Nebuchadnezzar wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 11:50 pm
Fey wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 5:36 am
If your 65 foot ability instantly brings you 60 feet closer to your target it's still an insane ability. Have any of us ever played a mdps in any other MMO? Probably not, other MMO's are always irrelevant.
If at that point you get kited that means there is a viable counter play. This is good game design, no?
If a gap closer ability cannot reliably get you into melee range to use a skill, does it really function as a gap closer? What's the point of using it if it doesn't get you there anyways? Hope that they trip over a rock or something? Although I guess that actually is a possibility with the geometry in this game
Other MMOs I've played recognize the issue and have sometimes addressed it by adding short root effects to charges, see Conan and Archeage. Even then, other games do not struggle with the position desync issues that this game does which makes these issues worse. The movement speed buff on leaps is simply to overcome the technical issues this game struggles with. IMO that's a better solution anyway than taking away control from the person being closed on.
Even with a functional Shadowstep, counterplay still exists in the form it already does of trading cooldown for cooldown. It exists by say knocking back after pounce/charge, or throwing a root/stagger to waste their run speed buff or create distance, the same way that it exists for every other skill. Counterplay is about important skills having similar cooldowns so that if you can bait an enemy into wasting their skill it gives you the upper hand. I agree that it's important and improving Shadowstep does not change that. The point is that if the skill can't get you there to hit them 70% of the time it doesn't matter if you used your skill or not, you still can't hit them and they may as well save their counter skill for somebody else. I really don't understand the resistance to making the skill reliably perform its function in a way that is in line with multiple very similar skills that already exist in the game.
If you want to talk about counterplay, maybe we should be talking about the zero cooldown option for Pounce and Squig Leap, which by this definition removes any possibility for counterplay
Honshu wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 6:25 amWhat if stance swapping had a lower cooldown? Hell, maybe even limit it to using up your GCD and that's it. You still would lose an attack in that space of time which would disincentivize stance swapping for no reason, but it would actually reward fast fingers and quick thinking. I think it'd be merely nice for Mara, but would be a pretty huge buff for SW since there are a lot of circumstances where they may want to swap between Assault and Skirmisher.
Arthem wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 7:07 am
Give SW sudden shift. Next stance change has no cooldown 15 sec downtime ez.
Interesting suggestions. These could be alternatives for issue 2, but it also kind of raises the question of why even have stances in the first place if it just becomes keyboard DDR?
Arbich wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 1:11 pm
I dont agree with your premise about pounce.
Pounce should you bring in the direction of the enemy. It does that. If you dont end at the exact spot of the enemy after you pounced, you can use charge. WL is already a class with a lot mobility, it doesn´t need this extra tool.
About my last point: If you can only be 66% of the time on your enemy to deal dmg (due to cc etc...) and you get tools to increase this to 100%, you get in effect a 33% dmg buff.
ASW is a (very) good class in smallscale. Its abilities in assault tree fullfil a purpose and arent useless. It doesnt deserve a buff.
I think you need to separate the association of a leap based gap closer ability with a WL's kit and look at the effectiveness of the skill in isolation, because yes I'd agree WLs probably have more mobility tools than they need. I think we need to be focussing on the merits of the ability itself in isolation, and then after that think about how the kit as a whole functions. Maybe refer to the skill as Dwarf Toss or Da Long Jump rather than Pounce. Imagine that Choppa lost its charge but had a leap that perpetually put you 10 feet behind your target - Would you say that skill effectively performs the function of getting you into melee range to let you use a skill? The move speed buff is simply a band-aid to a technical problem. Other games recognize the issue as well, see the above reply.
I never said that any of ASW's abilities or the class were useless. In fact, my very first point said its kit brings some good tools to the table. This is simply about making them able to reliably use these skills
Caduceus wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 1:55 pm
Stance-switching is a fundamental part of playing SW well.
It seems to me the problem here is that some are locked into a mindset that because one plays an 'Assault' SW, one should never have to leave Assault Stance, or that one is incapable of dealing damage with ranged abilities. This is wrong and it will ensure one does not utilize the class to its fullest potential.
Perhaps the OP could share against what classes in particular he struggles, and we may better pinpoint the issue here.
Also, in a group setting, aren't there tanks and other melee classes that can apply slows to near infinity?
See previous posts re: stance switching and why it does not qualify as a reliable range maintainer. While yes basic ranged attacks are there, the requirement of 15 hard points in Assault leaves the base damage of other ranged abilities so low that melee skills are the only ones with any potential to kill a target.
This is not a problem with a particular class, it's just a fundamental hole in the kit that often leaves it in awkward situations which is echoed by many other players. One could also argue that based on tanks having snares no other melee class should have them because they should always be with their tanks
It's a question of being self sufficient in basic core functionality. My analysis below demonstrates how ASW is hurting in this regard relative to other classes
drmordread wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 8:51 pm
Ummm SW... is an RDPS? You still have a bow, you still have a ranged slow in skirmish stance. Do what SW's have done since the game went live in 2008; Learn to skirmish dance.
This has already been addressed, please read up. The section below also addresses this to some extent
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To investigate this further, I've organized the various movement related abilities into categories below. I think this form is instructive and highlights the benefits/drawbacks of the various kits
Primary Gap Closers - Tools that quickly get you in range to use a melee skill
White Lion - Pounce
AND Charge (lol)
mSH - Squig Leap
Mara/Choppa/Slayer - Charge
WH/WE - Normal Stealth / Insta Stealth (can be viewed as both primary and secondary)
Tanks - None (trade off for various tank utilities)
DPS DoK/WP - None (trade off for heals)
ASW - Shadowstep (on stationary targets, often fails otherwise)
Secondary Gap Closers - Secondary tools that achieve the same thing but take a bit longer
White Lion/Mara - Fetch/pull (On WL if no 0 CD pounce)
Slayer/Choppa - None (trade off for badass aoe + utility, GtdC/Shatter Limbs etc)
mSH - Outta my Way!
WH/WE - Normal Stealth / Insta Stealth (can be viewed as both primary and secondary)
Tanks - Quake/Wave of Scorn/Similar abilities, run speed procs on hit/defence
DPK DoK - FoK spam with CoC active
DPS WP - None (lol)
ASW - Swap to Skirmish and Takedown
Skills for sticking to your target after you get there
WL/Mara/Choppa/Slayer - Melee slow
WH/WE - Pistol/dagger slow for quick response when melee range is broken
mSH - Melee slow
Tanks - Melee and AoE slows
DPS DoK/WP - Melee slow with curse requirement, CoC as well for DoK
ASW - None
Dealing with CC
MDPS Archetypes - Standard snare break
WL - Also potentially has zero CD pounce (lol)
mSH - Zero CD Squig Leap comes standard
Tanks - Juggernaut
DPS DoK/WP - Standard snare break
ASW - None (trade off for the limited range damage options while in an Assault spec)
This highlights a couple of things. First off, WL has a looot of mobility tools which we already knew (lol). Second, DPS WPs will really struggle to get to their target(also already knew). Most classes here either have something functional in each category or are missing a category but have some other benefit that makes up for it. As a simple metric, if we say that having something in a category is worth a point then most classes score 3-4, or 5 for WLs. Given the bugginess of Shadowstep, an ASW scores 1.5 on this scale, which actually seems fairly representative. This also happens to be comparable to DPS WP, which most people would agree is in need of some help with mobility.
This analysis really highlights how much ASWs hurt in terms of actually being able to use their real skills relative to other classes. Looking at it this way I think that an Assault based snare break is probably unnecessary - the combination of improving Shadowstep to make it functional and a melee slow would put ASW at a 3 and would make it in line with other careers in this regard. I've amended the original post to remove this suggestion but have left the info there for reference.