Without getting into any tactics that can further reduce its cooldown, or buffs to the slayers chance to crit while using it, let’s just examine the base ability. My premise is that this ability is by far the most powerful ability in the game, and takes very little skill to return a large value for its user. When used, it does not matter what gear, skills, renown, or buffs the slayers target brings to battle. All targets are reduced to a level playing field of zero block/parry. Being able to negate all of this at the click of a button simply takes the fun out of the game. It’s no fun having 4-5 slayers reduce even the best geared tanks in your party to nothing in a matter of seconds, and I don’t see how it can be fun for the slayer as it’s essentially an “I win button”.
Now, many of you are currently screaming “but Zij you can just shatter enchantment and take it away”, sure you can, assuming it's the last enchantment applied to the slayer. Perhaps, there are 4-5 slayers, shatter enchantment has a 5 second cooldown. Even if cooldown reduction abilities are used and the tank can spam shatter enchantment there’s no amount of the most skilled tanks that will peel it off a group of slayers in time for them to not be reduced to nothing.
Well, “but what about strategy” you’re now saying. Sure, you can disengage from the slayerball spread out and make them have to choose a target. This will work until it comes back up again very shortly, or not at all if they are staggering it so that one or two of them always have it up. One large advantage this creates for the warband with slayers is there is no need to go after healers, they can simply burn down dps or tanks before healers even have a chance to react to the amount of incoming damage. Countering it is very possible in small group settings a 6v6 or smaller and it’s probably fine for that type of play. When it comes to large scale rvr or 24 v 24 cities there’s simply too much going on for even the most skilled group to make sure they can get rid of it with shatter. Not getting rid of it is a death sentence, and this goes back to my “I win button” statement. Trying to go through a choke point where there are a large number of slayers all attacking targets that are now unable to block or parry as they try to make a push, puts an unreasonable amount of pressure on a warband.
To drive my point home I’ll bring up a rather sore topic on these forums, the chosen change that was mistakenly implemented that debuffed a large number of enemies crit chance by 25%. This was quickly rolled back as it was rather game breaking due to the amount of damage it negated from the enemy team. I would argue that rampage is just as bad as it fully negates the defensive stats of ANY target the slayer hits. I do not think destro should get a mirror ability, I believe that for the good of the game rampage should be drastically reworked. I fail to see how rampage is much different from the chosen buff in terms of power. To the order players that will no doubt lose their mind over this post, I don’t want you to be reduced to training dummies, I simply want to meet on a level playing field. I look forward to any positive discussion this brings about.
