New Bashing Changes!

Sena

Aerek said:

What's the general average across the board?

It looks like the general idea is 150-ish base (trans, 12 str/int/dex, no arties or traits), 200-ish offensive-spec (16 str/int/dex with nimble/quick-witted), and 320-ish fully artied.

Very rough DPS estimates for every class here. In addition to knight/bard/serpent being awesome with good weapon stats, jesters and priests are far above the average as well with their artefact weapons.

Valus

Does Sentinal's jaguar morph with reflexes still do good damage or did the new update changed that?

Sena

Valus said:

Does Sentinal's jaguar morph with reflexes still do good damage or did the new update changed that?

You can see how it compares in the link I just posted. 10 of the 17 classes (not counting dragon) are roughly equal. Sentinel is one of those 10. The other 7 (knights/bard/serpent/jester/priest) are far better.

Valus

what if I want to rp as a sentinel, should I decide to rp as a different class?

Sena

If you want to RP a sentinel, sentinel is the best class for that. If maximising your bashing speed is more important to you, then changing class is a good idea (but since it's likely that there will be more changes, I wouldn't change class for bashing just yet).

Valus

alright, thanks for the info again

Borran

Time to dragonform and go fish on a boat again.

Aliath

Shame about the reduction to dragon damage really, suspect that most at that level don't bash for experience, so prefer more damage over more experience

Dastan

Anyone else notice how bad shaman bashing has become?

Willpower drain has become worse because you will need more curses to kill the denizen.

Denizens shielding has become a pain. When they shield, I wait for them to hit me then I hit back. It usually takes them 2-3 shields before I can kill them. This without swiftcurse so bleed should do more damage.

At level 70...it took me twice as much time to finish Qurnok as compared before and being left with 2K willpower out of 12K. This is with swiftcursing. But still..I am mythical philosophy with willpower regen artifact.

@makarios Something has to be done.

Sena

Now that shaman damage isn't better than other classes, the willpower drain needs to be at least cut in half. Cursing through denizen shields would be a good idea too, to balance out the fact that it takes a lot more effort than other classes for the same damage (actually less damage, since you can't always swiftcurse optimally). ------ Blademaster needs help too, their damage is balanced around Arash, which has such a huge defense penalty that you can't usually use it for bashing. They also don't have good defense (even worse than shaman) to make up for the poor offense, except by using Mir and just crippling their offense. ------ Balancing DPS makes sense (because DPS determines how fast you can generate gold), but without other changes it doesn't balance bashing capabilities at all. ------ DPS also isn't balanced as intended, the disparity is even worse than before, just moved around. Artied priests now have old artied monk damage, the tankiest classes (knights) have far higher DPS than most other classes, and there are now 7 classes that can easily beat dragon DPS (which is intended to almost always be the best). ------ Edit: Using dashes as line breaks because of mobile forums.

Alzahn

Hi @Sena, with the bashing changes for serpent. What would you suggest?

1. Upgrade lvl 1 crit to lvl 2.

2. Buy a level 1 lash.

3. Spend the credits somewhere else.

Just debating whether  the recent changes plus the lvl 1 lash will outweigh the crit pendant.

I'm CON spec dwarf at level 83.

Appreciate your help. Thanks.

Isaiah

Alzahn said:

Hi @Sena, with the bashing changes for serpent. What would you suggest?

1. Upgrade lvl 1 crit to lvl 2.

2. Buy a level 1 lash.

3. Spend the credits somewhere else.

Just debating whether  the recent changes plus the lvl 1 lash will outweigh the crit pendant.

I'm CON spec dwarf at level 83.

Appreciate your help. Thanks.

My vote, use credits to respec race/traits for Dex and upgrade crit pendant

Edit: its cheaper to buy con Artefacts then Dex ones.

Ureel

Dastan said:

Anyone else notice how bad shaman bashing has become?

Willpower drain has become worse because you will need more curses to kill the denizen.

Denizens shielding has become a pain. When they shield, I wait for them to hit me then I hit back. It usually takes them 2-3 shields before I can kill them. This without swiftcurse so bleed should do more damage.

At level 70...it took me twice as much time to finish Qurnok as compared before and being left with 2K willpower out of 12K. This is with swiftcursing. But still..I am mythical philosophy with willpower regen artifact.

@makarios Something has to be done.

Join the club. Bm bashing is stupidly horrible too. 16 drawslashes to kill a tiny mhun guard. 29 to kill a keeper! Sorry, admin, but that is insane. There's no way I'm going to spend the money to change class when I haven't been a bm that long to begin with. So, bashing is currently a no go in this mud until (if) they change things. Can't properly advance/earn gold/anything really without bashing. You admin are essentially making playing your game a chore, when it should be entertainment. 

Bluef

I tried to follow some of the earlier posts about the effects of crits now that DPS has been balanced across classes, but I'll be honest I'm not sure I understand the impact fully. For example, I have a L2 crit pendant and I can sometimes get WORLD SHATTERING hits more than once on target, but no matter whether the hits are crits or not (and no matter the severity of the crits) I am not seeing any difference in the amount of time or overall hits it takes to kill anything while hunting. 

Can someone break it down for me. I guess I'm wondering what good this L2 crit pendant is if it's still going to take me 15+ hits to kill every darn thing. Thanks in advance for your input. 

Antonius

@Bluef: I'll let somebody more qualified than I am explain exactly how crits affect things now; the best I could do is say that more crits, and particularly more powerful crits, should translate to considerably faster hunting. However, if you can actually verify that crits (even the most powerful ones) aren't noticeably affecting the number of hits needed to kill a target, it might be worth filing a bug - possibly crits aren't functioning properly for Shaman (assuming you haven't changed class)?

Jacen

you can probe for denizen health now, so it'd be easy to see the effects of your crits

Suladan

Crits definitely do affect denizen health correctly. What's probably happening to you happens to us all - you get the WORLD-SHATTERING when the mob is already down to 5% anyway, so a normal hit would do just as well. When you start off with it is when you notice the difference.

Bluef

My overall crit rate as a shaman with a L2 pendant is the same as it ever was (42-44%), so I'm critting consistently throughout and not just at the end. What doesn't make any sense to me is that even when I'm hitting back to back world-shattering or annihilating crits, it still takes exactly the same amount of additional hits to kill targets. For example:

Yesterday I was hunting pirates. It consistently took me 15 hits to kill a regular no-named pirate. It didn't seem to matter whether I had two world-shattering hits and a handful of crushing crits or if I had just 3-4 regular crits in the mix (or none at all), the count to kill the darn thing was consistently 15 hits. 

That felt off to me so I thought I'd ask y'all before bugging it. 

Tharvis

Bluef said:

My overall crit rate as a shaman with a L2 pendant is the same as it ever was (42-44%), so I'm critting consistently throughout and not just at the end. What doesn't make any sense to me is that even when I'm hitting back to back world-shattering or annihilating crits, it still takes exactly the same amount of additional hits to kill targets. For example:

Yesterday I was hunting pirates. It consistently took me 15 hits to kill a regular no-named pirate. It didn't seem to matter whether I had two world-shattering hits and a handful of crushing crits or if I had just 3-4 regular crits in the mix (or none at all), the count to kill the darn thing was consistently 15 hits. 

That felt off to me so I thought I'd ask y'all before bugging it. 

yeah that sounds a bit.. wrong. File a bug report about it I suppose, knowing that team, it'll be fixed in literally no time at all

Sena

If a denizen takes 15 normal hits to kill, and it ever survives a world-shattering critical (or even annihilatingly powerful), either something is wrong or the denizen is somehow special and resists crits (I've never heard of a denizen like that, only denizens that you can't crit at all). A world-shattering critical simply multiplies the damage of that attack by 32 (so it's the same as 32 normal hits at once), annihilating is 16x. It could be higher than that if you have the Aim To Kill trait, but I can't think of any situation where it would be lower.

Alzahn said:

Hi @Sena, with the bashing changes for serpent. What would you suggest?

A level 1 lash isn't worth it, you can get a forged whip with similar or better stats. Saving up for a level 2 lash might be a good idea, or if you have a free reincarnation and trait reset, you could switch to dex spec and get tanking artefacts to make up for the lost con (I'm not sure how many credits you have to work with, but SoA would probably be a good first choice for that). The upgraded crit pendant would be useful, but I think there are probably better ways to spend 400 credits.

Bluef

I'm not sure if Someone read this thread or what but my crits are back!!! This probably belongs in Raves but I just had to share here too since it's where I OP. Thank you to the powers that be!

Alzahn

Sena said:

If a denizen takes 15 normal hits to kill, and it ever survives a world-shattering critical (or even annihilatingly powerful), either something is wrong or the denizen is somehow special and resists crits (I've never heard of a denizen like that, only denizens that you can't crit at all). A world-shattering critical simply multiplies the damage of that attack by 32 (so it's the same as 32 normal hits at once), annihilating is 16x. It could be higher than that if you have the Aim To Kill trait, but I can't think of any situation where it would be lower.

Alzahn said:

Hi @Sena, with the bashing changes for serpent. What would you suggest?

A level 1 lash isn't worth it, you can get a forged whip with similar or better stats. Saving up for a level 2 lash might be a good idea, or if you have a free reincarnation and trait reset, you could switch to dex spec and get tanking artefacts to make up for the lost con (I'm not sure how many credits you have to work with, but SoA would probably be a good first choice for that). The upgraded crit pendant would be useful, but I think there are probably better ways to spend 400 credits.

Thanks for the inputs. Unfortunately, I dont have a free reincarnation..I'm considering to get con arties and then reincarnate..nothing final yet though.

I have around 300 credits as of now and own an SOA and Mayan Ring as defensive arties.