Foofmonger wrote: ↑Thu May 28, 2020 9:02 am
So between boredom and insomnia, wanted to post this, a tale of the old original Thunderous Blows, for any Marauder players who didn't play WAR at release.
So at release, Thunderous Blows was a 5 point mastery ability, same icon it has now (and maybe similar damage, I forgot how hard it hit), in the Savagery path.
However, Thunderous Blows was not a wounds debuff at this time. It was actually one of the most frustrating and overpowered skills to fight against in the entire game (outside of the crazy AoE spam at the time). What Thunderous Blows was, was a build time increaser!
A build time increaser!? That's it? We have those in the game now you might say. Well yes, indeed we do, classes like the Chosen even get AoE build time increasers. However, Thunderous Blows was unique in it's functionality as it was the only build time increaser that gave a +1 second build time to all abilities.
Not all spells. All abilities.
What this means is that it gave every melee ability, every action, everything you can possibly do using a skill, a 1 second cast time (that can be pushed back of course, and/or even interrupted). In these days, the Marauder was a nightmare to fight in any small scale engagement. 1v1 a Mara? You'd be lucky if you actually got to use any of your skills.
Furthermore, unlike the current build time increasers, Thunderous Blows was not percentaged based as I mentioned above, it was always a flat 1 second increase, so it also impacted non-instant cast abilities, such as spells with build times. A 1 second cast became 2, a 2 became 3, and so on and so forth.
Eventually (it didn't take that long, roughly I'm going to say 9-12 months after release), Thunderous Blows was changed into the old version of the 160 wounds debuff. At the time, the Marauder community was not happy (nobody is ever happy with nerfs), but in retrospect that skill was so horribly broken and made playing the game so unfun for everyone else that it just had to be changed.
Most people know the rest: It was a 160 wounds debuff, it was a good skill, but not considered to be too OP on live (and it didn't stack, just over-wrote other wounds debuffs), and it remained at 5 points in the mastery path. In ROR, it was changed to be 13 points and to reduce the wounds debuff value to 100, during a period of time in which T2 was the highest level of content and most people were running around with 4-6k wounds. And that is how we got to where it is today, and why threads like this exist.
#cantsleep