Trickster Rogue Class Balance Suggestions

rustlord

Thanks @trgluesticks @blur for going with and refining my idea to tackle overhealing in PvP. I think we're onto something here.

I'd like to continue to build that idea with a rough sketch of a new feat or passive;

Fatal Wounds: All of your powers that apply Bleed now add a stack of Fatal Wounds on your targets. Each stack applies 1% Healing Depression, reducing the amount that enemies can heal for while in combat. You can only apply 1 stack per second and a maximum of 30 stacks.

Internally, these stacks fall off like the bleed stacks from DF if you fail to re-apply them within a given duration. Yes, I do believe it's going to be a sought-after effect wherever we place it, be it on a feat, a passive or a power. So then we consider working with stacks instead, the nature of it makes it more balanced and more reliant on player skill, unlike, as I know you were thinking, my first suggestion could be a fire-and-forget effect with DSH. That's correct! And I missed that. Hopefully though, this version brings us closer to what we're really after.

Please feel free to refine this more.

Numbers:
Fatal Wounds
Max stacks: 30
Reduced per stack: 1%
ICD: 1 second
Stacks reset: 4 seconds if not applied
Additive with current Healing Depression: Yes

trgluestickz

rustlord said:

Thanks @trgluesticks @blur for going with and refining my idea to tackle overhealing in PvP. I think we're onto something here.

I'd like to continue to build that idea with a rough sketch of a new feat or passive;

Fatal Wounds: All of your powers that apply Bleed now add a stack of Fatal Wounds on your targets. Each stack applies 1% Healing Depression, reducing the amount that enemies can heal for while in combat. You can only apply 1 stack per second and a maximum of 30 stacks.

Internally, these stacks fall off like the bleed stacks from DF if you fail to re-apply them within a given duration. Yes, I do believe it's going to be a sought-after effect wherever we place it, be it on a feat, a passive or a power. So then we consider working with stacks instead, the nature of it makes it more balanced and more reliant on player skill, unlike, as I know you were thinking, my first suggestion could be a fire-and-forget effect with DSH. That's correct! And I missed that. Hopefully though, this version brings us closer to what we're really after.

Please feel free to refine this more.

Numbers:
Fatal Wounds
Max stacks: 30
Reduced per stack: 1%
ICD: 1 second
Stacks reset: 4 seconds if not applied
Additive with current Healing Depression: Yes

Hmm this is an interesting idea. I am not sure whether or not this passive would be a good idea to implement but I did take a closer look at its mechanics.

Disheartening strike if I remember right can reapply its bleed faster than duelist's flurry can. This means that WKs would have an easier time working with this passive than MIs. A detailed explanation of what triggers a stack from fatal wounds is needed to understand how useful it would be; the tooltip you presented has 2 possible meanings I could think of. Option one is that the application of a bleed stack is what triggers a healing depression stack from Fatal Wounds. Option two is that each bleed tick is what triggers a healing depression stack from fatal wounds.

Option One:
A DF sequence lasts 4 seconds counting the flurry but not the time it takes for the target to completely stop bleeding.
At most, you would be able to trigger around 2 or 3 healing depression stacks in one entire DF sequence since you can only gain one stack a second and the application of a bleed stack is what grants a healing depression stack. In pvp, people commonly flee your flurry before its all the way finished so 2 healing depression stacks per DF sequence is a generous assumption under option 1.
Your healing depression stacks also reset in 4 seconds if you don't get another bleed up. This means you would have to almost immediately attack again with another DOT power to keep your healing depression stacks and gain more. The timing required would make maintaining your stacks by using DF multiple times in a row impractical. To make this passive work at all under option 1, you would have to mix in other DOTS with DF such as smoke bomb, certain insignia powers, and new DOTs we might get as part of the rework.
Another thing worth mentioning is that smoke bomb doesn't apply its DOT as stacks, it simply ticks is damage for as long as you are in the radius. This means SB would have to be programmed like option 2 instead of option 1.
Overall, option one will for sure take too long to reach max healing depression stacks.

Option Two:
If each bleed tick gives you a stack, then you have more time before you have to reapply your stacks. You also end up with more stacks per attack.
If you had 10 bleed stacks and each of those ticks twice, you would now have 20 or less healing depression stacks by the time the target stopped bleeding.
Right now, it takes 2 or 3 complete flurrys to reach 10 bleed stacks.
If the suggestion the main post put forwards (making it so one entire DF grants all 10 bleed stacks) was implemented, then this passive could reach its max of 30 healing depression stacks using 2 flurries or 1 flurry + another DOT power. Because of all the moving around + the other things that could delay you in pvp, it would probably take 3 DOT attacks to reach 30 healing depression stacks instead of 2(this is also assuming one DF equals 10 bleed stacks is implemented).
If DF continues to stack bleeds the way it does currently, then it will take around 2 or 3 flurries to reach 20 healing depression stacks and roughly 1 or 2 more to reach the max of 30 healing depression stacks.
Option two while it would preform better than option one, will also take too long to reach max healing depression stacks if DF's bleeds are left as is. If DF is upgraded to give you all 10 bleed stacks in one flurry, then this passive is a lot more viable.

Another con to this passive is that this passive is 100% pure pvp and has 0 applications in pve. Ideally, as many powers as possible should have a use in both pvp and pve. This is not always possible so this should be fine but it is worth mentioning.

Another thing you said was that Fatal Wounds would stack with the other healing suggestion idea we put forwards. Having both of these things I think would be too much.
If we went with the older ideas, healing depression should only apply to the damage from the power that proced the healing depression. The only powers that should get healing depression in this case, should be the ones that trigger too many heals too quickly.
Either that, or we don't get the other healing depression ideas from earlier but we do get the passive.

rustlord

trgluestickz said:

Option Two:
If each bleed tick gives you a stack, then you have more time before you have to reapply your stacks. You also end up with more stacks per attack.
If you had 10 bleed stacks and each of those ticks twice, you would now have 20 or less healing depression stacks by the time the target stopped bleeding.
Right now, it takes 2 or 3 complete flurrys to reach 10 bleed stacks.
If the suggestion the main post put forwards (making it so one entire DF grants all 10 bleed stacks) was implemented, then this passive could reach its max of 30 healing depression stacks using 2 flurries or 1 flurry + another DOT power. Because of all the moving around + the other things that could delay you in pvp, it would probably take 3 DOT attacks to reach 30 healing depression stacks instead of 2(this is also assuming one DF equals 10 bleed stacks is implemented).

Option two is not an issue because of the ICD: 1 stack per second. We've seen this multi stacking problem before with rampaging madness or avalanche I think. But this is where it gets tricky, should it be the bleed tick or the power that applies it? In that case, yes, won't the initial suggestion of having a flat debuff to targets affected by bleed be better?

trgluestickz said:

Either that, or we don't get the other healing depression ideas from earlier but we do get the passive.

Yes ^

So if we're working with stacks, it should be the bleed ticks. In that case, you have to keep a target under the effects of bleed to fully reap the benefits of the debuff, max at 30 stacks or 30%
additive with regular healing depression 50%. If your bleed stops for X seconds, this resets at 0.

Also isn't Smoke Bomb poison damage and not bleed? But again, this is based in the current powers not considering proposed changes in this thread. We don't know what will push through or any of these at all will be used.

Then -
Putting DF and DHS into comparison, it's the bleed damage tick, not the number of "bleed stacks" inflicted by duelist flurry. In that regard, DF and DHS can have a very close uptime. DHS being ranged and flurry melee is what sets usability apart, but even right now I'm only using disheartening for its debuffs because it's easier to keep up. On the other hand, DF gives CC immunity frames and does considerably more damage, can be paired up with oppressive darkness and synergizes quite well with CB. I don't see why adding the same debuff to both powers would make one better than the other.

I can keep reapplying DHS even to multiple targets but then I will be doing nothing else with its clonky animation time. IF there are other plans for this power, yes then let's consider making Fatal Wounds exclusive to duelist flurry.

Any thoughts? @trgluestickz

Edit: In PvE (could be) each stack of Fatal Wounds increase personal damage by 0.5% (max 15%) to targets.

rustlord

trgluestickz said:

Another thing you said was that Fatal Wounds would stack with the other healing suggestion idea we put forwards. Having both of these things I think would be too much.

Sorry! Meant the current regular healing depression (heals for 50% less when recently damaged in pvp) was put in there sometime during the early mods, now practically obsolete.

blur

Battlewise feat - Bleed ticks from at-will powers apply Fatal Wound which causes Healing Depression with max of 30 stacks. Each stack increases damage TR does by 0.1% in both PvE and PvP (total 3% damage).

This suggestion can be a solution for the so far useless feat Battlewise and since its tied to a feat you dont have to slot new Passive to get this ability. I reduced total damage from 15% to 3% because with 3% that feat would probably not be a must in current PvE content. 3% damage increase is still nice from a feat but it takes 30 seconds to reach that boost and in current content nothing lasts 30 seconds and in PvP 3% damage increase after 30 seconds would not hurt anyone, i guess.

For PvE 15% would be too high, maybe not in current content because, as i said, nothing lasts 30 seconds but if the future brings us bosses which dont have "time-out" phases and if they last long enough 15% would be overpowered and a must feat to pick.

rustlord

Thanks @blur I wasnt sure myself how to put pve buffs into perspective, and thats a nice suggestion adding it to an existing feat. Battleweis is the heroic for threat reduction, right?

archangelzorak01

In my first post I'll tackle At-Will powers, as those are the primary damage component in a TR's arsenal. Most notably Duelist Flurry.

Duelist Flurry has the highest damage potential of our at-will powers (or any of our powers for that matter). It is arguably the most difficult at-will power to utilize to full effect and also the most punishing in many situations. Most of the damage dealt by DF is from the bleed followed by the hit and the flurry, which vary but are often similar in total. This fact alone makes DF, which again is our single highest damage output, incredibly punishing against any target with low health -and/or- any target that has high mobility. Most enemies are simply dead before our bleed stacks can do anything -and/or- move around so much it becomes all but impossible to maintain a 10 stack of DF bleed.

Second in the hierarchy is Sly Flourish. This is the ability used most often against any enemy below the health threshold where DF take precedence. The damage component on SF is moderate and the debuff applied can be beneficial.

Third is Cloud of Steel. This ability is mostly used in PVP or when it is impossible to close to melee range to use either DF or SF. The damage component on this ability is mediocre and even though the damage increases the more times you hit a target in succession still feels rather un-appealing to me.

Finally we have Gloaming Cut, arguably the worst at-will power in a TR's arsenal. I've personally played around this with ability by slotting it in when a very high health enemy (Storvald) is below 20% health and it can hit extremely hard. However the incredibly slow animation time of this ability, even when used under ideal circumstances leaves much to be desired.

Ok, so thats how I feel about our at-wills. I love DF and SF, CoS I use when there are no other options and Gloaming might as well be removed from the game for all the good it does us. I feel that the functionality of DF, SF and CoS are part of what makes the TR feel unique. Particularly DF. None are without their flaws and the following are idea I've had about how to improve them.

Duelist Flurry. Firstly, speed up the animation across the board, faster hits, faster flurry and faster bleed ticks. Leave the dmg done by the hits and the flurry as they are but increase the animation speed by 50% and 25% respectively. As for the bleed ticks; first the damage would need to be reduced by about 50% per tick and the rate of ticks increased by 100% (twice as fast for half as much), second make the damage per stack more front-loaded - more damage for the first stack and increasing less per stack than in its current form. Basically I'd like to see DF do the same dmg it currently does but in a more efficient manner.

Sly Flourish. 25% increase in animation speed. Done. End of story. Can someone please explain to me why a Fighter with a 2-headed weapon can attack faster than a Rogue wielding 2 daggers? This has always bothered me, and if it were up to me I'd remove the atk spd component from Unstoppable completely... but I digress.

Cloud of Steel. I'd actually be ok with this staying as it is. The fact that it does less damage than our melee attacks makes sense. At range we are at less risk. Less risk - less reward.

Gloaming Cut. Oh sweet baby jesus help. Ok, so this one... I don't even know. Firstly its going to need a massive increase in animation speed. At least 100%. As I stated earlier it can actually hit incredibly hard, during SoMI while I played around with it I got hits on Storvard for anywhere from 2-4.5 million - so it has potential but is simply far to clunky. Speaking of. What the heck is with the numbers in Neverwinter (another thing I've been complaining about for a long time). Can we just move the decimal place on our damage numbers a few places to the left? I mean c'mon... its getting a bit out of hand. (obviously health values would need to be adjusted accordingly)

Conclusion: Faster. Faster. Faster. We are rogues, we run around dual wielding daggers. We should have the fastest attacks speeds in the game, bar none. Make rogues feel like rogues.

P.S. I didn't tackle anything relating to Whisperknife. There is a reason for that. In the current state of the game Whisperknife cannot... I repeat, CANNOT... compete with Master Infiltrator in PVE. I'm not being biased, I've tried it.. it just can't. I'd love it if WK could compete, I just have never thought about it long enough to come up with a game plan. I'll leave that to you WK aficionados. Hell, just give it abilities that make it the obvious choice for PVP. It would make a great deal of sense, one path for PVE and one path for PVP. (of course we would need a dual spec system for this, so chop chop Cryptic)

Still to come: Encounter Powers, Daily Powers, Feats, Ability Scores

blur

@archangelzorak01 Nice suggestions, i agree with most of them. Speed increase for at-wills would really help.
We tried in our original suggestions to give WK a version of two biggest advantages that MI has, ITC and damage boost from II and IA. Maybe damage buff for VP should be increased a bit to make it on par.
I agree that Cloud of Steel should be least rewarding since its ranged but still small boost wouldnt hurt.

Thing about Duelists Flurry, i agree that speed of Hits part should be increased, bleeds ticking twice as fast half as strong seems fair as well but increasing speed of Flurry might be dangerous. Flurry is already quite fast, so fast that it is skipping hits. I dont know what causes this but you can see it in my ACT test result. Flurry did only 2 hits instead of 6.
We could still suggest speed increase for Flurry as well but reducing number of hits by 50% and making them hit twice as much.

Also as someone already suggested, if our original DF suggestion gets applied, it doesnt have to be 10 bleed stacks, it could be changed to one single bleed, which would hit equally as current 10 or as @thefabricant said 11 stacks, applied from last hit.

archangelzorak01

@blur Excellent point about DF speed. It would be important, if such a change were to happen, for the dev's to be careful about changing the speed of the flurry to not attempt to be any faster than the game engine can handle. If we're already approaching that 'speed limit' with the flurry then nothing could be changed to increase that speed, which would be ok. If any of those DF changes I suggested were tobe implimented the most important I think would be the bleed tick speeds.

Another potential thing to consider, rather than changes to the bleed stacks. Remove them altogether and simply make it a single debuff. Then have each additional hit from the flurry instead add a buff to the player increasing the damage of that bleed debuff on the target. That could potentially solve any problems with debuff stacks. It would also allow the rogue to apply a bleed to a new target and potentially not have to re-apply 10 stacks of bleed because they (if done quickly enough) could still have stacks of the buff that increases the bleed damage done by the bleed debuff. I hope I explained that right...

That could potentially be changed further, possibly make the buff from the DF flurry 'increase all damage over time effects'. This would buff the WK Dots' as well but it would need to be controlled carefully to not be overpowered of course. I think it would bring it in line more with the sort of (*cough*overpowered*cough*) self-buffs GWF's give themselves.

sherifftruman

I have been playing WK for years, and I have some thoughts -

I have noticed that hardly anyone uses WK because we're the inferior of the two pathlines. Let's boost WK to make it more viable.

The theory behind WK is that you are a dagger thrower, so, thus - give the dagger throwing abilities a bump. In comparison to ranged attacks of HR we're far inferior at damage, and it should be a little closer to make WK viable.

Keeping in mind the vibe of TR, I'm all for adding or improving DoT damage, slow/daze effects, and interruptions.

We have a few special features only usable by WK, let's make them better:

Dagger Threat - Let's remove the range limit, and change the artifact power to something more creative, perhaps something like "5% more damage and adds a slow effect to enemies more than 20 feet away"

Vengeance Pursuit - Should add some bleed damage and a small damage buff. Animation speed should be just a little faster.
Disheartening Strike - The animation can get messed up pretty easily and the knife won't actually connect with a target, this is problematic due to how long the animation time is already. I'd like to see Distracting Knife have more of a positive effect on the party - perhaps a larger damage buff and debuff - 1.5/3/4.5/6/7.5
Cloud of Steel - The third or fourth strike should have an added effect, perhaps an additional 5% armor pen against that target or all attacks against that target for the next 3-4 seconds do 5% additional damage or something along those lines. Perhaps your own damage resistance can be boosted 5% for 3-4 seconds.
Impact Strike - The pushback should be greater the closer you are to the target.

trgluestickz

rustlord said:

trgluestickz said:

Option Two:
If each bleed tick gives you a stack, then you have more time before you have to reapply your stacks. You also end up with more stacks per attack.
If you had 10 bleed stacks and each of those ticks twice, you would now have 20 or less healing depression stacks by the time the target stopped bleeding.
Right now, it takes 2 or 3 complete flurrys to reach 10 bleed stacks.
If the suggestion the main post put forwards (making it so one entire DF grants all 10 bleed stacks) was implemented, then this passive could reach its max of 30 healing depression stacks using 2 flurries or 1 flurry + another DOT power. Because of all the moving around + the other things that could delay you in pvp, it would probably take 3 DOT attacks to reach 30 healing depression stacks instead of 2(this is also assuming one DF equals 10 bleed stacks is implemented).

Option two is not an issue because of the ICD: 1 stack per second. We've seen this multi stacking problem before with rampaging madness or avalanche I think. But this is where it gets tricky, should it be the bleed tick or the power that applies it? In that case, yes, won't the initial suggestion of having a flat debuff to targets affected by bleed be better?

trgluestickz said:

Either that, or we don't get the other healing depression ideas from earlier but we do get the passive.

Yes ^

So if we're working with stacks, it should be the bleed ticks. In that case, you have to keep a target under the effects of bleed to fully reap the benefits of the debuff, max at 30 stacks or 30%
additive with regular healing depression 50%. If your bleed stops for X seconds, this resets at 0.

Also isn't Smoke Bomb poison damage and not bleed? But again, this is based in the current powers not considering proposed changes in this thread. We don't know what will push through or any of these at all will be used.

Then -
Putting DF and DHS into comparison, it's the bleed damage tick, not the number of "bleed stacks" inflicted by duelist flurry. In that regard, DF and DHS can have a very close uptime. DHS being ranged and flurry melee is what sets usability apart, but even right now I'm only using disheartening for its debuffs because it's easier to keep up. On the other hand, DF gives CC immunity frames and does considerably more damage, can be paired up with oppressive darkness and synergizes quite well with CB. I don't see why adding the same debuff to both powers would make one better than the other.

I can keep reapplying DHS even to multiple targets but then I will be doing nothing else with its clonky animation time. IF there are other plans for this power, yes then let's consider making Fatal Wounds exclusive to duelist flurry.

Any thoughts? @trgluestickz

Edit: In PvE (could be) each stack of Fatal Wounds increase personal damage by 0.5% (max 15%) to targets.

I agree that option 2 won't have issues with stacking too fast since it has an ICD. I was more worried the exact opposite would be the case. Option 2, though better than option 1, will still take too long to reach max healing depression stacks if DF continues to take 2 to 3 DFs to reach 10 bleed stacks. If DF gets upgraded to reach 10 bleed stacks in one flurry, then option 2 should stack at a reasonable pace.

You said "won't the initial suggestion of having a flat debuff to targets affected by bleed be better?". I'm not sure I know for sure what you mean by this. I am guessing by flat debuff, you mean the debuff no longer has to be stacked up over time but is instead a static 30% debuff to targets effected by bleed. This would essentially be our old idea turned into a passive instead of worked into certain DOT powers or all DOT powers. As mentioned in other posts, a static debuff may end up too strong if it affects all healing received by the target while the depression is active. A possible way to regulate this would be to make the healing depression only apply to heals triggered by the damage from powers that can proc this healing depression. This way your other powers that do not need healing depression or hits from your allies do not gain the benefits of healing depression.

If we stuck with your first draft of Fatal Wounds and made it so healing depression is a stacking effect with a max of 30%, then it should be fine to leave it so the debuff affects all heals the target receives while its up, including heals triggered by damage from your non-DOT powers and your ally's attacks.

Yes smoke bomb is poison and not described as "bleeding". Though with my post on this passive, I included SB and other DOTs as things this passive would affect. I didn't think you were being 100% literal when you said "All of your powers that apply Bleed now add a stack of Fatal Wounds on your targets.". Only DF is described in the tooltip as being a "bleed", I'd guessed you meant to include at least some other DOTs and had been using the term "bleeds" mostly descriptively like I had been.

SB could be exempted under option 2 and option 2 would still function. SB does however have the same problem DF has where it procs a lot of self heals in a short span of time so I do suggest including it. That and it would fit for poison to also make it harder to heal.

As for my guess that WKs would have an easier time with this passive than MI's, you have a point, it probably would not be harder for MIs to use it after all.

Another thing, the devs for sure are not going to just give us an extra passive so in order to get fatal wounds, one of our other passives has to be replaced. Talisman of shadows or tenacious concealment would be good candidates for replacement. Another option would be to replace first strike with fatal wounds but seeing as first strike is commonly used, there may be more resistance to the idea of first strike getting replaced.

trgluestickz

blur#5900 said:

Battlewise feat - Bleed ticks from at-will powers apply Fatal Wound which causes Healing Depression with max of 30 stacks. Each stack increases damage TR does by 0.1% in both PvE and PvP (total 3% damage).

This suggestion can be a solution for the so far useless feat Battlewise and since its tied to a feat you dont have to slot new Passive to get this ability. I reduced total damage from 15% to 3% because with 3% that feat would probably not be a must in current PvE content. 3% damage increase is still nice from a feat but it takes 30 seconds to reach that boost and in current content nothing lasts 30 seconds and in PvP 3% damage increase after 30 seconds would not hurt anyone, i guess.

For PvE 15% would be too high, maybe not in current content because, as i said, nothing lasts 30 seconds but if the future brings us bosses which dont have "time-out" phases and if they last long enough 15% would be overpowered and a must feat to pick.

Battlewise being changed to Fatal Wounds is a nice idea to consider. For pvp, its uncommonly good for a heroic feat compared to the others but for pve, its more or less normal.

The damage boost of 3% could work in pve if it was made to stack to max faster than the pvp effect of this power does. So instead of .1% every second that there are bleed ticks going off, maybe this damage increase needs to be on another timer.

Here are 2 ideas for the pve version that are better than simply increasing how fast you get to max 3% in pve:

You deal 3% more damage to your target while they are affected by bleeds, no wind up or stacks for pve.

Your bleeds deal 3% or maybe 5% more damage, no wind up or stacks for pve.

Considering the pvp version is already pretty good, we should consider making it so you only get the non healing depression related effects in pve.

trgluestickz

archangelzorak01 said:

In my first post I'll tackle At-Will powers, as those are the primary damage component in a TR's arsenal. Most notably Duelist Flurry.

Duelist Flurry has the highest damage potential of our at-will powers (or any of our powers for that matter). It is arguably the most difficult at-will power to utilize to full effect and also the most punishing in many situations. Most of the damage dealt by DF is from the bleed followed by the hit and the flurry, which vary but are often similar in total. This fact alone makes DF, which again is our single highest damage output, incredibly punishing against any target with low health -and/or- any target that has high mobility. Most enemies are simply dead before our bleed stacks can do anything -and/or- move around so much it becomes all but impossible to maintain a 10 stack of DF bleed.

Second in the hierarchy is Sly Flourish. This is the ability used most often against any enemy below the health threshold where DF take precedence. The damage component on SF is moderate and the debuff applied can be beneficial.

Third is Cloud of Steel. This ability is mostly used in PVP or when it is impossible to close to melee range to use either DF or SF. The damage component on this ability is mediocre and even though the damage increases the more times you hit a target in succession still feels rather un-appealing to me.

Finally we have Gloaming Cut, arguably the worst at-will power in a TR's arsenal. I've personally played around this with ability by slotting it in when a very high health enemy (Storvald) is below 20% health and it can hit extremely hard. However the incredibly slow animation time of this ability, even when used under ideal circumstances leaves much to be desired.

Ok, so thats how I feel about our at-wills. I love DF and SF, CoS I use when there are no other options and Gloaming might as well be removed from the game for all the good it does us. I feel that the functionality of DF, SF and CoS are part of what makes the TR feel unique. Particularly DF. None are without their flaws and the following are idea I've had about how to improve them.

Duelist Flurry. Firstly, speed up the animation across the board, faster hits, faster flurry and faster bleed ticks. Leave the dmg done by the hits and the flurry as they are but increase the animation speed by 50% and 25% respectively. As for the bleed ticks; first the damage would need to be reduced by about 50% per tick and the rate of ticks increased by 100% (twice as fast for half as much), second make the damage per stack more front-loaded - more damage for the first stack and increasing less per stack than in its current form. Basically I'd like to see DF do the same dmg it currently does but in a more efficient manner.

Sly Flourish. 25% increase in animation speed. Done. End of story. Can someone please explain to me why a Fighter with a 2-headed weapon can attack faster than a Rogue wielding 2 daggers? This has always bothered me, and if it were up to me I'd remove the atk spd component from Unstoppable completely... but I digress.

Cloud of Steel. I'd actually be ok with this staying as it is. The fact that it does less damage than our melee attacks makes sense. At range we are at less risk. Less risk - less reward.

Gloaming Cut. Oh sweet baby jesus help. Ok, so this one... I don't even know. Firstly its going to need a massive increase in animation speed. At least 100%. As I stated earlier it can actually hit incredibly hard, during SoMI while I played around with it I got hits on Storvard for anywhere from 2-4.5 million - so it has potential but is simply far to clunky. Speaking of. What the heck is with the numbers in Neverwinter (another thing I've been complaining about for a long time). Can we just move the decimal place on our damage numbers a few places to the left? I mean c'mon... its getting a bit out of hand. (obviously health values would need to be adjusted accordingly)

Conclusion: Faster. Faster. Faster. We are rogues, we run around dual wielding daggers. We should have the fastest attacks speeds in the game, bar none. Make rogues feel like rogues.

P.S. I didn't tackle anything relating to Whisperknife. There is a reason for that. In the current state of the game Whisperknife cannot... I repeat, CANNOT... compete with Master Infiltrator in PVE. I'm not being biased, I've tried it.. it just can't. I'd love it if WK could compete, I just have never thought about it long enough to come up with a game plan. I'll leave that to you WK aficionados. Hell, just give it abilities that make it the obvious choice for PVP. It would make a great deal of sense, one path for PVE and one path for PVP. (of course we would need a dual spec system for this, so chop chop Cryptic)

Still to come: Encounter Powers, Daily Powers, Feats, Ability Scores

I liked your sugestion of making DF's animation faster, though Blur is probably right that DF probably can't safely be sped up. DF is already known to skip hits and this would undoubtedly get worse if the flurry was even faster. I'm wondering if lag is what causes the skips.
I' dislike the idea of the bleeds doing half the amount of damage they do now in exchange for making them tick faster. This would mean less damage from DF in longer pve fights and in pvp fights. Having the same number of ticks closer together would also escalate the problem DF has in pvp of triggering too many heals within too short of a time frame.
I am more in favor of making it so there are fewer bleed ticks/stacks but each bleed ticks for more damage. Because there are fewer ticks, each DF finishes dishing out all its damage sooner without changing the tick speed. The total damage from all of the bleeds put together should equal what it does now.
The idea of front loading the damage from the ticks is an interesting one to consider, I don't see any problems with it and it would be benificial so I don't see why not.

Your sugestion for sly flourish would definatly help. I also sugest making the "your target takes 5% more damage from all sources" effect apply/reapply on each even hit instead of on each 4th hit.

For cloud of steel, I do agree that COS's damage output should be lower than the damage output for our other at wills since it is both fast and ranged. However, I do not think COS should be left as is, its too weak in both pvp and pve right now and needs a boost. There have been a few sugestions for COS that I liked so far but so far this hybrid of me, @ravenskya , and @lordseth1985 's ideas is my favorite: "Toss a barrage of blades at your target. This attack is a narrow cone with a range of 60 feet. The primary target takes full damage from this power and other foes caught in the cone take half damage. This power has 10 charges and goes on cooldown for 5 secs after all 10 charges are consumed."

I agree with speeding up the animation for gloaming cut by a lot, that's exactly what this power needs.

There is one idea on this list of yours I find myself 100% opposed to.
The paragon paths should never be split to where one paragon path becomes the "obvious choice for pvp" and the other becomes the "obvious choice for pve". No other class has anything like this deliberatly set up, why should TRs? WKs are geared towards players who want a more mid ranged TR and MIs are geared towards players who prefer more melee. Not everyone who plays an MI in pvp wants to be a WK and not everyone who plays a WK in pve wants to be an MI. Your idea would blackmail many TRs into switching to a path that does not fit their preference or be put at a severe disadvantage in their prefered type of gameplay. This also reduces build variaty since now people have very little reason to build pvp MIs or pve WKs.

Here is a much better solution to seperating pvp and pve from my older posts:

"I wish the developers would just create 2 versions of every power in the game, one for pvp and one for pve. Then whenever something needs to be adjusted, they could just adjust one version without negativly impacting the other one. Would make the dev's jobs much easier going fowards and make all their players happy too."

"That does not mean every single power needs to have different effects in PVP but there should still be a seperate copy of all powers in existance as a percaution. Many of them are currently fine but could become a problem in the future if they are ever buffed/reworked or if a new build is invented that finds a way to make a power too strong."

rustlord

Great stuff @trgluestickz, appreciate you taking this idea to the next level. I already agreed that Battlewise is a good candidate for this passive/feat by @blur. I'd just like to second glue's suggestion for optimizing the pve counterpart. Here's the revised feat in line with those suggestions -

Battlewise: Your bleed and poison damage now apply a stack of Fatal Wounds. Each stack applies 1% Healing Depression to your target reducing the amount that they heal for while in PvP. You can only apply 1 stack per second to a maximum of 10/20/30 stacks. Additionally in PvE, you deal 2/4/6% more damage to targets under the effect of Fatal Wounds.

Just thought I'd bump up glues 5 to 6 so it scales evenly with heroic points, that or it could be 1/2/3% 1.5/3/4.5% etc

trgluestickz

sherifftruman said:

I have been playing WK for years, and I have some thoughts -

I have noticed that hardly anyone uses WK because we're the inferior of the two pathlines. Let's boost WK to make it more viable.

The theory behind WK is that you are a dagger thrower, so, thus - give the dagger throwing abilities a bump. In comparison to ranged attacks of HR we're far inferior at damage, and it should be a little closer to make WK viable.

Keeping in mind the vibe of TR, I'm all for adding or improving DoT damage, slow/daze effects, and interruptions.

We have a few special features only usable by WK, let's make them better:

Dagger Threat - Let's remove the range limit, and change the artifact power to something more creative, perhaps something like "5% more damage and adds a slow effect to enemies more than 20 feet away"

Vengeance Pursuit - Should add some bleed damage and a small damage buff. Animation speed should be just a little faster.
Disheartening Strike - The animation can get messed up pretty easily and the knife won't actually connect with a target, this is problematic due to how long the animation time is already. I'd like to see Distracting Knife have more of a positive effect on the party - perhaps a larger damage buff and debuff - 1.5/3/4.5/6/7.5
Cloud of Steel - The third or fourth strike should have an added effect, perhaps an additional 5% armor pen against that target or all attacks against that target for the next 3-4 seconds do 5% additional damage or something along those lines. Perhaps your own damage resistance can be boosted 5% for 3-4 seconds.
Impact Strike - The pushback should be greater the closer you are to the target.

I am not a WK expert though I did pull up the tooltips to help me comprehend your sugestions.

Your sugestion for dagger threat looks good, I agree that its stupid for dagger threat to have a range limit. At the very least, it needs to have its range limit raised by a large amount. Everything else you sugested for it also looks viable.

I do not have a great grasp on what is wrong vengeance's pursuit so I can't really input much here. Your sugestions look benificial though I am unsure if your sugestions are the main thing it needs or if these will only be part of what this power needs.

I have seen at least 1 other comment in this thread saying something about disheartening strike being easily interupted, this needs to be fixed. If I remember right, one of the HR's slower at wills, aimed shot was like this too where taking damage would interupt it. I remember seeing something saying the devs finally fixed this but I haven't been on my HR to check. Hopefully the devs will also find the time to fix the interruption issues for DS.

Your sugestion of adding 5% additional damage from all attacks onto cloud of steel is desirable though it would remove the incentive for any TRs to use sly flourish. Sly flourish's main appeal is that exact same damage effect. TRs would have little reason to take a melee power over a fast and ranged power like COS that has the same effects. COS does need more damage so you are on the right track here. However this specific damage boost is probably not the way to go.
Armor pen is of 0 use in pvp and only is useful to pvers with less than 60% armor pen, so only low geared pve players would benifit from this.
Your damage resistance being boosted for 5 seconds doesn't strike me as being something COS really needs, though it is better than the armor pen sugestion. I can see that feature being a mild aid in pvp but in pve, its less useful.

I like your impact shot sugestion +1 there. I also sugest speeding up the animation of impact shot a little bit.

archangelzorak01

@trgluestickz You make a very valid point about the paths. I cede to your opinion on the matter and agree, no path should have a specific designation as either 'the PVE path' or 'the PVP path'.

I also agree completely with the idea of there being different functionality on powers for PVE and PVP. The fact that they don't has caused many powers to go from great in PVE to almost useless in PVE because they were balanced to not be overpowered in PVP.

As for the Duelist Flurry bleed tick speed idea. It should'nt be less damage in longer PVE fights as you suggest, it should be the same. If s(speed) = 100% and d(damage) = 100% then 1*1=1. If s(speed)=200% and d(damage)=50% then 2*0.5=1. Speeding up the ticks just makes the damage more consistent per unit of time.

I am not opposed to the idea of reducing the number of stacks required to reach max bleed dmg/tick. I do however like my idea of having there be 1 debuff for a bleed on target and the damage done by that bleed be determined by a stackable buff on the player. This would remove the requirement (when done quickly enough) to re-stack bleeds on each new target as well as remove the RNG that exists in the current form of the ability where each hit from the flurry has a 'chance' to apply the bleed.

Sidenote: Good work to everyone on brainstorming changes to the Battlewise feat. The current gold-medal holder for 'Neverwinter's most useless Heroic Feat'. Although lets be honest, half the heroic feats are trash.

lordseth1985

lordseth1985 said:

About df: Why we still look for that stacks? I mean, why don't make df create only one stack, like the hr bleed? (they still have it, right?)



Smth like "with the last hit of duelist flurry, you apply a bleed on you target. For the next x seconds, you make it bleed for x% max hp/x% weapon damage/what ever other damage source. Also, it takes x% more damage from physical damage"



And... Why do we neglect so much combat advantage and deflection? I mean, even being a close combat melee damage dealers, we don't act like warriors or fighters. We do our job using tricks, subterfuge, poison and taking advantage of unsuspecting targets via stealth. Many other mmos, rogue like classes have a overall lower damage, BUT hav high critical % and critical damage dealt, but not here (and I know, saying that was stupid, but its a fact...). We should have more powers and feats that work together with combat advantage, that's why we are here: Take advantage of enemies while our tanker taunt them.

I'm quoting myself, but... whatever.

I said, and I can't find/remember who more said it, why not make df bleeds turn into only one bleed/debuff? I mean, thats much easier to work and get balanced. Also, it won't affect Battle wise feat, since they are two different debuffs.

BUT, and this is the tricky part, try to balance both would be a real pain and may take a while and a lot of work.

sherifftruman

I am not a WK expert though I did pull up the tooltips to help me comprehend your sugestions.

Your sugestion for dagger threat looks good, I agree that its stupid for dagger threat to have a range limit. At the very least, it needs to have its range limit raised by a large amount. Everything else you sugested for it also looks viable.

Appreciated - I could get more into the nitty gritty on radical changes, but I wanted to keep things simple based on just the feel and experience of playing over the years. There are some interesting ideas being floated about in this thread, but the more radical the changes - the higher potential to screw everything up.

I do not have a great grasp on what is wrong vengeance's pursuit so I can't really input much here. Your sugestions look benificial though I am unsure if your sugestions are the main thing it needs or if these will only be part of what this power needs.

Vengeance's Pursuit is just a weird looking attack. There's a jump up Liu Kang style kick out while you throw the dagger. During the first phase of the attack the enemy is under the effect of the attack as a damage debuff. As a PVE TR, I find it useful on boss fights like Orcus with lower geared OP/GF. I don't actually like the follow up attack that teleports you near the target for an AoE attack, as it abruptly ends the damage debuff.

The core of this approach - Vengeance's Pursuit with Dishearting Strike with the Distracting Knife feat provides a significant damage debuff. Why would I want to use the follow up attack to end the debuff? It seems that it would be better to have bleed damage or something along those lines during the duration of the mark - or that the follow up attack shouldn't end the debuff.

I have seen at least 1 other comment in this thread saying something about disheartening strike being easily interupted, this needs to be fixed. If I remember right, one of the HR's slower at wills, aimed shot was like this too where taking damage would interupt it. I remember seeing something saying the devs finally fixed this but I haven't been on my HR to check. Hopefully the devs will also find the time to fix the interruption issues for DS.

Disheartening Strike can be interrupted by minor lag in a way that I don't experience with any other powers. The animation hand off from throwing the dagger up to catching it and tossing it at an enemy seems easily broken from the catch to throw. It looks cool enough when it works, but I would like it to consistently work.

Your sugestion of adding 5% additional damage from all attacks onto cloud of steel is desirable though it would remove the incentive for any TRs to use sly flourish. Sly flourish's main appeal is that exact same damage effect. TRs would have little reason to take a melee power over a fast and ranged power like COS that has the same effects. COS does need more damage so you are on the right track here. However this specific damage boost is probably not the way to go.
Armor pen is of 0 use in pvp and only is useful to pvers with less than 60% armor pen, so only low geared pve players would benifit from this.
Your damage resistance being boosted for 5 seconds doesn't strike me as being something COS really needs, though it is better than the armor pen sugestion. I can see that feature being a mild aid in pvp but in pve, its less useful.

Yeah, sure enough. I just think after 3-4 volleys an added effect of some small buff would make sense for this ability. Or if the "each additional strike lands for more damage" scaled higher then it might be more worth it.

I like your impact shot sugestion +1 there. I also sugest speeding up the animation of impact shot a little bit.

In terms of feel, I always find it weird to be face to face with a spiderling crawling on the edge of the path in eTOS and I can't hit it hard enough to fall over the ledge. I can understand from a distance, but if I'm closer the pushback should be just a little more forceful. It could also scale with HP, as enemies lose health the pushback could be stronger.

ravenskya

I did a respec over the weekend on my WK to experiment - I went from my DOT/Debuff Build to an attempt at a full ranged WK

The result did not make me happy.

I went CoS, DS, Blitz, Impact Shot and Smoke. Feats were primarily Sabo for the increased stealth time but I made sure to pick any feat that referenced the ranged attacks I had chosen.

I ended up with quite the trash killer - but no substantial damage. In eToS I went from an average of 60-90mil in damage to 24 mil damage but spiked to #1 in mobs killed in every match. I did almost nothing to bosses (it was embarrassing) but could race the CW to clear out a room of spiders...

Is this what the dev's had in mind with the WK? I attempted to build based off of what they seemed to be going for - it was very disappointing.

rayrdan

i think there is only a way to fix the class all around:
- rework scountrel tree to be either a tank, a controller or a damage dealer.
- rework some execution feats to be more reliable (less: "when an emeny die you gain")
- stealth should recharge like unstopable(upon damage received and damage dealt)
- increase weapon damage
- introduce a new class bonu (like roots for hr to name one): every encounter you use deal 10% of enemy HP as piercing damage up to a cap of ()% of your maximum hp (damage is affected by your damage bonus)
- rework shoicking (way higher damage, totally resistible)
- rework courage breaker (more damage, higher damage debuff on enemy, enemy shall be able to free himself from the slow part)
- generally reduce by a ton our cooldowns
- increase our encounter base damage: lashing balde, impact shot, dazing strike to name few.
- rework duelist flurry to be more deadly.
- rework stealth: it should not grant 100% crit chance but 100% damage bonus.
- bring down deflect severity to 50%

and every one pvp/pve would be happy.
general aoe damage would be better, general single target damage would be better, general pvp performances would be more skill base while still giving the fair chance to kill your enemy after 10 rotations considering lifesteal and procs

mafiadelperro

Stealth:You move undetected for a short time. You have Combat Advantage, gain up to 100% Critical Chance,10% deflect chance, 25% crit severity and deflect severity also at will do not drain stealth and your encounter powers gain new effects. I like

lordseth1985

rayrdan said:

- rework stealth: it should not grant 100% crit chance but 100% damage bonus.
- bring down deflect severity to 50%

Man, are you insane? we are already too far away from any dps class [and noawadays, as many ppl pointed out, even tankers do higher dps than TR's!!!] and changing those two "vital" features from our class would only make us worse.

First, why stealth should grant 100% damage bonus? it make no sense. If you are stealthed, then obviously you should be able to deal deadly amounts of damage, and that is shown by 100% crit chance; the only change that I would sugest is to increase crit severity while on stealth and make it so at wills won't drain any stealth, only encounters and dailies.

Second, we are a squishy class, maybe the squishier of all [not even monks are that way, and they don't even wear armor!] and we should have the highest deflect severity among all classes. That's why we wear leather armor, to allow us to move faster and undetected.

Third, it's "normal and acceptable" that we have low base dmg, since we are oportunists and critical damage dealers. Having high crit chance/severity should put us on par with other classes, but that's not happening on NWO. Also, we should have some added effects when dealing critical damage [or even with combat advantage], like bleeds, poisons, debuffs...

mafiadelperro#8853 said:

Stealth:You move undetected for a short time. You have Combat Advantage, gain up to 100% Critical Chance,10% deflect chance, 25% crit severity and deflect severity also at will do not drain stealth and your encounter powers gain new effects. I like

I couldn't agree more, besides the points I said above.

mafiadelperro

Well i add 25% deflect cause with our 75% will make us 100% and make sense that in stealth we actually gain deflect

blur

Note: We are not trying to build a terminator lol. Just small improvements which would make us perform more efficiently.
100% damage from Stealth is like 70%+ more than what we suggested for Stealth. We already have highest deflect severity which is typical for a rogue but a 100% deflect severity would be overkill even if its only in stealth. Additional deflect % while in Stealth makes sense but might be too much for perma Stealth builds. Maybe a bit increased run speed while is Stealth is a fine addition.
When you take a look at TR abilities only, they make sense and are balanced in a way but when you pair them with the content and other classes they are very unbalanced.

mafiadelperro

Yeah i think about the runs speed but after i make the post lol but i did not think of takin off additional deflect sev i was not thinking on perma stealth build from pvp. Ither way this maybe to op but i will like to do more damage when the target have more of 40% hp meaning shadowborn 20/40/60/80/100% power and will also place a mark on target dealing 1/2/3/4/5% more damage also be active like shadow of demise with a direct hit and deathknell 3/6/9/12/15 more damage to foes with 30% less hp and to marked foes 2.5/5/7.5/10/12.5 more damage to target with more of 30% of hp same with last moment feat is just ideas i dont have much calculation skill

archangelzorak01

blur#5900 said:

When you take a look at TR abilities only, they make sense and are balanced in a way but when you pair them with the content and other classes they are very unbalanced.

^ This. This. A thousand times this.

I have always said that the TR is the most balanced class in the game. The problem is the other classes have scaled better as stats have increased. Other classes Tab function actually has scaled with the increase in player power where Stealth has remained stagnant.

One of the core functions of Stealth, from a PVE perspective, is the 100% crit function. Every DPS in the game has 100% crit, even my healadin can achieve 100% crit. That takes a significant portion of what Stealth is and makes it functionally useless. Add on to that the stealth reduction from dealing damage and you end up with a lame-duck of a class power.

Something needs to be changed to make Stealth more effective in PVE.

sherifftruman

ravenskya said:

I did a respec over the weekend on my WK to experiment - I went from my DOT/Debuff Build to an attempt at a full ranged WK

The result did not make me happy.

I went CoS, DS, Blitz, Impact Shot and Smoke. Feats were primarily Sabo for the increased stealth time but I made sure to pick any feat that referenced the ranged attacks I had chosen.

I ended up with quite the trash killer - but no substantial damage. In eToS I went from an average of 60-90mil in damage to 24 mil damage but spiked to #1 in mobs killed in every match. I did almost nothing to bosses (it was embarrassing) but could race the CW to clear out a room of spiders...

Is this what the dev's had in mind with the WK? I attempted to build based off of what they seemed to be going for - it was very disappointing.

The best damage I get as a WK is in the Executioner line with a few Sabo feats. I use stealth only briefly and usually shoot Blitz from stealth.

During eToS I run Smoke Bomb, Impact Shot, Blitz with CoS and DS. On the boss I switch to Wicked Reminder, Impact Strike and Lashing Blade. Sometimes I'll run Shadow Strike in the mix to get an extra stealth attack.

I consistently finish most dungeons with the most kills, even Tiamat. My damage never approaches that of top CW, HR, GWF, etc.

I try to make-up for this by being a good "support" character. Running Smoke Bomb or Blitz from stealth causes a slow effect. I use Dread for the debuff. I use DS on the most power enemies for the damage debuff/buff for the whole party. I try everything I can to increase the efficiency for everyone.

My damage isn't bad, it is just... middling. I don't think this is my fault in terms of concept and how I play, just that this class isn't balanced compared to other classes. I'd much prefer that the rework evens things out with other classes than that I have to totally rebuild and rework my playing style to be effective.

demonmonger

I can't stress how important it is for TR to have combat advantage on players that are dazed proned and stunned. Also attacks from behind should grant combat advantage to TR at all times.
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rustlord

WK was advertised to be ranged damage dealer, but when you see its passives like Dagger Threat, deals more damage closer to target.. everything unravels. This is the complete opposite of what this path stands for. I get that it shouldn't be as deadly as a CW or HR, but if range is its element why do I have to be "within 20ft" of my target?

In that sense, if devs would just revise how ranged powers work for WK it could fill in a gap in some boss fights where MI leaves a lot to be desired, bosses that move a lot and such.

ravenskya

rustlord said:

WK was advertised to be ranged damage dealer, but when you see its passives like Dagger Threat, deals more damage closer to target.. everything unravels. This is the complete opposite of what this path stands for. I get that it shouldn't be as deadly as a CW or HR, but if range is its element why do I have to be "within 20ft" of my target?

In that sense, if devs would just revise how ranged powers work for WK it could fill in a gap in some boss fights where MI leaves a lot to be desired, bosses that move a lot and such.

Why shouldn't a ranged TR be as deadly as an HR?