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CW class changes propositions (No proposed changes to DPS builds)
metalicum1
Member Posts: 200 Arc User
Let’s talk about possible CW changes. In recent reddit AMA the devs said they will not do anything major with a CW because it’s not in a bad place. Well, I disagree with that. I propose few changes that might not be that hard to implement (since devs refuse to put much effort into a class that hasn’t been changed since a stone age mod).
Note: Since I want to avoid people butthurt about losing their precious DPS, I will avoid talking about Thaum tree and Chilling Presence feature. I’m not in a mood for: “If you think it’s too powerful just unslot it you asxss” or any of that. I wanna have a discussion, so I’ll talk about Opp and Ren. Those need more attention anyway.
Let’s start with Oppressor path. Compared to what some of you might think I actually don’t think it’s in a bad shape. Sure, it’s almost useless for PvE, but that’s mainly a problem of the game and how CC works, rather than the actual tree. Plus it is very viable in PvP as a support controller. Though there are few things that might be a good idea to get rid of.
1) Frigid Winds and Icy Veins: Those feats go away from what might be (and in some cases is) an interesting factor in CW playstyle – keeping up status effects. Icy Veins feat goes against that, as you simply cast Icy Terrain and you have all chill stacks you need for both control and CP dmg buff. No need to combo power, no need to keep eye on your stacks and uptime. Frigid Winds is a synergistic feat. You cast Icy Terrain, you instantly freeze your opponent/mob, and you have CC effect plus dmg debuff without any gameplay effort whatsoever. Instead Icy Veins could take the debuff from Frigid Winds: for each stack of chill you get 0.5/-/2.5% debuff. Resulting in 6*2.5% 15%, which is a nice boost, and it would solidify CW position as THE debuffer of Neverwinter (really, we don’t have anything else right now, and in a third column it would be reachable for Ren buffers/debuffers).
Frigid Winds could instead, boost control ability and be utilized in PvP. Intead of a debuff: On hit Frozen enemies have a 1/-/5% chance to burst into “frozen nova”, applying chill to nearby enemies and doing dmg. (they have similar effect on 3rd Chilling strike cast, so there might be less work coding).
2) Controlled Momentum: This feat has no place here. 5% buff is marginal, and in a tree with very little synergy to fully utilize something like this. Though I like the idea, I would rather see something like this in a different tree. Instead, this feat could utilize “synergy” of this tree. Instead of buffing your allies dmg, you buff your allies control resist. The actual percentage would require a little deeper knowledge of PvP than I have.
Renegade tree:
This one requires the most work I think. The biggest problem: it doesn’t have a clear identity. It’s between a hybrid DPS spec and a support spec, and it works bad for both. Instead, I would leave DPS for Thaum tree, and focus on buff/debuff support.
To fix this becomes the hard part. CW already has a lot of debuff, it has enough ways to keep 100% uptime of them all. What CW support needs to be truly viable meta build is additional utility during boss fights (on mobs we have some control, enough to make us super viable for parties that needs help a little with incoming dmg). So what I would like to see that in the renegade tree.
1) Reaper’s touch: This feat not only has no place in this tree, it has no place in this class. Our dmg is not based on at wills, in fact those green things are such a minor factor in our overall DPS output it is not worth taking this feat ever. It is only taken because the other 2 options we are given to get to Abyss of Chaos are so, so useless.
Let’s preserve the idea of modifying at-wills. Since this is a support tree, we expect a CW to take a lot of recovery to be able to cast daily a lot and keep CA debuff 100%, therefore we expect 1) no real intention to deal dmg, 2) no spell twisting. Therefore, casting at-will might not be a waste of time, if it is substantially modified by the Ren tree. Reaper’s touch might be one of those feats.
For example, it can proc “Interrupt”. An effect already existing in the game (Vicious Dire Wolf). If this effect has low enough proc chance (1/-/5%), it would not be overpowered. Though it depends on whether it is even possible to interrupt bosses. It might be impossible due to coding. Though I would love to see this effect of preventing bosses from casting certain big abilities, or at least postponing the cast.
2) Energy Recovery: Another at will modifying feat. Though I like the basic idea, this feat has no synergy with our class and on its own it’s useless. Plus support CWs do not take Chilling cloud into boss fights. If, though, chilling cloud give stats, it would be a viable choice. Imagine a weaker variation on DC/OP power share, but instead keep it CW-esq, giving a percentage of all stats to all allies. 1)you can copy the effect of “Prestidigitation” and save yourself some coding, 2) you won’t face problems with OP sharing/companion bonding procs. “On third strike of chilling cloud you and your allies get 1%/-/5% increased stat ratings for 10 seconds.”
3) Uncertain Allegiance: Make it 2/-/10% crit severity so that you avoid crit cap problem.
4) Abyss of Chaos: I don’t like it in this tree but for same reasons I refuse to talk about Thaum and CP, I refuse to talk about this.
5) Phantasmal Destruction: Doesn’t fit into my idea of a Ren tree. If it gives the Crit severity to your allies it would.
“When you deal Combat Advantage damage you have 40% chance to give your allies 3/-/15% Crit severity.”
6) Masterful Arcane Theft: Modifying RoE is fine, as it is a cornerstone of support loadout. Adding dmg to it is not exactly useful. Reducing cooldown for each stack of chill would be much more useful. RoE on mastery could have much more AP gain potential, plus it would ensure 35% debuff.
7) Chilling Advantage: passive bonus is not fun at all. Plus support CW doesn’t need crit chance. This would require a completely new feat. Though if we want to preserve this idea of a passive bonus based on a slotted feature, we could try to make an unusable class feature good. For example, Frost Wave could get a boost of its control effect, or a Recovery stat bonus. I would rather see this modifying Swath of destruction, transforming it’s smolder damage buff into additional debuff. Though that might be too complex to code I don’t know.
8) Chaos Magic: The big one. The only relevant bonus is Fury, and even a part of that doesn’t really fit support CW playstyle. Technically, the devs can just disable Nexus and Growth, which would make it very good and very viable. I would rather see an amalgamation of all that makes CW support what is and what it would be with those changes: Daily casting, Debuff, Combat Advantage - Crit severity, modified at-will.
“When you cast a daily, you’ll get Fury for 10s (only 10% additional damage, but potential 100% uptime). When you an encounter you’ll get Nexus for 10s (instead of Crit chance all team get’s 15% crit severity), when you cast At-will you’ll get Growth (10% deflect). The idea is to have all 3 bonuses almost 100% uptime.
Changing powers might be a little harder. To simply do some percentage shenanigans would not solve anything. Some powers, like Avalanche shard for example, are really in core against what we want to do in PvE. Though there are some powers I would like to see changed.
1) Imprisonment: You can have so much fun with this power. It can be another source of “interrupt” effect. On mobs it can work as it works without the damage immunity. On bosses, it can work as “interrupt”.
2) Evocation: pointless feature. Not powerful enough to be in any dps build. Doesn’t have any other redeeming qualities. I would like to see something like “Elemental Presence”. Which would boost dmg of all fire/Lightning effects if you don’t slot any other “Presence”. I don’t have any idea how much it would need to be to be balanced though. I like the idea though that my main source of damage is smolder, similarly to how big portion of dmg Spell Storm is.
3) Arcane Power Field: Another useless feature. It might instead increase the dmg of daily massively while reducing encounter dmg to almost zero, so that we see some daily spamming DPS builds. Super interesting possibilities with that.
That’s about it. hit me with reactions/feedback. We won’t see any of this ever, because devs don’t care about us. That’s the price of not being broken.
Note: Since I want to avoid people butthurt about losing their precious DPS, I will avoid talking about Thaum tree and Chilling Presence feature. I’m not in a mood for: “If you think it’s too powerful just unslot it you asxss” or any of that. I wanna have a discussion, so I’ll talk about Opp and Ren. Those need more attention anyway.
Let’s start with Oppressor path. Compared to what some of you might think I actually don’t think it’s in a bad shape. Sure, it’s almost useless for PvE, but that’s mainly a problem of the game and how CC works, rather than the actual tree. Plus it is very viable in PvP as a support controller. Though there are few things that might be a good idea to get rid of.
1) Frigid Winds and Icy Veins: Those feats go away from what might be (and in some cases is) an interesting factor in CW playstyle – keeping up status effects. Icy Veins feat goes against that, as you simply cast Icy Terrain and you have all chill stacks you need for both control and CP dmg buff. No need to combo power, no need to keep eye on your stacks and uptime. Frigid Winds is a synergistic feat. You cast Icy Terrain, you instantly freeze your opponent/mob, and you have CC effect plus dmg debuff without any gameplay effort whatsoever. Instead Icy Veins could take the debuff from Frigid Winds: for each stack of chill you get 0.5/-/2.5% debuff. Resulting in 6*2.5% 15%, which is a nice boost, and it would solidify CW position as THE debuffer of Neverwinter (really, we don’t have anything else right now, and in a third column it would be reachable for Ren buffers/debuffers).
Frigid Winds could instead, boost control ability and be utilized in PvP. Intead of a debuff: On hit Frozen enemies have a 1/-/5% chance to burst into “frozen nova”, applying chill to nearby enemies and doing dmg. (they have similar effect on 3rd Chilling strike cast, so there might be less work coding).
2) Controlled Momentum: This feat has no place here. 5% buff is marginal, and in a tree with very little synergy to fully utilize something like this. Though I like the idea, I would rather see something like this in a different tree. Instead, this feat could utilize “synergy” of this tree. Instead of buffing your allies dmg, you buff your allies control resist. The actual percentage would require a little deeper knowledge of PvP than I have.
Renegade tree:
This one requires the most work I think. The biggest problem: it doesn’t have a clear identity. It’s between a hybrid DPS spec and a support spec, and it works bad for both. Instead, I would leave DPS for Thaum tree, and focus on buff/debuff support.
To fix this becomes the hard part. CW already has a lot of debuff, it has enough ways to keep 100% uptime of them all. What CW support needs to be truly viable meta build is additional utility during boss fights (on mobs we have some control, enough to make us super viable for parties that needs help a little with incoming dmg). So what I would like to see that in the renegade tree.
1) Reaper’s touch: This feat not only has no place in this tree, it has no place in this class. Our dmg is not based on at wills, in fact those green things are such a minor factor in our overall DPS output it is not worth taking this feat ever. It is only taken because the other 2 options we are given to get to Abyss of Chaos are so, so useless.
Let’s preserve the idea of modifying at-wills. Since this is a support tree, we expect a CW to take a lot of recovery to be able to cast daily a lot and keep CA debuff 100%, therefore we expect 1) no real intention to deal dmg, 2) no spell twisting. Therefore, casting at-will might not be a waste of time, if it is substantially modified by the Ren tree. Reaper’s touch might be one of those feats.
For example, it can proc “Interrupt”. An effect already existing in the game (Vicious Dire Wolf). If this effect has low enough proc chance (1/-/5%), it would not be overpowered. Though it depends on whether it is even possible to interrupt bosses. It might be impossible due to coding. Though I would love to see this effect of preventing bosses from casting certain big abilities, or at least postponing the cast.
2) Energy Recovery: Another at will modifying feat. Though I like the basic idea, this feat has no synergy with our class and on its own it’s useless. Plus support CWs do not take Chilling cloud into boss fights. If, though, chilling cloud give stats, it would be a viable choice. Imagine a weaker variation on DC/OP power share, but instead keep it CW-esq, giving a percentage of all stats to all allies. 1)you can copy the effect of “Prestidigitation” and save yourself some coding, 2) you won’t face problems with OP sharing/companion bonding procs. “On third strike of chilling cloud you and your allies get 1%/-/5% increased stat ratings for 10 seconds.”
3) Uncertain Allegiance: Make it 2/-/10% crit severity so that you avoid crit cap problem.
4) Abyss of Chaos: I don’t like it in this tree but for same reasons I refuse to talk about Thaum and CP, I refuse to talk about this.
5) Phantasmal Destruction: Doesn’t fit into my idea of a Ren tree. If it gives the Crit severity to your allies it would.
“When you deal Combat Advantage damage you have 40% chance to give your allies 3/-/15% Crit severity.”
6) Masterful Arcane Theft: Modifying RoE is fine, as it is a cornerstone of support loadout. Adding dmg to it is not exactly useful. Reducing cooldown for each stack of chill would be much more useful. RoE on mastery could have much more AP gain potential, plus it would ensure 35% debuff.
7) Chilling Advantage: passive bonus is not fun at all. Plus support CW doesn’t need crit chance. This would require a completely new feat. Though if we want to preserve this idea of a passive bonus based on a slotted feature, we could try to make an unusable class feature good. For example, Frost Wave could get a boost of its control effect, or a Recovery stat bonus. I would rather see this modifying Swath of destruction, transforming it’s smolder damage buff into additional debuff. Though that might be too complex to code I don’t know.
8) Chaos Magic: The big one. The only relevant bonus is Fury, and even a part of that doesn’t really fit support CW playstyle. Technically, the devs can just disable Nexus and Growth, which would make it very good and very viable. I would rather see an amalgamation of all that makes CW support what is and what it would be with those changes: Daily casting, Debuff, Combat Advantage - Crit severity, modified at-will.
“When you cast a daily, you’ll get Fury for 10s (only 10% additional damage, but potential 100% uptime). When you an encounter you’ll get Nexus for 10s (instead of Crit chance all team get’s 15% crit severity), when you cast At-will you’ll get Growth (10% deflect). The idea is to have all 3 bonuses almost 100% uptime.
Changing powers might be a little harder. To simply do some percentage shenanigans would not solve anything. Some powers, like Avalanche shard for example, are really in core against what we want to do in PvE. Though there are some powers I would like to see changed.
1) Imprisonment: You can have so much fun with this power. It can be another source of “interrupt” effect. On mobs it can work as it works without the damage immunity. On bosses, it can work as “interrupt”.
2) Evocation: pointless feature. Not powerful enough to be in any dps build. Doesn’t have any other redeeming qualities. I would like to see something like “Elemental Presence”. Which would boost dmg of all fire/Lightning effects if you don’t slot any other “Presence”. I don’t have any idea how much it would need to be to be balanced though. I like the idea though that my main source of damage is smolder, similarly to how big portion of dmg Spell Storm is.
3) Arcane Power Field: Another useless feature. It might instead increase the dmg of daily massively while reducing encounter dmg to almost zero, so that we see some daily spamming DPS builds. Super interesting possibilities with that.
That’s about it. hit me with reactions/feedback. We won’t see any of this ever, because devs don’t care about us. That’s the price of not being broken.
Aris Meyde CW MoF Renegade
[PS4] Alliance - House Stargaryen
[PS4] Alliance - House Stargaryen
Post edited by metalicum1 on
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Comments
I think chaos magic should be moved to be the oppressor capstone, and reworked to provide a more consistent damage boost.
Remove some of the power from fury (maybe make it a 10-15% boost) and then completely change the other options to always benefit end game groups. Nexus could be crit severity related, and growth could add an additional hit on each strike that gets stronger the more hits you do over the duration. These are just rough ideas though.
Then, as far as offensive buffing goes I think the CW is set. Between the debuffs available and a more consistent team buff through chaos magic I'd put CW roughly on par with a DO DC.
Then I think all they need is a solid team survivability boost. My personal favorite would be something like "Allies who stand on your icy terrain gain stacks of ice armor every couple seconds." This would act as a miniature barkshield type effect.
Or, if you didn't want to lock CWs into using icy terrain, you could change it to "Applying chill to an enemy has a chance to grant allies near that enemy stacks of ice armor." Would need to be a very low chance due to the rate at which we can stack chill.
I'm not a fan of removing icy veins as it's one of the class defining feats for CWs IMO. It's the single feat that makes the aggressive melee CW work.
Then, with oppressor more focused as a functioning support tree, you could turn renegade into a different style of DPS, maybe something recovery based to eliminate the need for spell twisting. It'd be similar to how HRs have two different trees with very different combat styles.
That's my dream anyways.
Even though CC is not good in PvE, I still like having purely CC oriented tree, even If only for PvP.
I would take those changes over no changes any day.
[PS4] Alliance - House Stargaryen
Off the top of my head... maybe the paragon specific feat in renegade could be something like "Furious immolation now increases your recovery by 5% per target hit", or even attach that ability to something like swath of destruction instead of furious immolation.
Sir, with CW being one of the top 3 overall damage dealing classes it makes sense that devs should first work on those that either by nerfs to them or direct/indirect buffs to others, have been left behind in terms of dps potential like SW and some argue TR as well. Why reworking a top class first before tweaking comparatively weaker ones/underperforming ones?
While I agree with you that TR probably needs their attention first, that's not a reason NOT to discuss CW, especially on CW specific forums. Plus as it has been stated, we KNOW they wont do major CW rework any time soon, so I specifically went through changes that might be not as time consuming and hard to implement, and specifically not touching Thaum, Chilling Presence, and other things that work and make CW a good DPS choice.
[PS4] Alliance - House Stargaryen
I mostly just wanted to get my ideas for a focused support tree and the defensive buff CWs need to really become a full fledge support for a group.
There is no intention to touch anything related to Thaum DPS builds. It works, it's fine, it's not bugged (not unplayable bugged anyway), it's not OP and it's not weak.
My intention was to suggest doable, relatively easy-to-do reworks to feats or powers which doesn't make sense in today's neverwinter, or are not used at all by any known end game PvE build.
[PS4] Alliance - House Stargaryen
Not saying that your suggestions should be diregarded, just that there should be an order to address things and in that sense classes that are comparatively weaker should be taken care of first instead of making the dominant ones more so.
CW dps > SW dps
CW dps increase to the party > SW dps increase to the party
CW control > SW control
CW is one of the best and most versatile classes atm and it's beast in pve and pvp. Devs should focus on classes that need the most tweaking and CW is not one of them.
I get that you want to make other paragon trees more viable and that's good but that should be done after class balance isn't the joke it is nowadays.
You'll probably get a lot better reception there instead of coming into a thread about wizard theory crafting asking for warlock buffs.
Anyways, back on topic. @metalicum1 after reading through your ideas again I think I like your version of choas magic better.
I'd replace crit severity with combat advantage damage both for synergy with nightmare wizardry and because combat advantage damage is a lot better for us than crit severity in general (large amounts of our damage cannot crit).
[PS4] Alliance - House Stargaryen
I agree the focus on this game and any MMO should always be about balance but not just DPS but other aspect such as the support build and provide support players more way to play their build. NW does an ok job at it by giving us quite a few different ways to play but more would never hurt us.
I'm not saying that we should ignore the great imbalance on the DPS side of the coin but enough is enough. I want all classes to have the option to play as a support player or a pure on DPS. With loadoust the devs should really look into this type of balancing. Such ad giving GWF the option to play as a tank and one that can buff, SW as healers / buffers and if setup that way count as a healer buffer, etc...
I would like some adjustments to the CW feats, but if it is for the greater good of other classes gaining more in the support realm sign me up. If it is for DPS balancing, I honestly don't care one bit.