Swordmaster Proposal

[soliticks]

Hi there, my name is Chris. I once proposed a more dynamic change, but considering the recent nerfs to the Black Orc aoe snare, I understand it was a little overkill. I'll keep this one short and sweet:

Problem: Swordmasters have a difficult time snaring. Our Sudden Shift can be used to force Improved Balance from the other two stances, but we often save that ability to maximize our uptime of perfect stance. Unlike standard and perfect balance, our improved balance is currently our most inefficient, and often cluttered, stance. There are three things in this stance that are extremely important to Swordmasters: Quick Incision (our snare), Wrath of Hoeth (our spirit debuff), and Eagle's Flight (our +25% parry boost). Juggling these three equally important things is difficult to impossible. As a tank, one of our main jobs is to keep enemies slowed. But with how often a tank switches targets, we are often stuck limiting our improved balance to spamming Quick Incisions on nearby targets. With Eagle's Flight's extremely low duration (5 seconds), cycling our stances to keep that up during heavy guard damage is extremely difficult in most situations (especially in low ap situations).

I have two proposals:

1) I propose that Quick Incision be simply taken off our stances completely and given a 5 second cooldown as a standard tank snare.

2) I propose that Eagle's Flight's duration be extended to 10-15 seconds (similar to the Chosen's Suppression) so that we are able to keep it up more reliably during heavy guard damage.

Result: This would allow Swordmasters to snare targets as a standard tank would, it would make keeping up our parry buff more feasible, and it would open up other improved balanced abilities we might wish to use with lower priorities (such as Sapping Strike). Thank you for your time.

[Azarael]

I have designs on Phoenix's Wing. I strongly disagree that the stance mechanic should be violated. Taking QI off it removes the mechanic interaction and buffing Eagle's Flight's duration means that expending an Improved on keeping it up in rotations is no longer necessary.

Declined.