Bullroarer Update 30: Early Look: Skill Balance Work

[Zaheer]

Captain

• Captain's ability to maintain high and extended degrees of invulnerability has made them irreplaceable in high challenge content, so we've needed to limit a few of their most powerful abilities.
• ‘Kick’ can no longer miss, nor be blocked, parried, or evaded.
• Fixed: Captain banner heralds were not correctly inheriting offensive bonuses from their summoner.
• Fixed an old 'Make Haste' duration change that was never processed correctly.
  
  • Yellow Line:
    
    • Captain Yellow line morale bonus reduced from 25->10%.
    • Shield of the Dunedain LI legacy cooldown bonus reduced from (+10->+5s) (total duration reduced from 20->15s), Shield of the Dunedain can only be used on others.
    • Stand Tall Duration bonus reduced from (+10->+3s), Proc cooldown reduced from (1.0,2.0,3.0->1.0s,1.5s.2.0s)
  • Red Line
    
    • Telling Mark base effect reduced from (5->3%), Traited bonus from (5->2%), total (10->5%).
      
      • As a 100% uptime debuff with no action time cost, Telling Mark's group effect was too powerful.

Yellow

Personally, I think this was required to bring down the captain tank. However, I think that this shouldn't be nerfed too steep. Because ''captains'' should not be compensating on their utility when the overall ''system'' is a complete mess.

Here I point out towards BPE and the mechanics of bosses heavily focused on buffer-sized tanks. Which is NOT the guardian.

The following I might say is just my thought but perhaps won't sound too nice.

I think that we shouldn't be compensating because guardians and other tanks do poorly. I think that the classes shouldn't be touched at all before you actually fixed the BPE system that I've been talking about for years now. Adjusting classes with a broken stat system makes no sense whatsoever. Guardian & warden rely heavily on BPE and you CANNOT dumb down every class to a ''buffer like'' tank, like the captain who is an absolute god at dealing with burst damage. Making a class compensate for a broken system that you guys do not want to fix sounds incredibly stupid to me and the idea of bringing in more burst mechanics is only going to be more catastrophic. I feel that when we do talk about more burst mechanics from bosses that circumvent BPE as a whole (as for the stat system being equally broken too) the game becomes very one-sided and builds and ideas are out of the question. You no longer have the choice to balance things out yourself and you're forced to go with a big size buffer as we've since pretty much Mordor. If you're enforcing players to stack more morale due to the burst mechanics circumventing defensive stats, no wonder the captain outshines everything because that's what it is good at, perhaps even too good in my opinion but it's hard to say with the way things are at this moment.

Because the class used to be less leaning towards a buffer-sized pool and was in the middle of everything but not the best at any. This is what is the ''core'' idea of captain within all lines and this is no longer maintained with the way yellow operates on live. The whole reason captain is currently #1 tank choice is because of multiple factors.

• Content in favor of buffer-sized pools
• BPE system complete pile of ####
• overall stat system being extremely one-sided
• Yellow being slightly overtuned

Since the yellow line got a good fix, I think that the pool in combination with heals has gotten too much.
I also understood that there was an attempt nerfing the yellow in the past with the standards when there was a patch to the captain in regard to ''fixing up the class''
The attempt was to nerf the yellow line standard from 30% inc heal to 20% inc healing. Which is very logical with the amount of heal yellow had at that moment. However, also yellow captain isn't working entirely as it should be. but I'll get to that point later.

Since the yellow line used to be the balance of everything, the yellow captain could actually be built in many ways when we do talk level 95-100 content. With 95 being slightly more restrictive in how far you could go with this. Because when the Faramir set was released with 5 slot essences, some crazy builds were being created that would blow everything out of proportion. From extremely sized buffer tanks to very small pools with high defensive stats in combination with strong self-healing. Though, we've seen which class was on the opposing side and was probably just as overpowered *urrrrrhm* ''wardens''

Getting down to what might happen upon fixing the stat system, including BPE as a whole, we might expect to see yellow line captain back at the top. Now you might wonder how and why this because for the entire time the class has been bugged in one of its traits that heavily, and I mean heavily affects the way it plays at this moment & how overturned it actually is.

We all do know that turning point stacks up to +25% inc healing with BPE. Now we also know BPE doesn't work properly. I've been observing conditions with tanking past year long enough to tell that turning point doesn't actually get past rank 1 due to the broken BPE system. Ah well, maybe it does but your chances are very slim :P

This brings us ofc back to how overturned yellow actually is, it just doesn't show yet until the content & overall stat system gets fixed.
I've been saying this for a very long time, sadly no one mentioned turning-point not actually working properly anymore due to external factors.

About time you start fixing the BPE system first so you can tow the warden and guardian back into line with the captain, instead of turning them into wannabe captain classes.
Maybe lower the ridiculous stat scaling regarding inc heal, BPE & mitigations too, so we have options because the current meta bores me


Redline

Yeah, we come to redline now after me ranting about the stat system.

So yes, I do understand that on paper, redline does seem like the ideal choice and top pick for every raid because of its utility, which is of course true but there are a few things people do not know or are not aware of.

The red standard of war is bugged (as of level 95) and still is in the current patch.
( Current numbers are M 5% T 2% R 0%) Which should be a 5% crit bonus on ranged, tactical & melee.
Then earlier, the standard of war got nerfed from 30% to 20%, which many people still do not know about.
OB having been nerfed and can no longer be used until its cd on target is finished.

Perhaps it's a good way of encouraging captains to do their study and actually DPS, or if required do more healing instead by sacrificing the sure-strike gaps within their rotation for off healing.

I think Telling should be scaled to 6/7%(as before the release of rohan), to see how much it impacts current game design. Losing 5% is very steep and hits the captain quite hard. The buffs we provide only make a few % difference in total raid DPS and with this change, I think that the captain might actually be hit too hard and I fear that we might actually be replaced (as we've already seen with Kidzu Kalah), where redline captain replacement was optional(mostly being the case as the captain was forced into either yellow or blue).


Overall utility

I think that perhaps the make haste change and so is good, 45 seconds make-haste for an entire fellowship is of course ridiculous, and changing the duration is a good idea. The captain still remains in a good position despite losing utility for the amount of support and options it brings to the table with its combat rez and overall off heal & DPS capability.

Banner heralds still not providing any damage bonus.

However there's still many issues and some very major ones that still need to be addressed like the standard of war fix, redesign of the stat system(in my opinion) due to DPS classes having too much room, but then again I speak from the perspective of a support role and do not have any knowledge on other classes.

Furthermore, I wanted to thank SSG for listening to the banner appearance, I think they're better visible now with the right settings on.

I'll later fill in more information perhaps as I'm still thinking a lot about this. As I've still not gotten to blue line.