You can heal just fine exactly as you did before, you can now dps exactly how you did before assuming you gear and spec for the roles. The mechanic is now still VERY strong, stronger than most other career mechanicsJohnnyWayne wrote: ↑Sun Dec 23, 2018 5:56 pmWhat if I don't want to play DPS? **** me, huh?Sulorie wrote: ↑Sun Dec 23, 2018 5:01 pmOr respec to dps.Stinkyweed wrote: ↑Sun Dec 23, 2018 2:30 pm It was fun and a nice balance to the heal spec portion of the class. Perhaps it should have been tweaked to find the right balance rather than scrapped while they look for alternate solution.
...shelving and back to gearing the zealot I guess.Its what I did.
Heres what it does now - 40% cast time reduction, 40% ap reduction and 25% augmentation on instants AND movecast on certain abilities - this is a strong career mechanic by any estimation. Even now, this only requires a SINGLE point to be active and receive all the benefits.
Heres what it DID - 40% cast time reduction, 40% ap reduction and 25% augmentation on instants AND movecast on certain abilities, converted all your willpower/intelligence from items to the other depending on ability type cast AND made said abilities behave as if the AM/SH had full 15 point investment in respective trees, oh and additional strikethrough on various abilities. On top of that, the conversion was not grabbing an average, it was grabbing ALL of your base stats, adding them together, and reducing it by 70%, then using that TOTAL value for the modifier. Not at average of your stats * .7, but the total of your stats * .7, which is ridiculous. This premise is broken, ignores the fact that stats exist on gear at all, and wildly overshadows any player who is building for their spec in an intuitive manner who might not realize the messed up way this mechanic was working.
So if you were full heal spec, as much willpower as you could muster on items with defenses and tools without a single point in the DPS trees, you could hot yourself then use an attack and it would convert all your stats (not average stat contribution, contrary to speculation) over to intelligence AND fill up your DPS tree with 15 points worth of augmentation.
So yeah, Archmage/Shaman having their own mechanic, stealing the RP and Zealots mechanic and massively improving on it as well, then adding in the other base benefits that STILL exist was grossly exploitable.
Now don't get me wrong, if you played as a straight DPS sham/am you wouldn't have personally benefited from the system as the stat transfer only went onto other people in heals. If you played as a healer with a little tapping, you would be benefiting by a large amount but assuming you invested to Energy of Vaul/ Fury of da Green you only gained 2 additional mastery points of benefit (and a crazy stat transfer). However, if as said, you were a full heal spec, will some in the "lifetap tree" and zero in damage tree you could hot 5 people pretty fast and then drop 5 massive attacks on people with a huge intelligence boost AND as if you had a full 15 points invested in the DPS tree, if you cant see how this was exploitative and overpowered there may be no convincing you.
You may not have used it this way, you may have played in a manner which didn't synergize the mechanic to its extreme, if you played as a heal caster nothing has changed, if you play as a dps nothing has changed, if you want to be caster healer/tapper hybrid you will feel the pinch currently and if you were a caster healer/nuker that's gone forever. If you want to deal significant damage, you're going to need to invest in the damage stat, like every other class also needs to do. There's choices involved, and having it all simultaneously is busted.
There is nothing weak about the AM/Shaman classes, they may not be the best class, they may not be the worst but NO class on RoR is going to be the recipient of a monstrously complex omni mechanic which when used at the extreme produces literally insane results.
This isn't a player fault, it was a mechanic which became a rolling snowball and its now been cut back to what a mechanic should be which is a benefit, not a plaster cast over class/ability issues in this manner which gave all things to all specs, that's not what a mechanic is for.
To sum up, its had the potentially exploitative shifter system removed, this is not where the class will remain, its just where the class is right now. Its on the agenda, flaws are known and its in the works. We currently have a decent draft for a more dynamic mechanic that encourages different uses of the mechanic, and will require a bit of relearning to use effectively. Which, in itself, will be reviewed over time to make sure the values line up with effectiveness of the class as a whole.
