Upcoming Changes to Monster Play

[Areyekuwe]

The first actual sign of understanding in this entire thread.

Lets move on, what exactly are you confused about with lets say, reavers damage?

I read and I wrote lots of this thread. It's your turn now. Please stop trolling otherwise. Do one or the other, either read or write. If my forum personality exites you, please restrain yourself and go back to reading or writing.

[Daec]

I read and I wrote lots of this thread. It's your turn now. Please stop trolling otherwise. Do one or the other, either read or write. If my forum personality exites you, please restrain yourself and go back to reading or writing.

Your convoluted thought and presentation process makes this entirely impossible.

[Areyekuwe]

Your convoluted thought and presentation process makes this entirely impossible.

Then make it easy on yourself? Stop addressing something that you do not understand as it is too convoluted?

[Daec]

Then make it easy on yourself? Stop addressing something that you do not understand as it is too convoluted?

You know, you're right for once. I cannot believe i attempted to communicate with you, when you reach the stage of making fire and graduate past cave paintings, we may have a discussion.

[SSG_Orion]

Please keep this civil.

There is no reason for devolving what should be a good discussion into something provocative and goading.

[Areyekuwe]

Please keep this civil.

There is no reason for devolving what should be a good discussion into something provocative and goading.

Well people and our differences are the reason.

There is another reason, that is a complete hopelessness at the pvp update process.

You yourself in several places said that it is slow in incremental. But now come up with new stances and completely reworked classes, all at once.

Here is one reply I completely agree with:

One question... why don't you listen to players?

This seems like a lot of changes and therefore a lot of work must have gone into it, but overall it will change virtually nothing. Why aren't you just doing the simple changes that are needed and that people are PERSISTENTLY asking you to do, rather than spending an eternity slightly tweaking every skill in the book? The skills aren't the issues causing this imbalance, it's a champion doing 5x the damage of any creep whilst being immune to cc and having a never-ending run-buff, or a healing bear that can jump around like a fool as 6 creeps try hopelessly to damage it, or a mini with a 50m range that seems to crit 90% of hits in the region of 100-250k, or an RK that can take on 3-4 wargs at once without breaking a sweat, or a hunter that can literally one-shot a creep walking out of grams.

5% damage increase is quite frankly an insult to all the creeps that have been logging in, keeping this section of the game alive, for months on end whilst facing horrendously overpowered, and in some cases, totally broken freep classes.

25% morale increase - it's something, but as you haven't mentioned anything whatsoever about buffing creeps' critical defense it's almost totally irrelevant for 95% of creeps in 99% of situations - an extra 400k morale isn't going to stop a champ slaughtering a BA like it's an NPC. If a hunter can devastate 2M, or a champ/bear can delete an unsuspecting creep in 5 seconds, then what does a 25% morale buff do? Seriously. What does it do?

- Give creeps 6 more corruption slots.
- Buff those corruptions so creep stats match the heavily stat-bloated freeps.
- Re-work audacity. This is a balancing tool already built into the game and yet you aren't using it to balance the game. I just cannot grasp the thinking behind this.
- Where is the in-combat rez for defilers, where is the in-combat heal for wargs to make them something other than an all-out glass-cannon? Name me one freep class that cannot heal in combat.

You seem to have gone through every single creep skill, buy why?! All we needed was for you to listen to the players to fix this quickly to buy you time to look at the skills in detail. Instead you looked at the skills in detail whilst leaving creeps to rot for months whilst refusing to make the changes the players have been begging you for, and then after months you come out with a 5% dps increase. Just unbelievable.

It feels like we have a good number of small things that are just broken.

Fixing them one by one or like several at a time would be a good direction.

After all we can see that yet again we got a dev that means well but does not remember the game all that well and refuses to do certain changes because they are too hard to do.

In your case we have your stream on top of things where you do say things that are meant to be a wake up moment for all the creeps as well. Like pvmp was not built to last, like creeps were not ever meant to be in any balance with freeps and so on. And how these demands and ideas are hard to work on.

Or, we can have a forum pvp with people that are pros at that. Because there is not much left to do?

[Askelin]

time to zaheer this topic so we can put you all out of your misery


ps; can sundering blow become raw mitigation instead of armor value?

I like this idea! In fact the armour value debuff seems to be a nerf judging from the OP. Mitigation debuff would be neat, both phys and tact mits perhaps? Armour mostly effects physical

You yourself in several places said that it is slow in incremental. But now come up with new stances and completely reworked classes, all at once.

My brother in Eru which one is it?
Is it "pvmp isn't being worked on fast enough, devs don't care about pvmp or understand how to fix it"
or is it "pvmp is being worked on too fast? We're getting too many changes and this is bad!"
Seriously, people like you can never be satisfied.

It's unproductive to attack the dev who is actually working on pvmp. Period. instead of that, perhaps consider providing something relevant to the table.
And it was established to get broader changes out there first that will make a difference instead of spending countless update schedules on small, incremental changes. At least we have things to show for it, these changes are great, the most realest thing we've seen to actual creep love in like 7 years and you're stuck up on the smallest of things.
So quit your whining, meat's back on the menu and you're acting like a vegan about all of this.

[Atomos]

Great, much needed changes. Thank you.

Are the fixes for non-VIP freeps not being able to use the map to Glan Vraig, not being able to be rezzed properly etc. also coming with this particular update?

[SSG_Orion]

Great, much needed changes. Thank you.

Are the fixes for non-VIP freeps not being able to use the map to Glan Vraig, not being able to be rezzed properly etc. also coming with this particular update?

Yes, this should also be fixed in the upcoming update.

[Areyekuwe]

My brother in Eru which one is it?
Is it "pvmp isn't being worked on fast enough, devs don't care about pvmp or understand how to fix it"
or is it "pvmp is being worked on too fast? We're getting too many changes and this is bad!"
Seriously, people like you can never be satisfied.

It's unproductive to attack the dev who is actually working on pvmp. Period. instead of that, perhaps consider providing something relevant to the table.
And it was established to get broader changes out there first that will make a difference instead of spending countless update schedules on small, incremental changes. At least we have things to show for it, these changes are great, the most realest thing we've seen to actual creep love in like 7 years and you're stuck up on the smallest of things.
So quit your whining, meat's back on the menu and you're acting like a vegan about all of this.

I did not say these things in that way.

I believe that PvMP did not get a steady dev for a long time with steady underlined.

As a result, what happened over the years many devs would step in and do a bunch of "lets turn this part of pvmp upside down" type of changes.

Then for years a number of people would beg for reverse of these changes and it would not get done.

Examples: Auto flips, move of OPs and war camps.

------------------------------------------------------------

Orion came in months ago.

1st thing we knew off him in game is when he took out a 1m map from the game, for new characters. Considering how this was a launch of the free pvmp and many made new characters, this was a bad welcome. He still telling us that it was a bug, or it was not put in by him.
And simple question like this: "why were you taking your valuable time to work on that?" (that which is not broken) was never asked. On our server it was a big discussion among new players or people making new classes.

-Things like this do discourage hopes. And yes it was in version notes.

So now he is mentioning that there is update to OP bonuses and some other bonuses and when asked a direct question a kabuki dance of deflection starts. That combined with professional trolls coming in to take whole discussion personal, instead of talking about issues at all. -Makes for some interesting mess.

Example of the question:

"There is more then one benefit that each side can get from the 2 relics. Total number can be counted as 7 benefits and possibly as 9! (freep side has a ton and some have tiers that stack??) Why not get rid of them and rework the whole of monster play effects associated with relics?
-Like do freeps need another +5 to damage buff?? Creeps never got that much.

But it felt that our dev did not right away get on board with the idea, for whatever reason.

To make it absolutely clear: I was never for large scale rework of everything. not this: "pvmp isn't being worked on fast enough, devs don't care about pvmp or understand how to fix it"

For years there were skills that got abandoned, that healed power, I picked a few and made a long thread with pictures on this same forum. I actually work for this: "perhaps consider providing something relevant to the table."

-So, if forums is the table, I am ful time employee here, working overtime, Sir.

Quoted above and I like these:

- Give creeps 6 more corruption slots.
- Buff those corruptions so creep stats match the heavily stat-bloated freeps.
- Re-work audacity. This is a balancing tool already built into the game and yet you aren't using it to balance the game. I just cannot grasp the thinking behind this.
- Where is the in-combat rez for defilers, where is the in-combat heal for wargs to make them something other than an all-out glass-cannon? Name me one freep class that cannot heal in combat.
Add to above:

• Remove auto flips.
• Move war camps closer to TA.
• Continue working with existing skills fixing abandoned skills (this is coming along, but on a much, much larger scale)

Add to this marshal chests in GV that were abandoned and when Orion was asked about it he said it is not on the list? (I do not even play freep, but abandoning things like this, not cool)

[pipje1]

Hey Orion,

First of all, thank you for the changes, I'm excited to see how they will all play out.
I think in general things will have a good effect on pvp, but there's a couple concerns on my end.

Overall state of creeps:
Defence stacking on healing classes tends to be very overpowered, I know on my server (Evernight) there are a couple of creep players who understand how to build, and often play a defiler/WL combination.
I did some stats crunching on it, and tested out the build with the defi/WL combo.
Trying to keep this somewhat short:
-you have incoming damage and mitigation which greatly affect each other, if you don't stack on one of the two you'll suffer exponentially more damage.
-by default on maxed out creep classes, regardless of rank, you can have -56% incoming damage on permanently (audacity with pot = 42%, food = 4% and tome of defence = 10%.
this means that if you stack physical mits, you can get near cap stats on both defiler/WL with all their buffs up, including WL aura and the Point-Defence skill and the commendation armour pot. turning into roughly 60%-65% physical mits.

Combine these 2 stats and you'll suffer 44% of 35%-40% damage. I know you can debuff relatively well to counteract this, however in reality this isn't done very often.
Some classes have passive penetration (hunter, champ and whatever else), and some classes have built in +inc dmg debuffs (like OBs). these work perfectly to take down targets, but are often limited to only 1 target, sometimes even on a large CD.

On that note some classes don't have either of those choices, rendering them near useless against players who trait their corruptions well.
Side-note, one of the most important freep debuff classes Lore-master is under quite heavy pressure in pvp, they often have no chance to escape and are killed off very easily even in big group situations, rendering their debuffs very ineffective because.. well... they're dead

I'd really like you to look into this so you can see how severe the impact of this can actually be, because I've seen 15 freeps fail to kill a non-supported defi/WL combo in a 10 minute fight...
That said creeps are currently very underwhelming if they trait anything else, so I'm happy to see buffs for them!

Going into some more specific class changes now.

Reaver:
Overall very happy with all of the changes with 2 concerns.
I think we've seen a lot of negative feedback on the state of champ sprint (should 100% be nerfed in some way, it's my main class and while it's fun, it's clearly very overpowered).
I feel like reaver charge is going into a similar direction, but they clearly need some sort of sprint skill since every time a large group of freeps counter pushes, reavers are just stuck in the middle of them while the rest of the creeps just runs off except for a few stragglers. I suggest changing it into a lower % speed, for slightly longer duration, on a longer CD (let's say 20s with 1m CD with immunity to slows/roots?)
It shouldn't be an escape jail free card (like champ), but it should allow them to not be completely stuck every time they go in and fail to go out before the freeps counter push.
Second is the miss chance, I agree with others, keep it between 20-30%, 40% just seems to be too much imo.

Defiler:
Generally happy, but I think the class has too strong heals, but mostly in situations of lag where HoTs excel they're completely unkillable or the previous inc dmg/mit combination making them too tanky for their base heals.
Love the idea of stances and very happy to see more buff skills in that healing line, think it will be awesome.
Only problem is once again with the incoming damage boon buff, if you stack that up with the other incoming dmg/mits build, it will reduce damage by a LOT more than probably intended. (I'll get back at this when I get to spider).
Also think gooey gourd is too OP at 100% induction duration, small buff is ok, max up to 40% I'd say. if you get targeted by a raid you have no chance to even react as a healer with this on, you'll be completely reliant on other classes and not your own skill, as you will instantly have like 10-20 effects to cleanse, which is impossible.

Warg/stalker:
Generally very happy with the buffs.
I think howl of the unnerving mits debuff is way too strong, unless it's somehow not a flat 50% debuff.
Overall flayer is likely gonna be in a very good spot, I'm just worried about shadow.
Shadow DPS warg is very hard to balance I think, it falls off dramatically after freeps get any sort of defence in a patch.
Either they kill the target in their first 2 stuns, or they are too squishy to do anything and die within seconds.
With the recent grace-period change, the stun duration has been dramatically reduced for shorter CCs, making warg have even less of an opening to do their dps.
I'm not sure how you should balance this, but I wanted to give some personal ideas about it because it's a class I love, but feel has little impact in pvp these days.

BA:
Great change, think it would be fair to let the corruption last 20-25 seconds, 4.5s build up for only 15s buff during which you can't move seems pretty underwhelming.
Think they could have some more damage on some low dmg skills to make rotation feel better, but good change overall!

WL:
Good changes, their heals are very strong if you manage to insta cast everything, I don't feel like a finesse buff is needed, cuz it will make the class too easy.
If you build the inc dmg/mits build you're so tanky, and with your incredibly high base healing, you're too tough to get down in combination with a defi.
Solo side I don't have enough of an idea what to do, but who would wanna play solo WL....
Reason why I think it's ok to have them get their fears resisted is that it's a bit skill based like this.
Some freep classes have much lower resistance than others, worse gear also impacts this, so it comes down to target priority so you can keep your insanely good insta heals rolling.
it's not like you need your WL to target the RAT too much anyway imo.

Spider:
Overall happy to see some spider buffs, but they're a very skill dependent class.
I think people who understand interactions of debuffs will do 20x better than someone who doesn't, because they have incredible control and debuffs.
Problems:
Miss chance % buff for no real reason imo, it was fine as it was.
New reflect....here we go...

I think the old reflect was kinda fine, if you were a good player you are severely less punished by your opponent spider using it.
Main issue with the new one: incoming damage....
Base incoming damage reduction on creeps = 56%, let's say a defiler gives you 10% extra with his new boon buff it becomes 66%, add 5% from a potential artifact (please remove incoming damage from this) makes it 71%, let's see 25% from a full reflect goes up to 96%!
that's better than a warleader bubble even if you take off or 2 corruptions, because of the duration...
I like the idea of turning it into a corruption of sorts because it allows for more counterplay, but even without the defiler buff, this is gonna make you so insanely tanky for as long as it's up.
Other than this it looks amazing.

Some side notes that popped up after making this essay:
Wardens: now that creeps have more removal of effects, warden are gonna deal significantly less damage, and their mitigation debuff (one of the best in the game to counter the inc dmg/mit build) can be cleansed so easily now. I feel like this class will be utterly useless after these changes in most group play, if not solo.
Champ sprint: I already said it needed a nerf, it's pretty niche in pve, where it's always good to close a gap, but sometimes it's WAY TOO GOOD because of the permanent slow immunity on it depending on the fight. It doesn't have to be that long in both pve and especially pvp, as much as I enjoy zooming all over and not giving a F.
Overall I'm very happy to see some genuine reworks of creep side, adding corruptions as buffs and being able to remove freep debuff effects more efficiently is a great addition!

Thanks for reading,
me
P.S.: creeps pls don't read about the overpowered stack inc dmg/mits build, I'd hate seeing you be much harder to kill...

[Namesse]

Not sure that a transitory +6 on BA range that needs to be built up and can be dispelled is adequate compensation for the freeps all running +10 range. Spiders need a range buff too. Please keep an eye on this and be open to giving us a traited corruption for range, and yes, more corruption slots are needed.

[Melkori]

WL:
Good changes, their heals are very strong if you manage to insta cast everything, I don't feel like a finesse buff is needed, cuz it will make the class too easy.
If you build the inc dmg/mits build you're so tanky, and with your incredibly high base healing, you're too tough to get down in combination with a defi.
Solo side I don't have enough of an idea what to do, but who would wanna play solo WL....
Reason why I think it's ok to have them get their fears resisted is that it's a bit skill based like this.
Some freep classes have much lower resistance than others, worse gear also impacts this, so it comes down to target priority so you can keep your insanely good insta heals rolling.
it's not like you need your WL to target the RAT too much anyway imo.

I usually roam around with 2 finesse trait slotted on WL.
Meanwhile it is enough for grams-lug and solo/small group fights but in raid vs raid situations where every freep has muster of courage buff I need probably atleast 1 or 2 more (3-4 overall) finesse trait slotted to successfully hit something with my shouts. And ofc the shouts still mostly resisted.

Also you probably forgot we have inductions which is easily interrupted by: champs/burgs/rk stones + in lag its sometimes very hard to manage heals.

So to sum up: Either give more base finesse to WL or reduce healing skill inductions (or make crack the whip not interruptable like relentless maul on beorning)

PS 1:

"it's not like you need your WL to target the RAT too much anyway imo."

With the recent changes if you want to get kills count for your deeds then yes you have to damage the RAT. (imo this recent change is not working well and it should be corrected)

PS 2:
"Solo side I don't have enough of an idea what to do, but who would wanna play solo WL"

WL could play solo in the past but now its just pointless because almost every freep can outheal its dps or just escape easily.
Also I used to play a lot in duo with a dps class, but now it is just a suicide tour mostly.

[Atomos]

Yes, this should also be fixed in the upcoming update.

Great news, thank you!

You should adress absurd commendation grind on both sides. Its borderline insanity to start new creep or freep(to less exstent). And focus on making pvp about pvp. People would still play it even if they didnt need to grind 80k+ comms. Make rank 0 creep and tell me that is good starting experience or go in in new gear as freep. Tell me that is good pvp. Gap between full gear/high rank and low gear/audacity and low ranks should be reduced drasticly.

I'm glad someone brought this up because I'm also facing the same issue. I appreciate the addition of new audacity gear for freeps and changes to audacity for creeps, but the amount of commendations required to buy the freep gear, for example, is quite off-putting.

Ideally I would like to play at least 2 freeps and 2 creeps in PvMP, but it seems like it would take a very long time to get enough commendations to acquire enough audacity for each character to be reasonably competitive. Admittedly I did stop playing for a while and had about 7k commendations saved up from before, but it still feels like a bit too much.

Any chance of having commendations acquired increased in general for both sides, Orion?

[pipje1]

I usually roam around with 2 finesse trait slotted on WL.
Meanwhile it is enough for grams-lug and solo/small group fights but in raid vs raid situations where every freep has muster of courage buff I need probably atleast 1 or 2 more (3-4 overall) finesse trait slotted to successfully hit something with my shouts. And ofc the shouts still mostly resisted.

Also you probably forgot we have inductions which is easily interrupted by: champs/burgs/rk stones + in lag its sometimes very hard to manage heals.

So to sum up: Either give more base finesse to WL or reduce healing skill inductions (or make crack the whip not interruptable like relentless maul on beorning)

PS 1:

"it's not like you need your WL to target the RAT too much anyway imo."

With the recent changes if you want to get kills count for your deeds then yes you have to damage the RAT. (imo this recent change is not working well and it should be corrected)

PS 2:
"Solo side I don't have enough of an idea what to do, but who would wanna play solo WL"

WL could play solo in the past but now its just pointless because almost every freep can outheal its dps or just escape easily.
Also I used to play a lot in duo with a dps class, but now it is just a suicide tour mostly.

Fair enough, I definitely forgot that muster courage fear will apply to everyone these days, that will make it hard to even hit on worse geared players etc.
Maybe a bit of finesse seems reasonable then, could just be WL specific as well
That said the deed changes I'm not even gonna bother with, I know it might be frustrating, but that's a problem on it's own and shouldn't be balanced about skill wise imo
Solo WL has been horrible for a longer time now, I guess a lot of work would need to be done for that to become a thing again and I doubt it's on Orion's priority list tbh

[Askelin]

*tldr*

Your post shows how little you actually understand pvmp and the history of its development.
Orion was working on this game before you even started playing my brother. He is NOT a new dev. He is a returned one.

I'd say he has a much better grasp on how this machine works than you.
Now for the two points you actually brought up. Which I'll grant are not uncommon suggestions.

Defiler in combat rez: Considering the current state of the warleader I don't think it's appropriate. It would be neat but if warleader has any hope of becommings a viable class again they need to be able to bring something to the fight that can't just be done with defiler. And as such I'd say it's fair to keep them the one creep class with IC rezzes. A compromise would be giving defilers a single target in combat rez. The issue is that WLs need some identity but ultimately need more than just a rez to make them more appealing than defiler. Orion did seem to acknowledge this in the past. And he has also mentioned that this about 25% of the creepwork he is setting out to do. More to come, WLs could benefit from better changes.

Wargs have performed adequately in 1v1s with no IC heal for years... Good wargs at least. Rallying becomes IC when you're in a group, due to defeat responses. Then again, it would also be neat to have. A way to trigger a defeat response other than a kill. And I personally don't see anything wrong about this.

The rest of your post and the others are completely irrelevant. It's self aggrandizing as all hell, riddled with inconsistancies and inaccuracies and frankly unhelpful.

[Fulgurix]

Warg Stalker Changes:

Base Melee Damage increased by 5%, Base Tactical Damage increased by 15%

Flayer stance

Flayer Bubble is now 7% of max health.

Improved Flayer Armour & Mit buffs rolled into regular flayer buff; Improved Flayer Trait now gives -10% incoming melee/ranged damage, +5% Beleriand Mitigation, and +20% Threat

Ending or cancelling Pack Flayers' root will no longer dispel Flayer bubble.

'Pack Hunters' (non-Shadow/non-Flayer version) now increases a target's incoming damage by 5% and reduces incoming healing by 50%.

'Shadow Pack' now reduces incoming healing by 25%; 10% after leaving the debuff area.

'Improved Rallying Howl' Damage buff lasts 25s, rather than 15s.

Baseline 'Stealth' no longer reduces movement speed, but base Stealth level has been decreased by 3.

The trait 'Improved Stealth' now increases stealthed movement speed 5%, Increases Stealth level by 7, and increases Critical Chance of attacks from stealth by 10%.

Reduced 'Bestial Claws' Damage slightly.

Added minor damage to the initial skill hits of 'Crippling Bite' and all versions of 'Savage Fangs.'

Shadow Fangs now places an effect that reduces the ability to parry by 68000, increases induction timers by 45% and reduces skill ranges by 5m for 45s

Snap! now reduces the target's damage by 10% for 30s (this is a multiplicative reduction)

Flea Bitten now applies an initial interrupt and then a pulsing interrupt on the target that lasts for 15 seconds pulsing every five seconds

Howl of unnerving now debuffs mitigation by 50% through fear on up to 4 targets

Brutal Fangs(Flayer Stance) now redes Block, Parry, and Evade by 25% and, when scoring a Brute bonus hit decreases armor by 25% for 45s

Pounce/Sudden Pounce now applies a corruption to the warg increasing the damage of "Fang" by 150% for 24s

Scratch and Snip damage increased slightly and now applies a buff when successfully striking with the scratch portion of the attack that increases the critical chance of Maul and Claw attacks by 75% for 3s.On a successful snip portion of the attack, this applies a buff on the Stalker increasing the critical chance of Fang and Snap attacks for 10s.

Swipe now adds a corruption to the warg increasing the chance to land "Brute" effects by 50%

Having mixed feelings about these, especially for shadow stance, Scratch and Snip buff seems kinda pointless. Need more incentives to choose other skills over usual bestial claws spam (either dmg or utility wise). Also, might be worth improving the positional damage of the class instead of simply increasing damage across the board, reward proper positioning and ability to seek positional.

[SSG_Orion]

I'm glad someone brought this up because I'm also facing the same issue. I appreciate the addition of new audacity gear for freeps and changes to audacity for creeps, but the amount of commendations required to buy the freep gear, for example, is quite off-putting.

Ideally I would like to play at least 2 freeps and 2 creeps in PvMP, but it seems like it would take a very long time to get enough commendations to acquire enough audacity for each character to be reasonably competitive. Admittedly I did stop playing for a while and had about 7k commendations saved up from before, but it still feels like a bit too much.

Any chance of having commendations acquired increased in general for both sides, Orion?

The change to the OP, Towers, and Artifacts are a very slight boost to commendation earns ahead of future changes that will make getting commendations easier.

[Baredur]

Yes, this should also be fixed in the upcoming update.

Any chance of getting audacity gear to stop un-equipping each time we log in?

[Daec]

Spider Weaver Changes:

Base Melee Damage increased by 5%

'Clinging Webs' miss chance debuff increased from 7% to 15%.

'Venomous Haze' now has a max range of 40m, and reduces player ranged skills by 15m.

'Lethal kiss' now deals slightly more damage at the outset, and deals ~4x that damage after ten seconds if the effect is not removed; cooldown has been increased to 10s.

'Grasping Webs' now has a 50% chance to break on damage.

'Necrosis' now reduces the resistance rating of targets by 120k

The trait 'Steelweave Webs' now increases the grace period of your roots to 3s.

'Envenom' base damage increased; bonus 20% damage for every venom pip.

'Shelob's Gift' reduced from a full heal to a ~1/3 heal.

'Feast' now restores morale on a defeat event instead of power.

‘Poison Spray' can now be used against NPCs

Hatchlings
Base Hatchling Health increased by 15%

Strong Brood now gives +75% Health, -10% power, 5% faster attacks, +25% melee damage, +25% Critical Damage, +25% Melee Critical Hit Points, +15% Evade Rate

Scytode Brood now gives +25% health, +15% power, +10% faster attack speed, -25% melee damage, +35% ranged damage, +25% critical chance, +15% melee critical hit points, +10% Evade Rate (Note: 'Ranged' damage mods also affect 'Tactical' damage, to hedge against inconsistent skill effects now/in the future, as Ranged & Tactical damage should be treated the same, for the purposes of this pet mod)

Minor text change to both Scytode Brood and Strong Brood Traits, which now say '*You* gain increased tactical or physical mitigation' They formerly said 'The weaver gains...' which was potentially confusing, as the rest of the trait affects your pet, which is also a weaver, in a sense.

New skill: Cleansing Shadows
Costs 3 Venom
The weaver can consume up to 3 negative tactical, song, or cry effects
The weaver is healed a small amount for each effect consumed.

Toxic Carapace' has been reworked slightly

The effect from Toxic Carapace now tiers down over time; the starting tier depends on the number of Venom pips consumed. Tier 5 effect is now -25% incoming damage, 80% reflected damage. Incoming damage potency is reduced 5% per tier, and reflect potency is reduced 10% per tier Overall duration and cooldown increased slightly (25s maximum possible duration, 90s cooldown) This effect is now a Corruption, meaning it can be tiered down or dispelled by the free peoples.

Oiz hit the nail on the head with a lot of his feedback, so most of this might just reinforce his points. I like a lot of these changes, some of them feel like they fall short of the intended effect.

Lethal kiss - While it sounds nice this will get clear most likely by most classes, and will definitely get cleared in group/raid play before it can proc, shortening the countdown before the effect does its damage would help or provide some lesser downside if it is cleared, somewhat like virulent poison has.

Venomous Haze - Cool its getting a buff, in solo its really just a venom builder, might give RKs a headache with a couple seconds until its cleared but otherwise won't have much of an impact. in Group/raid it most likely won't see any impact due to range traceries. Bumping it to 20m would bring it more in line with how it used to effect classes.

Necrosis - I'm not grasping why this was changed, even with the added finesse bonuses a lot of the problem with resists is due to % based increases from classes like champ for themselves, mini and captain for the group. Since the skill is ratings based it feels like if its not some huge value like it is currently the effectiveness of it is pretty close to 0.

Shelob's gift - This skill requires one of the 5 racial slots creeps get and requires a defeat response. Reducing the heal by 66% seems like a bit of an overkill, in group place its nice and "might" save you if its up when you need it but most likely 1) isn't up, and 2) is not enough in RvR to make that much of a difference due to heal debuffs, CC, etc. In solo play its rarely used because of the afore mentioned defeat response requirement. All in all, its a very niche skill and should be potent due to whats required to even fire the skill.

Envenom - Can you elaborate on this a bit? The dmg bump is nice, however the part about increased damage is a bit confused based on how the current skill works. Right now you get a 20% bonus for each stack of ensnared consumed, the note mentions a 20% bonus for venom, is this to say that instead of using ensnared to increase damage it now increases 20% based on how many venom pips it generates? Or is more changing on how this skill functions than the patch notes say.

Toxic carapace - I'm not sure how i feel about this. Will the -inc dmg from this stack with other sources such as audacity, food, relic, tome of defense?

Pet changes - Its nice they're getting love, but it seems like its not enough. Barring any other changes to how the pet functions, can their mitigations be increased significantly? The pet dies in group play to random aoes as its generally in the thick of the fight, even the ranged pet will drop its ranged abilities after a few seconds and run into melee range meaning it just dies and does mostly nothing. In solo play people just slap it with one skill and its dead. Even with the increased health i don't see the pet lasting more than a couple of seconds.

Cleansing shadows - Is there a reason physical effects were not included in this? Also the rate at which spider can build pips to use spenders is pretty low compared to classes like champ, brawler, and hunter. 3 seems like a bit much considering you're giving up a decent amount of damage/resist penetration to use this skill. Depending on the heal this may be worth it but moving the pip cost to 2 would be nice, so it can be used in a pinch by throwing venomous haze or latent poison quickly.

Poison Spray - Not gonna lie, I really like this change.

Base melee damage - Why was the ranged/tactical damage also not increased? While tactical damage of the class right now is okay a bunch of it is tied up in class matchups (due to cleanses) and resists, and suffers greatly from both of these in group/raid fights. With the nerf to necrosis spider will suffer even more from resists than it currently does overall reducing its tactical damage. The OP/relic changes may alleviate this somewhat, but as nice as it is to have these objectives be useful and will be fought over i'm not getting a bunch of warm and fuzzies about a good portion of the effectiveness of the class being tied to them.

Additionally as an overall note, spider animations still seem stuck in the past, in today's game it almost an eternity to fire skills with no way to cut these skills, is it possible to speed these up slightly?

It's been mentioned before but just to reiterate the changes overall are welcome but do little to address the spider's true problems in today's game, 1) Resists, 2) cleanses, 3) long animations 4) slow venom generation.

[upat12am]

You still didn't address WL's biggest problem, its heal inductions. All this new damage is moot when you are an Interupt Pinata' for Champs/Burgs/Guards/Ranged DPS, I suggest you get out in the Moors and actually play one.

This!!

[SSG_Orion]

Any chance of getting audacity gear to stop un-equipping each time we log in?

Different bug. It's on the list but is a very weird race condition.

[Jacen123]

Uruk Warleader Changes:
Base Melee and Tactical Damage increased by 10%

'Command Post' now increases all masteries by 25%.

'Banner of Terror' now also includes a Level of Dread when it is summoned.

'Banner of Horror' now also includes three levels of Dread when it is summoned.

'Menacing Roar' range increased to 20m and total targets increased to 6.

'Black Speech' damage increased.

'Cleave' damage increased slightly, and is now a small AoE, dealing damage to up to 3 targets.

'Fracture' damage increased considerably.

The trait 'Damage Boost' trait now grants +25% damage, rather than 3%.

The trait 'Empowering' now has a Tactical Mastery value appropriate for level 140 and its In-combat Power Regen has been changed to Resistance Rating.

'Purge' no longer breaks allies out of stealth.

When traited, 'Purge' now grants 6s of immunity to CC.

Seems like there is quite a lot of work going on behind the scenes.

Orion do you have any thoughts on why WL's are stuck with shadow damage only?
Is there any chance for orc craft or fellwrought damage types to be applied instead?

[SSG_Orion]

And here are the last of the changes that I should be committing before we open Bullroarer.

Warleader

Trait Harsh Language now adds a 15% reduction to induction times.

When the trait Power of Fear is active the skill Fracture now applies the Power of Fear induction removal effect.

Blackarrow

Steadfast Barrage now has a range of 40m.
Damage on each hit is increased.
Channels for a Duration of 6s and damages the target for every 1s that it is channeled.
Cooldown is now 20s.

Improved Steadfst Barrage now has a range of 40m.
Damage on each hit is increased.
Channels for duration of 8s and damages the target for every 1s that it is channeled.
The damage effect has a chance to crit.
Cooldown is now 20s.

[UselessSmurf]

And here are the last of the changes that I should be committing before we open Bullroarer.

Warleader

Trait Harsh Language now adds a 15% reduction to induction times.

When the trait Power of Fear is active the skill Fracture now applies the Power of Fear induction removal effect.

Blackarrow

Steadfast Barrage now has a range of 40m.
Damage on each hit is increased.
Channels for a Duration of 6s and damages the target for every 1s that it is channeled.
Cooldown is now 20s.

Improved Steadfst Barrage now has a range of 40m.
Damage on each hit is increased.
Channels for duration of 8s and damages the target for every 1s that it is channeled.
The damage effect has a chance to crit.
Cooldown is now 20s.

Ty Orion.