What's wrong with plague fire?

benskix2

Someone said in a different thread the other day that plague fire was worthless, I was wondering why. I have a greater one, I was thinking about upgrading to perfect, but I don't want to waste a coal ward. I switched my vorpal for one when the critical strike resistance thing on tenacity came out, now I'm wondering if I should switch back?

kweassa

Nothing's wrong.

It's just that a lot of the changes culminating upto mod6 have generally, sort of endowed this "uninspiring impression" upon weapon enchantments that are not associated with either direct damage increase, or burst damage. In other words, utilitarian/buff/debuff type enchants are not well received for a variety of reasons.

In case of PF, in PvE, for lv70+ content the mob damage was reduced, but the mob HP increased. This means the difficulty has been slightly adjusted to be, in general, more friendly with high DPS/burst DPS builds, but at the same time a bit more unfriendly with support/debuff/sustained DPS builds. In this aspect, PF is clearly a non-burst type enchantment, and with the mob HP increased even more than before, people sort of feel that their 45% "defense debuff" is just not noticeable, not to mention the fire damage is pathetic and uninspiring.

In PvP, maybe if PF was something like, simple and straight, "-7% DR debuff per stack, upto 3 stacks" then it would be considered very powerful and favorable, especially against targets with higher defensive specifications... but as it is.. -45% "defense" debuff is sort of difficult to really notice.

benskix2

I don't really play PVE at all, I'm wondering about PVP effectiveness only. So you are saying that the debuff only applies to DR from the defense stat? So as an example, if a player has 4k defense, plague fire, a greater plague fire reduces that by 400 per stack, and has no effect on other sources of DR?

kweassa

benskix2 wrote: »

I don't really play PVE at all, I'm wondering about PVP effectiveness only. So you are saying that the debuff only applies to DR from the defense stat? So as an example, if a player has 4k defense, plague fire, a greater plague fire reduces that by 400 per stack, and has no effect on other sources of DR?

Of those multiple defensive specs, the one stat that makes up for the "majority share" of how tough the character is, is Damage Reduction, in which case it is literally "what you see is what you get". If you have 30% DR it straight up knocks off 30% of incoming damage. Other stats like Defense, or AC, all have these large numbers in the thousands, but when actually calculated, translates to only a small portion of DR reduced.

I'm a bit hazy right now since its been quite a while since I've used PF, but IIRC, 3 stacks of PF for a -45% defense debuff on the target, actually equates to only around 9~10% damage increased. Of course, I may be remembering it wrong, but I'm pretty certain it was "9% damage increase at 3 stacks". Compare that to stuff like Feytouched, for a +18% damage siphoned, or Vorpal, which increases damage by +50% on crits. PF is a great tool for team-combat, but nowadays, when everyone has become so tougher through tenacity+negation, and with some classes that even a team cannot be taken down, PF seems to be just lacking.

Hence, as I said in the previous post, if PF acted sort of like a direct counter, a straight-up antithesis to Negation by directly debuffing DR, then it would have been treated as an absolute gem. Imagine something like this:

■ -4% DR debuff per stack
■ +1 stack at Pure
■ +1 at Transcendent.

That would make T.PF -20% DR at 5 stacks, which would not do anything to your base damage, but still would increase your overall DPS by making the target receive 20% stronger hits. It would directly counter 2/3rds of the T.Negation DR,

But as it is, it only amounts upto 9% damage increase, which is the equivalent of dropping the other guy's T.Negation down to Perfect Negation. Instead of directly counteracting its effects, it just chips it down a little, so it's not really too impressive IMO.

icyphish

if ur target has 4000 defence, plague fire 3 stacks reduces 45% on defence which is approximately 1800 defence, 1800 defences works out approximately 4.5%defence as its 400:1% ratio, then u get the idea....

pando83

As icy said. I use pure PF cause it's cheap and made the above calc. It's a 5%ish overall DR debuff and on 15k+ power builds a 2k=5%ish damage bonus debuff (15% power debuff at full stacks). The trans aoe attack is useless for pvp. Compared to tfey, terror and vorpal the enchant falls behind. But is a viable CHEAP choice for gwf if you're poor.
It's main advantage for a gwf is the damage stacks build almost instantly so you build them easy in pvp and have full capstone buff up sooner.

In pve high crit chance Lazalia build is more effective. PF unlike terror does not stack, which means if there's another PF user in group, one of the debuffs is lost...

flyingleon

There are people claim that terror only give half debuff and buff as in tool tip. Vorpal is hit by critical strike resistence in pvp. So it seems only feytouched outperform rest by a margin in pvp.