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M18 Class Balance Adjustments
noworries
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 651Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Many of you gave feedback that you'd like some balance adjustments now, rather than waiting for bigger/more accurate ones in a later module so that balance could be closer in the short term.
We did a quick pass on some paragon paths and the changes will be listed below. These changes are not intended to solve class balance once and for all. Some of these changes may later be changed again as more aspects of class are adjusted. That does mean that a magnitude that is boosted now, could be reduced in a later module or any other number of changes. It is unlikely we will tackle many more additional changes before launch, but we do certainly want to hear about any changes that are broken in some way.
One final note is that due to the quick time table that these were done, they've only had an initial quick QA pass before going to preview.
Arcanist:
Arbiter:
Whisperknife:
Hunter:
Warden:
Thaumaturge:
Dreadnought:
Hellbringer:
Blademaster: (won't be on preview until next week)
We did a quick pass on some paragon paths and the changes will be listed below. These changes are not intended to solve class balance once and for all. Some of these changes may later be changed again as more aspects of class are adjusted. That does mean that a magnitude that is boosted now, could be reduced in a later module or any other number of changes. It is unlikely we will tackle many more additional changes before launch, but we do certainly want to hear about any changes that are broken in some way.
One final note is that due to the quick time table that these were done, they've only had an initial quick QA pass before going to preview.
Arcanist:
- Chaos Magic: now has a 5% chance to trigger
- A Step Above Mastery: now grants 0.5% damage per stack instead of 1%
- Arcane Presence: no longer grants 5% recharge speed
- Chilling Presence: now grants 0.5% damage per stack
- Storm Spell: now has a 20% chance to trigger
Arbiter:
- Focused Light - this was incorrectly only receiving a 40 magnitude from Radiant Judgement, it has been fixed to be 100
- Perfect Balance - Burning Shift and Radiant Shift now add +1% damage bonus each stack
- Angel of Death - reduced to 26 stacks for activation
- Lance of Faith - magnitude increased to 85
- Sacred Flame - magnitude increased to 80
Whisperknife:
- Impact Shot - magnitude increased to 400
- Shadow Strike - magnitude increased to 375
- Shuriken Toss - magnitude increased to 45
- Vengeance Pursuit - base magnitude increased to 150, stealthed bonus magnitude increased to 550, but also fixed issues with multi-proccing when it shouldn't have been
- Dagger Threat - maximum benefit is now 20' instead of 15'
- Gutterborn's Touch - no longer increases awareness, now increases ranged damage by 5%
- Blitz - stealthed usage no reduces encounter cooldowns by 2s
Hunter:
- Disruptive Shot - magnitude increaed to 300
- More than Disruptive - now increases your ranged damage by 10% for 5 sec
- Slasher's Expertise - now increases your melee damage by 10% for 10 sec
- Longstrider's Shot - magnitude increased to 525
- Gushing Wound - magnitude and DoT magnitude increased to 300
- Aspect of the Falcon - now grants a 10% damage bonus
- Thorned Roots - increased magnitude against control immune targets to 150
- Hawk Shot - magnitude increased to 210
- Prey (from Predator) - now increases ranged damage by 10%
- Biting Snare - can now occur every 15 seconds instead of 20
Warden:
- Focused - now increases 2% per second to a maximum of 20%
- To The Wind - now grants a 5% boost to Throw Caution
- Skirmisher's Gambit - now reduces Critical Strike by 10,000 and increaes crit severity by 25%
Thaumaturge:
- Icy Rays - magnitude increased to 300-450
- Chill Strike - magnitude increased to 450
- Shatterstrike - now does 150 magnitude to control immune targets
- Frigid Winds - now does 1.25% extra damage per chill stack on the target
Dreadnought:
- Cleave: Increase magnitude from 25 to 35
- Brazen Slash: Increase magnitude from 55 to 75
- Shield Bash: Increase magnitude from 20 to 30
- Guarded Strike: Increase magnitude from 60 to 85
- Heavy Slash: Increase magnitude from 100 to 135
- Reave: Increase magnitude from 30 to 45
- Commander's Strike: Increase magnitude from 400 to 560
- Tremor: Increase magnitude from 250 to 340
- Griffon's Wrath: Increase total magnitude from 840 to 1050
- Onslaught: Increase magnitude from 300 to 420
- Earthshaker: Increase magnitude from 580 to 800
- Shockwave: Increase magnitude from 620 to 870
- Momentum: Increase magnitude from +200 Bull Charge to +300
- Heavier Slash: Increase magnitude from +200 Heavy Slash to +300
- Prepared Slam: Increase magnitude from 200 to 280
- Richochet: Increase damage output by reducing the damage reduction from 30%/60%/70% to 20%50%60%
Hellbringer:
- Eldritch Blast: Increase magnitude from 30 to 35
- Dark Spiral Charge: Increase magnitude from 80 - 240 to 95 - 280
- Hellish Rebuke: Increase magnitude from 40/10 DoT and 20 on counter to 45/10 DoT and 25 on counter
- Hand of Blight: Increase magnitude from 35 melee/45 ranged to 40 melee/50 ranged
- Arms of Hadar: Increase magnitude from 55 to 65
- Vampiric Embrace: Increase magnitude from 250 to 275
- Blades of Vanquished Armies: Increase magnitude from 20 to 25
- Hadar's Grasp: Increase magnitude from 200 to 230
- Fiery Bolt: Increase magnitude from 175 to 200
- Dreadtheft: Increase magnitude from 340 to 395
- Hellfire Ring: Increase magnitude from 120/200 DoT to 135/220 DoT
- Gates of Hell: Increase magnitude from 750 to 865
- Curse: Increase magnitude from 10 to 12
- Parting Blasphemy: Increase magnitude from 75 to 85
Blademaster: (won't be on preview until next week)
- Brash Strike - magnitude increased to 90
- Frenzy - magnitude increased to 750 and base cooldown reduced to 18s
- Battlerage - now increases damage done by 20%
- Relentless Battlerage - now decreases Battlerage damage to 14%
Post edited by noworries#8859 on
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Comments
On wizard, I'm more waiting for bugfixes as they probably will have more of an effect on the class. This seems pretty okay, the Chilling presence feels a little overreaching and I don't think that the Thaum buffs will do anything tangible for the paragon, but good to see them.
Great Weapon Fighter was by far way over powered but you guys took the nerf way to far down and no one wants that class as a dps, only tank. Not sure what numbers you guys go on to say that Barb is top dps because it's not.... not even close. Wizard is. So... Mod 16 comes out and you apologized to us for not listening when we submitted all our reports from preview. Trust has been broken. Will you listen to us now?
I think a lot of these changes are great, not sure the changes to warlock are enough but we'll just have to see.
The thing that frustrates me the most is Mod 16 was supposed to be the end all of the balance game to the classes... Not to sound negative but a lot of us have lost faith in the balancing system. We've been waiting 4 years for new classes to come out.
Why didn't you guys give us a race people would have gone crazy for like the Tabaxi? When is Druid coming out? It was voted #1 by players, Monk was #2, Bard was #3. Will we ever see new classes? "We're going to balance the classes we have now before we bring in new ones". Will you?
I stick around because I've invested a lot of time and money in this game and have built an awesome community within my guild and alliance, have made many friends, and truly love the game. Please take more care than you did with the mess up of Mod 16. Bring us things that we want and more people will return. Listen to us and we will recruit more players who will stay. Just a food for thought.
Now if warlocks get an adjustment to compensate for the damage loss from multiplicative damage change to additive then they would be back to mod 16 damage again, which wasnt great to begin with. But, that would put them on par or slightly ahead of arbiters single target damage.
Won't fix core mechanic and feat issues, but hopefully mod 19 addresses them.
for example barbarian: when dps 3 offence companion slots. when tank 3 defence companion slots.
While it is obviously never a good feeling to have your main ( and favourite ) Paragon nerfed, i am perfectly willing to except the 5% reductions in the benefits gained from both Focused and Skirmisher's Gambit.
What i do not find acceptable is the Critical Strike sacrifice from Skirmisher's being increased from 3000 to 10 000. This is THE ONLY DPS Paragon Feat in the entire game that requires removing a portion of your stats in order to gain the benefit from the feat and this is absolutely unfair to Wardens for no reason at all. Sacrificing 10 000 of any stat as part of your feat selection is a stupid way of designing any feat even if it did not significantly impact stat caps balancing and you can bet money that it will.
TL;DR : Fair enough with the DMG nerfs but revert the 10 000 Crit sacrifice on Skirmisher's, it is absurd and unfair design so keep it at 3000 or remove it completely.
as far as i can tell with arbiter they are getting 4-7% dmg buff on encounters? or does shift buff dmg of at will and daily as well? not sure if its enough but its a start (as a long term thing, by buffing that you are forcing players to only run one specific build with a strict set of encounters, i think it would be better in the long term to add variety either by adding other control encounters to proc doomsayer or other radiant or fire dmg encounters AoE and ST or more importantly provide an alternative to doomsayer all together because otherwise all the other encounters become useless as they wont be used which means maybe adding dmg to chains and or divine glow anyway appreciate the attention)
If you think a 6% buff from chilling presence was the issue, you should fire your entire staff
1. Soul Sparks provides damage buff, but yet we use this resource to use Soul Scorch (RB).
2. To use Hardars Grasp, a target must have lesser curse (12% damage buff with feat) and also provides stack of soul investment, however, we suppose to use Killing Flame for maximum damage but we just lost a damage buff by removing lesser curse but gain back 4%.... Essentially losing out on 8% damage. This is an excellent example of counter intuitive mechanics of this class....
MAYBE: Provide a lesser curse mastery effect on the RB similar to CWs. Apply the Soul Sparks damage buff innately into D2D (instead of 5% give us 9.5% or 10% damage buff) and use it strictly as a resource...
Another idea would be to allow us to innately apply lesser curse (remove class feature and apply it automatic to the class thru at Will's and encounters) Instead of certain encounters removing the lesser curse like Hadar Grasp, just check for it, but do not remove lesser curse, for us locks to benefit from the damage buff at its full power as intended. (Kinda similar to the mastery feature I spoke above)
Another recommendation is our spell timers, please make them faster, specially Hellfire Ring....
Regarding dailies, Flames of Phlegethos should do an initial magnitude, then burn the target for an additional magnitude for 5 seconds.... It's current damage is solely based of 1000 total magnitude, extremely weak for our last daily. Maybe 1k initial hit magnitude, then 200 magnitude per second for 5 seconds .... Like Brood of Hadar but more powerful with no slow effect.
I understand that changing the lesser curse mechanics is cumbersome, and requires additional changes but it can be easily implemented and would provide an easier transition for balancing the class.
Insightful comments however I'm sure we can both agree that raising the magnitude of SS to increase single target dps, although helpful, will not address some of the core imbalances in Blademaster. It would be more beneficial, in my estimation, to bring all dps classes into equilibrium with respect to off/def/util companion slots. 1 offense slot for a non-tank class is abysmal. Imagine keeping the current 1/3/1 loadout for Sentinel and establishing a new 3/1/1 Blademaster setup. This seems to me the most viable alternative and would go a long way to alleviate our single target woes when combined with the Rage and encounter changes you mentioned.
But in preparation for whatever you have planned, it's worth noting that most of the problems I hear about are that feats/passives available suck, the class mechanics are overestimated in usefulness, with some smattering of base damage problems in the mix.
For Dreadnaught, the base damage increases are appreciated, but the main problems with the spec look like:
-overestimated passives that barely help the spec deal damage in reality
-Vengeance coming from blocking/Seethe only forces players to run ahead or to do nothing while waiting for Seethe
-feats that look flashy but have very little practicality
(Crushing Blows and its ratio requirement, both of the daily attack feats tied being on abilities that you only use once a minute, Executioner's Gift won't see use for most of combat, and Bloody Reprise is useless when there's barely anything to use Vengeance on),
I can't speak much about Hellbringer, Arbiter, Hunter, or Whisperknife due to a lack of experience with those specs, but from what I have heard from the rumors, the problems end up looking something like:
Hellbringer
-bugged feats that don't work (see: Creeping Death)
-taking forever to buff up
-Puppet is a gimmick that is overestimated in usefulness
-the damage bonus from the old Hellfire Expertise under the multiplicative system was never recovered (there was that Mod 17 base damage increase, but I recall reading about many SWs finding the base damage increases to not be enough to offset the loss of old Hellfire Expertise)
Arbiter
-the stack management gimmick fails when CCs/boss mechanics force you to stop attacking, miss a stack switch, and have to rebuild your stacks from scratch when the game allows you to fight again
Hunter
-the base damage on ranged attacks being poor and not being compensated by the Archer intended buffs
-the cooldown reduction bonuses for the intended "Trapper" path barely reduce cooldowns
Whisperknife
-the throwing knife thing is a gimmick that wasn't really useful at all
1) Ray of Enfleebement does 20% more damage than expected - I attach a test image from a regular power slot. (This also reduces the use of imprisonment spells).
2) Arcane presence is weakened by recharge speed so that it is not strong but for example for Icy Terrain Arcane presence does not work on all hits (first hit only) and also does not work on some lighting base spells. Are you counting on this? Or did anyone just take a mathematical formula from the table, regardless of the current limited function of Arcane presence?
3) What about limiting AP gain from chaos magic? Shouldn't you at least tell Steal Time to give AP for every enemy hit?
4) Did you edit Darkened Journal artifact? - with this artifact it's total disbanding or bugged. If the Envenomed journal allows to the Wizard Arcanist to boost its damage (mainly through APgain) and you compensate for this with an unbalanced artifact - Darkened Journal artifact - than Arcanist and everyone are better off running with Darkened Journal - Arcanist stops having APgain boost and damage from Envenomed Journal and you also reduce Apgain from Chaos magic? These bugs change the game much more, and interventions in the feats create disbalances that are destructive to the thoughtful Classes.
I think you should address more weaknesses in missing test information than creating patches in places that will make you even more difficult in the future - that is, link to the original intent and find the mistakes you need to solve more. Meanwhile, it seems to me that it is a system: If something does not work out so we change the constant instead of finding a mistake.
but like,
1. Blademaster tweaks where?
2. I'm honestly bored of this concept that if we beat the spellcasting classes (specifically wizards) bloody, then balance and harmony will come out of it. It's never the case. In a few weeks there will still be calls for wizards to be nerfed for being too op. Wizards are overpowered because that's how they were designed to be. No amount of pulling the giant purple bat from Saints Row III and slapping wizards silly with it will change that.
Hellbringer:
- Eldritch Blast: Increase magnitude from 30 to 35
- Dark Spiral Charge: Increase magnitude from 80 - 240 to 95 - 280
- Hellish Rebuke: Increase magnitude from 40/10 DoT and 20 on counter to 45/10 DoT and 25 on counter
- Hand of Blight: Increase magnitude from 35 melee/45 ranged to 40 melee/50 ranged
- Arms of Hadar: Increase magnitude from 55 to 65
- Vampiric Embrace: Increase magnitude from 250 to 275
- Blades of Vanquished Armies: Increase magnitude from 20 to 25
- Hadar's Grasp: Increase magnitude from 200 to 230
- Fiery Bolt: Increase magnitude from 175 to 200
- Dreadtheft: Increase magnitude from 340 to 395
- Hellfire Ring: Increase magnitude from 120/200 DoT to 135/220 DoT
- Gates of Hell: Increase magnitude from 750 to 865
- Curse: Increase magnitude from 10 to 12
- Parting Blasphemy: Increase magnitude from 75 to 85
----------------------->Curse Increase magnitude is now by 12! No change. :-( Please check and increase.
I knew that arcanist was going to be nerfed. Nothing to say if the nerfs are reasonable. My initial opinion (without testing) is that you went a bit too far, and touching features is not a great idea because we had only 2 usefull features and now only 1. Please consider buffing / reworking the other features
Also, im more concerned about wizard bugs. Fixing those is mandatory to have a working class because what we have now is an illusory situation where dmg overshadow the bugs, but when this goes live and the dmg of wizards goes down by a lot, bugs like AP gain and others like A step above mastery will be more relevant. Ofc all the bugs you created with the thaumaturge nerfs should be adressed. Please please fix the wizards bugs and we will live with the nerfs.
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