Warden Shattered javelins change

[Osglinthor]

In addition to this change how about we make barbed javelins trait go 20 40 60 80 100% proc chance.Only reason this trait was somewhat viable for random trash clears was because trait was bugged and gave 100% proc chance to these bleeds.Target nerf already cuts damage to ~1/3 in ideal scenarios and this fix makes trait completly worthless.My guess is this was done due to anor or something considering at cap this has almost no use outside of trash clears wich are already irelevent.This would tone down big rng problem of this trait and would bring it back to viable for trash clears.

[AaronIU]

Ok honestly, I don't even know where to begin of how absolutely horrible this change is. Like it's really hard to fathom why this change was made and what kind of false information it was based off of.

Aside from that, the trait literally doesn't even work in a way that's possible to test and compare. I tried 10 pulls of mobs ranging from 4-10 in number and 1 in 10 (yes my sample size is too small) tries did I apply a severe bleed to more than 1 mob at a time. Then, when I did attempt to "shatter" the bleed, it didn't even work.. it would just consume the bleed and nothing would burst. This trait is now so incredibly broken that I can't even give you relevant information of how bad the change is. Not only does it not apply bleeds, it doesn't "shatter" those bleeds.

Im literally so frustrated that this is so insanely broken that I couldn't even give you relevant information on how to improve this change. This trait was already to situational, and not relevant at endgame that the dev effort to break this trait is just mind boggling. Changing this in no way helps to create balance, it doesn't actually apply even at 50% like the previous trait says, then when you try to "shatter" the bleed it's "limited to four" but you don't even get four mobs with bleeds to SHATTER ON...

I get some people felt that making this trait apply a bleed at 100% was "unbalanced", (I disagree but lets move forward anyway) make the previous trait apply at 10/20/40/60/80 (or similar/whatever) then this would allow a 100% application rate. The 50% doesn't even work right now, it applies at less than 10% (yes i would need to test more but it's NOT 50%). Then on top of that you limit the shatter effect to 4 mobs.. which would be one thing if you had 4 mobs to even shatter the bleed from.. but you don't.. you have 1 because the rng of bleed application was broken with this change also.

Like I seriously can't even express in logical circumstances how bad and unnecessary this change is, how it doesn't effect class balance, and how it's so broken that I can't even provide meaningful information/data for you to understand for feedback.

Seriously revert this change... this is so so so so broken, revert this change and go back to the drawing board instead of finding unnecessary traits to break on warden when we already have a barely working trait line as it is. Fix Bullseye, fix way of the spear, fix the horribly scaled debuffs and buffs this class provides..
STOP BREAKING THINGS THAT ACTUALLY WORK!!!!

[AaronIU]

Ok so went back and looked at the information, and thought about it for a bit...

This is actually so f*ckd up.. and if anyone gets better info please share.
1. It doesn’t apply a bleed at 100% rate like it’s supposed to it’s more like 10%, not even the 50% from barbed is working if all 5 points are there.
2. So it has 1 layer of rng IF a bleed is applied, then another layer of rng if the bleed is consumed or shattered, THEN another layer of rng if the bleed does burst and to which mobs of the possible 4.

So 10% chance to apply the bleed, 10% chance the bleed is shattered, 10% chance the burst applies to any mob at all. In all the pulls in all the mobs I had 1 pull where it “worked”. I had 10 mobs at once.. I hit EOB 8 times, only 6 ticks of severe bleed applied to 1 mob while I was trying to get it to proc a shattered, and when it did it only did 2 events of shattered. In other pulls I would get 1/6 or 1/8 mobs to have a severe bleed applied, no other time did I get a shattered to proc on a single mob.. most of the time the bleed was consumed and nothing happened.

Can a dev please... explain what you think this trait did before, what you think it’s supposed to do now, and why on earth did you gate such a tiny damage skill behind a T5 gambit and 3-4 layers of RNG that doesn’t even work??? Whatever you thought you were doing to this trait isn’t what you did, and now I can’t even give you feedback because you ignore our feedback anyway and it doesn’t even work in the way you described or think it works.

I literally can’t give you feedback beyond: This is absolutely broken and doesn’t work, revert the change and try again.

[Simba-]

1. It doesn’t apply a bleed at 100% rate like it’s supposed to

It was never supposed to but yeah, the chance depends how many points you've used on barbed javelins trait. 10% if you only put 1 and 50% if you max it out. So its 50% chance to apply, 50% chance to proc aoe burst. So it's working as intended(by being useless like it was supposed to according to the tooltip), but the change to maximum burst targets was a nerf because the balancer didn't know that we had 100% proc chance instead of 10-50%.
Also another big nerf was to give it a critical chance instead of having it always deal around 80k, now the crit is 80k and normal hit ~40k.

So yeah the trait is pretty bad but it's working exactly how the tooltip says lol

[AaronIU]

1st test: 1pt in Barbed/0pt Shattered, 8 mobs, 5 applications of EOB zero bleed procs. 0/40
2nd test: 2pt in barbed/0pt shattered, 8 mobs, 5 applications of EOB 2 bleed procs. 2/40
3rd test: 3pt in barbed/0pt shattered, 8 mobs, 5 applications of EOB 4 bleed procs 4/40
4th test: 4pt in barbed/0pt shattered, 8 mobs, 5 applications of EOB 9 bleed procs 9/40
5th test: 5pt in barbed/0pt shattered, 8 mobs, 5 applications of EOB 22 bleed procs 22/40
6th test: 5pt in barbed/1pt shattered, 8 mobs, 5 applications of EOB 20 bleed procs 20/40
1: 2 bleeds applied 8 shattered hits (total) on 4 mobs
2: 6 bleeds applied 24 shattered hits on 4 mobs
3 3 bleeds applied 12 shattered hits on 4 mobs
4: 5 bleeds applied 20 shattered hits on 4 mobs
5: 4 bleeds applied 16 shattered hits on 4 mobs.

So the bleed is applying at 50% much to my surprise against my rushed test earlier today when you are testing 5pts +1 pt (yes I did put in 5pts in barbed and 1 in shattered). However, lower tiers are applying at a pretty low rate 15 bleed procs in 160 damage events is pretty pathetic, and not really attributed to rng at that point. Shattered procs could always crit iirc.
So at a 50% application rate, with 10 mobs the average damage of this skills with be 20 hits, where about 35% are crit and 65% non crit so the average hit is closer to 50k. So the "maximum" damage to a single mob (when 250% over saturated targets) is 250k when you use two T5 gambits (6 masteries, 8 key presses). The total for 4 targets (if all RNG worked out for you) would be 1 million damage when target over saturated by 250%.
On live, you can pull 10 mobs, you have a 100% bleed proc rate and a effective max of 10 targets since your limited to EOB having 10 targets in a 6m area, and 100 hits at about 40k a hit average. That means your "maximum" damage to any one target is 400k for the same 6 masteries and 8 key presses.
If you left the 50% application rate, but returned it to the max 10 targets, you'd get 50 shattered procs at 50k each hit and it would skill be a massive nerf to the skill but at least it would retain some semblance of usefulness in situations where you're oversaturated on targets (which has zero impact on dps balance) because it's just trash pulls.

So I bring in "key presses" into the argument for a reason. A champ in AOE spec has max targets 10-13 for most of their skills. Blade wall with 1 key press for example tooltip 2 hits 67k + 48k (roughly give or take) to EACH 10 enemies with a 4s cooldown. Rend is 10 targets, 42k each target for 1 key press every 4s. Swift blade is 36k to 8 targets ever 3s. Raging blade is 13 targets, 45k, 45k 49k to all 13 enemies, every 10s.
So 1.8M total damage for 1 key press of raging blade every 10s.
300k total damage for swift blade every 3s again, 1 key press.
420k total damage for rend every 4s for 1 key press.
1.2M total damage for 1 key press of blade wall every 4s.
(this is without the massive crit multipliers of champs taken into account)
So why do you feel this skill/trait.. that requires 8 button presses must do less than 1 Champ skill that requires 1 button press??? The logic is so far gone that I can't even wrap my head around WHY you have to nerf this into the ground when there are things that are still broken with the class. Why is this skill being set to a maximum of 4 mobs, when you already have multiple layers of RNG that inhibit this skill from being useful anyway?

[Krindel]

I am glad they are doing bug fixes on warden. Shattered Javelins trait setting Barbed Bleed proc chance to 100% was bug, this change also fixed Ranged Unerring Strike bleed consumption. However I agree that Shattered Javelins trait is now not worth traiting for any scenario, because this bug fix dramaticaly reduced number of SJ hits and damage compensation does not correspond to this reduction. I understand they want to reduce number of SJ hits, because it has negative effect on server performance, it is ok, but if they are going to compensate reduced number of max targets by 25% damage increase, then they should also compensate 50% proc chance nerf. Basic math, if you are reducing number of hits by 50%, then you have to increase damage of one hit by 100% to achieve same damage as before.

[Osglinthor]

Biggest problem currently is that its too much RNG with 50% proc chance.100% chance was a bug but it sure worked better and healtier for the game considering you can balance it a lot easier is damage is consistent.Now you can end up with 0 dmg on multiple spams or damage that barely matches any other gambit spam.Raise proc chance back to 100%.
In idea scenario this would then result in 1/3 damage nerf compared to live where on 10 targets on avarage every 2nd eob did ~4-5m damage.This would leave option for higher target situational fights.
There is already too much rng when it comes to procs so moving barbed javelins from 10-50 to 20-100 % proc chance would be step in right direction.And from here they can balance damage easly.As it stands now skill is way too much RNG where its either useless or maybe somewhat works.

[AaronIU]

Biggest problem currently is that its too much RNG with 50% proc chance.100% chance was a bug but it sure worked better and healtier for the game considering you can balance it a lot easier is damage is consistent.Now you can end up with 0 dmg on multiple spams or damage that barely matches any other gambit spam.Raise proc chance back to 100%.
In idea scenario this would then result in 1/3 damage nerf compared to live where on 10 targets on avarage every 2nd eob did ~4-5m damage.This would leave option for higher target situational fights.
There is already too much rng when it comes to procs so moving barbed javelins from 10-50 to 20-100 % proc chance would be step in right direction.And from here they can balance damage easly.As it stands now skill is way too much RNG where its either useless or maybe somewhat works.

Agreed, the effort to return ratio on warden is so skewed compared to other classes due to multiple outcomes of every RNG event, multiple key presses that could be literally wasted and return nothing. The difference between highs and lows of our dps is probably more vast than any other class because our main dps source has multiple outcomes based on layers of rng, and relies on crit (which thankfully has been helped) but the unpredictability involved doesn’t add to class dimension. It also doesn’t help class balance when they are balancing against max dps while ignoring average values, given that other classes can perform max dps based on reactive rotations and wardens max dps is based on pure rng. Simply layering on more key presses while returning sub par dps per keystroke is a terrible change. Even though it was situational, shattered javs was reliable dps because it wasn’t based on rng. This change is absolutely in the wrong direction. Other classes damage per keystroke for aoe skills far outpace ours.

[Waynard]

Agreed, the effort to return ratio on warden is so skewed compared to other classes due to multiple outcomes of every RNG event, multiple key presses that could be literally wasted and return nothing. The difference between highs and lows of our dps is probably more vast than any other class because our main dps source has multiple outcomes based on layers of rng, and relies on crit (which thankfully has been helped) but the unpredictability involved doesn’t add to class dimension. It also doesn’t help class balance when they are balancing against max dps while ignoring average values, given that other classes can perform max dps based on reactive rotations and wardens max dps is based on pure rng. Simply layering on more key presses while returning sub par dps per keystroke is a terrible change. Even though it was situational, shattered javs was reliable dps because it wasn’t based on rng. This change is absolutely in the wrong direction. Other classes damage per keystroke for aoe skills far outpace ours.

Amen, very well thought out post. Combining basing our core DPS on RNG procs and the fact that half the time your gambits and masteries are going to missfire due to weird attack duration things it really really really artificially raises the skill cap of an already tricky class. I love the nuances and complexities of the warden, I have since MoM, but they're beating a dead horse "fixing" problems where problems didnt need to be fixed. But hey at least they didnt take Momentum away from us. Yet...