Re: Patch Notes 23/10/2020
Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2020 12:07 am
The pet 'buff' is cross-faction and both sides were hit equally by the change. There are no biases intended here.
Also - the pet changes were in the game for the longest time until 2 or 3 months ago.
Regardless, I am posting a full explanation as to 'why' these changes are made:
mSH and WL were hit especially hard by the stances changing to no longer inherit crit from their owner. Dalen fixed them to match the tooltip as opposed to having the crit inherited in the combat formula, as that matched the tooltip and the more user-facing information for you and your pet, the better.
That was a fix I put in back in 2019 to fix Git 'Em! and Coordinated Strike's effectiveness. After the Torquemadra WL guardian / melee SH spec was reverted and the classes were largely underperforming, that was the easiest option - and it gave Magus / Engineer another well-needed buff in the process.
Coordinated Strike or Git 'Em's 2nd hit from the pet would, effectively, never crit - and there are crit damage tactics that apply to pets that went unused. Damage on those abilities were in a good spot up until the pet crit change was introduced.
The removal of pounce damage was, in turn, removed. You are already getting an autoattack on landing in melee range with the target; there is no need for landing and dealing damage as well. The speed boost is the primary reason you'd pounce, and you have ample time to catch your target in the 3 seconds following landing. That did come up during discussions with dalen about it, and if the speed boost needs adjusting, we will do so.
Our options were either revert the CS/Git 'Em nerf across the board and have a more bursty game where players could not react before they're dead in a knockdown, or reintroduce stats applying to pets across the board. We chose the latter as it's better game design overall.
During the process, we found that engineers had lower base stats on their pets. Magus always performed higher, and this explains the disparity. Also, we added armor penetration to all pets, which pretty much makes the stat worthwhile for pet classes again. Engineer/mSH/WL in particular definitely would appreciate that. Magus now has crit reduction and other defense stats applying to their pet. I can imagine defensive maguses being happy about that change.
Renown tactics not applying to pets was a needed change so that the pets can inherit their masters' crit/crit reduction and other stats. This was done so that offensively and defensively geared DPS also grant their bonuses to their pet. It also means that there is less of an issue with taking weaponskill-based builds on some classes.
In the case of KOTBS vs Chosen:
Chosen, historically, did not have any use for Spirit damage attacks beyond autoattacks.
Their hard-hitting attacks were largely already spirit. Weaponskill, as a result, wasn't a useful stat for offense for them - yet their version of Runefang no longer grants anything but offensive stats. That's not particularly fair to a class that is largely spirit damage based to begin with, so we may reevaluate that later. Natherul was against mirroring the ability, and I agree.
Knight, by the way, was hit equally by the Mighty Soul change as their autoattack is once again physical damage.
They already deal massively more damage than Knight does, and the Elemental damage autoattacks from Knights were also removed at the same time. Knight getting a few more elemental attacks isn't too big of a deal - it's hard enough to stack strength and defensive stats as it is, so this only grants them a small damage boost. Any Knight player also knows their attacks don't scale well with strength anyways.
Also, any Knight/Chosen that ran the revamped Mighty Soul... you better not have ran that in ranked!
Ultimately, it puts those two classes in line with where we want their damage.
Also - the pet changes were in the game for the longest time until 2 or 3 months ago.
Regardless, I am posting a full explanation as to 'why' these changes are made:
mSH and WL were hit especially hard by the stances changing to no longer inherit crit from their owner. Dalen fixed them to match the tooltip as opposed to having the crit inherited in the combat formula, as that matched the tooltip and the more user-facing information for you and your pet, the better.
That was a fix I put in back in 2019 to fix Git 'Em! and Coordinated Strike's effectiveness. After the Torquemadra WL guardian / melee SH spec was reverted and the classes were largely underperforming, that was the easiest option - and it gave Magus / Engineer another well-needed buff in the process.
Coordinated Strike or Git 'Em's 2nd hit from the pet would, effectively, never crit - and there are crit damage tactics that apply to pets that went unused. Damage on those abilities were in a good spot up until the pet crit change was introduced.
The removal of pounce damage was, in turn, removed. You are already getting an autoattack on landing in melee range with the target; there is no need for landing and dealing damage as well. The speed boost is the primary reason you'd pounce, and you have ample time to catch your target in the 3 seconds following landing. That did come up during discussions with dalen about it, and if the speed boost needs adjusting, we will do so.
Our options were either revert the CS/Git 'Em nerf across the board and have a more bursty game where players could not react before they're dead in a knockdown, or reintroduce stats applying to pets across the board. We chose the latter as it's better game design overall.
During the process, we found that engineers had lower base stats on their pets. Magus always performed higher, and this explains the disparity. Also, we added armor penetration to all pets, which pretty much makes the stat worthwhile for pet classes again. Engineer/mSH/WL in particular definitely would appreciate that. Magus now has crit reduction and other defense stats applying to their pet. I can imagine defensive maguses being happy about that change.
Renown tactics not applying to pets was a needed change so that the pets can inherit their masters' crit/crit reduction and other stats. This was done so that offensively and defensively geared DPS also grant their bonuses to their pet. It also means that there is less of an issue with taking weaponskill-based builds on some classes.
In the case of KOTBS vs Chosen:
Chosen, historically, did not have any use for Spirit damage attacks beyond autoattacks.
Their hard-hitting attacks were largely already spirit. Weaponskill, as a result, wasn't a useful stat for offense for them - yet their version of Runefang no longer grants anything but offensive stats. That's not particularly fair to a class that is largely spirit damage based to begin with, so we may reevaluate that later. Natherul was against mirroring the ability, and I agree.
Knight, by the way, was hit equally by the Mighty Soul change as their autoattack is once again physical damage.
They already deal massively more damage than Knight does, and the Elemental damage autoattacks from Knights were also removed at the same time. Knight getting a few more elemental attacks isn't too big of a deal - it's hard enough to stack strength and defensive stats as it is, so this only grants them a small damage boost. Any Knight player also knows their attacks don't scale well with strength anyways.
Also, any Knight/Chosen that ran the revamped Mighty Soul... you better not have ran that in ranked!
Ultimately, it puts those two classes in line with where we want their damage.
