AM mechanic changes, results and a few thoughts.

[dansari]

Oh sorry! I just saw you posting, and I assumed that all player skill and ability was being ignored...



W/o sarcasm, I see a bunch of posts on the forums about Meta, and how something is “garbage” or how something “isn’t worth the group slot”. That wasn’t directly pointed towards anyone in this thread.

LOL fair point

[blackfyre06]

Is there any change on AM mechanic in today's patch? Cause my healing skills are healing for the same amount with or without mechanic points as a dps spec. My damage as heal spec works fine, doing much more damage with mechanics points.

[Azarael]

The mechanic will not affect the value of heals against yourself.

[blackfyre06]

ok thx it uses stat modification on other players only.

[live4treasure]

So, I think I'm about ready to bring you my thoughts on the DPS AM buffs from one patch ago. I'll go about this in order, since there were three main changes that effected the DPS Archmage, one quite spectacular one, and another more mediocre one and another more general one. I'll start with the general one first.

DISCLAIMER: This thread is about Archmage, so you likely won't hear me talk about shaman much outside of a few short remarks. I'm certain that shaman players would have a lot of pent up negativity over being the victims of the brutal disrupt rates for a long time until recent patch and may feel that the AM strikethrough tactics were gods blessing to the class, but I would implore that if you'd like to highlight Shaman's situation in detail, you make a specific thread for it in the corresponding Greenskin forum so that we don't get derailed.
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1) Disrupt Formula Change.

In short, this change is actually very important for pretty much every other caster dps class in the game except for AM. Before this change you would usually go with Discerning Offense and either Dispell Magic or Centuries of Training, mostly depending on the enemy team composition. You had to go Discerning Offense, otherwise you risk being chain disrupted by anyone with a mild investment into defensive stats.

So what changed now? Nothing, pretty much. I've tried to run Dispell Magic and Centuries of Training together, eschewing the strikethrough... and while I did have some success, it proved to be a bit unreliable. I couldn't pressure healers at all and I was still often chain disrupted by anyone with a defensive investment, although not quite as much as before, if I tried this setup. In essence, you still need Discerning Offense, otherwise you wouldn't be able to reliably land your heal debuff or ap drain.

Did something change for the usual Discerning Offense setup? Not much. I suppose you could pressure healers a little better, but it's not too noticable. You could kill low rr undergeared squishy healers without a guard before anyway, and you can still do that now. You couldn't hurt the other spectrum of healers quite as much, and you still can't do that now.

So in short, nothing changed for AM in this department, but it's not something aimed directly at AM anyway. I would say this change has been very beneficial for DPS Shamans and in evidence of that, you see a lot more of them playing, which is a good thing.

2) Storm of Cronos switch.

This is the best change, hands down. However, the reason why it is good is actually unintuitive here. You may think that this change is good because this means it can hit for higher damage and also debuff spirit resistance for a real amount. But you're wrong, in fact. In terms of single target damage, this helps you against pug scenarios where you don't have an SM to rely on, which you really should have in any other circumstance. However you will grow to appreciate the higher damage on the instant cast. It's not by much. It won't be that noticable at first, but you'll appreciate it none the less in those rare situations where you are simply allowed to free cast at a 65 foot range without consequence.

The real benefit here is that we can just forget about the Vaul tree. That's great for a number of reasons. The Vaul tree has lost all of its damage potential now and the lifetap dot doesn't scale with points very well, so just ignoring it isn't that big of a loss. So the only thing remaining is the silence, which you wouldn't be using anyway as healers will have a reliable chance to disrupt it, while the 1s cast time make it implausible to use against sorcs and what not, who can make most of your health disappear in that time. Also mostly because if the sorc is going to focus you, that usually means the enemy melee line is already on its way to say hello, so sitting in place for a second won't do you any favors. As for 6v6, once again, it's just not reliable enough to bother speccing into so high.

However, the extra points means that we can spec further into Isha tree without losing much from Asuryan in the process and the goodies we get out of that are sizable! They're not exactly what AM needed, in my opinion, but this is still a noticable benefit. So, the most basic benefit this gives us is that our resistance buff is actually higher now. I'm only 20 resistance points away from a pure healer, up from 40 before, which means this becomes extra utility that I can bring to a 2 2 2 team. But that's actually a minor thing, along with the slightly increased self-heals. What really matters here is that we can get MAGICAL INFUSION. 30 s duration 25% bonus to healing taken on any target and a minor, roughly 750 hp heal should the target drop below 20% hp. It's a very noticable boost to our survivability and to the utility we bring to a 6 man team. However, the truth is, we're still pretty squishy. We can take quite a bit of punishment by way of combining Magical Infusion, Force Empowered Shield of Saphery, Force Empowered Lambent Aura and Isha's Ward, but the difference, while noticable, hasn't fundementall changed anything. The reason being is that you don't really have a reliable escape mechanism, so if the enemy melee line locks in on you, they're most likely going to stay on you until the healers run out of AP and you run out of shields to soak damage with, which will happen faster than you might think. Sometimes you can get away, though and the amount of times you can get away has gotten bigger and you can throw this onto a team member to help them survive a hardfocus as well. So definitely a benefit, and one I am happy about, but because the nature of the AM beast is based around enchantments, these benefits are easily countered in a coordinated environment. Often timed I'll have my Magical Infusion simply shattered after a few seconds of uptime.

The real benefit this has is in solo play. Even with a solo-centric defensive build, usually you would have trouble killing a good witch elf in 1v1, because a timely use of their 100% disrupt ability allows them to basically kill you outright, or deliver enough pressure through detaunt that you will have trouble recovering afterwards. Now, it's more like you are very favored to win if you see the witch elf coming, even if you didn't get to make any attacks before she went into stealth, because magical infusion + lambent aura will actually keep you up quite well through the opening burst, and if you don't see them... well chances are, if our theoretical skilled witch elf has equal gear and is not too far behind in RR, you're probably dead even with Magical Infusion added to your arsenal.

3) Dissipating Energies buff.

This one is very controversial... So, the reason for that is because the 2s cast time and the ally-centric aoe is simply unreliable. In a pug, the tank won't know what to do with the sudden surging lightning coming out of his pelvic region and in a coordinated 6 man, he will just get punted instantly, seen it over and over. That's not to say the ability doesn't do noticeable aoe pressure. With the recent change, it actually does, especially when combined with a Storm of Cronos beforehand and a Dispell Magic proc or two. It's just extremely hard to use, unreliable and easily countered. The more tightly packed damage went a long way to make this ability more appealing, and while I do have it specced, I find myself doing so only because there are rare situations where it can really come in handy and because the alternative to it is just an extra mastery point invested into the Asuryan Tree, which is probably less worth it? The reason I say probably here, is because the amount of times I actually end up using Dissipating Energies is very low. You either need to burst right now and you don't have time to apply another dot with a 2s cast time, because Radiant Lance will give you an immediate benefit and just casting a second one if you really need to will be better, or the enemy is already losing and it's used as basically a "win more" nail in the coffin type thing to chase down specific targets. In short, the spell does decent aoe damage, but the way its mechanics work just make it almost unusable.

The reason this change didn't do much for AM is because the aoe centric nature of the ability is clearly pointed at warbands. The 20s cooldown is much more managable, certainly, and isn't a useless ability because it has a chance to proc dispell magic on effected targets and remove buffs, hots and shield, but what defines a dps in a warband dps slot is sustained aoe damage and morale bombing. Even with whispering wind this ability has a 33% uptime at best and Storm of Cronos, which it heavily relies on to deal noticable damage, has a 30s cooldown, which means you're not quite as flexible, as well as the only bombing ability of AM being present on M4. So it's more of a one-hit-wonder type of thing where you wait for two rare effects and combo them together. Still not quite warband viable for this reason, but closer.

Conclusion/TLDR:

My opinion mirrors the opinions of a few other high RR dps AMs. The changes are good, they are most definitely a step in the right direction, but the crux of the issue remains.

The issues, as I see them are:

1) Very decent but just short of sufficient damage in order to be viable for smallscale pvp.

2) Doesn't fit into largescale pvp in any real capacity.

You could say that the changes indirectly slightly alleviated both of these issues, but it seems like it might need one more little nudge. Magical Infusion and higher resists are nice, though, for sure. Another reason why they're not quite as impactful is because, well, they are enchantments. You wouldn't want to run a healer AM if you take a DPS AM so that their utility doesn't overlap, which means that a lot of this is going to fall victim to enchantment strip abilities which every second melee class and every single tank has, but without a healer AM, your effects would have no real "cover" so to speak. All in all though, good, solid stuff.

That said, I'll use this thread to provide a couple of suggestions, some my own, some I've heard floating around during conversations. I think the current DPS AM design space, assuming Dissipating Energies won't be reworked into a completely new ability, would be the 13 pt. tactic and the 3 pt. tactic, both of which have limited use, one more than the other.
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I think that the 15% asuryan strikethrough tactic is and was even with the previous disrupt changes, just not worth taking unless the AM in question is severely undergeared, which doesn't seem to be a point to balance around. 10% strikethrough for all abilities is much better because it makes your AP drain, which is an important utility, more reliable and is only 5% less and also because you need Dispell Magic or Centuries of Training to deal damage. So if any further tweaks are planned, that's definitely space that can be used to work with something that would give us a little more single target potential. That said, even if it is used, AM has so few tactics open, that whether or not such a tactic would be worth giving Dispell Magic up for is a whole other question.

One interesting thought was to replace it with a tactic that would reduce the cooldown of Searing Touch by 2s and decrease the time between each tick by 33%, effectively making the time between then 1s and not 1.5s. It's an interesting thought because it doesn't add any additional burst to AM while increasing the dps, so it's unlikely to cause any balance issues.

Another, less interesting one, would be to just give a flat INT bonus instead of the strikethrough. Would probably be specced into and potentially used instead of Discerning Offense as with the current patch it would provide a decent increase in landing your damage on enemies, but have the side effect of increasing AM burst damage. Whether that's bad or good, however, is difficult to test without observing through direct gameplay.
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So the other tactic that could serve as design space for any future changes is Forked Lancing. Simply put, the tactic is useless and not worth a slot. It's pretty plain and simple. I guess if one would set out to make this tactic a useful warband option without making any drastic changes or reworks, simply increasing the amount of targets it hits from 3 to 6 would probably be a start. Limited number of targets in exchange for a precious tactic slot and and 100 ft. range. Seems fine to me, although you could just make it a 20ft. pb aoe with 80 ft. range if the hassle is worth it. Either way, it'd probably be enough to give DPS AM a spot or two in a wb solely on the back of Dispell Magic being useful.
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Finally, making Dissipating Energies instant cast or at least castable on the run would probably do a lot for making the ability a plausible use of your time. I think the damage is there, when used with SoC spirit debuff, just needs a bit of quality of life polishing.
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And that concludes my thoughts on the recent DPS AM changes. Thank you for your attention.

[Telen]

Thing with DE is it has incredible potential. On the target dummies it was making up over 50% of damage. Actual rvr use it was less than 5.

[live4treasure]

Requires a bit of clarification there, Telen. Was it 50% of your damage on more than one target? Or was it 50% of your damage in single target?

PS: Errrgh, obviously not single target. Anyway, was sleepy, but the reason I posted this dumb question was because I wanted to focus the attention on one detail.

So, according to calculations, if DE hits with all 5 ticks that will add up to 1250 tooltip damage total for my character. In comparison Scatter the Winds and Radiant gaze are at around the 1100 marker, but single target, obviously.

The difference isn't big, right? The reason DE can seem to be effective is because the time between ticks is twice as fast. Which is why I think DE on its own is not so much damage as it is pressure, that only becomes noticable when used with other effects that deal instant damage, of which we have only one, SoC. So I suppose you could compare it to... using Radiant Gaze and Scatter the Winds, but they both become aoe and halve their duration, and have the auxiliary effect of proccing Dispell Magic instead of what they normally do. You won't really threaten anyone or pressure a healer by simply applying those two dots to a target without at least a Fury of Asuryan and a Searing Touch thrown on top. Of course, you have to factor in that this is aoe damage and all that.

That said if forked lancing tactic was made into something useful, we would have another instant damage effect to make use of, or something along those lines and would actually be capable of laying down some aoe damage that could be a threat. However dps am would still be a bit on the gimpy side in terms of aoe dps, because you either give up strikethrough for it or the crit tactic. But at the very least, it would be playable in a warband and could potentially be compensated by way of party wide critical hit chance buffs from SW, IB and possibly KotBS (if im not mistaken) and/or pierce defenses.

[Telen]

Its nice on paper and on the dummies problem is you have nothing to follow it with and its very situational. Plus unless you're lucky enough to have an aoe heal debuff the next group heal just wipes it out. You need to slot Dispel and CoT and follow it up with M4 FotP to make it carry any sort of aoe pressure.

Really it suffers from the same issue Magus did before their changes. A mish mash of aoe and st with no real burst. I think trees need to be dedicated or in the pure archtype game that ror is becoming its just fluff for the heal spam.

[live4treasure]

Yeah, I think we're on the same page here. Anyway, all that's left is to see where things go from here. There's a chance that the recent change to DPS AM won't be the last one, since Aza initially mentioned more extensive changes in the balance thread and as he commented in the patch notes, it takes more than one patch to fix a damaged spec

[Telen]

The level BW/Sorc and some of the MDPS were on was way above where the dot classes were on live. Now with the big buffs Magus and Engie and the melee trees for rdps have seen they are also on another level. This just doesnt compare. On live this buff might have seemed nice but were in a totally different world of dps levels. Utility classes were pretty weak on live, on ROR they have no place.
It will be interesting to see what DoK/WP get in comparison considering that devs do play that class.