Zealot - mastery tree rework discussion

[catholicism198]

Not entirely false but not entirely true...
Zealots had harbinger of doom upon release- it just functioned differently.
It would be nice if the zealot/rune priest had the standard heal- damage- life tap set up but I doubt that would happen. Life taps are just.... and they don't seem to have may anyways

[kweedko]

The topic starter, doesn't understand concept of the trees(st, dot, aoe) and meaning of investing points in them + synergy of the classes, his proposal brings only more mess in the trees, he never played 70+ DDZealot, and don't know playstyles of each specs and them places under the sun.

Places of the abils and tact in the trees are total fine now. The problem with DDZ not in this, but in skills and tactics themselves they need a little tweaks, and DDZ will be fine and dandy. I made a good proposal about it - you may check it here viewtopic.php?f=95&t=28103

[roadkillrobin]

Not entirely false but not entirely true...
Zealots had harbinger of doom upon release- it just functioned differently.
It would be nice if the zealot/rune priest had the standard heal- damage- life tap set up but I doubt that would happen. Life taps are just.... and they don't seem to have may anyways

The harbinger wasn't a class mechanic like it is now.
St corperal debuff that increased over a period of 60 seconds. 1 tactic that turned it into a dot and some skill that autotargeted it's target iirc.

[JUNDIE]

The trees look the way they do because of the original harbinger design. Needless to say there was the z-axis bug that caused it to not cast unless you were on the same exact plan (so it worked for dueling mostly).

The original harbinger was a 1m DoT with back-loaded (increasing) damage, and a corp debuff to make our damage worthwhile. You were supposed to go up your core trees (Single, HoT, AoE) and can grab some DPS tools to use on the player with the harbinger. There even was a pretty cool raven animation with it too. But with a lot of BIGGER issues at release, I imagine it was shelved and .... yeah.

If it was up to me, I would revisit the original design because it seems like less work. But maybe play around merging the current "thing" with the old design. Return it to a '"mark" on an enemy that basically does what the current mechanic wants, increasing our dps...

"The Harbinger of Doom slowly increases your magic power/ crit by X per second for the marked target"

You can play around with rate, base values, maximum values, duration... This way the trees actually work somewhat. And a healing zealot can still do their job and if they need to waste AP, dps. Also, since Dark Feces is what it is... you can still work the pure DPS builds into the middle tree.

Hopefully that helps explain the tree layout to some. And possibly spawns some better ideas down the road.

P.S. I love the AP ritual changes

[JUNDIE]

The topic starter, doesn't understand concept of the trees(st, dot, aoe) and meaning of investing points in them + synergy of the classes, his proposal brings only more mess in the trees, he never played 70+ DDZealot, and don't know playstyles of each specs and them places under the sun.

Places of the abils and tact in the trees are total fine now. The problem with DDZ not in this, but in skills and tactics themselves they need a little tweaks, and DDZ will be fine and dandy. I made a good proposal about it - you may check it here viewtopic.php?f=95&t=28103

I looked over it. I would rather not merge abilities with shaman (auto-detaunt tatic/ casting on the run/ life taps). BUT a lot of good things in there with scaling the abilities and lack of dps tools. Nice work.

[catholicism198]

It's pretty much what Jundie said but there was a little more to it.
It felt like it was something mythic failed to let fully bake.

That said, Rituals/Runes have always been marketed as the Zealot's/Rune Priest's mechanic- albeit a pretty lazy one.

[Athergic]

I wouldn't care for the re arrangement on my zealot. I actually think the abilities are in good places, it would be nice to see something done with tactics that don't work though.

[Valfaros]

Not entirely false but not entirely true...
Zealots had harbinger of doom upon release- it just functioned differently.
It would be nice if the zealot/rune priest had the standard heal- damage- life tap set up but I doubt that would happen. Life taps are just.... and they don't seem to have may anyways

The harbinger wasn't a class mechanic like it is now.
St corperal debuff that increased over a period of 60 seconds. 1 tactic that turned it into a dot and some skill that autotargeted it's target iirc.

Wasn't it the other way around. Starting with strong corp debuff for the first 10 sec, good for the next 20 and then okay for the last 30 seconds. I might mix it up though. Then that 1 tactic was transference and it wasn't just a dot it was a strong lifeleach (500-1000 / 5 sec). Basically the whole witchcraft tree depended on the harbinger of doom which is why this tree is now the weakest since it hasn't got access to it's prior strong corp debuff.

Then the harbinger a mechanic nah I don't think so, not with this cd and not with how tactics direct how you can play your class.

I guess everybody see it different however I always suspected just a lazy way to fix the issue with no correctly desinged equipment in later tiers for zealots. Their idea of int. and willpower on equipment showed to be failing quite early on in the game (just like dok and wp as frontline healers) and instead of having to add twice the amount of sets they just did this.

I just never understood why they would change the harbinger (and therefore breaking witchcraft) instead of just adding a new skill (like they did on rp). There were problems with the minute long debuff/lifeleach which could have been dealt by just reducing their duration but there certainly weren't an unbearable amount of solo roaming dps zealots around to justify this overall crippling nerf. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[roadkillrobin]

Not entirely false but not entirely true...
Zealots had harbinger of doom upon release- it just functioned differently.
It would be nice if the zealot/rune priest had the standard heal- damage- life tap set up but I doubt that would happen. Life taps are just.... and they don't seem to have may anyways

The harbinger wasn't a class mechanic like it is now.
St corperal debuff that increased over a period of 60 seconds. 1 tactic that turned it into a dot and some skill that autotargeted it's target iirc.

Wasn't it the other way around. Starting with strong corp debuff for the first 10 sec, good for the next 20 and then okay for the last 30 seconds. I might mix it up though. Then that 1 tactic was transference and it wasn't just a dot it was a strong lifeleach (500-1000 / 5 sec). Basically the whole witchcraft tree depended on the harbinger of doom which is why this tree is now the weakest since it hasn't got access to it's prior strong corp debuff.

Then the harbinger a mechanic nah I don't think so, not with this cd and not with how tactics direct how you can play your class.

I guess everybody see it different however I always suspected just a lazy way to fix the issue with no correctly desinged equipment in later tiers for zealots. Their idea of int. and willpower on equipment showed to be failing quite early on in the game (just like dok and wp as frontline healers) and instead of having to add twice the amount of sets they just did this.

I just never understood why they would change the harbinger (and therefore breaking witchcraft) instead of just adding a new skill (like they did on rp). There were problems with the minute long debuff/lifeleach which could have been dealt by just reducing their duration but there certainly weren't an unbearable amount of solo roaming dps zealots around to justify this overall crippling nerf. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No, the theme of Chaos design is that they deal slow damage and draining resources, with lots of CC and big Morale finishers. Zealot was no exception. Starting slow and setting up damage slowly over time. Alot of things have changed however like CC immunities, debuff stacking etz.

[Valarion]

I'll try to explain why Zealots and RP Mastery trees look the way they do.
It's part of the design of the healer classes all together.

All healer classes mechanics were designed to be hybrids where to fully utilize the classes you would swap from healing to use damage/debuff skills every now and then into your rotation.

Archmage/Shaman have their 5-1 mechanic. 5 Heals which all powers upp a dps spell.
DoK/WP have their resource gain mechanic. Heal- Heal - Smash - Smash - heal- heal

RP/Zealot came without the Rune of Breaking/Harbinger. They were designed to be a free choise of cast and instead of representing weakness/strenght from a mechanic the strenght is the free choise of skill type but limited by the situational mastery you have chosen.

The reason this was implemted badly is partly due to TTK doesn't allow for healers to really waste GCD/AP to use skills at the rate it was designed for and partly that the game wasn't built for Deft Defender and Parry/Block rates + Hold The Line which means the free cast often goes wasted.

The implementation of Rune of Breaking and Harbinger toggle fixed 1 issue but complety trashed the whole class concept. I would look into fixing these skills instead and instead of being a toggle maybe it should be something that activates as a passive mechanic somehow.

Example: All Alchamy heals have a 25% chance of Triggering Harbinger of Alchamy - Next Alchemy spell will be casted using healing statistics and also vice verse All Alchamy dps skills have a 25% chance to triggering Harbinger and next Alchemy heal uses dps statistic. Without changing the primary stat that the current toggles does.

The problem with this argument is the Dok/WPs have a strong, solid, viable and dedicated heal tree and the AMs/Shams have a half good tree (the Shams getting a wicked Hot and AMs a ST+).

Perhaps buffing the "heal your defensive target on damage" skills might improve things a bit for the Zeal here?