. My conclusion basically comes down to this: classes without either (1) dryblood to complement haemophilia or (2) excessively high bleeding values just are not good at bleeding against artefacted targets. This is because imperian bleed classes are very much attrition rather than burst, which means a single roll of the di on the nightshade eat can be a full progress reset, and because kill sequences tend to be fairly long, the reallistic chance of that lucky haemophilia cure happening is extremely high.
This is partially because of how bleeding works with being able to instantly clot it all away as well, but that's a far mor far reaching change and fairly necessary just because of teams. This is also why dk's position is so tenuous - teeth somewhat works because the values are too high, but if they weren't high they'd be in just as subpar a position as templar (and arguably they still have the same issues, it just comes down to how much artefact weight the target can throw at the problem). Its also why rg actually does its job fairly well (though rg suffers from many of the other issues). Naturally, runeflares obviously help.
I would personally recommend avoiding bleeding for berserker. The successful bleed class formula hasn't really been nailed down yet for the classes its already used by, adding another one into the mix is probably not going to work out. Impatience could work, though personally I feel one of the biggest issues berserker suffers is that outside of its endgame there's not much going on - there's no mid fight pressure etc. The target can basically go full throttle the whole fight until the execution phase where they just have to play safe for a few seconds. That execution phase is actually pretty good, its just in a vacuum so is trivial to deal with.
Its not a coincidence that most people play the classes that can kill outside of their closers if the target plays poorly. I think if this part of berserker can be improved it would see much more adoption.
Zerk Bleed I don't think touching up bloodlet/bloodflow will fix it all, but it'd be a start. I figured burst bleed was an interesting take on the theme since that's really only in DK mildly (and their miniburst bleed hitting the shred threshold is the only reason their bleed works). Either they have team support for the bleed, or they can stack affs into chunks of bleed.
I do have an odd idea for bloodflow: make it deliver sulfonal, dryblood, or haemophilia the same way as other aff warchants. And make Zerker sword hits relapse their toxins. That with a phys aff scaler for bloodlet would be swell when you're in the shield aff thresholds doing 3 affs with probably 50-60 raw phys with no artis and say 9+physaff*5 bleed. Or the bleed plus 2 affs plus pierce in the threshold. Then relapses!
Or instead of sulfonal, maybe a new bleeDoT called anemia or something.
Addlepation Could just make batter give impatience instead of its current 'if full' effects? That or some sort of mana-related debuff like 2x mana usage for 10-20s or something.
If Berserker is to keep bleeding as a primary facet of the profession, tying bleed mechanics more strongly into either afflictions (boring but achievable) or damage thresholds (potentially messy) is certainly necessary, as the current progression for this route... doesn't exist. Scaling up the bleeding delivered by Bloodlet based on the number of physical afflictions seems like the best solution here, rather than reducing the requirements for Bloodflow. Why? Simple. As a Bleedzerker, I want you to clot. Shatter is based on combined health/mana threshold and Vesselburst is not a finisher: it is designed to punish people who are trying to play 'smart' by not clotting. Giving the profession a more reasonably achievable method of achieving high bleed numbers is the only way to make it a relevant part of the kit. However: I agree with those who have said that it should not be included in the profession.
The philosophy behind the inclusion of bleeding in the Berserker kit is, to all appearances, to provide a method of reducing mana for shatter. There are a few mechanics tossed in to supposedly allow a user to punish someone for trying to play around this fact and gain extra damage but, on the whole, the entire thing remains toothless (obligatory DK-related pun? maybe) due to an apparent fear of the profession having "too much synergy" with a certain other bleed-based profession inside the circle it originally belonged to. Which brings us to the real question: How can we give the profession a way to more organically reduce a target's mana, using the parts of Berserker that arleady function well, without "over- synergizing" with other bleed- or mana-based professions?
Suggestion 1: Rage. The current buff provided by high rage really isn't worth maintaining in exchange for permanent recklessness. Keep that debuff, as it encourages active spending of rage, but remove the weapon damage buff and instead allow the mana cost of Warchants to be split between the Berserker and the target based on the Berserker's current rage. For example, at 0% rage the Berserker pays the full cost of the, while at 80% rage the target would take mana damage equivalent to 80% of the chant's cost while costing the user only 20% of the normal mana.
Suggestion 2: Overwhelm. 20% bonus damage to a shout that is already on the weak side really isn't a fight-changer, which is what you're looking for if you've managed to push them to 60% health as a berserker. Change Overwhelm to instead, at 60% health, induce a timed effect (duration scaling to number of physical affs?) that causes eating herbs to incur a mana cost.
Suggestion 3: Manaleech. Idfk, maybe adding this affliction into the kit somewhere will help if your 'zerker happens to be really good at affliction tracking and I'd love to see more Fitness-related tears, I guess.
The goal of any serious change should be to develop a mechanic that is both achievable by a Berserker in a reasonable amount of time during a 1v1 fight but not immediately available for your team to repeatedly smash targets with.
Whew, and I thought giving Sulfunol on demand to Berserker was spicy! That Rage idea is pretty cool. The funny thing is, it turns a concern I have in to a strength. Tahm and I have both individually commented on warchant mana costs while looking at Warchants. I would definitely be in favor of that as a major change if we're only going to offer up one, because it answers a few things in one change. I think the Overwhelm change would be interesting too, because I agree that it really tries to buff the wrong things right now - unsure if I would pair these two changes up, though.
Also unsure if Manaleech suggestion is really serious, but in case it is - put it somewhere in Warchant. Maybe change Bewilder to a Voice-Innyo style skill, with manaleech a/the payoff? All those DoT affs! I think one of the real problems is the windup of the class - it just 'gets going' slower than most of the popular classes these days. Unsure if another aff would fix that rather than add to it.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Manaleech was a bit of facetiousness because I don't think it would really help, the other two are intended to be kept separate as different ways to attack the same problem. The Rage thing is my favorite as well, though, for exactly the reasons mentioned. Berserker is surprisingly mana-hungry.
Mostly, this feels solid. Mindread's been buggy. Sap is boring and just gives the illusion of having a mana pressure route. Ouros shouldn't be able to be feared >.>. Otherwise, really great skills.
Ritualism
Of the two new skillsets, Ritualism feels the most complete with a little room for improvement and additions. It really feels like they need both mana pressure and a bit more of an affliction pool. Doesn't need to be old mana-draining deadeyes, but definitely something. With its limited affliction pool (not counting bodylink/mindlink throwing out randoms) being incapable of locks without anorexia/asthma/slickness and almost complete lack of mental affs, it's also got room for an aff like impatience.
Infirmity - Goes down the list of impatience, stupidity, hallucinations. If the target has all three, it instead does a burst of mana loss. Intensified - faster. Inverted - Cures one of those three or restores mana.
Void - Delivers masochism and a small mana loss. Inverted- Cure maso/restore mana. Intensified - Higher mana loss. Masochism isn't the perfect aff, but it's basically 'mental Magick' with it which is workable.
Sun - Relapse mana damge as well.
Stars - Mana-burst version of Moon, mutually exclusive use. Could also be done by making moon the charging thing with two different activation skills, dunno if that'd be easier or harder.
Fire/magickshield: the long duration and how inversion promotes the primary tradeoff kind of make these a lot more boring than they could be. I would probably just split them into four (fire/cold/magick/elec), drastically cut the duration to 4-6s (2-3 combos), make the regular symbol version add resistances and have the inversions reduce it. Change intensification to add effectiveness to the shield/curse. That makes them more defensive by nature but also requires active usage to employ the benefits, adding onto other inversions for a fairly decent support queue.
Nightfall
The enable/disable feature could be made entirely unnecessary by tweaking ethereal charging to something like +1 every 5 rooms moved or something not time-based + small tweaks to a couple other wraiths. The charging mechanisms serve as enough gating, so going above 4 wraiths will spread out your charges and take more time anyway.
Glowing has the issue of requiring the target to heal sensitivity or you to waste time throwing the symbol to charge. It should also get +1 every 3-4s your last symbol target has sensitivity on them.
Reflective is a must-have. It gives you wraith flexibility or a 2 combo speed burst. It should just summon when another wraith charges, since there's no reason not to just summon it on your first trace anyway.
Fiery is pretty good, both in charging and skills.
Whispering's charging requires that the opponent puts on mana pressure or that you just tank your own mana via manatap. It'd be better off on fiery's scheme of target <75%, even if its skills stay the mana version of vigorous.
Vigorous I'd change to +1 when taking a hit, 6s cooldown or thereabouts. Again, relying on hurting yourself or a particular enemy offense is meh, even if vigorous is far more likely to be engaged than whispering.
Translucent would likely need a nerf to its charging with removing enabling, either dropping it to +1 charge or restricting it to your last ritualism target.
Midnight's charge is decent, and amplify would be useful with the shield changes I described above. Scan might be more useful with the ability to pick between 4 reductions, but I'd rather see it replaced with something like "Eclipse - Invert both symbols in your next ritualism combination."
What's the windup on the Diabolist? This sounds like a lot of gating. Does it have any hope of really getting started before a lot of more common professions have likely blown it up?
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
You need to hit with all 3 symbols you want to attach to moon to start charging, then it's 8 hits to full for each charge. That's 27/2 or 14 hits, 2.25 for the fastest combinations gets you to full charge at 31s. A bane (25s fastest charge) will shave ~1s off, and intensifies (2 charges for 1 or 5 charges for 4, 1 charge/3s last target <75%hp -> 15s per Overload -> 2 or 4 faster combos in the charge window -> 3-4s off) can drag that time down, so an optimistic charge time to full is about 26s.
Then you have to pop the moon with sun/moon rep/some other damage, then you get the 3 relapses of each coming in on top of the straight dps. The damage is enough at that point to pop people, but it's kind of obvious. You can pop moon earlier, and iirc it's pretty close to (x+y+z/300)*damage for the pop so it's not unseemingly painful to do so.
Comments
Generally it only takes one person to highlight issues. I'm not going to get into the argument about whether there are in fact issues, but that's actually usually how this tends to work: somethings considered fine until one person comes along and proves otherwise.
It usually means you're doing something right.
Plus, any class that really needs it, generally already has a 3P diagnose skill.
I think there are probably a number of reasons assassin/renegade are low in numbers: higher entry level skill, less utility/viability in team fights, non-neutral class, subpar bashing, lack of tutors, etc.
E: And please jeebus make it neutral. Then maybe they'll prio the affinity wormhole cancellation that has made it even harder to keep up a relevant network
The 3p thing is just a pet thing of mine
edit: there's also a promo arti for that
On the topic of Aff 3ps, I am really leery of the idea of providing more information. The tracking of not so obvious factors is what differentiates skillful aff class players from not so skillful. This also is intrinsically linked to a couple other outside skills, I.e coding acumen, but every class is ultimately going to reach that issue. I would not be opposed to some more 3p info, but not a full sweep across the game. Is there an aff or list of affs in particular you would like this for?
Bloodlet at 0 bleed did 9 from Oz (longsword and serrated had no effect, he was using a scimi), whole combo does 18 with one aff. Damage was awful, like 75-80 raw phys a combo on me. He literally never had a chance to haemo with active clotting, and toadstool covered the mana usage.
The aff-heavy hybrid route is 91 raw cutting/blunt, so 32 a combo on me. The aps is enough for a hybrid class (1.03), but the damage (even with the occasional claymore thwack from eviscerate) barely stresses health even with sensitivity frequently up.
Cae's lacerate with a L1 (not sure if it impacts bleed) was 9 bleed as well, with 11 from teeth procs every other combo. That makes double lacerate ~95 raw phys minus her L1 damage, 18 bleed (29 every other), and two toxins. Lac/shred is 9 bleed, haemo+aff or 2 affs, and marginally less damage (from 56 to 54 raw on the shred hit). And even that was just pressuring down my mana slowly against my clot to zero. Granted, Caelya manuals her affs and there's a .15 aps difference, so there's more room for me to clear haemo versus her.
A potential 45% health instakill (90% out of mana%+health%) does make it a bit harder to throw too much power, though. At the very least, bloodlet should have its initial surge improved to not be exactly equal to lacerate. You could also maybe scale the burst off of number of physical affs, creating a way for Berserker to hit their haemo threshold and a clear progression of aff stack -> alternate burst bleed with aff/aff/pierce -> shatter.
Since there's no bleed-> aff, disorient could do a double dose at a bleeding threshold. It won't cause too bad of a feedback loop with mentals not on the bloodlet scale + no impatience.
Is Impatience too dangerous of an ask when the class has access to hemo, etc? If not - a possible way to go might be to push for a new Shield skill - 'Shield Addle', 'Shield Thwack', whatever you wanna call it. Aff pool would probably be a few off of Warchant Disorient plus Impatience. Of course, the 'closer' effect is also unknown, unsure what we could provide here that might give them an advantage to leverage.
How about dryblood somewhere? I'm unsure how strong it would be, but my gut says pretty good if they could get an otherwise decent nightshade stack going off of hemotoxin, haemophilia (if bloodflow ever worked on the target..) etc.
@Ozreas also mentioned to me his thoughts on Rampage dances and the Rage benefits, but I'm not going to put words in his mouth there.
On a side note, if Shatter is truly too strong that it really limits our design space or power budget, what is stopping us from also tweaking Shatter in exchange for more power elsewhere? I feel like Berserker has an abundance of closing tools on paper, but no way to get to a sufficient point in a fight where those tools are ever particularly relevant. The class wants somebody else doing their work for them.
For some thoughts on bleeding:
This is something I've fought about a fair bit when trying to make longswords less bad against good curing. My conclusion basically comes down to this: classes without either (1) dryblood to complement haemophilia or (2) excessively high bleeding values just are not good at bleeding against artefacted targets. This is because imperian bleed classes are very much attrition rather than burst, which means a single roll of the di on the nightshade eat can be a full progress reset, and because kill sequences tend to be fairly long, the reallistic chance of that lucky haemophilia cure happening is extremely high.
This is partially because of how bleeding works with being able to instantly clot it all away as well, but that's a far mor far reaching change and fairly necessary just because of teams. This is also why dk's position is so tenuous - teeth somewhat works because the values are too high, but if they weren't high they'd be in just as subpar a position as templar (and arguably they still have the same issues, it just comes down to how much artefact weight the target can throw at the problem). Its also why rg actually does its job fairly well (though rg suffers from many of the other issues). Naturally, runeflares obviously help.
I would personally recommend avoiding bleeding for berserker. The successful bleed class formula hasn't really been nailed down yet for the classes its already used by, adding another one into the mix is probably not going to work out. Impatience could work, though personally I feel one of the biggest issues berserker suffers is that outside of its endgame there's not much going on - there's no mid fight pressure etc. The target can basically go full throttle the whole fight until the execution phase where they just have to play safe for a few seconds. That execution phase is actually pretty good, its just in a vacuum so is trivial to deal with.
Its not a coincidence that most people play the classes that can kill outside of their closers if the target plays poorly. I think if this part of berserker can be improved it would see much more adoption.
I don't think touching up bloodlet/bloodflow will fix it all, but it'd be a start. I figured burst bleed was an interesting take on the theme since that's really only in DK mildly (and their miniburst bleed hitting the shred threshold is the only reason their bleed works). Either they have team support for the bleed, or they can stack affs into chunks of bleed.
I do have an odd idea for bloodflow: make it deliver sulfonal, dryblood, or haemophilia the same way as other aff warchants. And make Zerker sword hits relapse their toxins. That with a phys aff scaler for bloodlet would be swell when you're in the shield aff thresholds doing 3 affs with probably 50-60 raw phys with no artis and say 9+physaff*5 bleed. Or the bleed plus 2 affs plus pierce in the threshold. Then relapses!
Or instead of sulfonal, maybe a new bleeDoT called anemia or something.
Addlepation
Could just make batter give impatience instead of its current 'if full' effects? That or some sort of mana-related debuff like 2x mana usage for 10-20s or something.
The philosophy behind the inclusion of bleeding in the Berserker kit is, to all appearances, to provide a method of reducing mana for shatter. There are a few mechanics tossed in to supposedly allow a user to punish someone for trying to play around this fact and gain extra damage but, on the whole, the entire thing remains toothless (obligatory DK-related pun? maybe) due to an apparent fear of the profession having "too much synergy" with a certain other bleed-based profession inside the circle it originally belonged to. Which brings us to the real question: How can we give the profession a way to more organically reduce a target's mana, using the parts of Berserker that arleady function well, without "over- synergizing" with other bleed- or mana-based professions?
Suggestion 1: Rage. The current buff provided by high rage really isn't worth maintaining in exchange for permanent recklessness. Keep that debuff, as it encourages active spending of rage, but remove the weapon damage buff and instead allow the mana cost of Warchants to be split between the Berserker and the target based on the Berserker's current rage. For example, at 0% rage the Berserker pays the full cost of the, while at 80% rage the target would take mana damage equivalent to 80% of the chant's cost while costing the user only 20% of the normal mana.
Suggestion 2: Overwhelm. 20% bonus damage to a shout that is already on the weak side really isn't a fight-changer, which is what you're looking for if you've managed to push them to 60% health as a berserker. Change Overwhelm to instead, at 60% health, induce a timed effect (duration scaling to number of physical affs?) that causes eating herbs to incur a mana cost.
Suggestion 3: Manaleech. Idfk, maybe adding this affliction into the kit somewhere will help if your 'zerker happens to be really good at affliction tracking and I'd love to see more Fitness-related tears, I guess.
The goal of any serious change should be to develop a mechanic that is both achievable by a Berserker in a reasonable amount of time during a 1v1 fight but not immediately available for your team to repeatedly smash targets with.
Also unsure if Manaleech suggestion is really serious, but in case it is - put it somewhere in Warchant. Maybe change Bewilder to a Voice-Innyo style skill, with manaleech a/the payoff? All those DoT affs! I think one of the real problems is the windup of the class - it just 'gets going' slower than most of the popular classes these days. Unsure if another aff would fix that rather than add to it.
Malignosis
Mostly, this feels solid. Mindread's been buggy. Sap is boring and just gives the illusion of having a mana pressure route. Ouros shouldn't be able to be feared >.>. Otherwise, really great skills.
Ritualism
Of the two new skillsets, Ritualism feels the most complete with a little room for improvement and additions. It really feels like they need both mana pressure and a bit more of an affliction pool. Doesn't need to be old mana-draining deadeyes, but definitely something. With its limited affliction pool (not counting bodylink/mindlink throwing out randoms) being incapable of locks without anorexia/asthma/slickness and almost complete lack of mental affs, it's also got room for an aff like impatience.
Infirmity - Goes down the list of impatience, stupidity, hallucinations. If the target has all three, it instead does a burst of mana loss. Intensified - faster. Inverted - Cures one of those three or restores mana.
Void - Delivers masochism and a small mana loss. Inverted- Cure maso/restore mana. Intensified - Higher mana loss. Masochism isn't the perfect aff, but it's basically 'mental Magick' with it which is workable.
Sun - Relapse mana damge as well.
Stars - Mana-burst version of Moon, mutually exclusive use. Could also be done by making moon the charging thing with two different activation skills, dunno if that'd be easier or harder.
Fire/magickshield: the long duration and how inversion promotes the primary tradeoff kind of make these a lot more boring than they could be. I would probably just split them into four (fire/cold/magick/elec), drastically cut the duration to 4-6s (2-3 combos), make the regular symbol version add resistances and have the inversions reduce it. Change intensification to add effectiveness to the shield/curse. That makes them more defensive by nature but also requires active usage to employ the benefits, adding onto other inversions for a fairly decent support queue.
Nightfall
The enable/disable feature could be made entirely unnecessary by tweaking ethereal charging to something like +1 every 5 rooms moved or something not time-based + small tweaks to a couple other wraiths. The charging mechanisms serve as enough gating, so going above 4 wraiths will spread out your charges and take more time anyway.
Glowing has the issue of requiring the target to heal sensitivity or you to waste time throwing the symbol to charge. It should also get +1 every 3-4s your last symbol target has sensitivity on them.
Reflective is a must-have. It gives you wraith flexibility or a 2 combo speed burst. It should just summon when another wraith charges, since there's no reason not to just summon it on your first trace anyway.
Fiery is pretty good, both in charging and skills.
Whispering's charging requires that the opponent puts on mana pressure or that you just tank your own mana via manatap. It'd be better off on fiery's scheme of target <75%, even if its skills stay the mana version of vigorous.
Vigorous I'd change to +1 when taking a hit, 6s cooldown or thereabouts. Again, relying on hurting yourself or a particular enemy offense is meh, even if vigorous is far more likely to be engaged than whispering.
Translucent would likely need a nerf to its charging with removing enabling, either dropping it to +1 charge or restricting it to your last ritualism target.
Midnight's charge is decent, and amplify would be useful with the shield changes I described above. Scan might be more useful with the ability to pick between 4 reductions, but I'd rather see it replaced with something like "Eclipse - Invert both symbols in your next ritualism combination."
Then you have to pop the moon with sun/moon rep/some other damage, then you get the 3 relapses of each coming in on top of the straight dps. The damage is enough at that point to pop people, but it's kind of obvious. You can pop moon earlier, and iirc it's pretty close to (x+y+z/300)*damage for the pop so it's not unseemingly painful to do so.