Huzzah! Patch Lovin!

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A number of conical-area-of-effect melee abilities have been adjusted to a new standard melee CAoE. Range has been reduced but the arc of effect has been greatly increased. This will allow the character to more easily lash out at nearby targets without granting the career excessive range.

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Cool. What's a standard melee cone AoE?

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Bonus damage from Strength will now have a much greater effect on abilities with high base damage, but a reduced effect on abilities with low base damage.

Cool. I assume by base damage Adam is referring to tooltip damage. All our abilities have pretty low tooltip damage, can anyone give insight as to which abilities will be affected by this?

I also assume that abilities not receiving a strength contribution will be unaffected? What about autoattack?

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A number of AoE abilities have been reduced in effectiveness through reductions in damage, or increase in AP cost/cooldown.

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Cool. Quake, Blastwave, Petrify... and Rending Blade cops another nerf, lol.

What about Challenge?

Sounds pretty good imo, any shift away from AoE is good. Expecially AoE CC.

Very interested for someone to get specific about what abilities will/may be effected by the strength contribution aspect of the patch. Anyone?

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Very interested for someone to get specific about what abilities will/may be effected by the strength contribution aspect of the patch. Anyone?

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 Well, let's see... Ravage, Blast Wave, Quake, ToT are all base 100 damage with 0 mastery points spent.... pretty much everything else is less.

So... maybe they're going to increase damage done by Ravage, but at the same time nerf Blast Wave, Quake damage because it's AoE? 

Isn't Rending Blade already bad enough?  heh

Who knows anymore.  It's like russian roulette.

Pull the trigger, win a prize!

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Zhom wrote:

Who knows anymore.  It's like russian roulette.

 Just pull the trigger already.

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Yeah...

Anyway, the impression I got from the C&C and RvR dev interviews on WHA was that they'd be toning down AoE and giving single target a nudge in the right direction.

Not quite sure how they're doing that with this Str contribution business, I'd have to see some numbers (or have someone clever explain it to me).

Apologies for the incessant posting, I went a tad overboard on the caffeine to keep myself awake while I finished an essay.

Edit: Bovine, dude, how is this a nerf? Yes they are reducing AoE range etc, but they are doing that for all classes. Not just us. It doesn't really qualify as a nerf if it's happening to everyone.

I'm yet to understand this strength contribution business. Please explain how it nerfs us.

Yea looks like a nerf over all.

Not like our aoe damage was something to write home about anyways.

Even more of a reason not to use it and just spam ravage over and over and over.

Honestly.... cant wait 

nerf because quake is one of the only tools we get to help defend the rest of the group or pull someone off another teamate. if they reduce the range on it it will be much less effective wont it?

 Tank classes are there to protect others right? if we have to be standing right next to someone to protect them we cant protect more then one or two people.  

 I dont know about anyone else but i use quake as a peel sort of a tool and to stop people from escaping and if i cant reach them while they run away or after a teamate i cant do anything about it.

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Apth wrote:
Ack! Ok, when RB got nerfed, the sentiment was that it would be ok if we got some single target lovin. Is this not what we have here? With the increased strength contribution bit?

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Well then where is stat contribution on touch of palsey.

Other classes are now getting back the stats on thier barb abilities.. yet we are not

What other single target ability do we have that will out perform ravage spam?

if they all go up equally based on str then ravage will still be the only one worth using.

I am going to miss destroying RDPS' hopes and dreams of kiting me. However, less AoE across the board is good for the game, and Quake was an AoE ability. We'll manage.

I agree that damage isn't the role we are supposed to fulfill, and we need tools to help defend others. However, in the absence of an overhaul of those tools/getting new ones, I'll take some single target lovin. With any luck, that's what this is.

I'll reserve judgement until I actually get to experience the changes on the PTS. It's a bit premature to be crying about some potential quake nerf when you don't even know how bad it is. 

Good grief, another nerf to an already broken ORvR class... Reducing the range of our singular cone ability, which means we'll be dead before we ever get in melee now, because that was the ONLY was to stop a caster briefly to allow you to close and it's got an immunity so it was only mildly useful at that. Make it wider? Who cares, now it won't be useful in PVE because it will aggro and it their that close your dead already anyway. Well you wanted feedback so here it is: This will drive more of the already frustrated players away from the game. You have given them nothing to make their class fun and taken one of the few self defense mechanisms and made it less useful. What part of the hundreds of posts about tank uselessness in RvR did you guys read? We already get ignored because healers can autoheal through anything we do as it is and witht he cooldowns on our AoE and the immunity its useless most of the time anyway. Pleh I'm so pissed I am rambling... Good for you I paid for 6 months at a time, because I am stuck that long anyway.

The only way this patch won't be a kick in the teeth for chosen is if:

1. Ravage's base damage is considered 'high' base damage.
2. ToT is fixed
3. AoE with a cooldown see's substationally less of a nurf due to the already limited uses

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Zarrek wrote:

The only way this patch won't be a kick in the teeth for chosen is if:

 

 

1. Ravage's base damage is considered 'high' base damage.
2. ToT is fixed
3. AoE with a cooldown see's substationally less of a nurf due to the already limited uses

Considering the lack of progresion on our bugs.  I fully expect this to go live with a huge nurf to Chosen AoE, possibly a nurf to Ravage, and still not fix for our broken ToP/ToT/Seeping Wound/Petrify/Relentless.  What the heck do they expect chosen to do seriously?  We had good single target damage, which was nurfed.  We were given some decent (not good) AoE damage and now that's getting nurfed too.  Freaking make up your mind and buff us somewhere.  I'm so tired of this undecicive crap. 

 

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Even after our nerf to single target im still throwing out alot of dmg. But yes a nerf to ravage would be suicide for mythic since no one would bother to play a chosen anymore.

"the vast majority of tank abilities are not AoE and do not have high base damage value."

That sentance makes it sound like lower overall damage from tanks. 

In a nut-shell

1. They are nerfing Quake because it was the last "must-have" ability in any of our three trees. Anything useful must not be allowed to stay it seems.

2. Our attacks are all lower base damage, and already have very low strength contribution. Even less strength contribution simply means our primary stats no longer include strength. Seems a little odd to say that strength is no longer a primary stat for a Melee Tank class, but meh.

3. Tank classes whos attacks scale with their unique class abilities like Grudge, Balance, Plans, Hate, etc will benefit more from the hightened base damage from these attacks and their base strength as a modifier.

SO.. what are we left with?

1. Large Acrh/short distance (45ft? 30ft?) cone AoE Quake. Maybe better for tank walls; however, they usually do not want us to use quake due to immunity issues for the AoE KB of the other classes. Knocking down healers? Still the same I guess, except for the AM and RuneP that will kite heal. Running into combat? nope.. now you are FF'd right away

2. Less damage on Ravage and all other abilities due to lower strength scaling. Not any help if that's the case.

What do we gain?

1. Based upon this blurb above...nothing.

In conlcusion: I'd like to quote Caddyshack, "You will have nothing and like it."

I'm just tired of having my class balanced based upon the wishes of my enemies. .. . again. 

Why did they shorten the range on Quake? Because the two highest damage classes we face are ranged, have the two highest available amounts of crowd control in the entire game, and do the majority of the killing for Order.

Makes sense now..

Question for Mythic: What is the role or purpose of the Chosen Class in RvR?

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Akiba wrote:

I'll reserve judgement until I actually get to experience the changes on the PTS. It's a bit premature to be crying about some potential quake nerf when you don't even know how bad it is. 

 

 

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After Rending blade, I expect a few Chosen players are a little edgy. I see posts suggesting that our class was chosen  to die the death of a thousand cuts, and rending blade was the last bandaid. With so many order players saying that rending blade was only a little cut, and ignoring the first nine hundred, waiting to be cut before suggesting Chosen have had enough cuts may seem somewhat ineffective to various people.

Mind you, I look at the scenario scoreboards hoping that only the healers will do less damage than I do, and I want a tactic that reduces my outgoing damage by half and my incoming damage by a quarter, so I'll be watching the range and area of effect for changes.

Hey Adam, great to see you guys are still hard at work on class balancing. I really like the reduction in AoE and increase in burst overall, and the Zealot changes sound awesome as well

On a more pertinent note for the Chosen class, have you given any consideration to putting Touch of Palsy and maybe Bane Shield back on strength-scaling? Though I agree that they were rather OP back in 1.1, they also become rather lackluster abilities in the metagame where most people are running reasonably decent gear. Could we maybe see them go back to strrength scaling in the future, albeit with much lower coefficients?

Folks,

A few things I'd like to point out for everyone just so there are no blanks needing filled.

1. This is just a preview of things. Str contribution and specific changes are things we will have a thread for in the PTS boards once the servers go live and folks have a chance to test things.

2. The AoE thing is game wide and is not the static value across the board. Many people can agree this change is necessary so please try not to think that it's something against all the Chosen.

3. Bug fixes aren't a topic in these preivews because they aren't changes to the game necissarily. Bug fixes will be  included in the patch notes coming in the near future.

Hope this clears a few things up for people.

Max Morrison
Community Moderator
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning