Just a friendly reminder from the moderation team.
Please stay calm, engage the developers with some degree of respect, and please focus on the changes at hand. This is a process, and it's only been a little more than a week. We still have 3 more weeks until Module 10 launches, so instead of declaring the Ranger dead and gone, please keep up with the constructive. But that being said, we'll continue to prune any posts from this thread that focus on flaming, trolling, threatening the devs or otherwise unproductive so that the developers can focus on posts by those who are making an effort to balance and improve the Ranger.
Macjae, the more you say on this topic, the more disingenuous your replies seem to me. What makes it particularly amusing is you can't concede the very simple truth that this issue is a matter of opinion, then produce these fantastically laboured and convoluted posts in which you accuse me of using legalistic arguments and obscurantism. A+ for transference.
You've made no progress on establishing greater legitimacy of your preferred approach. You're just repeating the same tired slogans about how swiftness is a bug, it's broken and how your interpretation should be obvious. But that is just your opinion, nothing more no matter how creatively you try to dress it up and how hard you try to run down my own position.
Despite your insistence on this issue nothing has changed. This is simply a discussion between two groups people who have different, equally legitimate ideas about how best to handle this class pass. The tooltip is not specific and does not unequivocally support how you would prefer things to be. Frankly, I think the class pass discussion would be much better served by getting off this issue of trying to draw meaning from an incomplete description and back onto the issue of producing good fixes for the class with the minimum of developer effort.
The fact that trappers outperform the other two paths doesn't prove that trapper is broken. Arguing that trapper should be made less powerful in relation to the other two paths is nonsense, because the proper comparsion is how each of the builds are doing relative to other classes. It's already been established - by the developers - that trapper is due for some mild buffs, but combat and archery need much more help.
Once again, I'm not trying to promote the supremacy of the trapper over other HR builds. I would like for there to be more choice and would try my hand at playing the other paths if they were more competitive. I resisted moving to trapper for a long time, and while I enjoy playing it now I would like to see better options for myself and other people running HRs.
I had trouble keeping a straight face at your claims about wanting a simpler and better solution. Again, you really need to support these claims if you expect them to be taken seriously. How exactly is your preferred solution better? We have no evidence that even the very specific suggestions made by ralexinor would lead to a better outcome. let alone your much more general assertions. And if you think deciding upon, making and testing changes to the dozens of damaging power the class has, by adjusting cooldowns and/or damage is simpler, you and I have very different ideas of what the word 'simpler' means. I encourage you to consult the nearest dictionary as a matter of urgency.
I have not made any threats at all, despite what you've said. I am not threatening to quit the game or spend no more money on it, nor am I encouraging other people to do that. But as the developers are aware, actions have consequences, and pretending that if the class pass produces bad results for the majority of customers will have no effect on the game is very naive. My main point is that you are in a substantial minority on this issue, and irritating a large group of players just to please you and ralexinor along with your small but noisy crowd of agitators promoting other classes as well as a couple new people, might not be a good business decision.
I think your ideas for change have some merit, but they are a much larger undertaking than what I think is needed. My inclination is to try what is really simpler first, ie, making some changes to a few encounter powers and feats for combat and archery, then to look at a full rebuild for the class afterwards if the first approach does not work.
Thanks.
+1 like your response and ill do the same as you, try to stay on topic and with facts.
indeed macjae we should figure out how to fix encounters, class features, etc. not being talking about and how to improve the general hr's, once all the nerfs are done coming we can actually buff what needs oto be buffed and rework what needs to be changed.
The damage and movement speed buff from longstrider lasts for four seconds, and during that period it decays from the start to end. While it's possible to keep longstrider up most of the time using certain rotations, it requires using other powers which do not offer the best damage output and also requires a less damaging style of play.
There is a cost for using a rotation built mainly to keep longstrider up, it's not a full-time 20% buff, and other classes have powers which offer better debuffing.
There are two factors at work here. It doesn't matter AT ALL if encounter powers can be cycled without interruption so long as their effects take that into account. A 20% buff with a 100% uptime is not necessarily better than a 40% buff with a 50% uptime. In some circumstances, the lower buff with the higher uptime is actually worse, because good teams can time the use of their powers to take best advantage of the larger buff within a shorter period. Right?
Changing the way swiftness works is absolutely pointless if you also make other changes to the feats and encounters to recover what was lost. My point here is making a lot of unnecessary changes to get us right back to the same point we were at is nothing more than a colossal waste of player and developer time.
My point about your suggestion making trappers more powerful is based on how swiftness is currently more effective against a larger number of targets. At the moment, trappers can't use encounter powers against a single non boss target as quickly as they can against a group of two, three four or five. Your change would remove the requirement for a certain style of play which skilled trappers use to do well, ie, dont kill things off one at a time and instead would allow encounters to be spammed non stop regardless of how many enemies or allies were around.
The damage and movement speed buff from longstrider lasts for four seconds, and during that period it decays from the start to end. While it's possible to keep longstrider up most of the time using certain rotations, it requires using other powers which do not offer the best damage output and also requires a less damaging style of play.
There is a cost for using a rotation built mainly to keep longstrider up, it's not a full-time 20% buff, and other classes have powers which offer better debuffing.
There are two factors at work here. It doesn't matter AT ALL if encounter powers can be cycled without interruption so long as their effects take that into account. A 20% buff with a 100% uptime is not necessarily better than a 40% buff with a 50% uptime. In some circumstances, the lower buff with the higher uptime is actually worse, because good teams can time the use of their powers to take best advantage of the larger buff within a shorter period. Right?
Changing the way swiftness works is absolutely pointless if you also make other changes to the feats and encounters to recover what was lost. My point here is making a lot of unnecessary changes to get us right back to the same point we were at is nothing more than a colossal waste of player and developer time.
My point about your suggestion making trappers more powerful is based on how swiftness is currently more effective against a larger number of targets. At the moment, trappers can't use encounter powers against a single non boss target as quickly as they can against a group of two, three four or five. Your change would remove the requirement for a certain style of play which skilled trappers use to do well, ie, dont kill things off one at a time and instead would allow encounters to be spammed non stop regardless of how many enemies or allies were around.
Thanks.
+1 trapper is not actually meant for damage, that's why in the beginning developers said they are only going to do small changes to the trapper and bigger ones to the other trees. hopefully the trapper gets back in line but not by giving us back what we lost. but by giving us something different in return.
giving the hr less cooldown and slightly higher damage is nice, but all we need is lower cooldowns and our thorned roots to work on immune targets. making thorned roots dot effect the boss would fix most of the damage problem, as the thorned roots hits for a single time against immune targets and doesn't tick.
and forums700 is right as trappers are only good against mobs not single targets or bosses.
the archery tree and combat tree just need better damage and mobility as well as survival. but trapper tree needs its control fixed.
as for stacking recovery, in my opinion i think an hr should only need about 600 recovery that's one mythic artifact. any more recovery is just to improve on getting encounters somewhat faster. maybe the developers should fix how recovery affects out cooldowns so that all the classes can benefit from it that way 600 would actually be useful instead of needing 5k-10k. as someone else has said and he tested it he was testing recovery and said that he needed about 8k-10k and that's why too much needed. i can understand 2k or less, but any more and then its a burden to the other stats
This entire re-tuning process has been disheartening. While I admire @amenar and team for the effort they have put in, they have gone about this the entirely wrong way.
Trapper is the least broken of the trees right now, based on both their data and the player meta data. It makes no sense at all to start disrupting every single encounter available to the HR (and inadvertently nerfing the one successful tree) under the guise of "boosting" the class when one of the three trees is viable on live server. It makes much more sense to examine :why: that one tree is viable, and to try and replicate that success than it does to "throw the baby out with the bathwater".
Hunter Ranger's were designed to have access to six encounters, vs. other classes' three. The entire basis for damage and buffing for the HR's encounters revolves around this - we have less damage and buffing per encounter because we have more of them to draw on. I would argue that's its intended to be this way; at least, its apparent to me in the TAB mechanic at the heart of the class. Of the three trees, however, only Trapper is able to leverage all six encounters to their optimum capacity. This has to do with a combination of the feats, abilities, and general mechanics of the game currently in place, and at least some of the problem has to do with how the trees were initially conceived.
Archer's are unable to leverage both halves of many encounters due to the range restrictions currently in place. You cannot be both 60+ yards away for enhanced damage, and able to utilize melee abilities with a limited range. Conversely, with the way the range buffing currently works, it makes no sense for them to try and use encounters that may have group buffs for the melee components, because in order to maximize personal damage they will be out of range of group support. In essence, although they have access to six encounters, 3 of them are useless. The feat tree needs offsets built in to it to compensate for this. Also, if the "60+ yard" range idea is to be preserved, the tree should also compensate for the loss of group buffs. (Personally I think this is a major hindrance - Archers should be able to remain close enough to the group to receive benefits without sacrificing their personal dps)
Combat, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. They are able to remain close enough to the group to receive and grant buffs - most of the dual-encounters are poorly designed, however, and the best "ranged" group buffs don't necessarily correspond to the best melee dps skills.
There's a very simple fix to this mess that both the community and developers seem to have overlooked: BUFF THE OTHER TREES WITH EQUIVALENT ENCOUNTER RECHARGE AND DAMAGE SO THAT THEY DON'T NEED TO STANCE-DANCE. This only requires changes to their feat trees at equivalent tiers to Trapper's Swiftness of the Fox and Thorned Roots.
For Archer, add the following effects to (or replace) existing feats: "Your ranged attacks reduce your ranged encounter cooldown's by XX%" and "When you remain in ranged stance for 10s, you gain YY% damage to all ranged powers". XX would have to be a number that gets them close to the Trapper's encounter cooldown reduction, while YY would be the number required to get compensate for Thorned Roots damage bonus. They would retain all six encounter, but would be incentivized to only use three of them, in keeping with their chosen path, while also ensuring that this is a viable choice.
For Combat, do the same, just tweaking the variables as needed. Heck, you could even augment the additional damage on Archery and Combat to augment Crit and Bleed (respectively) damage in lieu of Grasping Roots if you wanted to really add flavor, to capitalize on the HR's many strengths (Crits, Bleeds, Roots - each having their own tree).
This would compensate for Trappers use of six encounters while not breaking its current meta (which, as noted, is still sub-par compared to other classes) or fun-factor (which is currently incredible). It would also provide a clear choice between those HR's that chose to remain ranged, those that choose melee, and those that prefer a mixed path, while not overlapping existing classes - Combat HR's, for example, would be a very different creature from TR's.
If needed in PvP - and want to :emphasize: that I rarely PvP, so I am only forming an opinion based upon this thread's feedback - reduce the effectiveness of Crushing Roots... Crushing Roots is the only way a HR can have permadaze - it makes much more sense to just alter Crushing Roots if this is an issue than it does to rework every single encounter and at-will. Also, to make the PvPers happy, it would seem to make sense to rework one or two encounters (there are plenty that go unused) to have high burst damage, but charges and longer internal counters - make a couple high damage encounters with ONE charge and a long internal cooldown. Then the CD reduction feats wont affect them (so they can't be abused) but the PvPers would also have the spike damage they need.
I really hope we can reign in the massive amounts of micro-alterations and focus on the initial goal - MAKING THE OTHER TREES PERFORM AS WELL AS TRAPPER.
Thanks again @amenar and team for all your hard work.
This entire re-tuning process has been disheartening. While I admire @amenar and team for the effort they have put in, they have gone about this the entirely wrong way.
Trapper is the least broken of the trees right now, based on both their data and the player meta data. It makes no sense at all to start disrupting every single encounter available to the HR (and inadvertently nerfing the one successful tree) under the guise of "boosting" the class when one of the three trees is viable on live server. It makes much more sense to examine :why: that one tree is viable, and to try and replicate that success than it does to "throw the baby out with the bathwater".
Hunter Ranger's were designed to have access to six encounters, vs. other classes' three. The entire basis for damage and buffing for the HR's encounters revolves around this - we have less damage and buffing per encounter because we have more of them to draw on. I would argue that's its intended to be this way; at least, its apparent to me in the TAB mechanic at the heart of the class. Of the three trees, however, only Trapper is able to leverage all six encounters to their optimum capacity. This has to do with a combination of the feats, abilities, and general mechanics of the game currently in place, and at least some of the problem has to do with how the trees were initially conceived.
Archer's are unable to leverage both halves of many encounters due to the range restrictions currently in place. You cannot be both 60+ yards away for enhanced damage, and able to utilize melee abilities with a limited range. Conversely, with the way the range buffing currently works, it makes no sense for them to try and use encounters that may have group buffs for the melee components, because in order to maximize personal damage they will be out of range of group support. In essence, although they have access to six encounters, 3 of them are useless. The feat tree needs offsets built in to it to compensate for this. Also, if the "60+ yard" range idea is to be preserved, the tree should also compensate for the loss of group buffs. (Personally I think this is a major hindrance - Archers should be able to remain close enough to the group to receive benefits without sacrificing their personal dps)
Combat, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. They are able to remain close enough to the group to receive and grant buffs - most of the dual-encounters are poorly designed, however, and the best "ranged" group buffs don't necessarily correspond to the best melee dps skills.
There's a very simple fix to this mess that both the community and developers seem to have overlooked: BUFF THE OTHER TREES WITH EQUIVALENT ENCOUNTER RECHARGE AND DAMAGE SO THAT THEY DON'T NEED TO STANCE-DANCE. This only requires changes to their feat trees at equivalent tiers to Trapper's Swiftness of the Fox and Thorned Roots.
For Archer, add the following effects to (or replace) existing feats: "Your ranged attacks reduce your ranged encounter cooldown's by XX%" and "When you remain in ranged stance for 10s, you gain YY% damage to all ranged powers". XX would have to be a number that gets them close to the Trapper's encounter cooldown reduction, while YY would be the number required to get compensate for Thorned Roots damage bonus. They would retain all six encounter, but would be incentivized to only use three of them, in keeping with their chosen path, while also ensuring that this is a viable choice.
For Combat, do the same, just tweaking the variables as needed. Heck, you could even augment the additional damage on Archery and Combat to augment Crit and Bleed (respectively) damage in lieu of Grasping Roots if you wanted to really add flavor, to capitalize on the HR's many strengths (Crits, Bleeds, Roots - each having their own tree).
This would compensate for Trappers use of six encounters while not breaking its current meta (which, as noted, is still sub-par compared to other classes) or fun-factor (which is currently incredible). It would also provide a clear choice between those HR's that chose to remain ranged, those that choose melee, and those that prefer a mixed path, while not overlapping existing classes - Combat HR's, for example, would be a very different creature from TR's.
If needed in PvP - and want to :emphasize: that I rarely PvP, so I am only forming an opinion based upon this thread's feedback - reduce the effectiveness of Crushing Roots... Crushing Roots is the only way a HR can have permadaze - it makes much more sense to just alter Crushing Roots if this is an issue than it does to rework every single encounter and at-will. Also, to make the PvPers happy, it would seem to make sense to rework one or two encounters (there are plenty that go unused) to have high burst damage, but charges and longer internal counters - make a couple high damage encounters with ONE charge and a long internal cooldown. Then the CD reduction feats wont affect them (so they can't be abused) but the PvPers would also have the spike damage they need.
I really hope we can reign in the massive amounts of micro-alterations and focus on the initial goal - MAKING THE OTHER TREES PERFORM AS WELL AS TRAPPER.
Thanks again @amenar and team for all your hard work.
+1 their is no actually perma-daze, people who do pvp without decent pvp gear get dazed constantly. but what you said in the whole of your post i agree with and i think what you said is the same thing i had said a page or two ago. give the range tree and combat tree a feat to buff their damage and cooldowns. though what you said is better put then when i said it. even if trapper is broken now it has plenty of time to be picked back up and put together differently as long as it remains a trapper that is; meant for control.
I have to agree with @forums700. Putting HRs as a whole to a worse state is not productive. No matter it is a bug fix or a nerf.
I have to say it is a pity that Devs touch Swiftness of fox before they have an alternative approach to keep the old playing style, which is very entertaining. I do hope Devs come up with a better solution here.
Ana-GWF SM Destroyer | Farseer-CW MoF Renegade | Leon-GF SM Tactician Adrik Battlefate-DC DO Virtuous | Cassi Woodsheart-HR PF Trapper
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gabrieldourdenMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,212Arc User
@amenar: went for another round of test at the Trade of Blades.
I did that on live where Steel Breeze has no charges like it will be in preview soon. I tried different rotations on a single dummy and dismissed my companion to avoid multiple procs of Swiftness of The Fox on buffs or Gushing Wound. I have 4,9k of recovery (Lathander's set, HR Artifact, Twisted weapons, 1 piece of armor with 974 points and a boon for 400 plus 200 points that I don't know where they come from). I probably have more recovery than most trappers in the game.
If I run with one single charge power or completely without charges the encounter rotation gap is somewhere in the range of 4-5 seconds. I couldn't really point out a difference between 1 charge power or none. Stacking recovery to 10k would probably work it out (or potentialy increasing Swiftness to 20% per activation).
With two charge-based powers (I tried Constrictive, Cordon, Hindering which is the most popular on live also according to your data) as soon as I run out of charges the gap goes up dramatically. Basically in this case melee powers are left on long cooldown (say somewhere around 9 seconds to get back the first one).
The rotation that works better is Constrictive, Longstrider, Cordon. As some time is anyway lost to move back and forth to keep the Longstrider buff up the rotation is decent with my current 5k of recovery. Unfortunately this rotation is quite difficult to handle in solo if everything rushes at you.
As far as I can see Longstrider procs Swiftness only if the buff triggers. I don't know if the new change to Swiftness will fix this (i.e. whether it will trigger on activation or not). Please keep an eye on this. Longstrider is a great power and the new Gushing Wound too (thanks for the buff on that one).
Le-Shan: HR level 80 (main)
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
macjaee has been pleading the case as it should so far, while some players are gettin pissed because they dont have patience or the same vision as the others, for what i understood what you wrote so far is that you are not pleased that swiftness of the fox got fixed even thou it was a bug, not a nerf. You want the class balance be revolved around a bug? you see thats wrong, the Hunter ranger issue is close to what GWF is atm: Instigator and Sentinel are like Combat and Archery, while Destroyer owns all the goodies: such as crazy ammount of damage bonus, to balance them out and have the same or close output damage for Destroyer on live, we will have to remove damage bonus from Destroyer and add that on base damage, teh same logic applies for hunter ranger in this case: trappers were gettin their damage from a bug that was givin recharge speed = 0 CDs and problably Thorned roots, while the other 2 paragons have nothing, for the sake of balance in PvE and PvP we asked for burst damage, but it wouldn't make sense to have burst damage + 0CDs ? right... so fixing swiftness of the fox was a must, now the HR is in a must need of bonus damage to perform and have the same output damage as before, and now it's the time to improve the base damage, it will not solve the combat and archery issues, but it will decrease the gap between the 3 paragons, the same thing should be done for GWF , and pretty sure amenar is tryin to achieve the same stuff for every class between their paragons, but the issue of the HR athand is between their paragons and how he must perform and it's standing against the other DPS classes.
There is no evidence at all that how swiftness works now is a bug. That is simply a claim being made by some of the people involved in this discussion, nothing more than an unsupported opinion. Swiftness is not acting in a way which is different from what is written in its tooltip.
Repeating, again and again, that it is bugged and broken does not make it true. Showing how things would be better if it worked differently would be far more constructive, but there's been precious little of that. The closest thing we have is ralexinor's suggestions but they are not proven to lead to a good outcome. Maybe they will, but as of now they are not.
So making the argument that a class should not be balanced around a bug is nonsense, when it hasn't been established that there is a bug in the first place. You can win any argument if you can dictate the starting premises, and that is the approach that is being taken here. However, there are a number of other possible solutions to balancing the three HR paths than changing swiftness. I have offered some solutions as have other people.
My problem with ralexinor's and macjae's approach is that at this point there is not one shred of evidence that what they want would lead to an improvement. If the development team has time, I am not opposed to all of their suggestions being implemented at once so we can see how it tests. But nerfing swiftness and not making substantial improvements to feats and encounter powers they recommended puts the trapper build in a much worse spot than it is now. Both testing and napkin math shows that very clearly.
There have been some other suggestions which I think would require fewer changes and give a good result. These involve allowing the same cooldown reductions to those paths, then seeing how they test for damage output against trapper. Further adjustments could be made to combat and archery feats and powers if they are still behind. What recommends this approach is it equalises the paths regarding cooldown reduction, and requires only a small number of changes to a few feats and encounter powers, rather than a rebalancing of all encounter power cooldowns, charges and damage output.
My fear about how our current trajectory is going and may come crashing down very soon is this:
Swiftness is nerfed, then powers are not adjusted up enough to compensate to offset the loss to trappers or to give enough help to combat and archery. The class goes from having one competitive path to none. The project succumbs to distraction and scope creep, ie, 'fixing' things which were working fine rather than focusing on the areas which did need help, then it bogs down in arguments about how exactly dozens of powers should be changed. Then the project leader realises they are out of time, stuff that isn't right goes live because they need move on to reviewing other classes, leaving all HRs in the dirt for an indeterminate period of time.
I have seen this sort of thing happen in other games and also in my professional life. It is a real danger. Time and resource constraints, lack of discipline in deciding then sticking to what is in and out of scope, as well as the effectiveness of lobbying, can produce very bad outcomes even when intentions were all good. I would love to be proved wrong about that happening here, but all the writing is on the wall so far that it isn't going to turn out well without some major changes.
@amenar If you nerf the Trapper by changing the feat Swiftness of the Fox. It will cripple our rotation and dmg. Not to mention anger the HR community nobody wants that on live. Its already causing mass panic and negative feed back. You would to have to decrease the cds times by a lot to make it the same playstyle and I last I checked our base orginal tool tips cd times are the longest in the game. Ranging from 14 to 20secs. Plus recovery doesn't work well, and we would have sacrifice stats we need and overhaule our gear to even get enough. Sure your giving us little buffs of stuff we don't really use but 10 to 30% dmg of nothing is still nothing. I commend you for really ripping apart all the builds but don't mess with the Trapper it's not the problem it's the other two builds. Trapper will not be functional. Even with the way it is currently it's buggy gliches and we still end up waiting for the cds especially Dragonborns. We will not be able to keep up with the other classes it's hard enough as it is. As it stands without buffs classes are balanced for the most part if you play them properly.Then with Buffs are ridiculously unblanced compared to one another due to how it scales for each of us and our gear. You guys already nerfed the buffs though. You want to make the other Trees viable then do it but don't mess with the Trapper.
Thank you for all your hard for work your doing a good job and I don't want you to get discouraged. Just don't mess with the Trappers Swiftness there very few of us that are actually good against the best as it is.
treesclimberMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,161Arc User
edited July 2016
@amenar you are awesome, keeping us updated. taking our sugestions in consideration to change the game, that is a huge deal, thank you, other 2 feedbacks that i think are important:
Feedback:Feat It would be great if Stillness of the forest had a treath reduction associated, endgame archery HR's will many times steal the aggro from other players and even uneperienced tanks.
Feedback: Power As some players said before marauder's escape should break control powers.
Post edited by treesclimber on
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treesclimberMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,161Arc User
edited July 2016
I honestly dont get where you take the "HR is dealing low damage" testing and re testing on preview i've reached with HR in a full run( not specializing aoe, single taget) similar results between HR and SW.
And please dont make comparission to classes that have not been rework yet, GWF will deal 2 times more damage than HR? probably for 2-3 months until rework reaches them. I mean i am foreseing a massive down the toilet nerf to hidden dagers for example.
The bottom line is that no class is supposed to have zero cooldowns. Something is borked. When TR had the bug with Knife's Edge and Bloodbath, everyone demanded it be fixed. This is no different. Getting Recovery like every other class has to do, is not going to break the class. The fact that the build is built around a bug, does not mean the bug has to stay. You could make the same case that Murderous Flames and the Soul Puppet should not be fixed as well.
Sorry but this is a load of bull. The Trapper class should have zero cool downs when used right, which is why most people actually play it. It is the only class you can get this chance to role play the game this way.
You only have 0 cool downs in the right situations in the right circumstances... It is not always and it also can depend on how many players are around, you can also mess it up completely and give yourself cool downs in combat.
Some rotations, right now, even when they all connect sometimes leave you with cool downs. I cannot imagine what those rotations will be like with enhanced cool downs. Some rotations only work with a certain number of people near by... more tactics and changing powers on the fly.
I have a rotation on my HR right now on the X1, when just me and my Companion are running around, after my 6 Encounters I switch to Ranged and have to wait up to 3 seconds for the Powers to finish cooling down... This is with 5 Points in Swiftness of the Fox and 3k Recovery... right now. So what is going to happen to that particular HR build with even more cool downs than that?
@amenar this really needs to be rethought as you are going to pigeon hole people in to finding 1 build that might work and give the cool downs needed. Then the entire HR community will be 1 character.
Main - Rydia (HR70) - Xbox One Player only Alts : Storm (SW70), Edge (TR70), AD Farm (CW70), Grunt (GF70), Rosa (DC70), AD AD AD (GWF70), Your Mum (OP70)
My fear about how our current trajectory is going and may come crashing down very soon is this:
Swiftness is nerfed, then powers are not adjusted up enough to compensate to offset the loss to trappers or to give enough help to combat and archery. The class goes from having one competitive path to none. The project succumbs to distraction and scope creep, ie, 'fixing' things which were working fine rather than focusing on the areas which did need help, then it bogs down in arguments about how exactly dozens of powers should be changed. Then the project leader realises they are out of time, stuff that isn't right goes live because they need move on to reviewing other classes, leaving all HRs in the dirt for an indeterminate period of time.
I have seen this sort of thing happen in other games and also in my professional life. It is a real danger. Time and resource constraints, lack of discipline in deciding then sticking to what is in and out of scope, as well as the effectiveness of lobbying, can produce very bad outcomes even when intentions were all good. I would love to be proved wrong about that happening here, but all the writing is on the wall so far that it isn't going to turn out well without some major changes.
Thanks.
As ironzerg says, the developer hasnt even conclude their work yet and there is 3 more weeks of testing and tweaking..i suggest u to wait till then before u conclude anything. Speculating about power not adjusted up enough is totally baseless. Its like arguing that the end of the world is 2012 back then. Just be patience and wait like the rest of us..adding unnecessary speculation isnt gonna help.
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gabrieldourdenMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,212Arc User
@amenar: went for another round of test at the Trade of Blades.
I did that on live where Steel Breeze has no charges like it will be in preview soon. I tried different rotations on a single dummy and dismissed my companion to avoid multiple procs of Swiftness of The Fox on buffs or Gushing Wound. I have 4,9k of recovery (Lathander's set, HR Artifact, Twisted weapons, 1 piece of armor with 974 points and a boon for 400 plus 200 points that I don't know where they come from). I probably have more recovery than most trappers in the game.
If I run with one single charge power or completely without charges the encounter rotation gap is somewhere in the range of 4-5 seconds. I couldn't really point out a difference between 1 charge power or none. Stacking recovery to 10k would probably work it out (or potentialy increasing Swiftness to 20% per activation).
With two charge-based powers (I tried Constrictive, Cordon, Hindering which is the most popular on live also according to your data) as soon as I run out of charges the gap goes up dramatically. Basically in this case melee powers are left on long cooldown (say somewhere around 9 seconds to get back the first one).
The rotation that works better is Constrictive, Longstrider, Cordon. As some time is anyway lost to move back and forth to keep the Longstrider buff up the rotation is decent with my current 5k of recovery. Unfortunately this rotation is quite difficult to handle in solo if everything rushes at you.
As far as I can see Longstrider procs Swiftness only if the buff triggers. I don't know if the new change to Swiftness will fix this (i.e. whether it will trigger on activation or not). Please keep an eye on this. Longstrider is a great power and the new Gushing Wound too (thanks for the buff on that one).
100% uptime buff at max stack for example longstrider buff? also continuous use of only 2 encounter refreshes each other not broken? cmon..think about it. U practically could abuse any encounter u want.
Removing multi target proc is merely just removing this broken a$$ feature..it does meant to cripple ur rotation. The CD reduction is still there..all u need to do is either
1) reduce the cooldown of encounter one bye one as suggested by others 2) start stacking recovery 3) increase the cooldown reduction of swiftness to close up the gap of ur rotation.
About the last line u said, i dont quite get it..are u saying spamming encounter power against even one enemy is making trapper more powerful? It makes me wonder the point of we having this conversation...
The damage and movement speed buff from longstrider lasts for four seconds, and during that period it decays from the start to end. While it's possible to keep longstrider up most of the time using certain rotations, it requires using other powers which do not offer the best damage output and also requires a less damaging style of play.
There is a cost for using a rotation built mainly to keep longstrider up, it's not a full-time 20% buff, and other classes have powers which offer better debuffing.
There are two factors at work here. It doesn't matter AT ALL if encounter powers can be cycled without interruption so long as their effects take that into account. A 20% buff with a 100% uptime is not necessarily better than a 40% buff with a 50% uptime. In some circumstances, the lower buff with the higher uptime is actually worse, because good teams can time the use of their powers to take best advantage of the larger buff within a shorter period. Right?
Changing the way swiftness works is absolutely pointless if you also make other changes to the feats and encounters to recover what was lost. My point here is making a lot of unnecessary changes to get us right back to the same point we were at is nothing more than a colossal waste of player and developer time.
My point about your suggestion making trappers more powerful is based on how swiftness is currently more effective against a larger number of targets. At the moment, trappers can't use encounter powers against a single non boss target as quickly as they can against a group of two, three four or five. Your change would remove the requirement for a certain style of play which skilled trappers use to do well, ie, dont kill things off one at a time and instead would allow encounters to be spammed non stop regardless of how many enemies or allies were around.
Thanks.
Your dont even understand how longstrider work and the multi target proc could do to it. U should get this straight 1st before trying to argue about its legitimacy.
@forums700 - if you apply the buff Longstrider actually multiprocs on live. To give you an example, next time you fight Orcus try this rotation while staying at a distance: Constrictive, Longstrider, tab, Hawkeye, tab. Only these three powers, without using their counterparts. If all your buddies are up and attacking Orcus this rotation self sustains itself and you can deal pretty decent damage and buff the party while staying at a distance because both Longstrider and Hawkeye multi-proc Swiftness of the Fox. Obviously if one or more of your teammates die it becomes clunky, but with a full group it is seamless. I often use it when we have no tank or the tank cannot deal with Orcus without dying. From my point of view this is a great example of how Swiftness of the Fox helps a trapper in adapting to the circumstances, but some other people on this thread will cry havok....
I have 4,9k recovery. If you have less you may see some gaps, but only short ones and you still have the chance to fill them with a daily or Hawk Shot. With my recovery you'll have no need.
To be 100% honest (if possible) I'd rather have Archer and Combat buffed up heavily on damage and recovery and the trapper transformed into a control/buff machine with no cooldowns and some of the feats reworked into enhancing our buff powers like we had before the horror of mod6 when the Nature path was still there.
If you greatly reduce the effect of Swiftness like currently planned on preview and buff up at-wills several times like proposed by some people then the difference between Combat and Trapper becomes blurred as the buffed at-will will hit like an encounter when Flurry is up (and @amenar: two seconds are probably a bit too short given the cooldowns a combat is gonna face without any help to reduce them from feats as the only cooldown reducing feat is too weak atm). The only differences will be Thorned roots that can be easily balanced with damage buffs on the Combat and a slightly longer duration of the roots. Both paths will always use Plant Growth because it hits better than anything else. The trapper will then have to use Constrictive or Binding and a third power, probably Longstrider (Hindering is not an option as there is no way to keep up with two charge-based powers). Both Constrictive and Binding hit less targets in average than Hindering due to the smaller radius of Constrictive and the line effect of Binding, so even the difference in control will be little. Currently T2 mobs have so much control resistance that the extra 60% control strength of the Trapper is a blink of an eye on Crushing roots and probably 1 second or slightly more on roots. Both me and one of my guildies tried to make a control-based build with Valindra's set and control companions and still in T2s you can't control stuff. Crushing roots base time is too short and stunning a mob for 0,10 or 0,25 seconds is basically the same (an interrupts). Roots on their own do very little as ranged mobs and casters can still attack you. The only area where you see a control difference is in solo where mobs are not so resistant and then roots run for reasonable times.
If you want to have a real controller then Master Trapper should have control penetration or something like that and crushing roots should have a longer duration like they had in the beginning (possibly reduced for PVP only). In that case you could remove Thorned Roots completely and transform the Trapper into a real control build.Remove some of the damage feats and transform them into buffs for the utility powers and then the Trapper will become a controller/buffer tree with some meaning, not sharing the same space of combat.
Post edited by gabrieldourden on
Le-Shan: HR level 80 (main)
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
@amenar: went for another round of test at the Trade of Blades.
I did that on live where Steel Breeze has no charges like it will be in preview soon. I tried different rotations on a single dummy and dismissed my companion to avoid multiple procs of Swiftness of The Fox on buffs or Gushing Wound. I have 4,9k of recovery (Lathander's set, HR Artifact, Twisted weapons, 1 piece of armor with 974 points and a boon for 400 plus 200 points that I don't know where they come from). I probably have more recovery than most trappers in the game.
If I run with one single charge power or completely without charges the encounter rotation gap is somewhere in the range of 4-5 seconds. I couldn't really point out a difference between 1 charge power or none. Stacking recovery to 10k would probably work it out (or potentialy increasing Swiftness to 20% per activation).
With two charge-based powers (I tried Constrictive, Cordon, Hindering which is the most popular on live also according to your data) as soon as I run out of charges the gap goes up dramatically. Basically in this case melee powers are left on long cooldown (say somewhere around 9 seconds to get back the first one).
The rotation that works better is Constrictive, Longstrider, Cordon. As some time is anyway lost to move back and forth to keep the Longstrider buff up the rotation is decent with my current 5k of recovery. Unfortunately this rotation is quite difficult to handle in solo if everything rushes at you.
As far as I can see Longstrider procs Swiftness only if the buff triggers. I don't know if the new change to Swiftness will fix this (i.e. whether it will trigger on activation or not). Please keep an eye on this. Longstrider is a great power and the new Gushing Wound too (thanks for the buff on that one).
100% uptime buff at max stack for example longstrider buff? also continuous use of only 2 encounter refreshes each other not broken? cmon..think about it. U practically could abuse any encounter u want.
Removing multi target proc is merely just removing this broken a$$ feature..it does meant to cripple ur rotation. The CD reduction is still there..all u need to do is either
1) reduce the cooldown of encounter one bye one as suggested by others 2) start stacking recovery 3) increase the cooldown reduction of swiftness to close up the gap of ur rotation.
About the last line u said, i dont quite get it..are u saying spamming encounter power against even one enemy is making trapper more powerful? It makes me wonder the point of we having this conversation...
The damage and movement speed buff from longstrider lasts for four seconds, and during that period it decays from the start to end. While it's possible to keep longstrider up most of the time using certain rotations, it requires using other powers which do not offer the best damage output and also requires a less damaging style of play.
There is a cost for using a rotation built mainly to keep longstrider up, it's not a full-time 20% buff, and other classes have powers which offer better debuffing.
There are two factors at work here. It doesn't matter AT ALL if encounter powers can be cycled without interruption so long as their effects take that into account. A 20% buff with a 100% uptime is not necessarily better than a 40% buff with a 50% uptime. In some circumstances, the lower buff with the higher uptime is actually worse, because good teams can time the use of their powers to take best advantage of the larger buff within a shorter period. Right?
Changing the way swiftness works is absolutely pointless if you also make other changes to the feats and encounters to recover what was lost. My point here is making a lot of unnecessary changes to get us right back to the same point we were at is nothing more than a colossal waste of player and developer time.
My point about your suggestion making trappers more powerful is based on how swiftness is currently more effective against a larger number of targets. At the moment, trappers can't use encounter powers against a single non boss target as quickly as they can against a group of two, three four or five. Your change would remove the requirement for a certain style of play which skilled trappers use to do well, ie, dont kill things off one at a time and instead would allow encounters to be spammed non stop regardless of how many enemies or allies were around.
Thanks.
Your dont even understand how longstrider work and the multi target proc could do to it. U should get this straight 1st before trying to argue about its legitimacy.
@forums700 - if you apply the buff Longstrider actually multiprocs on live. To give you an example, next time you fight Orcus try this rotation while staying at a distance: Constrictive, Longstrider, tab, Hawkeye, tab. Only these three powers, without using their counterparts. If all your buddies are up and attacking Orcus this rotation self sustains itself and you can deal pretty decent damage and buff the party while staying at a distance because both Longstrider and Hawkeye multi-proc Swiftness of the Fox. Obviously if one or more of your teammates die it becomes clunky, but with a full group it is seamless. I often use it when we have no tank or the tank cannot deal with Orcus without dying. From my point of view this is a great example of how Swiftness of the Fox helps a trapper in adapting to the circumstances, but some other people on this thread will cry havok....
P.S: I have 4,9k recovery. If you have less you may see some gaps, but only short ones and you still have the change to fill them with a daily or Hawk Shot. With my recovery you'll have no need.
As ironzerg says, the developer hasnt even conclude their work yet and there is 3 more weeks of testing and tweaking..i suggest u to wait till then before u conclude anything. Speculating about power not adjusted up enough is totally baseless. Its like arguing that the end of the world is 2012 back then. Just be patience and wait like the rest of us..adding unnecessary speculation isnt gonna help.
It's a staged testing process. Changes are being made progressively, and we have been invited to test them as they are made and provide feedback as we go. That is how the developers have asked us to do it.
Waiting to the end and providing all the feedback in one go at the end means the opportunity to make further adjustments is lost when time runs out. It also means you cannot look at changes in isolation from each other rather than all together.
The conclusions I've made are based on what the situation is now. As things change, I will modify my position if that seems like the best course of action. It would be a tactical error to say nothing now, sit back and hope it all turns out all right, then get caught at the end because the developers have run out of time. If you see danger signs, you don't just ignore them, that is the height of foolishness.
However, if you think saying nothing for now is for the best approach, you are welcome to do that yourself. I look forward to seeing you take your own advice rather than being caught in the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another.
What I don't need is people like you attempting to portray my position as ill-informed and/or premature because you are having difficulty coming up with facts and logical arguments to support your own ideas.
As ironzerg says, the developer hasnt even conclude their work yet and there is 3 more weeks of testing and tweaking..i suggest u to wait till then before u conclude anything. Speculating about power not adjusted up enough is totally baseless. Its like arguing that the end of the world is 2012 back then. Just be patience and wait like the rest of us..adding unnecessary speculation isnt gonna help.
It's a staged testing process. Changes are being made progressively, and we have been invited to test them as they are made and provide feedback as we go. That is how the developers have asked us to do it.
Waiting to the end and providing all the feedback in one go at the end means the opportunity to make further adjustments is lost when time runs out. It also means you cannot look at changes in isolation from each other rather than all together.
The conclusions I've made are based on what the situation is now. As things change, I will modify my position if that seems like the best course of action. It would be a tactical error to say nothing now, sit back and hope it all turns out all right, then get caught at the end because the developers have run out of time.
However, if you think saying nothing for noe is for the best apporoach, you are welcome to do that yourself. I look forward to taking your own advice rather than being caught in the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another.
What I don't need is people like you attempting to portray my position as ill-informed and/or premature because you are having difficulty coming up with facts and logical arguments to support your position.
Thanks.
Problem is the developer themselves didnt indicate anything about running out of time and there u go speculating again totally based on what u feel.
The bottom line is that no class is supposed to have zero cooldowns. Something is borked. When TR had the bug with Knife's Edge and Bloodbath, everyone demanded it be fixed. This is no different. Getting Recovery like every other class has to do, is not going to break the class. The fact that the build is built around a bug, does not mean the bug has to stay. You could make the same case that Murderous Flames and the Soul Puppet should not be fixed as well.
Sorry but this is a load of bull. The Trapper class should have zero cool downs when used right, which is why most people actually play it. It is the only class you can get this chance to role play the game this way.
You only have 0 cool downs in the right situations in the right circumstances... It is not always and it also can depend on how many players are around, you can also mess it up completely and give yourself cool downs in combat.
Some rotations, right now, even when they all connect sometimes leave you with cool downs. I cannot imagine what those rotations will be like with enhanced cool downs. Some rotations only work with a certain number of people near by... more tactics and changing powers on the fly.
I have a rotation on my HR right now on the X1, when just me and my Companion are running around, after my 6 Encounters I switch to Ranged and have to wait up to 3 seconds for the Powers to finish cooling down... This is with 5 Points in Swiftness of the Fox and 3k Recovery... right now. So what is going to happen to that particular HR build with even more cool downs than that?
@amenar this really needs to be rethought as you are going to pigeon hole people in to finding 1 build that might work and give the cool downs needed. Then the entire HR community will be 1 character.
1 other thing... we all know how poor a HR/Trapper is in PvP... well imagine what that HR/Trapper is going to be like in PvP with cool downs? ha ha lol it makes me laugh just thinking about it. Minimal damage, minimal healing and a sitting duck waiting for powers to come back up. Sometimes the only way to stay alive (and have a chance at damaging someone) in PvP are the rotations.
Also if the sustained minimal damage cannot be achieved (don't forget most people out heal our damage as it is) then how are we going to be able to kill anyone at all?
Main - Rydia (HR70) - Xbox One Player only Alts : Storm (SW70), Edge (TR70), AD Farm (CW70), Grunt (GF70), Rosa (DC70), AD AD AD (GWF70), Your Mum (OP70)
Problem is the developer themselves didnt indicate anything about running out of time and there u go speculating again totally based on what u feel.
What are you trying to say here? This exercise has an end point. It may not be set in stone, but it will come to an end, don't doubt it.
Waiting until right before that end point, where there may be more people offering feedback and there will be less time for the developers to do anything with it is pretty uncontroversial. It's pretty obvious that you want to stifle discussion by telling people to wait until the end, but fortunately you aren't the one setting the terms of this process.
Do you think that we have an unlimited amount of time to make these changes? And that all feedback will be taken into account and implemented whenever it is presented? If so, you are sadly mistaken.
@forums700 - if you apply the buff Longstrider actually multiprocs on live.
I'm aware that longstrider multiprocs on live because it's part of my regular rotation. I don't know why the other poster thinks I don't understand that, but I do. Perhaps he can explain it.
Thanks.
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lirithielMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,482Arc User
The launch of Mod 10 does NOT mean there will be no further changes made. It's an on-going process and one that will bear fruit in the end. Stop all the drama and have faith that the HR class will be better in the coming weeks.
Our pain is self chosen.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
lets wait for final balance in preview before we decide and hopefully @amenar - will finish what was started because as of now we are more broke than we were.
At ist I was very upset being maxed in my class and still cant compete in pvp is a major source of frustration for me. then to wreck PVE and my play style also when no nerfs were promised. I do admit after trying to boost recovery and finding it impossible, I then became even more frustrated. then I voice it on here which is sad since I am usually very easy going . I apologize for my outburst but I only play HR and will die with the class before going thru that grind again on another toon.
now we can only leave our fates in the Devs hands which worries me all I see is nerfs and small Damage increase and over all came away with worse than we were
as far as other HRs that don't like trapper I understand this and that your choice and I respect that and wish none of you ill will and respect most of you. If it seems I was bashing you I was not and do not want others to do that either but ever mod since 5 I have taken it in the teeth and some where it needs to be a betterment for me to stay in this game. Ara
PLEASE we have to get back to topic the other classes that smell the blood in the water are starting to pick us apart I would say most of the post in last 4 pages are not even HR. How can Our Dev fix us he will not have time to read all the bickering opinions need to be done now get us some thing to test.
For devs Go to wilds forums see the HR who play the class these are there every day suporting the HR class Aravein@jhpnw, feanor70118,@dmcewen,rayrdan,wdj40,durugudesu,lirithiel, hawkend. and Mcjae let us test your balances and give good feed back we have archers combat and trappers here and you will get honest opinions of HRs not trolls for the PVP guilds agenda. I would have included Sandstorm(ralexinor ) but she has uninstalled the game Thou I would have loved to have input on changes and what we need. I have played all trees of HR and went trapper due to I pvp and I do like feel of trapper but will play which ever tree is best for my goals
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lirithielMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,482Arc User
edited July 2016
It would be nice if HRs had more options for class features. As an Archer I use Aspect of the Pack and Twin-Blade Storm. Even on single-target fights, there aren't better options for me. As Combat I use Aspect of the Pack and Blade Storm. My guess is that most Trappers use Aspect of the Serpent and Seeker's Vengeance. There are far too many that are underwhelming - most of the Pathfinder ones in fact (Battlehoned, Pathfinder's Action, Cruel Recovery). IMO others could use a rework too: Aspect of the Falcon, Stormstep Action.
Our pain is self chosen.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
I'd also like to see some more attention given to class features.
Seeker's vengeance is a pretty good one especially when you have the off hand artifact power active. I use it a lot and see it adding a good amount of damage to bosses when you're in position and the DoT procs. There are some fights where getting behind a boss is impossible or very dangerous, but apart from those it's not usually hard to do.
Cruel recovery doesn't really seem to do anything, and I've heard other HRs saying that it is currently broken. Even if it was working properly, it looks underwhelming compared to the others.
Battlehoned really needs a boost. The bonus to incoming healing from the increased regen stat is very small, and regen itself doesn't heal during combat anymore. Even if the numbers were boosted a lot it wouldn't be very good compared to the others. If it provided a significant amount more healing amplification to the whole party not just the HR, or worked all the time, that might be enough to get some people using it.
I'd also like to see the coding for Careful Attack get a once over and a change if there's any way to make it work more efficiently. It's widely believed in the community that CA causes lag during large fights, but it would be really nice for pathfinders to be able to use this ability without causing problems for other players and being hassled about it. I've never heard anyone complain about gushing wound causing lag, so maybe if CA worked more similarly to GW using it in Tiamat and for dragon runs wouldn't be such a no-no.
Thanks.
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lirithielMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,482Arc User
I'd also like to see the coding for Careful Attack get a once over and a change if there's any way to make it work more efficiently. It's widely believed in the community that CA causes lag during large fights, but it would be really nice for pathfinders to be able to use this ability without causing problems for other players and being hassled about it. I've never heard anyone complain about gushing wound causing lag, so maybe if CA worked more similarly to GW using it in Tiamat and for dragon runs wouldn't be such a no-no.
It is not a myth that CA causes lag in big encounters. That is because of the way it interacts with the rest of the group and is similar to the way Astral Seal worked before they changed it. CA does damage for every player attacking the mob. Now imagine 40 players attacking a Herald in WoD, causing damage every 1.5 seconds from each source attacking the dragon = lag.
It was noticeable on a DF run I did a while back. Our leader made sure to inform the party not to use suspected powers that caused lag. We did the run and lo-and-behold we encountered terrible lag. Afterwards our leader looked at the combat log and saw that 1 HR had indeed used CA on that run.
Our pain is self chosen.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
Food for thought, I posted over in the HR section but relevant to this thread.
Without multiproccing cool downs are going to be a joke. You are going to HAVE to use all 6 Encounters in your rotation, there will be no connecting with some powers to allow using powers in different order in combat... all those tactics/fluidity will be gone.
Any Trapper Hunter Ranger that uses 2 or 3 buffs in their rotations are going to have to wait aaaaages for their cool downs (the buffs fire so fast you will back in the other stance very quickly).
What about our lovely Trans Dread Enchantment... A lot of us have this equipped along with Aspect of the Serpent. This generally means we cannot use At-Wills as they will waste a stack of AotS... What are we supposed to do during the period of waiting for cool downs? At-Wills are only useful at the end of rotations so you cannot use them before the Encounters when you switch.
Main - Rydia (HR70) - Xbox One Player only Alts : Storm (SW70), Edge (TR70), AD Farm (CW70), Grunt (GF70), Rosa (DC70), AD AD AD (GWF70), Your Mum (OP70)
This class feature is useless, even change for incoming health would not help to improve this power to being usability for HRs. Instead this i'd be interested in changing this class feature into Shield based on taken damage from enemy and ours hit points for a short period. It could be good in PvE/PvP wise because you're releasing Everfrost damage. Additionaly i'd like change a Battlehorned offhand into this: - Battlehorned offhand: When you are under 30% of your hit points, you gain additional 10% deflect severity. Effect is not stackable.
Additional notes:
/not required/ Class feature activating under x % of hit points. /required/ Cooldown, otherwise it'll be too broken. /required/ limit of absorbed damage based on entering/leaving combat or separated timer.
It is not a myth that CA causes lag in big encounters.
I don't really want to get into an argument about CA, although I will say that I don't think it always causes severe lag as some people say. Despite my reservations, I do not use this power in dragon runs or tiamat.
There are other things which can cause lag, including other abilities, interactions between abilities, and even temporary load balancing issues on servers or network congestion.
So the argument that because there was lag and careful attack was used, careful attack is definitely to blame for it doesn't seem like it's necessarily always true. Try to remember that while we can guess at the causes of lag, and even note a reliable correlation between an action and decreased game performance, we as players cannot actually see the causes of the lag.
What I would like, though, is for CA to be usable in all content. It seems like one of the best perks for pathfinders, and if we were completely certain that it didn't cause lag, it could add a huge amount of damage to bosses in large groups.
Gushing wound doesn't seem to cause the same problem, so maybe one of the coders could take another look at CA, compare how the two work, and see if any performance improvements could be made. If it is a bandwith issue, then it might be as simple as making the CA proc larger but occurring less frequently.
Comments
like your response and ill do the same as you, try to stay on topic and with facts.
The damage and movement speed buff from longstrider lasts for four seconds, and during that period it decays from the start to end. While it's possible to keep longstrider up most of the time using certain rotations, it requires using other powers which do not offer the best damage output and also requires a less damaging style of play.
There is a cost for using a rotation built mainly to keep longstrider up, it's not a full-time 20% buff, and other classes have powers which offer better debuffing.
There are two factors at work here. It doesn't matter AT ALL if encounter powers can be cycled without interruption so long as their effects take that into account. A 20% buff with a 100% uptime is not necessarily better than a 40% buff with a 50% uptime. In some circumstances, the lower buff with the higher uptime is actually worse, because good teams can time the use of their powers to take best advantage of the larger buff within a shorter period. Right?
Changing the way swiftness works is absolutely pointless if you also make other changes to the feats and encounters to recover what was lost. My point here is making a lot of unnecessary changes to get us right back to the same point we were at is nothing more than a colossal waste of player and developer time.
My point about your suggestion making trappers more powerful is based on how swiftness is currently more effective against a larger number of targets. At the moment, trappers can't use encounter powers against a single non boss target as quickly as they can against a group of two, three four or five. Your change would remove the requirement for a certain style of play which skilled trappers use to do well, ie, dont kill things off one at a time and instead would allow encounters to be spammed non stop regardless of how many enemies or allies were around.
Thanks.
trapper is not actually meant for damage, that's why in the beginning developers said they are only going to do small changes to the trapper and bigger ones to the other trees. hopefully the trapper gets back in line but not by giving us back what we lost. but by giving us something different in return.
giving the hr less cooldown and slightly higher damage is nice, but all we need is lower cooldowns and our thorned roots to work on immune targets. making thorned roots dot effect the boss would fix most of the damage problem, as the thorned roots hits for a single time against immune targets and doesn't tick.
and forums700 is right as trappers are only good against mobs not single targets or bosses.
the archery tree and combat tree just need better damage and mobility as well as survival.
but trapper tree needs its control fixed.
as for stacking recovery, in my opinion i think an hr should only need about 600 recovery that's one mythic artifact. any more recovery is just to improve on getting encounters somewhat faster. maybe the developers should fix how recovery affects out cooldowns so that all the classes can benefit from it that way 600 would actually be useful instead of needing 5k-10k. as someone else has said and he tested it he was testing recovery and said that he needed about 8k-10k and that's why too much needed. i can understand 2k or less, but any more and then its a burden to the other stats
Trapper is the least broken of the trees right now, based on both their data and the player meta data. It makes no sense at all to start disrupting every single encounter available to the HR (and inadvertently nerfing the one successful tree) under the guise of "boosting" the class when one of the three trees is viable on live server. It makes much more sense to examine :why: that one tree is viable, and to try and replicate that success than it does to "throw the baby out with the bathwater".
Hunter Ranger's were designed to have access to six encounters, vs. other classes' three. The entire basis for damage and buffing for the HR's encounters revolves around this - we have less damage and buffing per encounter because we have more of them to draw on. I would argue that's its intended to be this way; at least, its apparent to me in the TAB mechanic at the heart of the class. Of the three trees, however, only Trapper is able to leverage all six encounters to their optimum capacity. This has to do with a combination of the feats, abilities, and general mechanics of the game currently in place, and at least some of the problem has to do with how the trees were initially conceived.
Archer's are unable to leverage both halves of many encounters due to the range restrictions currently in place. You cannot be both 60+ yards away for enhanced damage, and able to utilize melee abilities with a limited range. Conversely, with the way the range buffing currently works, it makes no sense for them to try and use encounters that may have group buffs for the melee components, because in order to maximize personal damage they will be out of range of group support. In essence, although they have access to six encounters, 3 of them are useless. The feat tree needs offsets built in to it to compensate for this. Also, if the "60+ yard" range idea is to be preserved, the tree should also compensate for the loss of group buffs. (Personally I think this is a major hindrance - Archers should be able to remain close enough to the group to receive benefits without sacrificing their personal dps)
Combat, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. They are able to remain close enough to the group to receive and grant buffs - most of the dual-encounters are poorly designed, however, and the best "ranged" group buffs don't necessarily correspond to the best melee dps skills.
There's a very simple fix to this mess that both the community and developers seem to have overlooked: BUFF THE OTHER TREES WITH EQUIVALENT ENCOUNTER RECHARGE AND DAMAGE SO THAT THEY DON'T NEED TO STANCE-DANCE. This only requires changes to their feat trees at equivalent tiers to Trapper's Swiftness of the Fox and Thorned Roots.
For Archer, add the following effects to (or replace) existing feats: "Your ranged attacks reduce your ranged encounter cooldown's by XX%" and "When you remain in ranged stance for 10s, you gain YY% damage to all ranged powers". XX would have to be a number that gets them close to the Trapper's encounter cooldown reduction, while YY would be the number required to get compensate for Thorned Roots damage bonus. They would retain all six encounter, but would be incentivized to only use three of them, in keeping with their chosen path, while also ensuring that this is a viable choice.
For Combat, do the same, just tweaking the variables as needed. Heck, you could even augment the additional damage on Archery and Combat to augment Crit and Bleed (respectively) damage in lieu of Grasping Roots if you wanted to really add flavor, to capitalize on the HR's many strengths (Crits, Bleeds, Roots - each having their own tree).
This would compensate for Trappers use of six encounters while not breaking its current meta (which, as noted, is still sub-par compared to other classes) or fun-factor (which is currently incredible). It would also provide a clear choice between those HR's that chose to remain ranged, those that choose melee, and those that prefer a mixed path, while not overlapping existing classes - Combat HR's, for example, would be a very different creature from TR's.
If needed in PvP - and want to :emphasize: that I rarely PvP, so I am only forming an opinion based upon this thread's feedback - reduce the effectiveness of Crushing Roots... Crushing Roots is the only way a HR can have permadaze - it makes much more sense to just alter Crushing Roots if this is an issue than it does to rework every single encounter and at-will. Also, to make the PvPers happy, it would seem to make sense to rework one or two encounters (there are plenty that go unused) to have high burst damage, but charges and longer internal counters - make a couple high damage encounters with ONE charge and a long internal cooldown. Then the CD reduction feats wont affect them (so they can't be abused) but the PvPers would also have the spike damage they need.
I really hope we can reign in the massive amounts of micro-alterations and focus on the initial goal - MAKING THE OTHER TREES PERFORM AS WELL AS TRAPPER.
Thanks again @amenar and team for all your hard work.
their is no actually perma-daze, people who do pvp without decent pvp gear get dazed constantly. but what you said in the whole of your post i agree with and i think what you said is the same thing i had said a page or two ago. give the range tree and combat tree a feat to buff their damage and cooldowns.
though what you said is better put then when i said it.
even if trapper is broken now it has plenty of time to be picked back up and put together differently as long as it remains a trapper that is; meant for control.
I have to say it is a pity that Devs touch Swiftness of fox before they have an alternative approach to keep the old playing style, which is very entertaining. I do hope Devs come up with a better solution here.
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I did that on live where Steel Breeze has no charges like it will be in preview soon. I tried different rotations on a single dummy and dismissed my companion to avoid multiple procs of Swiftness of The Fox on buffs or Gushing Wound.
I have 4,9k of recovery (Lathander's set, HR Artifact, Twisted weapons, 1 piece of armor with 974 points and a boon for 400 plus 200 points that I don't know where they come from). I probably have more recovery than most trappers in the game.
If I run with one single charge power or completely without charges the encounter rotation gap is somewhere in the range of 4-5 seconds. I couldn't really point out a difference between 1 charge power or none. Stacking recovery to 10k would probably work it out (or potentialy increasing Swiftness to 20% per activation).
With two charge-based powers (I tried Constrictive, Cordon, Hindering which is the most popular on live also according to your data) as soon as I run out of charges the gap goes up dramatically. Basically in this case melee powers are left on long cooldown (say somewhere around 9 seconds to get back the first one).
The rotation that works better is Constrictive, Longstrider, Cordon. As some time is anyway lost to move back and forth to keep the Longstrider buff up the rotation is decent with my current 5k of recovery. Unfortunately this rotation is quite difficult to handle in solo if everything rushes at you.
As far as I can see Longstrider procs Swiftness only if the buff triggers. I don't know if the new change to Swiftness will fix this (i.e. whether it will trigger on activation or not). Please keep an eye on this. Longstrider is a great power and the new Gushing Wound too (thanks for the buff on that one).
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
Repeating, again and again, that it is bugged and broken does not make it true. Showing how things would be better if it worked differently would be far more constructive, but there's been precious little of that. The closest thing we have is ralexinor's suggestions but they are not proven to lead to a good outcome. Maybe they will, but as of now they are not.
So making the argument that a class should not be balanced around a bug is nonsense, when it hasn't been established that there is a bug in the first place. You can win any argument if you can dictate the starting premises, and that is the approach that is being taken here. However, there are a number of other possible solutions to balancing the three HR paths than changing swiftness. I have offered some solutions as have other people.
My problem with ralexinor's and macjae's approach is that at this point there is not one shred of evidence that what they want would lead to an improvement. If the development team has time, I am not opposed to all of their suggestions being implemented at once so we can see how it tests. But nerfing swiftness and not making substantial improvements to feats and encounter powers they recommended puts the trapper build in a much worse spot than it is now. Both testing and napkin math shows that very clearly.
There have been some other suggestions which I think would require fewer changes and give a good result. These involve allowing the same cooldown reductions to those paths, then seeing how they test for damage output against trapper. Further adjustments could be made to combat and archery feats and powers if they are still behind. What recommends this approach is it equalises the paths regarding cooldown reduction, and requires only a small number of changes to a few feats and encounter powers, rather than a rebalancing of all encounter power cooldowns, charges and damage output.
My fear about how our current trajectory is going and may come crashing down very soon is this:
Swiftness is nerfed, then powers are not adjusted up enough to compensate to offset the loss to trappers or to give enough help to combat and archery. The class goes from having one competitive path to none. The project succumbs to distraction and scope creep, ie, 'fixing' things which were working fine rather than focusing on the areas which did need help, then it bogs down in arguments about how exactly dozens of powers should be changed. Then the project leader realises they are out of time, stuff that isn't right goes live because they need move on to reviewing other classes, leaving all HRs in the dirt for an indeterminate period of time.
I have seen this sort of thing happen in other games and also in my professional life. It is a real danger. Time and resource constraints, lack of discipline in deciding then sticking to what is in and out of scope, as well as the effectiveness of lobbying, can produce very bad outcomes even when intentions were all good. I would love to be proved wrong about that happening here, but all the writing is on the wall so far that it isn't going to turn out well without some major changes.
Thanks.
Thank you for all your hard for work your doing a good job and I don't want you to get discouraged. Just don't mess with the Trappers Swiftness there very few of us that are actually good against the best as it is.
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Main: EMERALD LEGEND
Feedback:Feat
It would be great if Stillness of the forest had a treath reduction associated, endgame archery HR's will many times steal the aggro from other players and even uneperienced tanks.
Feedback: Power
As some players said before marauder's escape should break control powers.
And please dont make comparission to classes that have not been rework yet, GWF will deal 2 times more damage than HR? probably for 2-3 months until rework reaches them. I mean i am foreseing a massive down the toilet nerf to hidden dagers for example.
You only have 0 cool downs in the right situations in the right circumstances... It is not always and it also can depend on how many players are around, you can also mess it up completely and give yourself cool downs in combat.
Some rotations, right now, even when they all connect sometimes leave you with cool downs. I cannot imagine what those rotations will be like with enhanced cool downs. Some rotations only work with a certain number of people near by... more tactics and changing powers on the fly.
I have a rotation on my HR right now on the X1, when just me and my Companion are running around, after my 6 Encounters I switch to Ranged and have to wait up to 3 seconds for the Powers to finish cooling down... This is with 5 Points in Swiftness of the Fox and 3k Recovery... right now. So what is going to happen to that particular HR build with even more cool downs than that?
@amenar this really needs to be rethought as you are going to pigeon hole people in to finding 1 build that might work and give the cool downs needed. Then the entire HR community will be 1 character.
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My fear about how our current trajectory is going and may come crashing down very soon is this:
Swiftness is nerfed, then powers are not adjusted up enough to compensate to offset the loss to trappers or to give enough help to combat and archery. The class goes from having one competitive path to none. The project succumbs to distraction and scope creep, ie, 'fixing' things which were working fine rather than focusing on the areas which did need help, then it bogs down in arguments about how exactly dozens of powers should be changed. Then the project leader realises they are out of time, stuff that isn't right goes live because they need move on to reviewing other classes, leaving all HRs in the dirt for an indeterminate period of time.
I have seen this sort of thing happen in other games and also in my professional life. It is a real danger. Time and resource constraints, lack of discipline in deciding then sticking to what is in and out of scope, as well as the effectiveness of lobbying, can produce very bad outcomes even when intentions were all good. I would love to be proved wrong about that happening here, but all the writing is on the wall so far that it isn't going to turn out well without some major changes.
Thanks.
As ironzerg says, the developer hasnt even conclude their work yet and there is 3 more weeks of testing and tweaking..i suggest u to wait till then before u conclude anything. Speculating about power not adjusted up enough is totally baseless. Its like arguing that the end of the world is 2012 back then. Just be patience and wait like the rest of us..adding unnecessary speculation isnt gonna help.
Obviously if one or more of your teammates die it becomes clunky, but with a full group it is seamless. I often use it when we have no tank or the tank cannot deal with Orcus without dying.
From my point of view this is a great example of how Swiftness of the Fox helps a trapper in adapting to the circumstances, but some other people on this thread will cry havok....
I have 4,9k recovery. If you have less you may see some gaps, but only short ones and you still have the chance to fill them with a daily or Hawk Shot. With my recovery you'll have no need.
To be 100% honest (if possible) I'd rather have Archer and Combat buffed up heavily on damage and recovery and the trapper transformed into a control/buff machine with no cooldowns and some of the feats reworked into enhancing our buff powers like we had before the horror of mod6 when the Nature path was still there.
If you greatly reduce the effect of Swiftness like currently planned on preview and buff up at-wills several times like proposed by some people then the difference between Combat and Trapper becomes blurred as the buffed at-will will hit like an encounter when Flurry is up (and @amenar: two seconds are probably a bit too short given the cooldowns a combat is gonna face without any help to reduce them from feats as the only cooldown reducing feat is too weak atm).
The only differences will be Thorned roots that can be easily balanced with damage buffs on the Combat and a slightly longer duration of the roots.
Both paths will always use Plant Growth because it hits better than anything else. The trapper will then have to use Constrictive or Binding and a third power, probably Longstrider (Hindering is not an option as there is no way to keep up with two charge-based powers).
Both Constrictive and Binding hit less targets in average than Hindering due to the smaller radius of Constrictive and the line effect of Binding, so even the difference in control will be little.
Currently T2 mobs have so much control resistance that the extra 60% control strength of the Trapper is a blink of an eye on Crushing roots and probably 1 second or slightly more on roots. Both me and one of my guildies tried to make a control-based build with Valindra's set and control companions and still in T2s you can't control stuff. Crushing roots base time is too short and stunning a mob for 0,10 or 0,25 seconds is basically the same (an interrupts). Roots on their own do very little as ranged mobs and casters can still attack you.
The only area where you see a control difference is in solo where mobs are not so resistant and then roots run for reasonable times.
If you want to have a real controller then Master Trapper should have control penetration or something like that and crushing roots should have a longer duration like they had in the beginning (possibly reduced for PVP only). In that case you could remove Thorned Roots completely and transform the Trapper into a real control build.Remove some of the damage feats and transform them into buffs for the utility powers and then the Trapper will become a controller/buffer tree with some meaning, not sharing the same space of combat.
Born of Black Wind: SW Level 80
Waiting to the end and providing all the feedback in one go at the end means the opportunity to make further adjustments is lost when time runs out. It also means you cannot look at changes in isolation from each other rather than all together.
The conclusions I've made are based on what the situation is now. As things change, I will modify my position if that seems like the best course of action. It would be a tactical error to say nothing now, sit back and hope it all turns out all right, then get caught at the end because the developers have run out of time. If you see danger signs, you don't just ignore them, that is the height of foolishness.
However, if you think saying nothing for now is for the best approach, you are welcome to do that yourself. I look forward to seeing you take your own advice rather than being caught in the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another.
What I don't need is people like you attempting to portray my position as ill-informed and/or premature because you are having difficulty coming up with facts and logical arguments to support your own ideas.
Thanks.
Also if the sustained minimal damage cannot be achieved (don't forget most people out heal our damage as it is) then how are we going to be able to kill anyone at all?
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Waiting until right before that end point, where there may be more people offering feedback and there will be less time for the developers to do anything with it is pretty uncontroversial. It's pretty obvious that you want to stifle discussion by telling people to wait until the end, but fortunately you aren't the one setting the terms of this process.
Do you think that we have an unlimited amount of time to make these changes? And that all feedback will be taken into account and implemented whenever it is presented? If so, you are sadly mistaken.
Thanks.
Thanks.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
we have to get back to topic the other classes that smell the blood in the water are starting to pick us apart I would say most of the post in last 4 pages are not even HR. How can Our Dev fix us he will not have time to read all the bickering opinions need to be done now get us some thing to test.
For devs Go to wilds forums see the HR who play the class these are there every day suporting the HR class Aravein@jhpnw, feanor70118,@dmcewen,rayrdan,wdj40,durugudesu,lirithiel, hawkend. and Mcjae let us test your balances and give good feed back we have archers combat and trappers here and you will get honest opinions of HRs not trolls for the PVP guilds agenda. I would have included Sandstorm(ralexinor ) but she has uninstalled the game Thou I would have loved to have input on changes and what we need. I have played all trees of HR and went trapper due to I pvp and I do like feel of trapper but will play which ever tree is best for my goals
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
Seeker's vengeance is a pretty good one especially when you have the off hand artifact power active. I use it a lot and see it adding a good amount of damage to bosses when you're in position and the DoT procs. There are some fights where getting behind a boss is impossible or very dangerous, but apart from those it's not usually hard to do.
Cruel recovery doesn't really seem to do anything, and I've heard other HRs saying that it is currently broken. Even if it was working properly, it looks underwhelming compared to the others.
Battlehoned really needs a boost. The bonus to incoming healing from the increased regen stat is very small, and regen itself doesn't heal during combat anymore. Even if the numbers were boosted a lot it wouldn't be very good compared to the others. If it provided a significant amount more healing amplification to the whole party not just the HR, or worked all the time, that might be enough to get some people using it.
I'd also like to see the coding for Careful Attack get a once over and a change if there's any way to make it work more efficiently. It's widely believed in the community that CA causes lag during large fights, but it would be really nice for pathfinders to be able to use this ability without causing problems for other players and being hassled about it. I've never heard anyone complain about gushing wound causing lag, so maybe if CA worked more similarly to GW using it in Tiamat and for dragon runs wouldn't be such a no-no.
Thanks.
It was noticeable on a DF run I did a while back. Our leader made sure to inform the party not to use suspected powers that caused lag. We did the run and lo-and-behold we encountered terrible lag. Afterwards our leader looked at the combat log and saw that 1 HR had indeed used CA on that run.
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
Without multiproccing cool downs are going to be a joke. You are going to HAVE to use all 6 Encounters in your rotation, there will be no connecting with some powers to allow using powers in different order in combat... all those tactics/fluidity will be gone.
Any Trapper Hunter Ranger that uses 2 or 3 buffs in their rotations are going to have to wait aaaaages for their cool downs (the buffs fire so fast you will back in the other stance very quickly).
What about our lovely Trans Dread Enchantment... A lot of us have this equipped along with Aspect of the Serpent. This generally means we cannot use At-Wills as they will waste a stack of AotS... What are we supposed to do during the period of waiting for cool downs? At-Wills are only useful at the end of rotations so you cannot use them before the Encounters when you switch.
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Storm (SW70), Edge (TR70), AD Farm (CW70), Grunt (GF70), Rosa (DC70), AD AD AD (GWF70), Your Mum (OP70)
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Battlehorned:
This class feature is useless, even change for incoming health would not help to improve this power to being usability for HRs. Instead this i'd be interested in changing this class feature into Shield based on taken damage from enemy and ours hit points for a short period. It could be good in PvE/PvP wise because you're releasing Everfrost damage. Additionaly i'd like change a Battlehorned offhand into this:
- Battlehorned offhand: When you are under 30% of your hit points, you gain additional 10% deflect severity. Effect is not stackable.
Additional notes:
/not required/ Class feature activating under x % of hit points.
/required/ Cooldown, otherwise it'll be too broken.
/required/ limit of absorbed damage based on entering/leaving combat or separated timer.
There are other things which can cause lag, including other abilities, interactions between abilities, and even temporary load balancing issues on servers or network congestion.
So the argument that because there was lag and careful attack was used, careful attack is definitely to blame for it doesn't seem like it's necessarily always true. Try to remember that while we can guess at the causes of lag, and even note a reliable correlation between an action and decreased game performance, we as players cannot actually see the causes of the lag.
What I would like, though, is for CA to be usable in all content. It seems like one of the best perks for pathfinders, and if we were completely certain that it didn't cause lag, it could add a huge amount of damage to bosses in large groups.
Gushing wound doesn't seem to cause the same problem, so maybe one of the coders could take another look at CA, compare how the two work, and see if any performance improvements could be made. If it is a bandwith issue, then it might be as simple as making the CA proc larger but occurring less frequently.
Thanks.