Class Update - Loremasters

[Arathrinn]

Hello all,

These are my 2 cents on the changes made to the LM so far.

- Removing the hastened skills to prevent skill cluttering is great. I was never a big fan of the way it was implemented, and changing this to a non-flanking requirement and guaranteed effect on Staff Sweep seems like a good choice. This will make the LM less of a stationary spell caster, and force him/her to get into the fray to maximize your damage.

- Increasing the induction reduction to 25% on Rapid Fire wasn't necessarily needed but suits the playstyle described above. A welcome change.

- The reduced cooldown on Lightning Strike is a nice bonus as well, however the issue of cashing out burning/searing embers still exists. The cashout damage still is mediocre at best, whilst removing the most damaging skill the LM has. Furthermore, the 20% chance of calling down an extra lightning strike seems too RNG heavy. Perhaps changing this to 50%, but requires ancient craft up to provide this bonus?

- Changing Fierce Lightning to 100%, seems to tackle the same problem, reducing RNG. Sadly the trait doesn't seem to work after testing, it leaves the fire but deals no damage. (To training dummies at least). But even if it did, I doubt it would deal significant damage, if you look at how it is on the live servers. Hopefully we can test this out in the next Bullroarer session.

- Removing Wizard's Fire... not a fan. Although it's supposedly coming back, simply copying its effects and putting them on Gust of Wind is not an elegant solution. For starters, Gust of Wind has a 10 second cooldown compared to Wizard's Fire. Moreover, the induction is still the longest of all the damaging skills. This makes the LM unable to get up 3 searing embers. As others have mentioned, this also means it will take too long to react to a flanking pet for a heal. (even though that healing will need scaling to the current level as well) You seem to realise having an on the move, no-cd but low damaging skill is a pretty big thing by bringing it back, so I am interested to see what you come up with.

- Increased healing was desperately needed. I feel like Water-Lore is in a pretty good spot right now. The incoming healing aspect was obviously overtuned and it's pretty fair right now. Maybe increase the range of Water-Lore by 5m? 15m is just slightly too short of a range.

- Beacon of Hope is supposed to be an AoE heal, but the radius of the skill is ONLY 4m from the initial target. I'd definitely recommend drastically increasing this to even 20m at the least. It's a beacon after all, they tend to be *seen* from a longer distance

- Pleasant Breeze.. changing it to a heal was nice, but the heal is simply too little for the requirements it has. You would only take this whilst yellow-traited, meaning that you don't slot crit rating to activiate this skill in the first place. Second, when yellow traited Gust of Wind has an even longer induction when you cannot take Rapid Fire. I like the mechanic, but it's not realistic. It being a ground targeted skill is a nice change of pace, but then again it only has a 7m radius. This really needs to be increased to say 30m for it to be worth taking.

- Power sharing nerfs are justified. Giving it a cooldown was the least you could do. But on top of that, reducing the values by that much? A questionable move, I'd say the cooldown on its own would make both skills quite fair. But then again, with hunters not being able to spam barrage anymore, maybe it's not THAT desperately needed.

- Bring back Power of Knowledge. One of the best skill animations, while providing some nice utility. Even though it was hardly (if at all) used at level cap, changing it a bit would mean a lot to us players rather than simply removing it.

In conclusion a great start to the upcoming class changes.

- Change Gust of Wind and Pleasant Breeze accordingly
- Interested to see what you come up with for Wizard's Fire
- Give back Power of Knowledge!

PS.
Things to look at in the future that aren't related to these changes:

- Morale cost on skills is irrelevant at level cap. Maybe increase this whilst buffing the damage?
- Scale up the flanking mechanic rewards
- Rework pets, in the sense that they each fill a unique role. The Raven fire-mitigation debuff would fit better (thematically) on the Sabre-Tooth, for example. Maybe add more pet skills when blue traited?