"Changes coming to the Champion in 13.1 which we can talk about after update 13 is out the door."

[Giliodor]

What's with the sudden need of a low CD removal skill? How much did you need it the past 7 years? I'd rather have a solid red line with DPS equal to Wardens/ Hunters/Burgs.

[ararax2]

What's with the sudden need of a low CD removal skill? How much did you need it the past 7 years? I'd rather have a solid red line with DPS equal to Wardens/ Hunters/Burgs.

I don't think we are going to be near warden hunter burg dps, but red should beat yellow ST....

I'm hoping 14 will continue the upgrade.

[Aarodir]

While I like most of these changes there isn't much to address the main issues of berserker champion, attack duration and skill damage. I feel that even after these changes champions are still going to be far behind from most other classes single target DPS.

[Giliodor]

I don't think we are going to be near warden hunter burg dps, but red should beat yellow ST....

I'm hoping 14 will continue the upgrade.

Likely not, but that doesn't take away the fact we should be.

While I like most of these changes there isn't much to address the main issues of berserker champion, attack duration and skill damage. I feel that even after these changes champions are still going to be far behind from most other classes single target DPS.

These are my concerns as well. Emboldened Blades change might be a good damage boost now, though.

[Malganis_Lefay]

overall the red skilltree seem with these changes now worth to trait
the change to Harmstring is absolute meh,
the rest seems ok but i need to test this for a better opinion.

i would wish that some of the traits would change there position in the trees like ebbing ire gets moved into yellow, exchange of blows to blue
sudden defence available for people who dont specialized on blue, battle frenzy and second wind as general skills and things like this,
but if the planed changes will all implemented in 13.1, i will be pleased for now

i have one, two questions
will fear nothing still contribute fervour?
do you plan any changes to unbreakable and born for combat? these skills are not really ... good for capstone skills
(maybe in update 14)

[mrfigglesworth]

considering that damage primarily comes from primary strikes, that you will guaranteed have 5% more crit at all times from wild attack and that wild attack will now be beefed up, and that you can now reliably crit on a remorseless strike every 10 seconds or so, I can see red line champs dps going up substantially.

[mrfigglesworth]

What's with the sudden need of a low CD removal skill? How much did you need it the past 7 years? I'd rather have a solid red line with DPS equal to Wardens/ Hunters/Burgs.

with a trend you see across all other classes and champions being the only one without, i see that as a problem. I do think the solution is to nerf other freeps' dot removal because right now, it seems like no one is going to fear being PFWD'd since many classes can remove one or multiple ones on themselves or others.

[Jinjaah]

overall the red skilltree seem with these changes now worth to trait
the change to Harmstring is absolute meh,
the rest seems ok but i need to test this for a better opinion.

i would wish that some of the traits would change there position in the trees like ebbing ire gets moved into yellow, exchange of blows to blue
sudden defence available for people who dont specialized on blue, battle frenzy and second wind as general skills and things like this,
but if the planed changes will all implemented in 13.1, i will be pleased for now

i have one, two questions
will fear nothing still contribute fervour?
do you plan any changes to unbreakable and born for combat? these skills are not really ... good for capstone skills
(maybe in update 14)

- Fear nothing will still function as it had, just with a pdfw and the cooldown adjustment.
- Unbreakable and Born for Combat are something I am looking into for update 14. I think born for combat especially is a little backwards (which I think we talked about once upon a time in the champion forum) that it should be based on what you do and not necessarily based on what people do to you.

-Jinjaah

[Jinjaah]

While I like most of these changes there isn't much to address the main issues of berserker champion, attack duration and skill damage. I feel that even after these changes champions are still going to be far behind from most other classes single target DPS.

As others have mentioned I think you will find a dps boost in the changes to crit chance but especially from emboldened blades being at max stacks more often. Add on top of that the the red line bleed being implement based provides a significant damage over time boost between strikes. I do think however that a base damage pass is not out of the cards for update 14. At that time, I would also look into the attack duration issues we talked about earlier with the strike skills.

-Jinjaah

[GilendirD]

If this is all we get, there won't be any PvMP-champs left. As a player who highly enjoyed solo play, I was disappointed that Helms Deep had such a wide distribution in solo capability for different classes and the Champ at the very bottom end but at least in yellow you had good fun in groupfights. But since U13 no mentaly sane raidleader wants to take champion in the Moors. Thanks to the Yellow nerf our AOE is easily outheald by a wl and increased defiler heals. Right now we really can do nothing in Groups. So please Jinjaah can we get a reliable Heal-Debuff skill and higher burst-damage in redline and please decrease the cooldown of true heroics, it can be a good boost in damage but the 5 min cooldown makes it kind of worthless and please make all buffskills instant or at least fast.

edit: Jinjaah could please point out, why tactical damage is superior to physical?

[ararax2]

As others have mentioned I think you will find a dps boost in the changes to crit chance but especially from emboldened blades being at max stacks more often. Add on top of that the the red line bleed being implement based provides a significant damage over time boost between strikes. I do think however that a base damage pass is not out of the cards for update 14. At that time, I would also look into the attack duration issues we talked about earlier with the strike skills.

-Jinjaah

Is Emboldened intended to tier down or remove on crit?

[Thorcar]

The KD for hamstring has some potential at least as another interrupt skill for the Moors. After rank and audacity, it will probably only KD a higher creep for a second.

[Giliodor]

The real question is, why Reavers are doing equal DPS, with 3-4x larger morale pools. But hey...

[GilendirD]

The KD for hamstring has some potential at least as another interrupt skill for the Moors. After rank and audacity, it will probably only KD a higher creep for a second.

I'm not sure but as far as I remeber KD isn't reduced by audacity. But actually I think right now audacity has no effect on cc-effects. Blade toss slows me down for 10 seconds. (one of the reasons why every mediocre creep can avoid the champion kiting that was possible during RoR.)

[Anreon]

Very much underwhelming.



We still won`t be able to compete with like all the other classes out there in terms of dmg.
Is it so hard to just increase the base numbers and like fix the extreeeeeme delays between our skills?

Most of the Berserker traits were just plain out stupid, ... , so thanks for fixing them at least ... , I guess.


Very dissapointing for half a years work though.

[GilendirD]

The real question is, why Reavers are doing equal DPS, with 3-4x larger morale pools. But hey...

As well as better selfheals. A very strong slow (blade toss).
An even better question is why I can put out 2k dps with my r5 Warg killing scaled freeps before they can get out of the stun. Maybe RvR is nearly balanced right now, but i'd like to know how the devs imagine a new Champ getting used to the moors, no one will take them in raids and questing won't get them their audacity gear. But hey not a problem in a few month we can toss our champs into the abyss of unplayed toons and start over with a beorning.

[GilendirD]

This may come across a bit harsh, but everything you mention in your post is wrong...

In reality:
-Knockdown is reduced by audacity.
-Audacity does have an effect on CC.
-Blade toss is not affected by audacity because it is a slow, not a daze/root/fear/stun/knockdown.

Are you sure it's a few month since I played my reaver more frequently but the burg dazes were 8 secs back then.

Full audacity of course.

[Thorandril]

While I like most of these changes there isn't much to address the main issues of berserker champion, attack duration and skill damage. I feel that even after these changes champions are still going to be far behind from most other classes single target DPS.

Nothing I can really say at this point that hasn't been said, but the removal of flurry has hurt the champion class far more than any other change, and the persistently clunky animations... post-animation delays and what have you. They make this class un-fun and not worth playing, DPS obviously needs to be increased dramatically but even if it were boosted somewhere in the region of 2-300% (which is probably the actual figure for competing with hunters/burglars, I'm not even going to mention fire RK's as a feasible thing that I think should happen since they're just unreal) we would still be dealing with playing a slow, boring class.

And none of these changes address that.

[Andang]

Hey All,

So here is a list of the following changes coming to the champion for 13.1. There may be a few more on the way but we are weighing the possibility of moving them to update 14 for a few reasons that we don't need to get into at this moment. These changes are not a means to be the fix all problems with the berserker (as you can see the pip consumption changes are not included for now) but are meant to address some concerns with damage and other issues brought up in this thread:

Champion:

General
- Fear Nothing Now removes PDFW not just fear. Cooldown has been reduced to 45 seconds, down from 3 minutes.
- Blood Rage and its improved version are now immediate skills.
- Wild Attack is now considered a Strike skill. All bonuses and procs affecting strike skills work with this skill.
- Hamstring’s cooldown has been increased to 20s. Its slow duration has been lowered to 8s, down from 20s.
- Blood Rage is now an immediate skill.

Berserker
Specialization changes:
- Emboldened Blades has a 100% chance to apply its buff, up from 20%
- Devastating Strike now increases enemy incoming melee damage by +10% instead of debuffing miss chance.
Trait Changes:
- Wild Swings:
- Critical Chance buff from the final rank now lasts for 10s, up from 6s.
- Vicious Strikes:
- Now increases the Critical Chance of all strikes, not just additional strikes.
- Strong Armed Swings:
- Now affects the damage of all strikes, not just additional strikes.
- Deep Strikes:
- Deep Strikes bleed is now based off your implements dps and has been greatly increased in potency.
- Controlled Burn:
- Increased duration of effect to 30s, up from 20s.
- Decreased cooldown to 90s, down from 120s.
- Athletic:
- Each rank reduces the cooldown of Sprint by 40s, up from 10s.
- Hamstrung:
- Ranks 1 through 4 increases the duration of the slow by 1s. Max rank enables hamstring to knock down its target for 3s.
- Renewing Strikes:
- Increased proc chance to 20%, up from 10%.
Specialization Trait Changes:
- Continuous Blood Rage
- Continuous Blood Rage is now an immediate skill.
- CBR now lasts for 20s, up from 15s.

Apologies for the formatting, it looked really nice in my document but as you all know, forums don't like formatting sometimes.

-Jinjaah

That is nice and all but the real problem for me with champions was the decrease in diversity of animations. While blue line does have a good diverse mix, red and yellow both seem to have several skills that have very very very similar animations. What happened to our fire swords? What happened to swinging swords over our head and all around like awesome um... champions. Champions need better animations in yellow and red. I am not asking for a huge diversity but give each line more special looking skills. While balance and power are nice, animations are that final layer that turn combat from boring to amazing.

Please take a serious look at changing this as it is my only real issue with the current champion. I actually like the difficulty of red line but I have a hard time not being bored with the class. I have seriously thought about abandoning my champ because of how simple the animations are now so please help me enjoy a return to the class by adding greater diversity to the animations.

Thanks for reading this and doing a better job interacting with the community as a whole.

[Shumzuda]

- Fear Nothing Now removes PDFW not just fear. Cooldown has been reduced to 45 seconds, down from 3 minutes.

This is a great change, and also brings the legacy in the same ballpark as the CD.

- Blood Rage and its improved version are now immediate skills.

Good.

- Wild Attack is now considered a Strike skill. All bonuses and procs affecting strike skills work with this skill.

Good, this will be a nice buff.

- Hamstring’s cooldown has been increased to 20s. Its slow duration has been lowered to 8s, down from 20s.

With legacies and skill trees this should not be a problem. With the knockdown at the final tier of the trait this will make investement there a must.

- Blood Rage is now an immediate skill.

Ditto with BR.

- Devastating Strike now increases enemy incoming melee damage by +10% instead of debuffing miss chance.

Much more useful, and more appealing for boss fights in champ.

- Wild Swings:
- Critical Chance buff from the final rank now lasts for 10s, up from 6s.

Good.

- Vicious Strikes:
- Now increases the Critical Chance of all strikes, not just additional strikes.

Great, more incentive to go into red.

- Strong Armed Swings:
- Now affects the damage of all strikes, not just additional strikes.

Again, boosting dps.

- Deep Strikes:
- Deep Strikes bleed is now based off your implements dps and has been greatly increased in potency.

Great! This skill was really useless before.

- Controlled Burn:
- Increased duration of effect to 30s, up from 20s.
- Decreased cooldown to 90s, down from 120s.

Great, a nice idea could be a rune legacy to bring this CD down further? But 1/3 up time is probably good enough. Can we make this immediate cast too?

- Athletic:
- Each rank reduces the cooldown of Sprint by 40s, up from 10s.

This would leave the skill with a 1 minute 40 second CD and 15 second duration. With a legacy this would mean a roughly 40% up-time for a skill that ignores all slows and gives the speed buff. This seems to have gone slightly too far the other way to me - especially by locking this behind a trait line. I suppose it will encourage people to use red for moors?

- Hamstrung:
- Ranks 1 through 4 increases the duration of the slow by 1s. Max rank enables hamstring to knock down its target for 3s.

The 5th rank perk is VERY nice, again making this attrative for moors. I worry though about survivability - the renewing blades buff is all we have seen. Could you think about putting the bubble back on heroics for red line?

- Renewing Strikes:
- Increased proc chance to 20%, up from 10%.

Survivability goes up in the moors - good.

Specialization Trait Changes:
- Continuous Blood Rage
- Continuous Blood Rage is now an immediate skill.
- CBR now lasts for 20s, up from 15s.

Big thumbs up - this skill will be very useful now that the speed has been fixed.

Overall I can see this giving a good boost to Berserker dps and also big buffs for utility skills like Sprint and CBR.

I think a few of us have mentioned that attacks seems clunky and the animations are long for fero strikes, brutal strikes, devestating strike - something odd is going on with the skill queue aswell. Are these problems too big/annoying to solve in a patch or will we have to wait?

ty Jinjaah!

[mrfigglesworth]

This would leave the skill with a 1 minute 40 second CD and 15 second duration. With a legacy this would mean a roughly 40% up-time for a skill that ignores all slows and gives the speed buff. This seems to have gone slightly too far the other way to me - especially by locking this behind a trait line. I suppose it will encourage people to use red for moors?

sprint only has 3 tiers so it only reduces it to 3 min cd. that's a 25% uptime, which is quite nice for red champs, but sucks for everyone else.

[mrfigglesworth]

lets look at the bonii to single target dps as a whole. Not overall mind you, just things increasing from these listed changes.

controlled burn -> 10 more seconds with -5% ad and +5% dmg = at least 1 more rotation of increased damage and decreased attack duration.

wild attack -> +10% damage, +10% crit chance +25% crit magnitude, much longer 5% crit chance tail (will be able to keep this up permanently).

devastating strike -> 10% crit chance and 25% crit magnitude for first strike. +10% damage for 8 seconds which is a +10% damage for any of the big hitters.

brutal strike -> 10% crit chance and 25% crit magnitude for first strike

ferocious strike -> 10% crit chance and 25% crit magnitude for first strike.

remorseless strike -> 10% crit chance and 25% crit magnitude for first strike, much higher crit chance and crit magnitude for nearly all remorseless strikes if you use 5 strikes in between (resulting in remorseless strike having over 80% crit/dev chance fully tiered which will happen every 10-15 seconds and if it crits you're looking at a 250-300% mag buff for PRIMARY AND SECONDARY STRIKE...every 10-15 seconds, nearly guaranteed).



The name of the game is going to be using remorseless fully tiered with the 5% crit chance from WA and the +10% damage from dev strike.

[Stephen1981]

why do i feel like we are talking to a brick wall when we suggestion something

[Jinjaah]

This is a great change, and also brings the legacy in the same ballpark as the CD.


I think a few of us have mentioned that attacks seems clunky and the animations are long for fero strikes, brutal strikes, devestating strike - something odd is going on with the skill queue aswell. Are these problems too big/annoying to solve in a patch or will we have to wait?

ty Jinjaah!

You are welcome!

The clunky feel and animations is something that will have to be part of a larger patch as it may involve roping in other departments to shore up. That why it was not really on the table for 13.1. However, I do agree it is an issue and we will look to remedy it or at least mitigate it as best we can.

-Jinjaah

[Jinjaah]

Thank you. I really hope this gets done.

EDIT: Would you be able to answer my question of where you ideally see the Champion relative to other classes in terms of dps? It would give closure to know whether or not we are intended to be bottom-tier single target dpsers, as we still will be if the 13.1 changes are all we get.

Top tier single target dpsers being Wardens, Burglars, RKs (fire), and Hunters, just for clarification. And Beornings, I'm sure.

I feel like this will be abused at some point in the future but I think that the berserker champion should rank up among the top single target dps classes. Its focus is sacrificing defense for offense and as such, should be one of the more dangerous classes of the free peoples. Now that being said, I don't think we are there yet and I think there are other issues that we need to resolve to get there, but that is the end goal for where they should rank.

-Jinjaah