DistractingBellow Swap with Raze

[wonshot]

Hello,

This conversation is probably long overdue, but all we see is oneliners and not really fully explaining the situation and the case for why these two morale tank abilities need to be reverted back into their origal spots.

I will try to run the leading argument of the game has changed, but more than anything the reasons why the morales were initially swapped has been corrected and adressed so the morales can go back to their original spots.

1) The issue was tanks doing morale-bombs with an early raze.
We have to look at the era of when this was an issue. Brightwizard especially were doing M2 drops, on top of tanks doing raze from M2 leading to unmitigateable oneshots. This has been adressed with the patch about a year ago where morale damage will be lowered if a taret takes more than 2400 per second. As a follow up patch, Damage over time morales were not affected by this for a couple of weeks, but this has also been corrected and these are now affected by the 2400 per second implimentation.

2) The players have improved and the meta shifted away from morale-bombs-only
BW/Sorc/Mara and other M2 drops are still "a thing" but morale bombs are no longer blowing full cityinstance warbands up, Players have improved and especially DoK/WP with Syphone are seeing fun counterplay to any potential morale drops.

3) Distracting Bellow is too powerful, too fast, and too impactful for a morale2
Stage3 cityfights are pretty much a pve damage race, but it is not decited based on who has better gear, more singletarget specs, more group autoattackspeed buffs, or anything related to minmaxing. it purely comes down to who can cover a better M2 Bellow rotation for mitigating 50% damageoutput on the enemy damagedealers during the dps race.
8 tanks, with Bellow being 10seconds and 60sec cooldown. That is too fast to gain, too hard to drain, and at times tanks who have the choice between giving their own party 75%mitigation vs debuffing 8 damagedealers for 50% they choose the M2 option because it brings better defensive value.

4) Ranked, orvr, city and pvp in general.
When City sieges are decited in pve race, it is 99% of the time based on Bellow rotations. And the difference between a succesful bellow system vs a none exsisting one, is shockingly high on the lord-dps races.
But in Ranked 6v6 Bellow is also a counter if you are getting superpunted away from your guarded dps player, and cant provide guardrange. Your counter? A ranged 50% mitigation to help your target stay alive till you can be back in guardrange.
In oRvR which is my main activity there are a few keyabilities and roles you assign as a warbandleader. Bellow being so important than shotcallers are happy to hear others overwrite their calls simply to hear Bellows being applied. Bellow being a ranged ability helps vs big outnumbered fights where you have a backline pounding on your frontline and hold the line stacks are not enough to sustain the heavy outmatched ranged presure when facing a zerg, in these situations it helps having Bellows being ranged and not a 360degree pbaoe or frontal 45cone as it could had been suggested changed to.
Instead Bellow being on a fast morale, so basicly when you are roaming and stop for anything more than a singleplayer your tanks will be close to M1 already. Meaning that any force with 2-2-2 who are dismounted, have to be concidered if they have morale damage advantage, but also if you should expect to get hit by a 50% damage mitigation if you engage anyone already in combat. And as a result many engagemetns backfire, when engaging into someone already in combat. or not picking the fight is simply a smarter choice. Meaning pvp is not happening, in a pvp game.

5) Morale pumps and destro advantage to get Bellow first IF it was on M3
Yes, that is correct Destro tanks with their selfpumps would reach M3 bellow before order tanks.
But that gets the realm vs realm balance closer to the original state it used to be in. Where Order had advantage on raw damage numbers+healing. While destro had advantage on the morale minigame with mitigations and faster focused mind on zealot, to combat the tempo from Order realm.
so naturally a swap from M2 Bellow into M3 Bellow would give destro a slightly faster Raze, meaning they can get some tempo to even out the Order tempo.
it will also mean that Destro are going back to having a Win-condition on M3 where they can chose between their faster M3 aoe silence on BO or getting Bellow faster on BO without Order being able to match it as early. This leads to Destro having one of their lost advantages given back, slightly. And at the same time Order would have a few more tempo seconds on engagement where there are no Bellows on them before the destro Selfpump Bellows kick in. Leading to a lower TTK game, more death, more casualties.. More War!

[Bloodmasked]

Sounds like fun to throw raze more often where that extra bit of damage is needed to secure kills. Also as a result, AOE morale drains more draining/valuable since morale pumpers will have to spend more time to get M3 for their bellows. Brings bellow closer to M4 so that M4 is not neglected as easily, and prevents from using defensive M4 and then bellow shortly after (60seconds?).

[Uchoo]

I agree that Bellow is probably too strong and feels bad to play against (much like Trivial Blows LUL) but I don't agree on the bellowing winning the stage 3 race. I've lost the race where we've bellowed better and won where we've been bellowed. Stronger considerations in that case are number of Skull Thumpers/Blurring Shocks, DPS maximizing Single Target damage. Advantage Goes to Destro for Skull Thumpers due to running more Black Orcs than Swordmasters in general and ST DPS advantage should go to Order as they have generally stronger ST DPS.

Destro running heavy Borc & Mara have a unique advantage if played right. Maras can Swap to Brut and have pretty insane single target damage. Order can be troublesome because a lot of their AA Haste is from Tactics, which a lot of Slayers and White Lions tend to not run in city.

As a tank player, I really enjoy having Bellow on Morale 2. The only tool you have for damage reduction is challenge and waiting for morale 3 or 4 to influence the damage output of enemies kind of sucks. This is a much bigger problem on Order due to lack of morale pumps on tanks but I would rather see the effectiveness of Bellow reduced rather than its position on morale. The other reason that Bellow being on 2 is great is that a lot of tanks have AMAZING morale 3s they can now use.

How I would change Bellow if it was decided that Bellow should be changed: Either A. Reduce it from the insane 50% that stacks with everything else -OR- B. Reduce the duration. This isn't 2010. Players aren't the same potatoes on average. You don't need debuffs lasting 10 seconds, games are much faster paced.

The last thing I'll say is that balancing Destro to be strong with morale and Order without isn't futureproofed at all IMO. The game is slowly being balanced and classes are being reworked into viability and less viability. Choppa's Burst was destroyed when GTDC was "fixed" and RSH are top tier Single Target now after their rework. 10 years from now when Lost Vale is released, can you really speak for where the game will be for balance?

[kirraha]

May I give a sugestion to ''solve'' this Bellow issue.

Instead of moving Bellow to m3 spot to cuck order. Why not give it a try and make Bellow an Aoe effect that is not on a target but around yourself instead?
It will instead affect enemies within 30feet of YOU, not your target. It will require for you as a tank to move where you want to place your bellow.

To be able throw the bellow on a target within 100 foot range is very strong for a morale 2 atm. It is too strong, and I am a main tank player myself. But if it would get move back to it's original place, it will still not affect destro very much since they build morales very very fast.

I concider Bellow > Immaculate Defense, since Bellow benefits ALL you allies and not just you partyteam. You throwing off some nice bellows in a keep-push for example, both first line and on deep ranged targets and you can pretty much just walk right in in some situations.

Still not 100% sure this sugestion will work out well. It will make it harder as a lesser number to fight big number with lots of range.
Bellow does atm reward good tanks and good players. I don't like a habit to reward zerging. It is not healthy gameplay in the long run. But ofc, can do a test and see how it will behave.
Moving it to m3 again will force order to use other methods. We don't run solar flare anymore to counter tanks m4, since the aoedrops are chagned.

This is all my own thoughts, I play tanks all both sides and all classes, mainly it's Kotbs and BO and the amount of speed you build morales on destro is just silly sometimes. It's ez, gg omegalul to have bellow withing 20 seconds and throw it off anywhere you like withing 100 feet.

[emiliorv]

Stage3 cityfights are pretty much a pve damage race

When City sieges are decided in pve race

Really this is weird (to me)...this "endgame RVR" decided by pve dmg race.

Isnt this another issue for the target-cap increase??