Acidic wrote:lefze wrote:
Stance dancing is still not a mechanic, right now you would never switch to scout in a skirmish or assault build, you extremely seldom/never swap to skirmish in an assault spec (Only do it for the occasional snare or RF/FS finisher), and swapping into assault from a skirmish spec skirmish is either purely for the tanky stats or the disarm. What I'm saying here is that stance dancing isn't actually playing a nearly as big part as you are making it out to do for any other spec than scout. And skirmish as it is now is still the meta spec I believe as asw can't keep up with a WL for example, and still outperforms scout HARD at what is supposed to be ranges where scout shines. And even with a buff to scout skirmish will continue to be superior in most areas.
And why are you bringing up the meta in the first place? This isn't about changing the meta of the class, it's about improving a dead mastery tree which has the biggest drawbacks and the biggest dependencies on switching to non-specced stances making it a hell of a gimpy spec.
And while I agree a range buff is nice and all and is a decent fix for certain stuff, it still leaves the spec unable to assist, and keep up with a party. And it will also make it very obnoxious to play against and remove counterplay as opponents are no longer fighting something that's stationary for 3 seconds (2 with 1a) in range of CC, but outranges almost everything. But in the end of the day this is gonna make it better at leeching, shooting from keep walls and derping around with pugs, while the inability to play with a party is gonna leave it as it is, a cheesy gimp spec that is still outperformed by full skirmish, skirmish/assault and assault.
I feel that this sums the situation.
Stance dancing is not a thing, it should be . Link more skills to stance is solution to this to prevent use of tools that are in other stances. This will make stance dancing a thing.
Skirmish is good yes but it get benefit from skills in scout tree, remove the availability of scout skill to skirmish build sorted, especially when even considering or arguing "can't keep up with WL" just shows the ambition level is out there in space.
3-2second cast on skills , nothing new for range dps look at other range classes
Party aspect is not probably best but this spec should work well in WB, where having range helps.
Unable to assist cos of range, lost me there. change target, positioning etc etc, 3 letter combo comes to some arrangement of lp2 I guess
What makes stance dancing not necessary is not "being able to use skill from different stance mastery"... but the fact that 90% of the necessary tool for ranged play are in skirmish while 90% of necessary tool for melee play are in assault...
to explain more in depth:
Skirmish: Snare, KD/ini debuff, Healing debuff, spammable DoT, finisher, spammable AoE ..... this on top of haveing a 98 ft range vs 110 ft range of scout and tha ebilit to use every skill while on the move
Scout: silence, armor debuff, AoE dot, finisher
Assault: disarm, KD, interrupt, Spammable DoT
As you can see most of the utility are grouped in the same mastery, yes there are more specific and situational better CC in the other 2 mastery but we'r taliking of a 4sec disable vs 3 sec disable, with 3 sec being a 98ft ranged skill usable on the move while the other 2 are either melee or 1 sec standing cast so you already have a Counterbalnce on them ON TOP of the need to swap stance... this make using the KD (that also work as an INI debuff) instead of swapping stance a good choice in most cases... and lead to only swap if you need the CC and the KD is already on CD ^^'
This is IMHO the greatest problem of SW stance balance;
Skirmish have EVERYTHING you want and need to play a ranged character.
Assault being the only mastery focuse on melee obviously have all the avaible tool for melee in it (yes there are a few tool like the snare that are only avaible in other stances but as said 90% are built into the assoult stance).
Scout have several damaging abilities but lack of KEY utility (do you really want to play a ranged without a ranged snare nor a CC effective against melee?).
This lead to skirmish and assault having little to no need to ever swap to other stances (even if you bind the few stance free abilites to their mastery stance) while scout NEED to swap to skirmish in order to get those tool... result: why go scout if you have everything in skirmish?
in this regard the only thing I can see ginving a reason for swapping from skirmish to scout wold be the range discrepency between the 2 being actualy sensible (98 vs 110... is really little and once you take into account the fact that skirmish can cast on the move whle scout have standing cast you will realize that those 12ft actualy can't even cover the distance of a fleeting target that start to run away at the start of your cast...) this lead to either give scout stance a higher range increase (from 10% to 25% or greater) or to reduce the efficency of powerfull draw (from 50% to 25%... that is actualy what eng and magus get from their similar tattics), this way you will create a range gap between the 2 stances and will put the player into the position of having to chose between utility and range
