New PvP meta musings

spani4rd

A few thoughts of mine. I'm not really gonna go in to builds or how I feel the class should be played because that's already being discussed plenty in other threads. This is more just to recap a few ideas of things I've noticed since the pvp patch, and maybe people can help clear up a few questiosn I have.

I feel that in the new meta shadowtouched is probably better than enraged regrowth and the same could be said for elven ferocity over elven tranquility. Due to healing depression and righteousness the heals are very small. And even though the dmg is not great from the other boons it's at least something. I don't know what the ICD on these boons is either.

I feel like I have a lot of DP now so I tend to use my divine at wills, either punishing light for more dmg or soothing light to help heal up team mates. Because of this I feel desperate renewal could be an interesting feat for pvp purposes. I really don't bother to heal my allies unless they at much lower life. Due to healing depression my dmg outstrips my healing and my dr and buffs/debuffs are what shine. Healing people at low HP is great because the other team tries to focus them allowing your team freedom to cc and dps the other team down. Desperate Renewal would seem to benefit this even more. I'm not sure you gould justify taking it over being able to improve foresight or exaltation though.

I'm not currently, but I would go righteous tree for PVP. I'm not too sure how sovereign just exactly works. Is the tooltip correct? What the ICD? What do people feel about it? It would probably come down to that or a point in rising hope in a full pvp build and I'm not sure which would be better.

DR, healing % increase, dmg % increase...all these things scales as percentages and therefore become decimals in the game. Somebod brought to my attention the other day that they are multiplied in order to determine final amounts. I had never though about this before but it makes pefect sense. This is how diminishing returns are built into the game to avoid over stacking stats to make you too powerful or being able to completely eliminate healing or dmg, etc. Imagien as a DC you already have a 90% healing reduction and somebody procs shadowtouched on you that would mean you have 115% healind reduction which would mean you have 0 but that would be somewhat absurd therefore it makes sense that they would all be multiplied so the great the amount of reduction the less healing one receives but never actually being able to make it 0. It creates an asymtope mathematically speaking. Not gonna explain the math but if somebody really whats to know more about it I can go lay all the math out. Thing brings me to the conclusion that some DC abilities may not be as beneficial for us as thought. Primarily AS, the 20% DR is great but I was noticing that I didn't feel that much more tanky in my circle than out of it. This would make sense because I have so much DR already that even more, while helping doesn't add that much any more when multiplied with my other DR multipliers. It's still great of course for what it gives to the party, or the people in it at least. Things brings me to the conclusion that for that for a lot of encounters, and especially with players who are already tanky themselves, BtS becomes an even better spell because it reduces enemy dmg instead of increasing your DR whish is already probably highly capped. BtS has to be my new most favorite PVP encounter and I'm slowly starting to think it may be one of the most powerful encounter available to any class for PVP purposes.

I'm currently not really aware of which of our powers are affected by APen. I thought there was a thread about this but for some reason I haven't been able to find it. If anybody knows the current state of APen and which of our powers thye afect, or knows the post of which I speak of and can link it would be much appreciated.

I'd also be curious about any data people have on what point Deflect seems to cap at, soft cap, hard cap, etc.

As far as I can tell +HP seems to be the stat that stacks the best by far and we shold get as much defensive stats as we can.

I'll update more If I have any other interesting thoughts, ideas, etc. Feel free to debate

vorphied

Quick notes:

- Soothing Light...yuck. Was a poor use of Divinity before except when truly desperate and using that bit of heal to make the difference between kill or be killed, and now it should pretty much never be used. The associated feat isn't likely to do anything to make it useful, either, since it was a HAMSTER feat even before this patch.

- Sovereign Justice is okay. Some DCs do choose a point in Rising Hope instead; I keep Sovereign around just because it's a free passive AoE heal. The ICD is in the description; too lazy to check it right now, but it isn't long.

- If my info is correct, there's an effective cap of 80% DR, though DR in excess of that is negated first for the purpose of calculating penetration.

- BtS is a fun spell and offers some additional damage along with the debuff(s), but in most cases it benefits only one target (if any) being attacked by that enemy. Astral Shield offers DR to everyone in the radius with the option to heal, which while not amazing at the moment is at least something. I have BtS but consider it a very situational choice.

- ArP is only of value to damage-focused DCs, who don't seem to be having any easier of a time in PvP since they have even less burst potential than before and still have the same issues that held them back before the patch. A support DC intending to be viable in competitive play needs to remain defensively viable to do its job, and that precludes stacking significant amounts of ArP.

- Deflection is amazing if you get it up there a bit. There's a thread kicking around somewhere that details soft caps and progression beyond them, but you should be able to achieve 20%+ easily if AC.

spani4rd

+

vorphied wrote: »

Quick notes:

- Soothing Light...yuck. Was a poor use of Divinity before except when truly desperate and using that bit of heal to make the difference between kill or be killed, and now it should pretty much never be used. The associated feat isn't likely to do anything to make it useful, either, since it was a HAMSTER feat even before this patch.

- Sovereign Justice is okay. Some DCs do choose a point in Rising Hope instead; I keep Sovereign around just because it's a free passive AoE heal. The ICD is in the description; too lazy to check it right now, but it isn't long.

- If my info is correct, there's an effective cap of 80% DR, though DR in excess of that is negated first for the purpose of calculating penetration.

- BtS is a fun spell and offers some additional damage along with the debuff(s), but in most cases it benefits only one target (if any) being attacked by that enemy. Astral Shield offers DR to everyone in the radius with the option to heal, which while not amazing at the moment is at least something. I have BtS but consider it a very situational choice.

- ArP is only of value to damage-focused DCs, who don't seem to be having any easier of a time in PvP since they have even less burst potential than before and still have the same issues that held them back before the patch. A support DC intending to be viable in competitive play needs to remain defensively viable to do its job, and that precludes stacking significant amounts of ArP.

- Deflection is amazing if you get it up there a bit. There's a thread kicking around somewhere that details soft caps and progression beyond them, but you should be able to achieve 20%+ easily if AC.

Thanks for all that vorp.

1-No, soothing light is not agreat heal. You're right I neve used it before, or almost never because I had more effective heals, or something better to do with my DP. Currently though with thet setup I run and how I'm playing I always have excess DP. It seems like it's good to use it for someting. I've used soothing light efectively to keep party members alive and tilt the battle for a cap point in our favor. As I said though you probably wouldn't be able to justify putting points in it improving foresight or exaltation, assuming a 20 point righteous build or so. It'd be pretty niche, like fits well into wha I'm doing, for most builds it proably serves almost no purpose, especially more traditioanl healing builds

2-The ICD is 15s according to the tooltip. I'm pretty sure it didn't use to specify. They must of updated the tooltip and I never noticed.

3-That's interesting that you could say ovecap DR, which does nothing for you, but yet it will still help negate the effects of APen.

4-Without a doubt AS is a much beter party buff. I am having fun taking dps classes and nerfing their dmg output though. I tend to try and figure out who the high dmg people are on the oher team and continually target them with BtS or whoever is directly harrasing me or my teammate.

5-I'm aware that APen is an offensive stat. It should be the preminent dps stat for PVP. Which is why I was asking about which of our powers it currently affecs. As a support DC you'd probably just soccet power into your offensive slots. It's not like it stacks amazingly well so I wouldn't mind slotting APen for my offensive slots to deal some more dmg, mos of my slots are defensive anyways so it's jus a little something here n there.

6-Agreed. I have like 13% deflect atm because I'm not AC. Still having fun as a DO . I'll look for that thread if I can and link it here for anybody who ineresed, if I can find it

xmon7x

There are a few different ways to spec your PVP DC now.

For Defense:

1, High HP/ High Defense:

You have high damage reduction. With high HP. You can take a lot of hits.

For this build, you need to up your healing power a bit. Otherwise u can't really recover after the 80% healing nerf on yourself.

Benefit is your teammates also get higher healing numbers from you.


2, High MIT/ Lower HP

For my build. I have 30% + Deflect, 65%+ dmg reduction.

Obviously I don't have high Wisdom, that also means my healing numbers are lower. But since i'm taking less dmg. So i can heal myself better.

The idea is when u invest in healing power. You only get 20% in return. So...thx NW!

Benefit for this build is you can solo tank a node better than the other build. But less support for your mates.

Comparison:
1 is more supporting base. 2 is more solo based.
You can pick which way to go base on your playing style. Also you have to know if your teammates/guildies are good at supporting you or not.


Offense/Healing:

I put these two together. Since power = healing in this game.

1. Power/Recovery

Pretty Basic, fast cooldowns high healing numbers.
Once you hit 2.8k on recovery. You dump more pts into healing.

would be good to go with supporting set up.


2. Power/Crit/Recovery

Most DCs use faithful gears recently. There are no crit So if you want crit, that means you don't stat extra power after you reach 3k to 4k(depends on your wealth).

Some of our healing spells never crit. If you are using typical HW, AS way. Then go for 1.
If you are action based style. IE, Sunbrust, HW in Divine mode, Ext, Forgemaster Flame(divine). Burst healings can be crit'd.
Since the heal/sec calculation is similar to DPS(multiply, not sum). So a little crit would help once your power is high enough.

I think this set up is better to go with the solo based defense setting.


*more*
DPS DC.... joke... 1 execution and I LOL

CC DC.... If you can CC the CW 2 times before he can CC you 3 times... you can LOL at him

spani4rd

Another thing or Two to add.

I'm thinking Fey Thistle is probably the best final boon of the Sharandar campain for PVP, of course you have to have decently high deflect for it to be beneficial.

All the final Dread Ring boons are pretty meh for us in PVP. I guess madness would be the best just for the ocasional buff...it seems hard that the tiny ticks from burning guidance would be worth it.

morsitans

BG ticks would keep healing depression up on lots of people, presumably.

Might as well make everyone else depressed as well, right?

xmon7x

spani4rd wrote: »

Another thing or Two to add.

I'm thinking Fey Thistle is probably the best final boon of the Sharandar campain for PVP, of course you have to have decently high deflect for it to be beneficial.

All the final Dread Ring boons are pretty meh for us in PVP. I guess madness would be the best just for the ocasional buff...it seems hard that the tiny ticks from burning guidance would be worth it.

Burning Guidiance

1. It procs a lot
2. It helps to reduce perma's stealth
3. It keeps ppl as depressed as u're

spani4rd

ELO systems feels like it kicking in finally

In regards to burning guidance. I had it before and now I dropped it for rampaging. Can't say I miss it at all not that Rampaging Madness is making a huge diference either.
With that said, yes it procs a lot, but the dmg is neglideable, regen ticks put burning guidance ticks to shame. I have no issues keeping healing depression up on people. I have no issues with permastealth rogues anymore, but if I wanted to help somebody kill one to clear up a point then yes it would have that upside to it.

xmon7x

lucky u. i have no attk power at all lol

spani4rd wrote: »

ELO systems feels like it kicking in finally

In regards to burning guidance. I had it before and now I dropped it for rampaging. Can't say I miss it at all not that Rampaging Madness is making a huge diference either.
With that said, yes it procs a lot, but the dmg is neglideable, regen ticks put burning guidance ticks to shame. I have no issues keeping healing depression up on people. I have no issues with permastealth rogues anymore, but if I wanted to help somebody kill one to clear up a point then yes it would have that upside to it.