Please for the love of Gandalf do not nerf yellow line to make red line feel better!!!! Just give red love :)
Also, true heroics is scant used since its on a 5 min cd with 12 sec duration. Please lower the cooldown.
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I like Rend being where it is and giving the red line champ some more avenues of DPS.
Yellow I agree, we have fixed some bugs on the raging blade extra strikes but I will look into it further. Born for Combat could use some other passive element to it to make it a little sexier as a capstone trait.
-Jinjaah
Yes, this was a very informative read. Taken a bunch of notes from it and plan to address some of the issues in there. I have some plans for minor changes that may negate some of the need for skills like Seeking Blades coming back so after 12.2 goes out the door, we can talk more in detail about that sort of stuff. I also think Hedge will be coming back. The intention was to not take it away, but give it in another form and that just fell through. Y'all need a disarm removal back and it is coming.
-Jinjaah
Agreed, the idea was that the offensive side of you would be the downfall to the lack of defensiveness. Some things changed in Beta that negated this which is really sad to see. Red line champ was my first ever character and the state it is currently in is very much a let down to me.
-Jinjaah
I think the perception of the champion losing its individuality is not really fair to say, but I will say it was hit hardest than most classes because it was a simple yet well oiled machine previously. The switch to trait trees, while not there yet, is basically telling the utility knife to focus on being scissors or a knife. And that is a hard pill to swallow. I do feel however that if red felt more powerful and blue had a little more active play in it, the pill wouldn't nearly be as hard to swallow as it is right now.
To answer your question about devs playing their classes, the answer is yes. We played everything a lot. I played the champion a ton and that was kind of what lead to the downfall of the dps of the red line. For example, during implementation, the berserker champ was very heavily crit based. That was where most of the power was coming from. As we continued to play the class, the boom overtook the bust. We were worried about those crit numbers and scaled them back. Unfortunately, it ended up being too much of a step back, putting the red line where it is now.
-Jinjaah
All great suggestions that I will look into. Seems like from reading this, I can see a few additional bugs in the red line that I will address in the future. For pvmp damage types, I have a fix for this, but might have to wait for u13 as it will affect big battles balance at the same time.
-Jinjaah
There is a fix coming for 12.2 that includes trait pages remembering skill locations. (And there was much rejoicing)
As mentioned before, difficulty will be addressed as we move forward, we got some very talented people on the case.
The issue of gear also has to do with some under the hood things that we need to fix. But I will make sure to sit down with itemization and discuss these concerns.
blue line: See my previous comment on hedge but I agree. In terms of blue line trait tree, yeah it needs some changes, lot of filler, not enough active play there.
red line: agreed on both points.
Yellow Line: Agreed on both points.
-Jinjaah
I can get a little more into detail in the future about opinions and such. I do have a lot of great notes on all the suggestions from the other two threads, but I am currently juggling multiple discussions in various threads both council and public. On top of that, I am working on some monsterplay stuff as well as bug fixing and speccing for the future. My plate is very full and I apologize if I can't go into detail at this moment. But I assure you, before 13, we will have some more indepth discussions about changes. I think that Beta proved, when we all work together, we can make some pretty great fixes.
-Jinjaah
Here my impressions to the 3 Trees: (I hope my English isn´t that worse)
Deadly storm:
actuell the best line we have, the combat is fluid, the damage output ok (most time in the aggro chain i am the second one after the tank, so it seems... fine for me)
howerever, they are two "design choices" that are hard to understand for me (more below), and the lack of survivalbility in this tree that are a littlebit annoying.
Berserker line:
i have not that much experience with this, just because of its biggest flaw, you deal more or less equal damage on a single target as you do with yellow on... everyone around you which makes this line obsolote in most of the content, with the exception of fights where aoe is bad like... like ... ähm ... library.
after testing it a littlebit there is another problem with red, the bigger strike have all a very annoying delay after the animation which breaks really the flow of combat.
And when my champ does auto attacks after strikes until he use the next strike, when i know that he has serius problems.
Martial champion:
our tankline is … i would call it ambivalent. There are things i like and things which seems not good at all.
I actuell like that we have now more controll over our aggro instead of the old way, which relayed only on glorios exchange. Also i like that we need a little power management for our survivalbility -> dire need
however i dont like our force taunts, both have a far to long cooldown. In contrary to other tanks most of our aggro is generated through damage thanks to 300% more aggro, but not all enemys can be tanked like this, good example are the two bosses of Elendil with all the absorpion and damage reduction. Our challenge should have a 15sec cd like the counterparts of other classes, and true heroics cd need to be adjustet to 1-2 min at max.
also i dont like that our survivalbility is stat-wise far beyond other tanks, we cant block, we have a smaller moral pool, and we have nothing that compensate this at all. (And it is more less possible to block with 1 or 2 one-hand-swords)
And what i realy dont like is „Unbreakable“. I guess it should close the hp gap between Champs and tanks but in the way it now works, its just... useless. Up to 20% max moral sounds good but the first problem is that its empty moral and second its just temporary, so if someone heals this pool and its expires it was nothing else when overhealed. The tactical mit. is nice but as tank you should (nearly) reach the cap.
Thats my impressions of the 3 skilltree
now some other things that are „meh“ to me:
some traits/boni feel for me a littlebit misplaced or hard to understand why they are there
Exchange of blows: why is this here and not in the blue line? as DD you are not suposed to get aggro, and if you get it, you dont want to salt the wound of your enemy so that the tank has even more problems to get the aggro back, only thing where it could be funny are the moors but as a bonus it should be useful in every situation
Born for Combat: same here, you are not supposed to get hit at all, so this belongs to the blue tree, or better said it is already in the blue tree, because it works exactly like the shockwave of unbreakable
an additional note, the shockwave of born for combat is not just a weak attack, it is the weakest aoe-attack we have (ok unbreakable is weaker, but its in the end the same move)
Ebbing ire: (hope this is the right one, dont know every english name of the skill) why is an aoe de-aggro skill in the single target tree? especial if it is fairly easy for near every tank to hold aggro of a single target with force taunts
common skills that are in the trees:
"Second wind" and "Battle frenzy": with the changes to our stances we lost the two common skills of them, the power reg. and the passive favour reg. to skill this to skills is not a matter of choice, its a must have
the Fervour-pip-bonis
combining the special stance bonus with the fervour pips seem just wierd for me. Its not like the old runekeeper attunments, where you supposed to be on max attunment, you want to build and cash it out so fast and effective you can, which seems realy bad for the potence of this bonis
Solutions/wishes:
i would first shift some of the skills
-> second wind should become a treeless skill
-> sudden defence should take second wind position (which would make many many champs happy i guess)
-> exchange of blows should take the place of sudden defence
-> ebbing ire should take the place of exchange of blows
-> and ebbing ire could be replaced with seeking blade's
-Born for Combat need somekind of redesign (and a serious damage upgrade)
it should proc if you hit your enemy and maybe do something exiting as alternative to pure damage... like reset some cds or like this
-Unbreakable need a redesign,
my thoughts would be that it is either permanent activ
or work similar to Warg bubbles, a 800-1200 bubble which renew itself after 8-10 sec or like this and is affected by the explosion upgrade of sudden defence -> good for defence and aggro
-the actuell fervor-pip bonuses should give a static bonus
-Vitality Trait in blue should give either evade or aditional moral 5-10% at max
-(a little wish to the end) bladewall trait at max should give the 1-pip-per-crit-bonus of the old BG and Hytbold-armor similar to the critbuff of the wild attack trait
were are other things that people have pointed out very well so i think that i dont need to repeat post and end my own here.
If you read this far, thank you for you patience
I thank you greatly for all your replies, Jinjaah, it clearly shows some dedication. That gives hope for the future.
Same, a bit bummed that my list didn't get any replies, but the future is looking promising and that is very good indeed! Thanks for communicating with us Jinjaah!
Incidentally, what's the ETA for Update 13? I think I've read somewhere that Update 12.2 should hit the end of this month, but that should include only minor fixes, and the big balancing changes and hopefully revitalization of our class will be left for Update 13. How long do you think that will take, just to give us an estimate?
Thank you for taking your time reading all that stuff and responding every single one of them in this thread, Jinjaah. You cannot imagine how much of a relieve it is for most if not all of us. Let us celebrate for seeking blade's and hedge's arrival back to us, shall we!? (Do not be hasty it won't happen tomorrow right away :P)
I do hope this thread becomes your source of information concerning champions and we can keep this thing going in peace:)
Sorry about the lack of replies. I promise in the near future I can go into more detail with you and I want to, I just have a lot of my plate this week.
I can't really give an estimate on that at this time as that's more of the producer world of things. I prefer to just keep my head down and slamming work in until someone yells "TIME!"
-Jinjaah
No worries. I would say that I think seeking Blade will remain away but there is a plan to fill that void. We can talk about it later when we have some more time to discuss all these things. Hedge on the other hand, really needs to come back to you in some form.
-Jinjaah
Thanks for this Jinjaah. At least I know that someone does really care who has some power to change it. My champ was my first toon and is still what I spend 95% of my game time on, usually in the moors these days.
It's been a rough adjustment for some of us, especially when the whole server knows that champs seem to be the most broken class right now.
Thanks for the replies Jinjaah!