The problem with Soulfire

[live4treasure]

It's been some months since my last suggestion regarding AOE DPS WP, and in that time, with some breaks in between, I've achieved RR 83 and what I believe to be the best in slot set of gear for the class. I've played it a bunch, nearly every day for about two months since I've returned with the changes to the meta in place and I have some conclusions I wish to share.

First of all, it feels more viable than before. The change that allows class-based buffs and consumables to stack together was possibly more impactful for this archetype than for the pure DPS, because it shortens the gap between raw offensive stats that it would have. It does not eliminate it, it simply shortens it. A proper DPS like a WL will still vastly out-raw-stat a DPS WP in HP and Weapon Skill, but now it at least feels more playable than before in an equal situation.

Second, the playerbase seems to have shifted towards a more pug-based environment, with far more lower geared people around, which favors the DPS WP with his low amount of armor penetration. That lack of armor pen simply matters less when the opposition consistently has less armor to begin with, but that's not an advantage that only the warrior priest gets to take advantage of.

Third, the advent of aoe witch hunters has also made aoe armor debuffs very common, which also, once again, helps mitigate the lack of armor pen that a warrior priest would usually have. Which is again not an advantage that is unique to the warrior priest, but it's served as a step towards making the archetype more playable in rvr.

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The Problem:

Now to the downsides. Unfortunately, the main problem of warrior priest is that around 50-60% of your damage will come from smite. That's not because you have no other buttons to press, it's simply because your other button, Soulfire, is very impractical. It has a setback possibility from damage taken and a range of 25 feet, which is the same range as most aoe attacks of your average melee dps. In other words, in order to cast it, you will have to get within range of taking damage, whereupon that 1s cast time can turn into 2 or even 3 seconds due to setback from damage. At which point you've lost 2 smite casts and an enemy may have had guilty soul fall off.

Which means, you can only really use it if you slide your way around the melee dps and come in from the side or preferably even from behind, to avoid damage. Unfortunately, doing so takes time with our slow, no-speed-boost DPS WP and is just not always possible. In other words, Soulfire should be a larger part of our damage output, but in RVR you will struggle to use it effectively when you need it. So you are stuck with smite and guilty soul.

Guilty Soul in really long fights can climb as high as 20% of your damage output, but usually you will see it be around 10, at most 15%. What's more, smite procs damage proc effects, which each constitute another 5% of your total damage output each. All the more reason not to use soulfire, which artificially drives our DPS down. The issue is you SHOULD be using soulfire, because the extra bit of pressure it exerts can in fact be the difference between a secured kill in an aoe environment or a healer having enough time to bring the enemy back up. But you can't, normally.

Using Lefze's calculator against postpatch targets along with a rough comparison against other dps; I've calculated that a DPS WP with bis will deal around the same DPS as a WL/Mara would do, once WP fully stacks up guilty soul AND applies Soulfire. WL/Mara can pretty much get going with damage almost immediately in comparison.

So to sum the problem up:
- Unlike a normal MDPS, that put their burst upfront and on demand, WP needs to RNG stack their damage output up (it will take on average around 5-7 smites depending on the gear), and use Soulfire to achieve the same amount of pressure.
- Soulfire is also supposed to help you stack up to Guilty Soul faster, but you can only rarely afford to use it properly.
- Soulfire, however, is barely usable because of how much setback it causes. Which means you're going to be forever around 100 DPS behind a proper MDPS, and that's only if you stack up 3 stacks of Guilty Soul on a target, where each individual target has their own set of RNG to determine if that happens.

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The Solution:

Alright, now that we've established this, the most important question is; should this setback be removed from it?

In this case all I have to offer is an opinion.

In my opinion, because ST DPS WP is strong, then if soulfire was intended to be inconvenient in the way that it is, it should remain so for that specific spec.
But for AOE DPS WP, I firmly think that this is one too many roadbumps on the specs way towards functioning properly as a slowburner sustained dps spec.

As such, because AOE DPS WP has a tactic it relies on that ST DPS WP pretty much never uses, Soulfire should offer no setback whilst said tactic is equipped: Empowered Smite.

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Obviously, this all applies to AOE DPS DOK as well, I imagine, and they have an identical tactic that works just fine for this purpose.

Thank you for your time and attention. I hope you consider the suggestion.