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The Squat of Annihilation
dread4moor
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,154 Arc User
Decided to step over the tumbleweeds and revisit Took's old home for 5 years (until Mod16).
Shocked by the absolute silence. Not a single post for nearly a month.
Guard Barracks use to be a thriving hub of shared ideas, advice, debate, guides and theorycrafting.
All of that slowly died with Mod16.
Some would say the etiology is multi-factorial.
The Took says "blame the squat".
Nothing embodies the good-intentioned failure of the Fighter redesign more than the literally passive-aggressive tab Seethe/Dig-In.
Now, nearly a year since the tab-function redesign, was curious if @asterdahl had any retrospection or lessons-learned about how Fighter changes affected this community.
What would you do differently if you had a do-over?
Is it too late to save the Fighter?
Edit:
Accidental 1st person voice.
Took blasphemy.
Shocked by the absolute silence. Not a single post for nearly a month.
Guard Barracks use to be a thriving hub of shared ideas, advice, debate, guides and theorycrafting.
All of that slowly died with Mod16.
Some would say the etiology is multi-factorial.
The Took says "blame the squat".
Nothing embodies the good-intentioned failure of the Fighter redesign more than the literally passive-aggressive tab Seethe/Dig-In.
Now, nearly a year since the tab-function redesign, was curious if @asterdahl had any retrospection or lessons-learned about how Fighter changes affected this community.
What would you do differently if you had a do-over?
Is it too late to save the Fighter?
Edit:
Accidental 1st person voice.
Took blasphemy.
I am Took.
"Full plate and packing steel" in NW since 2013.
Post edited by dread4moor on
1
Comments
And some people, including myself, left the class because its straight up boring... class mechanic is annoying, long cooldowns with no way to reduce them like other classes, useless/clunky at-wills...
> Well with the new dumb down feats there isn't a lot of options to discuss...
> And some people, including myself, left the class because its straight up boring... class mechanic is annoying, long cooldowns with no way to reduce them like other classes, useless/clunky at-wills...
No argument to any of that from me.
I hope you all and @asterdahl see this post as I intended it:
Not a salty negative vent or rag on Asterdahl and the devs.
To the contrary...
Asterdahl was awesome during the Mod 16 preview.
For weeks he was the most active dev, reading all of our comments, posting dozens of reponses per day.
His objectives were logical. His motivations included our (GFs) benefit.
Full respect to Asterdahl.
But good process change should always include retrospection.
What worked? What didn't?
What did we learn from these mistakes?
What can we apply to improve the class going forward?
I am Took.
"Full plate and packing steel" in NW since 2013.
Any time we face a fighter (bad guy) in the game with a shield they are like totally HAMSTER and can move fast and do tons of damage.
My fighter. Let me squat down here for a bit and then wait while all my cool downs count down and yay! Fights over! Did we win?
There are a lot of posts of people saying what they think is wrong with the class and ways of improving it
In my opinion
- introduce some feat or something in the class mechanic that reduces cooldowns... (imagine if the class had a feat like the one from rangers, everytime you use 1 encounter you reduce the cd of the rest of them)
- slightly increase at-wills dmg
- weapon master strike was 100x better than cleave.
- i don't know if onlsaught was fixed... when i played the class it was bugging a lot and doing 0 dmg
- and the class mechanic... i remember dismounting every so often to maintain it above 50% so i wouldn't lose stacks of enduring vengeance and was always in ''top dps conditon''
- and fighting bosses like the 2nd at fbi was a nightmare with the stamina drain...
I stopped heading for minmax, the game is just not worth it at all, so doing some random for fun with an active companion the class doesn't feel totally crappy.
Running feated bullcharge 600mag and anvil 950mag and Griffon 840mag with a 30% damage (Enduring VEngeance, VEngeance , HS).
Heavy Slash sounds and looks like smashing a frying pan on someones head, but that´s a matter of taste.
The focus damage looks OK to me (more than ok)...not compareable to a TR maybe.
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And I would not say the class is oneway or brainless. It needs some management to keep buffs and vengeance gauge >50% (to have that 25% damage buff running) tab-tab-tab.. same as you have to manage a lot about positioning to keep up Combat advantage. More dynamic than most of my other classes.
In a dungeon I am running ahead all others since momentum is such a huge speedbuff, faster than near all other classes.
Only power I did not use regularily till now are: Knee breaker and Shield Throw, Into the fray is more like a team buff in a support run maybe.
I run Bronzewood same as an active companion at 109k power 93k CA and don´t feel like anything underpowered when a 173k power CW in lomm is below me same as a 143k power /130 CA - TR deals 35% more damage than me. I know randome queue etc....
That's good. Wishing you continued enjoyment.
But the absolute silence in the Barracks still speaks to the overall failure of this redesign.
I am Took.
"Full plate and packing steel" in NW since 2013.
I'm not surprised that most builds have devolved into screenshots of powers used and lists of gear to check off, since the game has shifted to being primarily gear and stat based, with not much to build.
No interesting weaknesses to account for, very little unique strengths to capitalize on, very little that makes me rethink how I use my powers, nothing that "wows" me and makes me feel different apart from animations and whether or not I get benched because of the epeen chart factors. Tank wise, it's fine, if plain; DPSwise, boring and does nothing better than most other DPS specs (aside from angering people in PvP and sitting on the bench).
Fun fact, but back in the Mod 16 beta, Goofy Fighter actually had a different class name: "Guardian".
(GWF took the "Fighter" title until some event that happened after I left the beta. Also, "leaks" I guess, but I think the PWE Ninjas have better things to do that don't involve doing a lawsuit against a snarky miscreant talking about names that have long since been discarded.)
After re-considering that fact and after re-reading the Mod 16 "rework" blog , all the changes make much more sense.
I'm not too amazed on the tank side, as our gimmick is that we can hide behind our shield all day thanks to the squat (if the Barbie gimmick is just being really tough and Paladin's is seemingly about protecting others). Makes sense for "Guardian" I guess.
DPS wise, I think the class was always designed to be the counter attacker that would get rewarded from taking attacks (ie, "Guardian"), but just poorly implemented.
See lines such as or Conqueror worked because it could take aggro from powers/mechanics/pure damage, and by being a good tank, you would be rewarded with more damage. Makes sense.
The current DPS spec tries to encourage a similar style something similar with the Vengeance meter (and with blocking attacks building slightly more meter than squatting, if I recall correctly)... except that it's a DPS spec in a game that nearly forces you to make way for the tank role for absorbing damage.
Which is why the DPS path feels like the awkward afterthought, repurposed from scraps after realizing "oops, we can't have leave a spec based around taking damage, we need to give the spec some way to function without taking over the tank role".
(Or it was meant for soloing only/PvP, of which would make sense as to why the class' DPS is apparently "fine".) Not like much would change, given the game seems very much in sleep mode to support the release of Bugs the Gathering.
I know a certain dwarf says that we couldn't get any changes because we didn't have a unified front on the changes (like how the Wizards were complaining about not having Fireball, albeit for various different reasons). I personally think said dorf is wrong and no matter what we say in "Feedback" threads, the feedback will get thrown into the bin of laughing.
But I got a slight case of insomnia and had some ideas in my head.
The Mod 16 "rework" blog mentioned two aspects of Vengeance: that you get a damage bonus if the meter is above half and that you can spend Vengeance to power up some abilities.
Sounds pretty cool and implies two unique styles: one that involves the constant drain and refilling of Vengeance and another, more simple style that keeps the meter as high as possible.
Except, in reality, the style more or less ends up at "keep your meter above half an occasionally spend it on Anvil/never spend it at all if you use Heavier Slash".
Right now, there's only 3 things that consume Vengeance, and all are tied to feats.
Two (Landwaster & Crushing Blows) of the feats are so impractical that their Vengeance cost may as well never exist (daily attacks take too long to cast+slow AP gain means rare use of Landwaster and Crushing Blows' ratio requirement just ... blows).
The only "real" feat that consumes Vengeance is Weight of Vengeance, except that its Vengeance cost may as well not exist because of Rolling Hatred (and everyone picks Rolling Hatred because of Crushing Blows' stupid ratio).
To make the styles more distinct, I would love to see some feats, passives, or even all of the DPS exclusive encounters that require Vengeance to cast, so that keeping the meter above half isn't a no brainer choice (aside from the meter ticking down in combat).
At the same time, I would like to see great incentives to keep up the Vengeance meter to make meter management a bigger impact. Right now, the incentives for keeping Vengeance above half aren't too great: a rather neutered 20% damage bonus and the buildup of another 5% in Enduring Vengeance (of which is missable if you want to experiment with other passives).
Things such as "Griffon's Wrath costs 11 Vengeance per hit to cast", with corresponding feats+passives such as "your AoE powers consume 7 extra Vengeance to cast, but deal extra damage (+20 mag on At-wills, +60 on Encounters, +100 on daily attacks)" would encourage the spending.
Things such as "if your Vengeance is above 75%, all of your damage buffs are increased by 75%" (Vengeance above half -> 35%, Heavy Slash -> 8.5%, etc) could encourage the style of keeping your Vengeance meter high.
By "combo", I mean things like Landwaster, where you use one ability and get another one to follow up with or a powered up effect on another power.
Strangely, there are a lot of these types of feats on the tank path (Cleaving Bull, anyone?), but they're mostly there for establishing aggro rather than for dealing damage.
The DPS exclusive side has 3, and two of them don't see regular use thanks to daily attacks not recharging often. The only combo feat that sees regular use is Heavier Slash, which is actually rather nice (even if the basic Heavy Slash is still bugged to deal 80 mag damage rather than the listed 100 mag...).
That being said, I would love to see more combo stuff go into passives (class features) rather than feats. Right now, the combo feats affect only a specific subset of powers, which locks you into using those powers or "wasting" a feat.
I'd prefer that the bonuses for only specific powers becomes a passive (see: Momentum) because you can select which powers you like and use their passives accordingly, rather than pick a feat and being "forced" into using that power.
If the combo bonuses affected a wider array of powers, I could see them being tied to feats. Prepared Slam is an okay example, since it only requires you use an "AoE power" rather than just one specific AoE power.
Consider such a rework for Striker's Mark (as a feat): targets affected by Commander's Strike or CC effects take extra damage from your attacks (+10 mag on At-wills, +30 on Encounters, +50 on daily attacks).
Something like "your At-wills will consume 2 Vengeance but reduce the cooldown of all of your encounter powers by 0.2 seconds. Scoring a Critical hit will consume 4 Vengeance and reduce encounter cooldowns by 0.4 seconds".
I don't think the devs want us to have 0 cooldowns, but I think something like this would make the "consuming Vengeance" thing more apparent and still encourage "tactical" gameplay by still having downtime on encounters.
Personal note: I would not make the basic effect a passive or a feat, as I think that would force that passive/feat to always be chosen (which forces that choice and makes other choices invalid, unless the other choices have equally useful effects).
Adding extra versions of this effect into other passives/feats would be nice, like upgrading Heavier Slash to also reduce cooldowns by 0.8 seconds.
No way i'm playing that clown dps path that requires you to press a button(tab) while you out of combat... This and only makes you believe that you are playing something that is not right (like pressing /sit in wow classic to get crit hit and proc a feat)
Seriously pressing tab between mobs in the middle of nowhere feels right to you guys ?
I got dps gear and rings demonlords set etc in another vanguard loadout and i play this for solo as a dps spec, that can give you a taste of how bad the dps spec for fighters feels right now.
Cheers
*Sry for bad englando hehe