Foofmonger wrote: Tue May 12, 2020 2:23 pm
So the Mara heal debuff sucks, I think that's been covered in this thread to death, it has a lot of issues and I'd personally love to see it changed. However, as many people have pointed out, you'd also have to balance it to accommodate for the change, and there shouldn't be just a "straight Mara buff". Here's what I would do personally if I were the devs:
1. Remove Tainted Claw as a baseline ability. Put Draining Swipes at baseline. Draining Swipes as a core ability is hardly "strong", and this is basically a nerf.
2. Put Thunderous Blows back as the 5 point Savagery ability like it should be and always was. This is a small buff, but it's to fix a nerf from 2015 when this server was in t2 and early wounds debuffs mattered. They don't. You can still keep the nerfed value, so it's still nerfed overall from where it was on live.
3. Put Tainted Claw back in as the 13 point Savagery ability. The Marauder shouldn't have a 5 or 9 point heal debuff IMO, it should be 13 points for balance. Double the cooldown of tainted claw to 10 seconds to make it work like other heal debuffs. Boost it to a 50% heal debuff baseline, to be worth a 13 point ability.
4. Completely remove the current heal debuff/drain life tactic. The drain life is garbage, the fact that the Marauder has to waste a tactic slot is garbage, it's just pure garbage. Throw this entire tactic into the garbage bin.
5. Give Mara's a new random 11pt tactic, really doesn't even matter what it does, as long as it is occasionally situationally useful.
These changes would achieve a variety of things:
1. The Mara heal debuff would be much harder to get, and objectively weaker as an ability (higher cooldown), but frees up the Marauder to not have to waste a tactic slot to do what other DPS can do without one.
2. Draining Swipes, which is savagery only abiity, would be core instead of the 25% tainted claw, which is argueably weaker early on. Later on it still removes a Mara who doesn't spec for 13 savagery to get any heal debuff, which is fair.
3. Thunderous Blows goes back to where it should be and allows for more Marauder spec diversity.
TLDR: Nerf the heal debuff cooldown, remove it as a core ability, put it as a 13 point savagery ability, increase the debuff to 50%, and remove the tactic.
In my opinion, the above changes would be relatively balanced. This is a give and take, and the Marauder needs to give up something to get something here. That being said, the current way in which the Marauder heal debuffs is totally stupid and sucks in comparison to every other class with a heal debuff in the game. It made a lot of sense at live when the Marauder healing debuff tactic boosted Tainted Claw to a 75% heal debuff (which was overpowered), but the change to the tactic to make it 50% with the horrible horrible worthless lifeleech was a terrible decision by Mythic. It was a stupid idea in 2009, and it's still a stupid idea in 2020.