Warhammer Online: 1.4.9 Patch Notes on PTS

[Tesq]

dont fear bw/sorc as we are usualy see them dot rotation in 1.4.0 in a pre 1.4.0 enviroment or in one with crit fixed their rotation would make no more sense, also i was refering to this when i spoke about order ranged knock down, BW rotaion would be uselss with out Ranged KD cos most healer would just be more near their mate with out fear to be knockdowned etc. While guard alredy proved defense on dps

Nod my remarks was made regarding 1.4.9 being good or bad

I understand that but war is complex you cant judge a patch from his own you need to look what influence what.
And why a patch is bad or good.

If BW/Sorc are causing a problem which is only kept in check by an overpowered feature of another class, which in turn hurts balanced classes, the root of the issue should be attacked.

the only issue i see with bw is their ranged knockdown, it should not be on BW, it should not exist in game or maybe it should have been given to classes such engi/magus.
For sorc maybe order player can tell us if there is something that is gamebreaking as im not an exepert on that class.
But i always hear as complain that sorc made more damage than bw.

[Azarael]

I think not doing incremental small changes are where EA truly failed. Change one or two abilities keep or discard based on feedback and after live testing ensures gradual improvement and a wide acceptance from players. Weekly small steps not quarterly marathons is vastly superior when it comes to fine tuning and keeping the bug troll away

I've been balancing a mod for over three years and this is indeed the correct approach. Change too much at once and you just disrupt the metagame entirely. You lose the ability to predict at all the end result of your modifications.

[Tesq]

small fix are oki for me but the things to touch do not change they still the same, if you work all togheter it does not mean you have make big chance on the thigs you work on, work on more than 1 stuff x time can let you see how interation work for those stuff

[Bejkon]

Heads up, wall of text inbound!

I spent some time on the PTS when it was running 1.4.9 and this is what i remember/felt/feeling about the changes.


Sorc and BW

WDPS:
Damage went up if you clinged onto a rr100 stick, otherwise it was on par with 3x bugged souls at best. Mind you, this WDPS scaling was not present on every ability.

Backlash:
I cant quite remember the exact number here but i believe it was >1,5k@rr100 with full resource. Anyways, I remember thinking "ouch" when i was testing out some ability chains on my own.Anyhow, as ppl before me, im no big fan of this as the drawback of the machanic. Im siding with the heal-debuff guys on this one.


BO/SM

Sapping/Arm Breaka:
A buffed version of the BO ability, just as stated in the OP.

Heavens/Greenest:
A mix of the two more or less. Same numbers on everything as used in todays Da Greenest, differences beeing it procing on the player hitting stuff instead of beeing hit and it also was a debuff/buff(steal) and not just one of the two.

Phantom/Toughest:
This was a wounds debuff/buff which permanently healed the player and his allies for the same amount as it buffed. This amount was 3x[effective rank], meaning that a BO/SM at rr100 or otherwise bolstered, with a maxxed out toughest/Vaul tree, would buff/debuff 152 wounds and heal 1520HP or 129w/1290hp in a more common "no M4" build(ER=43). This procced just as the precent Toughest, a 10s effect with a 10s ICD, meaning you could never luck out and heal for 5k in four hits.

Nature's/Biggest:
Worked just like todays. However im not sure if the buff to 4x[effective rank] was reverted back to todays 3x[effective rank]. The reason for pointing this out even tho it says 160 in the OP, is that i have a vague memory of me thinking "hey it steals as much hp as the other bellow(Biggest) steal other stats" when i first saw the new Greenest..

New leap abilities:
Someone mentioned this as a change/mirror of the SM M2, it was not. Wings of Heaven was untouched. This was a leap to you defensive target, working in exactly the same way between the two classes. It made you do a short animation after which you flew to your defensive target granting it(but not you) a XX%(cant remember how much, but it didnt look OP, that much i can say, guessing it was in the 20-40 range) reduction to incoming damage for 3s. It had a 30s CD, 80ft range(shorterthan SM M2, longer than WL pounce), didnt scale in any way and had no required plan/balance. These new leaps replaced We'z Bigger and Aethyric Armor in the mastery trees. The old, and now almost useless(see new Enchantments/Bellows above) buffs got removed. What im not sure of about this is if they also swapped the abilities to be the 9p ability in each tree, moving the old 9p moves to the 5p slot. Again this detail i remember vaguely had cant give you a "this" or "that". However, in my opinion, it only seems logical to swap them into the 9p slot. Seening as they are very potent tools,its hard to motivate putting them at 5p, leaving the mediocre self-bubble at 9p when most other classes got the weak stuff coming in low for obvious reasons.

This following bit is just more of my thoughts on the BO/SM stuff, skip ahead if in a hurry. Like you would've gotten this far if you were!

On paper all these looks super juicey, and they are. But dont start crying OP. Its buffs with no drawbacks for sure, but one has to concider this was added to the BO/SM, not the chosen/KotBS. This made the two shittiest(yes, I know there was a few good BOs/SM but those ppl were still held back by the class and wouldve stomped even hard playing a diffrent class) tanks in RvR acually become good/appealing. Still, they dont push the other tanks away to much, the chosen/KotBS still adds grp support/AoE control while the BG/IB brings the best ST buffs/debuffs/CC. THe SM/BO remains the "offDPS" tanks, just with alil more umpf. And no "...but, but, OP solo...". With this they surely went from the easiest tank to kill 1v1 to a very potent duelist, still, there is AMs/DoKs/Maras and still, Balancing WAR around solo would break it(im a solo nerd btw).


Magi/engi

Well, cant tell you much here, never played any of these classes past T1. The only thing I remmeber about the magi getting the WDPS treatment was my magi-playing mates crying about the scaling not getting put on any useful abilities.


General

Leap fix:
This was used for WL/BO/SM@PTS. It felt like alot more work had gone into this than just "a simple bug fix". It felt like they had redone the whole coding behind the leap mechanic. It was ALOT smoother than the old WL pounce, triggered instantly, made you land closer to your target and did not have any trouble with diffrences in Z axis as long as you werent trying to jump at something straight above your head. This made the BO/SM leaps feeling really usefull for making playes/saves and made those abilites shine selling-point style. The WL version however, got abit too strong with this. one could jump around so fast, I remember playing pounce between two destru toons and you didnt even touch the ground(yes, you could tab/pounce mid air) between jumps. This surely would need like a 5s CD if ever this new leap code gets reinvented.

Not only was this new way of coding leaps a super easy save from taking falling damage since it was so fast u could drop on a target and just leap the last bit. It would also require that alot of invisible walls got put up everywhere. How so, you might ask. Well, scaling keep walls was a breeze, even the walls oil platform was reachable as WL(shortest leap). I could pounce to the walls oil, jump of the wall towards the keep, leap to the inner oil mid air and then pounce to a target at the heli pad, in the matter of seconds. It was alot of fun on PTS, however maybe not so healthy for a live server. Also worth noting from my leap testing, BO/SM could jump from the outer wall to the helipad and SOM could jump there straight from the ground with M2. Just some examples. BTW, I never tested if this code were also put behind the Maras lasso, IMO it would oly be logical since its the last of the "targeted reversed knockbacks".



Now, mind that this was all pulled from the top of my head.


/Bejk

[Azarael]

Awesome, hard numbers on the BO/SM buffs. Thanks for the perspective, too.

[Telen]

Problem with 1.4.9 was it was never tested and was the first step in adding wdps to all magic classes. They scrapped it when they found out the license was being pulled and they would never get around to adding the wdps for all classes.

[Telen]

the only issue i see with bw is their ranged knockdown, it should not be on BW, it should not exist in game or maybe it should have been given to classes such engi/magus.
For sorc maybe order player can tell us if there is something that is gamebreaking as im not an exepert on that class.
But i always hear as complain that sorc made more damage than bw.

The greenskin racial speed proc
DoK party wide snare covenant
Mara armor bypass

Sorc did have a harder hitting burst rotation but bw had the better cc

[Luth]

Leap fix:

As i tested the leap fix on the PTS my first thought was, that they borrowed the code from SWTOR. The fixed leap worked exactly like the jedi knight jump in SWTOR. The devs also said, that the fix was pretty easy and the coders from bioware and mythic worked also very close together.

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To the never ending debate about the two order range knockdowns: the marauder has a 100 feet range knockdown called "mutated energy", it just requires the disrupt from a simple dot tick (e.g. bw ae dot "detonate") to activate it.
Cooldown: 10 seconds. Only 25 ap, doesn't even require any special mutation to be activated.
I don't know why the mdps class with the best debuff capability/survivability needs this

[Penril]

I think SM should be a useful 1h + shield / 2h tank (even was my first toon)

But I also think 1.4.9 was another bad EA-patch. The only part that made some sense IMHO on PTS was the pounce bugfix

Agreed. The wounds buff was OP, and dont even get me started on a AoE armor debuff (SM + Slayers... ouch).
The defensive pounce on the other hand gave SMs and BOs a spot in top tier premades... most ran 2 tanks anyway so i could see many groups wanting a tank that is kinda "immune" to punts.

[Telen]

Its unfortunate that at the end they actually were getting around to fixing the balance.
That they actually ran a poll and were fixing the classes in order of what the community wanted was great from Kevin and Keaven.
Next up were AM and then WL. Shame it all came too late for the High Elves.