Magusar wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 3:35 pm
It is quite possible that there is some misunderstanding due to the fact that English is not my native language.
I know perfectly well that the proposal to make soulfire x2 damage is not yours, if that's what you mean. My research in this thread is aimed at the situation as a whole, and not just at your proposals, which include making soulfire similar to ID choppa or adding an analogue of Hammer of Sigmar for AoE.
Specifically in your proposals, as far as I can judge, the point of misunderstanding is soulfire. In your proposal, I did not see either a CD or damage numbers, which leads me to believe that you simply forgot about it (I read the topic quickly, except for the main post, because it is the main criterion for the discussion - so maybe I missed where you propose specific damage and CD numbers for the reworked soulfire).
My position specifically on your first proposal is that soulfire is used in the st dps component, because it is a very strong aoe dot. The current version of this dot has a drawback - the cast time, which in turn stops some dps WP from spamming this dot every 10 seconds to refresh. Some dps WP do not use it at all to deal dps, which I consider an omission. Dps WP now has a lot of damage, even without taking into account the use of soulfire, and you suggest removing the drawback from this ability (you also suggest adding a mini charge to this skill), thereby forcing WP to use this dot more often. And now the most important thing - all dps abilities of dps WP are used in the st "action". What do you think - will increasing the ease of use of this ability coupled with a charge from the same ability - lead to an increase in damage, which, in my humble opinion, would be good to avoid? And it will also activate an extra guilty soul stacks, which hits hard.
Your second suggestion is to add a new ability to the AoE list. Here everything is simpler - I think that there is already a lot of AoE in the game at the moment and it is necessary to make more of it, and through class specialization, which is not intended for constant AoE pressure or explosion.
I also noted that there are very large risks, even if the changes are tied to some specific condition, for example tactics.
Here I have only touched upon your suggestions in the first post, bypassing other suggestions in the topic to avoid confusion.
Thank you for the response, it's clear what you mean now. I would like to counterargue a few points here:
1) I don't suppose that the devs, if they do anything at all for AOE DPS WP, will follow my suggestion exactly. I leave it up to them to judge what sort of damage numbers, cooldowns or other things a changed Soulfire would have. In fact, I pretty much don't care, given that any iteration of Soulfire that is at least beneficial/functional to use is better than the one we have currently for the purposes of AOE DPS. Specifically what I initially suggested was that every tick of this Furious Stompin' analogue version of Soulfire would drain some amount of Righteous Fury. The reason I don't believe this to be beneficial to DPS WP's single target damage is because the ST playstyle relies on: 1) either keeping up pressure by building up RF to Hammer of Sigmar while maintaining the various debuffs that DPS WP has, then spending it, building up, spending it or; 2) Building up RF to at least 210 (3 HoS) or 250 (Divine Impact + 3 HoS) and dumping all of it at once during a coordinated burst phase.
An effect that slowly drains your RF actually interferes with this strategy, because it makes it less convenient, rather than more convenient, to execute it vs the dot version of Soulfire. Gersy would argue that some use it to timestamp damage all at once, and this is a detriment in that scenario; I would argue that this is pretty negligible, because using Soulfire as a timestamp has so many things with it that can go wrong, that this being an effective plan has more to do with the opposing team being clueless to this plan than it being actually practical. As for having the speedup effect, if this is the path chosen by the devs, if it does increase the DPS of Warrior Priest in a single target scenario, it does it in a roundabout way, which leads me to my second counterpoint;
2) At the end of the day it's about how much damage you can squeeze in to the shortest possible window of time. Moving faster does not directly contribute to doing more burst damage, and typically in premade scenarios vs premade scenarios, how much pressure you can put out is a secondary concern to how much burst you put out in the exact right moment of time. DPS WP's ST design is essentially built around timing a Divine Impact + Auto Attack + Hammer of Sigmar, all of which can land onto the target within the span of a single second, resulting in a kill. Speed helps your melee uptime, but this is a class the ST rotation of which just needs the single right moment to connect and it will deliver its burst damage. As a sidenote, changing smite wasn't brought up in this thread, but for the same reason as why a speedup doesn't actually directly increase your kill potential, doing anything to smite's damage doesn't actually effect it either, because ST DPS WP lands kills on people with the use of Hammer of Sigmar, not Smite. That said, the reason I didn't suggest changing smite itself is because I think everyone would rather DPS WP gets at least one additional button to press, rather making the one button rotation it already has stronger.
3) Finally, as you might have read at the bottom of the OP, this topic is valid only as long as the current meta remains in place and the direction of the game's development supports it. When you say you would rather there be less AoE in this game, that's a statement regarding the general state of the game and is therefore off-topic to the thread. If the game has less AoE in general, which would include every single class having less AoE and thus vastly changing the meta, then this suggestion is a moot point, because it relies on the current meta in the game as a benchmark for what is underperforming or overperforming. As I've said to everyone else that has expressed a similar opinion; if you'd like to discuss whether the game at large has too much AoE or too little of it, please make your own suggestion thread and do it there.
That said, thank you for actually making a detailed post and actually reading the subject matter. This is far more constructive a conversation than most.