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Official M16: Fighter Feedback
asterdahl
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 1,258Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Feedback: Fighter
Greetings adventurers, Asterdahl here! This thread is for providing bug reports and feedback on the upcoming changes to fighter (formerly guardian fighter) in Module 16. If you haven't already please take a moment to read Noworries' M16: Overview thread.The most important takeaway in terms of class feedback is: we are still making changes to class powers, both functional and numerical. We wanted to get your hands on the changes sooner than usual. However, as a result, we ask that you realize what you see on preview will change, sometimes dramatically before launch. If you find your perfect build on preview, it may not be the perfect build on live. Powers you feel are very strong, may not stay as strong. We ask for your patience with these changes.
Finally, there are some known issues going into the initial preview build. Particularly in feats, a number of feats may reference powers that are not available when the feat is unlocked, or in some rare cases, reference powers which no longer exist. We have made a number of changes coming out of closed beta, and it is our short term goal to have these feats updated in the near future.
As always, thank you for taking the time to come check things out on preview, we look forward to your feedback!
Formatting Your Feedback and Bugs
For posting feedback and bugs, please follow the following format to ensure your feedback and bugs are seen clearly and processed in a timely manner, thank you!Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)
If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use CYAN. If you are replying to another user's post, asking a question, or just engaging in general discussion, please do not color your posts, general discussion is welcome and we will read all of it, regardless of color! You can use BBCode to color your text:
<font color=cyan>This text will display in cyan.</font>
<font color=red>This text will display in red.</font>Examples:
Bug: Threatening rush said that I should lunge towards the target, but I can only use it if the enemy is right next to me.
Feedback: I don't like the changes to Griffon's Wrath, I prefer the old charge based approach.
Post edited by asterdahl on
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Guild--And the Imaginary Friends
BTW "dig in" after its turned off could explode damage accumulated into enemies around (something like OP "Binding Oath" but without taking damage)
Guild--And the Imaginary Friends
Guild--And the Imaginary Friends
Feedback: New Knight's Valor too situational, perhaps too good for pvp, but too bad for pve. Should be reworked to affect the whole party with reduced damage transfer, but maybe added in some other functionality, like aggro transfer.
It could also be Gladiator Guile from mount insignia bonuses, I have it stacked 4-5 times, maybe it's that? Try looking into that if possible, thanks.
All I know is that when I switch to my loadout with Vanguard fighter my speed jumps through the roof, whereas in Dreadnaught loadout (where I dont have Gladiator's Guile stacked) it reverts back to normal.
Now the feats. Maybe is just me but it feels so poor, it binds me to choose between two useless feats because l don't use the powers related to the feat or makes me use a power that l don't want to use if l want to take advantage of it... its all rigid.
Also, what is that about -30% of damage? its like a pasive mechanic? why would l want to sacrifice 30% of my damage in exchange for threat generation if l can pick a feat wich makes anvil of doom places me as first in threat priority... my options in that situation are not use that feat because is way better than the mechanic or use it anyway and feel like lm loosing 30% of damage for nothing.
Probably lm just wrong so, if someone can explain me l would be really happy.
That being said, we know it can be a little bit stressful from a psychological perspective to see that damage adjustment spelled out in a passive power. We may consider lowering the base magnitudes of all tank powers and removing that adjustment based on feedback.
In regards to why the threat increase matters as it relates to anvil of challenge or enforced threats' ability to put you at the top of the target's threat list: keep in mind, that only places you at the top of the threat list of affected targets at that moment. You still need to maintain a threat lead in order to keep the enemy's attention.
Those powers are tools to help you in the case of coming into a fight late, taking aggro back if someone steals it with DPS, picking up aggro after being KO'd (where your threat is cleared) or tank swapping in a 10 man encounter.
For example: say that you're fighting a boss and the ranger opens with a big single target daily, giving them a nice threat lead. Let's say they did 50,000 damage, that means they are now at 50,000 threat. You can anvil of doom with anvil of challenge set to put yourself just over 50,000 threat, but then you still need to use your own attacks continually to maintain a lead.
Your passive increase to threat generated means that unlike most classes you don't generate only 1 threat for 1 point of damage, you can keep a threat lead over someone dealing more damage than you as a result. Additionally, some powers have the "Added Effect: Generates additional threat," these powers generate even more than the normal amount of threat. They deal less damage than powers which do not generate additional threat, but you should use these to maintain an aggro lead when your DPS are excellent and pushing the limit, or when you're otherwise struggling. If you're having an easy time keeping threat, you can switch in more pure DPS powers.
Guild--And the Imaginary Friends
l know a tank class shouldn't outdamage a DPS with a similar gear but anyway a support class, regardless if is healer or tank, should be able to clean mobs in a comfortable way while solo playing (like they can in the live server in this momment), if they aren't able to do that you are not reworking the healing and tanking, you are nerfing it, most people will take DPS paths and, after that, start to work in a build for parties (proper support builds), not mention the wave of frustration that probably makes the support roles even more scarces.
It is true that many players will be able to run both paths with the same gear but heading to end game you'll want to look into more specifics builds.
As a fighter player:
l always felt the GF as a hybrid class and that was awesome, even if you weren't the top damage, the godlike buffer or the most tanky you were good (Not excellent, but good). Now l see great ideas splitted in two paths, l really feel like into the fray and enforced threat should be common encounters for both paths as the live server. Why?
- Tank: Like the armored potato that tank fighter seems now, you could give a great use to the stamina refill from into the fray. Also, who doesn't like to run faster?
_ DPS: l love the Seethe idea, specially because the tank's dig in seems like just a second block, but is useless in parties if l can't pull aggro towards myself using like, l don't know, enforced threat? with that the fighter could be a DPS able to be a backup tank for a few seconds, specially useful in a game where lifesteal is no more. Also, would be challenging because l would have to coordinate with the real tank (A pally or a felow fighter) to switch the aggro between us.
Talking with friends who plays another classes and after testing the whole day, l feel the old versatility (The greatest feature of neverwinter in my opinion) death, everything is turning into an A or B choose (Again, feats) and, as a player of a versatile class as GF is, l feel a bit hopeless.
Unfortunately NW really lacks the ability to accommodate the complexities of Hybrid classes in that respect as well as D&D Official being relatively strict on Class Roles which is what all D&D licensed products need to respect in some capacity.
For Solo, that is honestly why the DPS Paragons exist and have been properly given thought and time in development, the outlier is of course the OP but it is now the only class that has this difference and by default it has never had real issues with Solo content, it only slows playtime while making it a relative non-issue of failure. Boring/tedious for some yes but that's why there are 7 other Classes.
As for people making DPS builds almost exclusively, well they'll find the necessity to shall we say, Not Do That, very quickly and either learn to use the Support Paragons or simply resign themselves to longer wait times on queues and difficulty clearing even simple content because of it.
Neverwinter needs the simplicity to survive and even though it may result in more standardized Builds, don't pretend that isn't the case already. The extra time left over for players can be focused on the improvement of player skill and understanding of Class mechanics.
8-9/10 players over 14.5k at this time are to be polite, terrible at the game. That needs to be remedied or they need to be given an incentive to move on.
In regards to Seethe, please play around with it a bit more and re-read the tooltip. Seethe converts stamina into vengeance regardless of whether or not you are hit. You gain vengeance in one of two ways: blocking damage, stamina consumed is converted, or channeling seethe. When soloing or in PvP you can even use the standard block ability to get your vengeance up, or when blocking random white noise damage in group PvE content.
Seethe can be an even faster way to boost your vengeance up when taking damage, but most importantly, you can seethe and quickly convert stamina into vengeance even when you are not taking damage. So, in a group setting, you can build yourself up with seethe, then as needed top off with seethe or block stray attacks.
That being said, weapon master's strike is gone from fighter because we have divorced fighter from barbarian, the two used to share paragon paths, which was a bizarre situation that we've long since wanted to change. Dreadnought does get heavy slash which buffs their damage. However, both paragon paths have access to cleave which is now your new go-to AoE at-will. If you feel like cleave is too weak, just know that weapon master's strike would have been toned down in damage to the same values as cleave if it had stayed. AoE powers are essentially balanced to be a DPS gain after 3 targets, so generally they'll feature a magnitude of about 1/3rd that of a similar single target power.
In regards to why we chose to separate more powers by paragon path: we've done so in order to further differentiate the paragon paths from one another. Especially in cases like fighter or cleric where the two paragon paths play entirely different roles, it was necessary to restrict more powers between the paragons in order to preserve that paragon path's function as that specific role.
I understand that this limits choice compared with the old system, however, you still have access to 10 encounters, and you may only set 3 at a time. Ultimately in the old system, were there any classes where you felt like there were more than 10 valid encounter choices? Usually there were only a handful worth using. Because we have a smaller and more focused field to work with for each paragon path, we're hoping to provide more genuinely valid options.
@asterdahl , I already wrote down that Fighter needed a lot of work back on Week 1 of the Owlbear forums. You told me that all of my feedback was accounted for and I'd see it in future builds (well, before the forums apparently ate it when I left to survive midterms).
Nearly one month later, I am not seeing any of the feedback that was supposedly taken into account (aside from Griffon's Wrath getting its damage lowered, but At-wills were not given a damage increase in exchange...).
None of the core issues that Fighter had since Week 1 on Owlbear seemed to be addressed.
Here's a short recap on the core issues:
Base damage on Fighter At-wills is too low. It is not fun or satisfying to use on Dreadnought and near impossible to use At-wills to hold aggro.
Drastically increase the base damage of At-wills, but lower the damage of all encounter powers to compensate (ex: Raise Brazen Slash base damage to 150 magnitude, but lower Anvil down to 1000 magnitude).
Low base damage is workable if the class is supported by a ton of self buffs, see Mod 15 & prior GWF. Given that buffs seem to be practically dead, this means that low base damage makes no sense. You just start tickling enemies and it's not fun (or great for new player retention) if the experience becomes "hold down the At-will buttons for 5 minutes while you slowly chip enemy HP counts". The only time I felt like I was dealing respectable damage was when I used my encounters ... which I can only use once every 20 seconds (on average).
Strangely, it seems as if Fighter had its At-will base damage lowered even further from week 1 while encounters were not touched at all.
You reduced the damage of this ability by nearly half of that from before, and "before" was when Fighter was still weak and unsatisfying to play.
Another example would be poor Cleave, which was bad enough back on week 1, but somehow got even worse. Why did Cleave, the onlyAoE At-will available until Level 71 (one of two if you really count Shield Bash), get its base damage lowered from a pathetic 25 magnitude from my time on preview ... down to 15?
Additionally, it seems as if Aggravating Strike and Shield Bash still have their low damage, which makes it near impossible to hold aggro. It leads to annoying situations where you use a hard taunt, have the enemies turn around, and then instantly turn around again because you have 0 damage.
And all of this is after a change that normalized weapon damage across classes (ie, reduced Fighter weapon damage compared to Mod 15), meaning I have even less damage when compared to before.
There are some feats that make no sense or are near useless.
Brazen Thrust, Cleaving Bull, and Shake it Off are seemingly DPS related feats on the defender path.
Heated Vengeance & Steady Vengeance, are both equally useless, just shield the ridiculous enemy damage and instantly get full Vengeance.
Prepared Pierce makes little sense, you will almost never use Heavy Slash and Piercing Thrust on the same setup (Piercing Thrust shines on AoE setups while Heavy Slash impractical for AoE setups due to being slow and only hitting a single target; Piercing Thrust will almost never see use on single target with Heavy Slash when there are several other powers that hit harder than
There are other examples and I think each one will need its individual balance pass. I do not wish to extend this post's length any longer than it needs to to make my point.
Most of the class features are near useless or do not fit with the theme of the class.
Similar to the feats, the class features are useless or make little sense.
Here are some examples:
I think the biggest offenders are the Dreadnought exclusive ones. If I'm playing Dreadnought, the DPS path, why are most of my class features not offensive related (a movement bonus, a negligible Vengeance passive, a healing passive, and then one offensive passive)? I have to run all the way to level 65 to get the first offensive class feature, and a particularly weak one at that.
Enduring Warrior's survival bonus is so small and negligible for its activation time that you will never have situations where you survive close calls due to Enduring Warrior alone.
Another example would be Combat Superiority. Combat Superiority would be great if it wasn't a small 3% boost linked to a resource that I am not intended to spam (daily attacks).
The dev team would need to run balance passes on each individual feat, as with the class features.
---
I do hope that this build represents something hastily put up for public consumption rather than the final culmination of what the class balances will look like.
From rumors I heard, you guys are doing balance passes on classes one at a time on Owlbear, and Fighter hasn't gotten its balance pass yet.
If this is the case, then I do hope that the core issues get addressed.
I do hope that you guys decide to bring the weaker classes to around the same tier as the strongest classes, rather than nerf everything to be as bad as the bottom tier classes.
The post addresses some of why we had to make the changes we made. Yes, we could have continued to make challenging content, but we could really only challenge you in a very limited number of ways. In terms of providing punishment for failing a mechanic, we could basically kill you, and that's it. If something didn't kill you, you were back up to full quickly solo, and in a party almost instantly, and with layers of shields and temp HP on top of that.
Now, we could apply a stacking damage resistance debuff to you so that as you continued to fail a mechanic, it gets harder and harder, but that is essentially a system that is trying to emulate what a health bar and a resource pool for healers in a group would normally do. It's also a relatively unintuitive system.
We needed to go back to basics and restore hit points to something meaningful that rose and fall at a pace that players could actually react to.
Certainly, we could have turned up the difficulty and continued to provide more ways to stack mitigation and damage up buffs to overcome those challenges, but that is a really narrow experience that is unintuitive and arcane. Difficulty spikes up and down wildly as buffs and debuffs fall off and are reapplied.
Hello again! I would like to address a few specific issues/comments, and thank you again for your feedback. There are still changes on the way, particularly for class features and feats. With that said, let me address a few specific items.
First: at-will damage. When you say at-will damage is too low, are you saying that in relation to any other classes specifically? At-will damage has been lowered for all classes across the board. We are targeting that at-wills represent roughly 1/5th of your damage in an optimal scenario and all straight DPS powers, without taking into account feats or class mechanics. (Encounter powers also represent 1/5th each, or 3/5ths total, and dailies represent the final 1/5th.)
This means at-wills are doing less, encounters are doing slightly more, and dailies are doing significantly more, relative to the old paradigm. This is true across the board for all classes. It takes some getting used to, that's certainly true, I haven't found it to be too bad in either solo or group settings, at endgame at least, there's usually plenty to keep me occupied.
As far as the at-wills that had their damage lowered, there were some that were not properly balanced against their timing.
In regards to aggravating strike and shield bash, unless you take aggressive guard, those at-wills generate no extra threat. They have somewhat lower magnitudes because fighter is the only tank class that can attack while blocking. (However, the magnitudes are only reduced by about 20% from what they would be if they were always available. Remember that cast time plays into the magnitude.)
To establish and maintain aggro, you'll want to use powers which have added threat, but also just doing high damage combined with vanguard's base threat increase can generate decent threat. Tide of Iron can further improve that. I have been tanking in a lot of group content as fighter, and generally having no problems even without Enforced Threat. For AoE tanking, I usually run cleave, tide of iron, and linebreaker. After that, it depends on the situation, but those can be a solid foundation.
Enforced Threat is primarily to help you re-establish aggro after being KO'd, after joining a fight late, or after a DPS gets a head start on you on threat, or pulls threat on enemies you weren't getting threat on from positioning. It places you just above the other player in the threat list and needs to be followed up with other attacks to keep the lead. By virtue of the way Enforced Threat works, it's not actually effective to open a fight with it, for instance.
Keeping in mind that your threat is based on your damage, feats adjusting what you do to deal maximum damage are not entirely out of place in the tank tree, as dealing damage to generate threat is a core part of your role. For instance, cleaving bull gives you a solid opener to build a foundation of threat on at the start of a fight. However, I understand the sentiment, and feats will be receiving a rework, so I'll keep your feedback in mind.
On the specific topic of Dreadnought's "Prepared Pierce," you state that there's no reason to use Heavy Slash in an AoE build. On the contrary, heavy slash provides a solid damage increase with a decent duration. Heavy Slash should be a staple in almost all Dreadnought Builds. Heavy Slash isn't really meant to be spammed, but used to reapply the buff before returning to brazen slash, cleave, reave. Taking prepared pierce, you'll want to keep heavy slash and piercing thrust lockstep with one another, and the buffed piercing thrust (both from the standard heavy slash damage increase, and the proc) is well worth losing 1 or 2 cleaves.
The design of that particular column of feat choices is intended to change how heavy thrust fits into your rotation, since its such a staple of Dreadnought. Chose prepared pierce and you always want to follow heavy thrust with piercing thrust. On the other hand, heavier slash means you'll be wanting to use heavy slash whenever you get a proc off brazen, even if the buff timer hasn't expired yet, making its use less predictable. While I wouldn't say this build was "hastily put up;" a lot of work has gone into the game since closed beta week 1. A lot of issues have been resolved, and a lot of changes have been made beneath the surface that affect balance, such as how equipment and enemies are balanced. As a result, the game is feeling a lot better in many places.
However, it is absolutely not the final class balance. We will continue making adjustments not only over the coming weeks, but after the module goes live. We are dedicated to getting the classes in a much better state than they have ever been. It may not be clear from the surface level, but we are in a much better position fundamentally to react and make changes to the classes. There was a lot of really bad stuff going on under the hood for all the classes that has been cleaned up.
That being said, I do understand it can be frustrating when there are some areas which don't seem to change from preview build to preview build. We have been working very hard across the game so that things can be ready when the module launches. Sometimes we have to concentrate elsewhere and return to something after weeks and it can seem like nothing has been done in the meantime.
Other thing is that agro indicator (good idea btw, i like it) but as tooltip sais it shows only status of selected enemy ( one that i'm aiming at) might be more useful for tank if perhaps all enemy that are focused on tank to be affected by visual effect of mod15 "Knight Challenge" (though it might be strain for GPU if there are lot og enemies focuseed on tank), alternavive could be old X mark that would apear above head of enemies that are focused on tank. That way I as tank can distinct which enemy is fixed on me and which i should try to agro more.
tooltips of powers that say "Increas threat" in my opinio should say also by how much. Also "Stamina regeneration" on character screen tooltip should be more clear. It sais for me now that "Stamina regeneration +48% ", 48% of what, whats the base value of stamina regeneration? 1%/s or 10%/s. would be more clear is it would say "Stamina regeneration 10%/s" which would indicate that my stamina regenerates 10% of my full bar per 1s (its just an example value wise)
"Quick turnaround" tier 5 boon indicates that it increas Recovery Speed, I presume it should be Recharge Speed instead as there are no Recovery Speed in character window
When we're at boons their tooltip should say whats the chance certain boon would be activated, its too vague for me at this point
Shouldn't new "Knight's Challenge" also work while in dug in state?, it does sais "while blocking" but still.
Also you might consider restricting how much character mesh would grow when Dread warrior pasive skill kicks in continuasly. Its funnt when i grow as big as a mountain for the first time but it obstruct view if my character covera whole screen
Companion Enhancement sais "when companion is near", how near? Is it just flavour expretion and skill works as long as companion is in combat range to the player?
thats about it for now waht I found. Aside of that i have few ideas.
1. as i like my Drowned weapon set skill i use it till this time but its outdated stats wise, there could be Upgrade kit item in campaign shop that would reroll weapod statistics to level of certain campaigh and left set skill untouched. That upgrade Kit would cost as much as new weapon in campaign ( that could be also used for belt and necklace.
2. As there is collection page in game that by this point serve no other purpose then preview items it could work like this. When you unlock new item u can use that entry as skin to transmute item without need of that item in your inventory