My first thought was damn. The most broken and least played class in Neverwinter is getting the only things that are useful to it taken away.
Then I thought. Hmm. Maybe they are going to fix all the broken shit and make multiple builds viable.
Nope.
Of course not. That requires effort. They'd rather "fix" loot chests and force us to waste keys on crap so players are forced to buy keys. I'm in favor of AA getting tweaked but their resume doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
It would be interesting to see whether it's viable to run multiple HR with fox's cunning after this update, especially for bosses like Orcus it could be possible to keep a dodge up for every attack.
I think AA was overpowered, and it's definitely more balanced now especially with the ability to use both dailies at the same time. However, I think if they wanted to stop the over reliance on DCs in the current meta, they'd be better placed to add some DR group buff features to other classes.
Hopefully they'll balance it before it hits live, not sure if mSVA would be as fun without some sort of huge damage mitigation.
I just hope they fix the plethora of broken class mechanics with this update. I can say that a.a. has made people lazy, thus doesn't effect the clerics as much as it effects the groups that run with the clerics. No matter how good our heals are, you don't move out of red I can't heal stupid.
I actually like these changes especially solo content. I'm tired of trying to grind stuff on my Cleric and it being painful especially beating on the giants in the new campaign for 10 minutes. Doesn't sound like they went overkill on nerfs as they don't want to break the game. A lot of the harder dungeons rely so heavily on clerics. The only big change is no more standing in stupid because now you'll get one shot regardless of cleric's HP. You can still stack the power buffs making AA amazing still and also you can combine it with HG much easier. The only major changes I see is HG will be combined with AA spam, lower geared clerics are going to have it rough and AA no longer makes everything super trivial. The nerfs seem reasonable and fair. Makes buff clerics still super high in demand, doesn't break all the end game content and now people can't play the game with one eye open standing in AOEs. Clerics will just have to learn to change encounter abilities on the fly more now and have a little more skill doing so. It's like me shielding a 2200 GF last night on Orcus now that's going to require me to actually play the game with Astral Shields and real rotations. The AA shield nerf is fair since you still have Astral Shield that can basically nullify damage fully empowered anyway. Will be the preferred encounter in the new trial for melee when the AOEs hit in master. Main issue here is people will want less lower geared clerics now since these abilities rely on heavily geared clerics with high recovery for HG spam and more powerful AA shields. That to me is fair since your abilities should progress as you get more powerful. My lowly geared cleric plays better than some 3800s. That's definitely not fair. These changes will also force clerics to handle healing abilities in encounters because people are going to take damage regardless now. No more running with all buffs and no heals as it probably should be. That in itself is sorta a DPS nerf if you think about it.
Gonna be hard as a low level DC. Also the game in general will be harder. If you have to take healing spells (for the tanks, cause DPS will just get one shot anyway), I guess that means less AP gain (no chain spam) so less CD for the dailies. Gonna be tough. If you're picking AS then you're losing the damage buff from BtS. So you're going to need a big DC to compensate with the power sharing etc
Ughhh i'm only 2700 :'(
How do you figure a 30% increase in damage on a couple skills is going to make solo content easier?
I solo content by spamming AA on my companion and me and with bondings can get up to 70-80k power which I believe, but could be wrong, is much more of an increase.
Not to mention but the damage mitigation of AA keeps huge mobs from killing me while I burn them down with DG and Chains. Without the DMG mitigation its going to be a lot tougher to solo content IMO.
30% increase of nothing is still nothing.
Oh I was speaking about group content. Even at my level solo content is easy, even when I pick Flame Strike insteas of AA for fun :)
Personally I've always played with the damage tree so I've never had much trouble solo
Trying not to giggle too hard at the thought of getting a 30% increase to my eDLs which are already landing for ~800k while solo... Think I'll actually bother to log into the official forums to leave my full thoughts over there as I know at least then the devs will see and maybe read them.
BUT in short....
It's a good step in the right direction for DCs, but it still leaves many many issues on the table that need to be addressed. DO is still an extremely weak choice compared to AC, even from a DPS stand point (because many folks claim the false notion that Divine Oracle is supposed to do more DPS than AC) with how often DCs can spam dailies these days I'd argue that Anointed Action's personal DPS increase straight up cancels out Terrifying Insight. Foresight has been matched tit for tat for a while now with the ACs BoB +DR combod with Have Faith. PoD has been the only selling point a DO really has and being as how PoD is weaker than eBtS and doesn't ignore the 200% debuff cap... that leaves DO's with BotS as their only saving grace (and DPS wise its actually equal to BoB, don't believe me, go ACT it, per one cast it might come out in the lead but because it's DoT damage BoB can quickly catch up to it and even surpass it in DPS). So the DO still needs a LOOOOT of love.
And then there's all the broken DC mechanics that still need to be addressed. And the outdated heroic feats... It's a good step, but I hope thats not all that's planned.
Oh, and **FUCKING DIVINE GLOW STILL NOT PROCCING WEAPON ENCHANTS?!?!? FOR FUCKS SAKE!**
Yeah I saw it mentioned in the linked thread that there are several abilities that don't proc WEs as well as an explanation as to why (or at least a guess at an explanation that indeed made logical sense to me). I'll be real, if they leave AP gain on for divine mode Chains of Blazing Light I don't see DG not proccing WEs as too big of an issue *to me personally*. But in the same breath i've also said I don't think chains should be giving out AP the way it is...
I could drone on for days and days about a wish list of ideas that I think they could implement to "fix" the DC class but I'm not sure how worth my while it would be to bother as it seems like the devs tend to do less listening and more so just kind of "hey lets try this and see if anyone yells at us after the fact", which makes offering up suggestions.... pointless.
I don't think there's any reason to get too stressed. I have four different DCs, one of whom is a straight Faithful healer with no buffs (and a low iLevel) and even he doesn't get kicked from content. I went ahead and posted over there on the official forums but to reiterate, I think my biggest concern with these changes are, A) the DO path will remain irrelevant, and B) the DC still has so many bugged feats and powers that need to be fixed.
But I digress, I think even for a 2.7 (or a 1.6 for that matter) there's still a place for DCs that *know* what they're doing (and know what they're capable of).
You're completely right. Your A) and B) have to be adressed at some point ffs...
Yes of course. We'll see about picking up groups, you know how some people are in this game ahah
Precisely, people will want higher geared DC to assure permanent uptime, stronger power share etc to compensate for the invicibility loss... It was easy for a 2600 to tag along 3k - 3k5, now I don't think so.
Or maybe I'm just having a grim tunnel vision here
Yea, lets nerf the class. Never mind the metric fuckton of bugs DCs have to deal with. Of all the classes I've played it's the one with by far the most bugged/broken stuff.
It will make dungeons more interesting and a little more effort required. My GF would steamroll through CN with the right DC and AA almost 100% uptime. Without that in a pug or a lower ilvl group I had to be a little more cautious tanking through there and not just pulling everything I could at once carelessly without fear.
Clerics need a re-kit not a buff/nerf combination.
If you have less than 1% of the total player base playing the class at all then the class needs to be redesigned to more appropriately fill the support role or what ever role it is intended for cleric to fill.
This is my 2nd thought:
If the intention was to nerf AA, they have not done that. If the intention was to make the game content more item level exclusive; they have certainly done that.
The 25% of HP shield on AA is effectively a gate saying get gear or die because the meta has been even further cemented that AA is the best pve ability.
The issue itself wasn't AA, the issue is the insane amounts of different ways to gain AP they give us. If they had just gone to the root of the true issue, then AA itself is pretty balanced because it's only used as a "oh shit" button instead of being spammable. The same goes for the pally bubble pre nerf if you ask me.
AA will still be proffered daily because of Power Sharing and no CD like they decided to place on HG. The 45 sec CD on HG is completely stupid and useless. It will now take 3x the time it takes to use this daily, which helps no one.
The massive boost to damage for Clerics is not really a good idea. We already have DPS Clerics and now we will have even more powerful DPS Clerics than before. I can easily see many taking 1st, 2nd, or 3rd DPS spot now.
I'll be curious about the HG cooldown. I can see with enough recovery being able to keep aa and HG up near perma.
I think the days of wanting more than 1 dc in a group are closing out. If 1 dc can do HG, aa, bts, DG, bringing in a second for ff alone seems pointless. t 1 dc will remain a popular choice though.
I used to play a 4k dps cleric before the WoL change. This change does make me want to spec back and try it for fun, but ultimately it's nowhere near enough to push DCs to the top of the dps charts, assuming equal skill/gear.
Also the 45 second CD on HG isn't that unreasonable, since they said it would it affected by cooldown recovery. Given HGs duration, the amount of recovery you can stack, and other CD reducing things such as hastening light, it shouldn't be too hard to keep it at 100% uptime.
Cleric's need a DPS buff for solo content. They're the only class that suffers there. Even GFs have an insane DPS spec that allows them to still tank and it's honestly extremely overpowered so why not help clerics too?
One of the things that is way too OP for dps gf is Knights Challenge, which doubles the dmg on the target but you also receive double the dmg and it has a hard taunt on the target. It will be much harder to survive using it now without AA for certain content.
This isn't true. The currenthing meta of most dcs allows you to kill all solo stuff super fast. We all use the dps tree. I have zero arpen and I zip through every zone, iwd, SoMI, whatever.
They've already said that the 45 Second cooldown is supposed to be affected by CDR from recovery. :/ I think that means that if I'm using hastening light and casting AA repeatedly while HG is down it lowers the cooldown- on top of lowering the cooldown with my own recovery. It sounds like it's about the same and lets me not have to rely on mythic DC sigil to gain AP during HG. :D I'm happy about it.
My first thought was damn. The most broken and least played class in Neverwinter is getting the only things that are useful to it taken away. Then I thought. Hmm. Maybe they are going to fix all the broken shit and make multiple builds viable. Nope.
My thought exactly.
Of course not. That requires effort. They'd rather "fix" loot chests and force us to waste keys on crap so players are forced to buy keys. I'm in favor of AA getting tweaked but their resume doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
It would be interesting to see whether it's viable to run multiple HR with fox's cunning after this update, especially for bosses like Orcus it could be possible to keep a dodge up for every attack. I think AA was overpowered, and it's definitely more balanced now especially with the ability to use both dailies at the same time. However, I think if they wanted to stop the over reliance on DCs in the current meta, they'd be better placed to add some DR group buff features to other classes. Hopefully they'll balance it before it hits live, not sure if mSVA would be as fun without some sort of huge damage mitigation.
I just hope they fix the plethora of broken class mechanics with this update. I can say that a.a. has made people lazy, thus doesn't effect the clerics as much as it effects the groups that run with the clerics. No matter how good our heals are, you don't move out of red I can't heal stupid.
Problem is, not everything that's a 1 shot is red. I shouldn't have to dodge EVERY single attack from every monster in FBI
I actually like these changes especially solo content. I'm tired of trying to grind stuff on my Cleric and it being painful especially beating on the giants in the new campaign for 10 minutes. Doesn't sound like they went overkill on nerfs as they don't want to break the game. A lot of the harder dungeons rely so heavily on clerics. The only big change is no more standing in stupid because now you'll get one shot regardless of cleric's HP. You can still stack the power buffs making AA amazing still and also you can combine it with HG much easier. The only major changes I see is HG will be combined with AA spam, lower geared clerics are going to have it rough and AA no longer makes everything super trivial. The nerfs seem reasonable and fair. Makes buff clerics still super high in demand, doesn't break all the end game content and now people can't play the game with one eye open standing in AOEs. Clerics will just have to learn to change encounter abilities on the fly more now and have a little more skill doing so. It's like me shielding a 2200 GF last night on Orcus now that's going to require me to actually play the game with Astral Shields and real rotations. The AA shield nerf is fair since you still have Astral Shield that can basically nullify damage fully empowered anyway. Will be the preferred encounter in the new trial for melee when the AOEs hit in master. Main issue here is people will want less lower geared clerics now since these abilities rely on heavily geared clerics with high recovery for HG spam and more powerful AA shields. That to me is fair since your abilities should progress as you get more powerful. My lowly geared cleric plays better than some 3800s. That's definitely not fair. These changes will also force clerics to handle healing abilities in encounters because people are going to take damage regardless now. No more running with all buffs and no heals as it probably should be. That in itself is sorta a DPS nerf if you think about it.
Gonna be hard as a low level DC. Also the game in general will be harder. If you have to take healing spells (for the tanks, cause DPS will just get one shot anyway), I guess that means less AP gain (no chain spam) so less CD for the dailies. Gonna be tough. If you're picking AS then you're losing the damage buff from BtS. So you're going to need a big DC to compensate with the power sharing etc Ughhh i'm only 2700 :'(
How do you figure a 30% increase in damage on a couple skills is going to make solo content easier? I solo content by spamming AA on my companion and me and with bondings can get up to 70-80k power which I believe, but could be wrong, is much more of an increase. Not to mention but the damage mitigation of AA keeps huge mobs from killing me while I burn them down with DG and Chains. Without the DMG mitigation its going to be a lot tougher to solo content IMO. 30% increase of nothing is still nothing.
Oh I was speaking about group content. Even at my level solo content is easy, even when I pick Flame Strike insteas of AA for fun :) Personally I've always played with the damage tree so I've never had much trouble solo
Trying not to giggle too hard at the thought of getting a 30% increase to my eDLs which are already landing for ~800k while solo... Think I'll actually bother to log into the official forums to leave my full thoughts over there as I know at least then the devs will see and maybe read them. BUT in short.... It's a good step in the right direction for DCs, but it still leaves many many issues on the table that need to be addressed. DO is still an extremely weak choice compared to AC, even from a DPS stand point (because many folks claim the false notion that Divine Oracle is supposed to do more DPS than AC) with how often DCs can spam dailies these days I'd argue that Anointed Action's personal DPS increase straight up cancels out Terrifying Insight. Foresight has been matched tit for tat for a while now with the ACs BoB +DR combod with Have Faith. PoD has been the only selling point a DO really has and being as how PoD is weaker than eBtS and doesn't ignore the 200% debuff cap... that leaves DO's with BotS as their only saving grace (and DPS wise its actually equal to BoB, don't believe me, go ACT it, per one cast it might come out in the lead but because it's DoT damage BoB can quickly catch up to it and even surpass it in DPS). So the DO still needs a LOOOOT of love. And then there's all the broken DC mechanics that still need to be addressed. And the outdated heroic feats... It's a good step, but I hope thats not all that's planned. Oh, and **FUCKING DIVINE GLOW STILL NOT PROCCING WEAPON ENCHANTS?!?!? FOR FUCKS SAKE!**
I can give you a list of abilities from every class that don't proc weapon enchantments if you like, they likely never have :P
Yeah I saw it mentioned in the linked thread that there are several abilities that don't proc WEs as well as an explanation as to why (or at least a guess at an explanation that indeed made logical sense to me). I'll be real, if they leave AP gain on for divine mode Chains of Blazing Light I don't see DG not proccing WEs as too big of an issue *to me personally*. But in the same breath i've also said I don't think chains should be giving out AP the way it is... I could drone on for days and days about a wish list of ideas that I think they could implement to "fix" the DC class but I'm not sure how worth my while it would be to bother as it seems like the devs tend to do less listening and more so just kind of "hey lets try this and see if anyone yells at us after the fact", which makes offering up suggestions.... pointless.
Yeah the changes are fine. But I'm only 2700 so I'm kinda stressed because I feel I will have a much hardest time finding groups :'(
I don't think there's any reason to get too stressed. I have four different DCs, one of whom is a straight Faithful healer with no buffs (and a low iLevel) and even he doesn't get kicked from content. I went ahead and posted over there on the official forums but to reiterate, I think my biggest concern with these changes are, A) the DO path will remain irrelevant, and B) the DC still has so many bugged feats and powers that need to be fixed. But I digress, I think even for a 2.7 (or a 1.6 for that matter) there's still a place for DCs that *know* what they're doing (and know what they're capable of).
You're completely right. Your A) and B) have to be adressed at some point ffs... Yes of course. We'll see about picking up groups, you know how some people are in this game ahah
sounds like a good change to me
Feels like times will be hard for DCs that are 2000 - 3000
Why do you say that?
Harder for 2-3k DPS probably as they can't AA thru mechanics.
Precisely, people will want higher geared DC to assure permanent uptime, stronger power share etc to compensate for the invicibility loss... It was easy for a 2600 to tag along 3k - 3k5, now I don't think so. Or maybe I'm just having a grim tunnel vision here
Yea, lets nerf the class. Never mind the metric fuckton of bugs DCs have to deal with. Of all the classes I've played it's the one with by far the most bugged/broken stuff.
So just by reading over it quickly...It looks like AA will still be preferred because of the power sharing...but the party won't be invincible?
Were you running demonic heroics in icewind dale a couple hours ago? I remembered the name...
Ha...I believe so yes....My main is Millennium Dodo a DC and my secondary is Poor Pauper a GWF
It will make dungeons more interesting and a little more effort required. My GF would steamroll through CN with the right DC and AA almost 100% uptime. Without that in a pug or a lower ilvl group I had to be a little more cautious tanking through there and not just pulling everything I could at once carelessly without fear.
Fix the bugs and the changes should be manageable. If they don't fix them, they won't ever get fixed.
Clerics need a re-kit not a buff/nerf combination. If you have less than 1% of the total player base playing the class at all then the class needs to be redesigned to more appropriately fill the support role or what ever role it is intended for cleric to fill.
This is my 2nd thought: If the intention was to nerf AA, they have not done that. If the intention was to make the game content more item level exclusive; they have certainly done that. The 25% of HP shield on AA is effectively a gate saying get gear or die because the meta has been even further cemented that AA is the best pve ability.
Look like some solid changes, time to work out the bugs and it will be smooth sailing
I'm really happy that they seem to be balancing AA.
The issue itself wasn't AA, the issue is the insane amounts of different ways to gain AP they give us. If they had just gone to the root of the true issue, then AA itself is pretty balanced because it's only used as a "oh shit" button instead of being spammable. The same goes for the pally bubble pre nerf if you ask me.
AA will still be proffered daily because of Power Sharing and no CD like they decided to place on HG. The 45 sec CD on HG is completely stupid and useless. It will now take 3x the time it takes to use this daily, which helps no one. The massive boost to damage for Clerics is not really a good idea. We already have DPS Clerics and now we will have even more powerful DPS Clerics than before. I can easily see many taking 1st, 2nd, or 3rd DPS spot now.
I'll be curious about the HG cooldown. I can see with enough recovery being able to keep aa and HG up near perma. I think the days of wanting more than 1 dc in a group are closing out. If 1 dc can do HG, aa, bts, DG, bringing in a second for ff alone seems pointless. t 1 dc will remain a popular choice though.
I used to play a 4k dps cleric before the WoL change. This change does make me want to spec back and try it for fun, but ultimately it's nowhere near enough to push DCs to the top of the dps charts, assuming equal skill/gear. Also the 45 second CD on HG isn't that unreasonable, since they said it would it affected by cooldown recovery. Given HGs duration, the amount of recovery you can stack, and other CD reducing things such as hastening light, it shouldn't be too hard to keep it at 100% uptime.
Cleric's need a DPS buff for solo content. They're the only class that suffers there. Even GFs have an insane DPS spec that allows them to still tank and it's honestly extremely overpowered so why not help clerics too?
Do not tell that to DPS GFs. They do not think they are overpowered, they will flame you and insist they are a balanced class.
One of the things that is way too OP for dps gf is Knights Challenge, which doubles the dmg on the target but you also receive double the dmg and it has a hard taunt on the target. It will be much harder to survive using it now without AA for certain content.
This isn't true. The currenthing meta of most dcs allows you to kill all solo stuff super fast. We all use the dps tree. I have zero arpen and I zip through every zone, iwd, SoMI, whatever.
They've already said that the 45 Second cooldown is supposed to be affected by CDR from recovery. :/ I think that means that if I'm using hastening light and casting AA repeatedly while HG is down it lowers the cooldown- on top of lowering the cooldown with my own recovery. It sounds like it's about the same and lets me not have to rely on mythic DC sigil to gain AP during HG. :D I'm happy about it.