Disrupt vs magical class, nerf/boost classes or rework disrupt in general?

[cimator]

Wait a second here, KOTBS and Chosen already can reduce targets chance to defend against attacks with Staggering Impact and Critical Suppresion tactic by 10%, instead of nerf shouldn't players tell their tanks to test rdps with these debuffs first? Or are this skills so rarely used nobody bothered?
Or this skills work in somewhat different way that I fail to see?

edit: and dont forget about stat steal and willpower debuff

For Kotbs you lose too much of your utility to take Staggering Impact(13pt on left tree), and for the chosen one, it is a single target debuff on a 10s cooldown and you spend a tactic slot for it, just doesnt worth it.

[Xarko]

just doesnt worth it.

Then I guess there is no issue after all.

[Cimba]

In my humble opinion the propasal from wargrimnir is the best one by far in this thread.

Spoiler:

Crazy thoughts. Go nuts they said.

Initiative now does
+ dodge and disrupt avoidance
+ crit reduction
+ stealth stuff

Willpower now does
+ healing power
+ disrupt strikethrough (same rate as INT)

There are no significant caches of items that provide tons of initiative, stacking it would only be so effective, and it certainly wouldn't reach the heights that an average healer would get to in Willpower. Also, prior to Willpower receiving the innate disrupt buff, it was removed from all of the non-healer items. Largely because without disrupt it was pointless/unwanted to stack outside of pumping the occasional self-heal ability.

As there are exceedingly few ways to stack willpower from items unless you're a healer, it wouldn't be like free disrupt strikethrough for your average caster beyond what the base willpower provides. As it would provide the disrupt strikethrough at the same rate as INT, casters wouldn't bother stacking it unless they were capped. It would always be better to get more INT until you're capped. Being capped on INT and pumping into Willpower would be the purest of glass cannon specs, there are far more important places to put your stats if you want to survive. This change to add disrupt strikethrough to Willpower would largely resolve the issue of healers totally unable to land any offensive skills short of a full DPS spec.

This would also give IB/BG some synergy with Inspiring Attack and Brutal Smash, as those Willpower buffs landing on a caster would provide a nice chunk of additional disrupt strikethrough. But then you would have a tank buffing a rdps, requiring a melee target be within ~50' of the rdps, and OF/DP NOT on a class that would benefit from the several other buffs (maybe not that common an opportunity).

It would mean Willpower debuffs (of which there are not many that I'm aware of, summon Bozzax) also switch to reducing the targets Disrupt strikethrough instead of reducing their avoidance. This would, on casters, be almost entirely offset by their base Willpower stats not climbing higher than 200 anyway. Which means heavily debuffed, you would go back to current Disrupt rates or at least very close to it, which would probably feel right.

This doesn't resolve issues of class mirroring, but we prefer the classes aren't mirrored in the first place. It would be easier to balance of course, but it's also lazy as **** and boring.

It addresses the problem on a mechanical level and offers a viable solution to players independent of tactics/skills.
On top of that it solves a few other smoldering issues currently in the game

• No offensive secondary stat for magic user
• Lacking disrupt strike through on healers for their offensive abilities
• Initiative being pretty useless beyond 250 (considering 100 ini debuff)

I dont believe adding strike through to staffs is a particular good solution. You might as well just give everyone -10% disrupt and be done with it. It just creates a threshold you need to exceed before having any chance on avoidance. Which would essentialy mean that low disrupt values are entirely worthless while not really balancing the top end of disrupt stacking.

Also adding strike through to tactics is not that amazing. You can observe the effect on BW right know, where BWs are more or less gently pushed into picking up certain tactics if they want to deal any significant damage to high disrupt targets. I believe most BW are grateful that they have these tactics but it also drastically reduces build diversity. So either you go all out and add it to every other skill to preserve build diversity (at which point you basically just created another threshold for disrupt values) or you accept that caster only function with very specific setups against high disrupt targets.

Also I have a question to the proponents of the rock-paper-scissors argument (caster are supposed to be inherently weak against healers). Could someone please explain how the medium armor healers fit into that equation. Because from my obersevation they dont appear to be weak against phsyical dps either.

The more I think about wargrimnirs solution the more I like it.

Wait a second here, KOTBS and Chosen already can reduce targets chance to defend against attacks with Staggering Impact and Critical Suppresion tactic by 10%, instead of nerf shouldn't players tell their tanks to test rdps with these debuffs first? Or are this skills so rarely used nobody bothered?
Or this skills work in somewhat different way that I fail to see?

edit: and dont forget about stat steal and willpower debuff

Quite a lot of people bothered. You can see it used in RvR from time to time if you pay attention. The fact that we're still having this discussion (and like 10 before this one) could indicate that one skill on Chosen and KOTBS might not suffice to resolve the problem at hand.

[Telen]

I still think this entire conversation is insane and we should be asking the question: "How do we nerf rdps to a position where they do not completely dominate mdps in all situations other than a perfectly setup premade with competent tanks and healers?'"

Thats not an issue about avoidance thats an issue with guard. The only way you could ever balance while taking pre and none pre mdps into the equation is to reduce its effectiveness. We can discuss 18% avoidance here and 10% strikethrough there but as long as there is a all source 50% mitigation elephant in the room to balance around you will always have a massive disparity.
Its pivotal to the tanks role in pvp though and if you want tanks having a key role then you have to accept that unguarded mdps have to remain pretty much free kills to preserve any semblance of balance.

[Aurandilaz]

I still think this entire conversation is insane and we should be asking the question: "How do we nerf rdps to a position where they do not completely dominate mdps in all situations other than a perfectly setup premade with competent tanks and healers?'"

MDSP with guards + healers are hardly dominated by RDPS, see for example typical 6man meleetrain dominating in scenarios with relative ease, even if enemy has massive numbers of RDPS at hand.
If you balance the game around players not having Guard/Challenge/Detaunt/pots/Cleanse/healers, you need something like massive -50% dmg reduction to every class and completely remove Morals so that Chosen/Blorc/BW cannot be meaner than everyone else.

Also, as mentioned above, the Rock-Paper-Scissors becomes somewhat problematic when you take into account medium armour Healers (especially WP with 10% disrupt tactic). They have decent defences against melee attack, and atm superb defences against magical casters because how easy it is to stack both armor talis/+pot and then spec high with DeftDefender + Willpower from gear + tactic + pot, giving easily 40-50 base Disrupt, and then on top of that you start adding more defensive buffs.
So you might end up with a medium armor class that has +3k armor and at best 60-90% Disrupt with maximum buffs.

Assuming GOOD COMPETENT gameplay from your enemies, you might just leave your DPS shaman, DPS zealot, DPS AM, DPS Runie, Magus and Sorc and (maybe even BW unless it runs strict BurnThrough-tactic build) home and reroll/change partysetup so your dps player is on a class that can realistically put pressure on both enemy healers, tanks and DPS classes; if all boxes are not ticked you are just gimping your own setup on purpose by bringing subpar classes to fights against competent enemies.

And last time I checked, the general purpose of balancing in general is to ensure all classes have valid roles in combination of both 6manscale and largescale warband gameplay.

[Trekman]

Disrupt and dodge abilities removed from reknown tree, lower willpower base, add more skills to combat disrupt e.g.. Abilties that cant be disrupted . turn up the base melee damage. Just some thoughts

[Tamarlan]

Also, as mentioned above, the Rock-Paper-Scissors becomes somewhat problematic when you take into account medium armour Healers (especially WP with 10% disrupt tactic). They have decent defences against melee attack, and atm superb defences against magical casters because how easy it is to stack both armor talis/+pot and then spec high with DeftDefender + Willpower from gear + tactic + pot, giving easily 40-50 base Disrupt, and then on top of that you start adding more defensive buffs.
So you might end up with a medium armor class that has +3k armor and at best 60-90% Disrupt with maximum buffs.

Right now cloth-wearing healers are weak versus MDPS and strong versus RDPS. Sounds fair to me.
DOK and WP on the other hand are ok versus MDPS and strong versus RDPS. Sounds like there might be an issue.

By simply reducing disrupt significantly cloth-wearing healers are weak versus RDPS and MDPS.

Solution could be to change DOK and WP to be ok versus MDPS and RDPS.

[Tesq]

Also, as mentioned above, the Rock-Paper-Scissors becomes somewhat problematic when you take into account medium armour Healers (especially WP with 10% disrupt tactic). They have decent defences against melee attack, and atm superb defences against magical casters because how easy it is to stack both armor talis/+pot and then spec high with DeftDefender + Willpower from gear + tactic + pot, giving easily 40-50 base Disrupt, and then on top of that you start adding more defensive buffs.
So you might end up with a medium armor class that has +3k armor and at best 60-90% Disrupt with maximum buffs.

Right now cloth-wearing healers are weak versus MDPS and strong versus RDPS. Sounds fair to me.
DOK and WP on the other hand are ok versus MDPS and strong versus RDPS. Sounds like there might be an issue.

By simply reducing disrupt significantly cloth-wearing healers are weak versus RDPS and MDPS.

Solution could be to change DOK and WP to be ok versus MDPS and RDPS.

they dont have the kite level of a AM/sh/zeal/runy..... mobility x durability; if you anyway agree onto that scheme, then rdps should beat the crap ouf of melee, which is currently not happening. You should be able to deal dmg to all equally but this also matter for melee; how this link to disrupt is a mistery; not like melee have few wep skill....

parry on melee and disruot on helers have similar values if a mdps is dual weild.

[Cimba]

Right now cloth-wearing healers are weak versus MDPS and strong versus RDPS. Sounds fair to me.
DOK and WP on the other hand are ok versus MDPS and strong versus RDPS. Sounds like there might be an issue.

By simply reducing disrupt significantly cloth-wearing healers are weak versus RDPS and MDPS.

Solution could be to change DOK and WP to be ok versus MDPS and RDPS.

So, you're saying shamans are weak against mdps?

[xtc1999]

[*] Initiative being pretty useless beyond 250 (considering 100 ini debuff)[/list]

order has a 200 ini debuff (SW wrist slash + nature's blade), destro only 120 (black orc steal)