Vaqual wrote: »

Some masteries are indeed extremely strong and not much different from what we saw in the stream preview. In that sense the goal to bring power of pure class setups closer to meta subclass builds was achieved. The big losers here are the subclass builds that incorporate non-meta lines for flavor.
I can't honestly say that I think the solution is good. But at this point I'll refrain from detailed criticism until the class reworks are done, I don't think people are receptive for it anyway.

I'll just say that I find many of them way too strong. People often act as if some skill lines had 0 value to begin with, but that is obviously an exaggeration. For example, Conservation of Energy (+ you can bring Surge) just leaves any other form of fully passive heals completely in the dust, while providing resource sustain that can easily eclipse scribed resource restores or dedicated sustain abilities. And the thematic fit? Seems arbitrary. Doesn't blood magic mean anyway that you'd sacrifice blood for spells? One passive from Dark Magic should be better at siphoning than the entire skill line of Siphoning? Besides the point. I have to say I dislike this extreme power creep. Can someone explain to me how this isn't just a reversion of the back-and-forth hardened ward changes from the last two years, except that this is way stronger? Wasn't there a unanimous conclusion that this was bad?

Many such cases with those masteries...

These were either designed without the intent of providing a balanced experience or with a very poor understanding of the game.

You are aware that Heart of Flame provides even more on live already and will nie heal for even more since the buff in the patch notes.

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

Vaqual wrote: »

Some masteries are indeed extremely strong and not much different from what we saw in the stream preview. In that sense the goal to bring power of pure class setups closer to meta subclass builds was achieved. The big losers here are the subclass builds that incorporate non-meta lines for flavor.
I can't honestly say that I think the solution is good. But at this point I'll refrain from detailed criticism until the class reworks are done, I don't think people are receptive for it anyway.

I'll just say that I find many of them way too strong. People often act as if some skill lines had 0 value to begin with, but that is obviously an exaggeration. For example, Conservation of Energy (+ you can bring Surge) just leaves any other form of fully passive heals completely in the dust, while providing resource sustain that can easily eclipse scribed resource restores or dedicated sustain abilities. And the thematic fit? Seems arbitrary. Doesn't blood magic mean anyway that you'd sacrifice blood for spells? One passive from Dark Magic should be better at siphoning than the entire skill line of Siphoning? Besides the point. I have to say I dislike this extreme power creep. Can someone explain to me how this isn't just a reversion of the back-and-forth hardened ward changes from the last two years, except that this is way stronger? Wasn't there a unanimous conclusion that this was bad?

Many such cases with those masteries...

These were either designed without the intent of providing a balanced experience or with a very poor understanding of the game.

You are aware that Heart of Flame provides even more on live already and will nie heal for even more since the buff in the patch notes.

Yes and I heavily critizied that ability before. Also, blood magic is entirely passive. Almost the entire skill line was balanced around the power of this proc. Unlocking it for any resource costing cast completely upends those calculations. It should rather be either a weaker version of it for using non-Dark Magic skills, or have an internal cooldown for proccing off non-Dark Magic skills. Underestimating this passive by comparing it to the strongest active sustain ability in the game is just so far from being genuine.
I'd like it if people would open their eyes to absurd power creep before we need to reach Update 60, where all healing, sustain and damage can be taken care off by passives and overloaded abilities.

Vaqual wrote: »

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

Vaqual wrote: »

Some masteries are indeed extremely strong and not much different from what we saw in the stream preview. In that sense the goal to bring power of pure class setups closer to meta subclass builds was achieved. The big losers here are the subclass builds that incorporate non-meta lines for flavor.
I can't honestly say that I think the solution is good. But at this point I'll refrain from detailed criticism until the class reworks are done, I don't think people are receptive for it anyway.

I'll just say that I find many of them way too strong. People often act as if some skill lines had 0 value to begin with, but that is obviously an exaggeration. For example, Conservation of Energy (+ you can bring Surge) just leaves any other form of fully passive heals completely in the dust, while providing resource sustain that can easily eclipse scribed resource restores or dedicated sustain abilities. And the thematic fit? Seems arbitrary. Doesn't blood magic mean anyway that you'd sacrifice blood for spells? One passive from Dark Magic should be better at siphoning than the entire skill line of Siphoning? Besides the point. I have to say I dislike this extreme power creep. Can someone explain to me how this isn't just a reversion of the back-and-forth hardened ward changes from the last two years, except that this is way stronger? Wasn't there a unanimous conclusion that this was bad?

Many such cases with those masteries...

These were either designed without the intent of providing a balanced experience or with a very poor understanding of the game.

You are aware that Heart of Flame provides even more on live already and will nie heal for even more since the buff in the patch notes.

Yes and I heavily critizied that ability before. Also, blood magic is entirely passive. Almost the entire skill line was balanced around the power of this proc. Unlocking it for any resource costing cast completely upends those calculations. It should rather be either a weaker version of it for using non-Dark Magic skills, or have an internal cooldown for proccing off non-Dark Magic skills. Underestimating this passive by comparing it to the strongest active sustain ability in the game is just so far from being genuine.
I'd like it if people would open their eyes to absurd power creep before we need to reach Update 60, where all healing, sustain and damage can be taken care off by passives and overloaded abilities.

I see what you say. It seems disingenuous comparing it to the strongest sustain ability in the game. From the perspective of a tank however, this is not so far-fetched, because Sorc has nothing in this way currently. Dark Deal is not viable, because you can't just drop all you are doing and channel something for 1+ second that will also drain another important ressource and opens you up to getting one shot by a boss.

This is why I stand by what I say. That passive must be strong, and this is not only true from a PvE tank perspective. But you are right that this power creep is crazy. Yet here we are, and now we have to power creep underperforming things so that they can also shine.

Just tested out pyrebrand DK, and it's absolutely terryfying.

Pyrebrand was nerfed 30%, but new passive increases its dmg by 300%, while also adding additional dot. From my calculations (confirmed by testing) 100% - 30% = 70%. 70% * 300% = 210%. So basically pyrebrand damage is DOUBLED and additional dot is ticking. ALSO new passive stacks are generated by PYREBRAND. So by just LA (not casting any skills!!!) you can get AMAZING dps.

Meanwhile reffering to my previous templar post, aetheric lancer got 4 second longer duration, for better uptime. Comparing to pyrebrand and new passive synergy, I cannot really find words how unfair it looks.

From my todays PVP testing - DK, serpent disdain warden and sorcerer are very strong, while arcanist, nb and templar are absolute garbage. I haven't tested PvE, but I'm quite sure situation is quite similar.

So the new stance is that unless you go pure class, or use a combo of the 3 most OP skill lines in the game, you can go fork yourself? These passives are INSANELY over powered beyond belief, so the only way you can possibly justify dropping them (which happens even if you only swap out one skill line) is by making sure that you're using three skill lines that synergize perfectly together from a power standpoint. What about the NB that wants to drop assassination for stomcalling? They end up massively underpowered despite keeping 2/3 of their oh so holy main class skill lines. And what happens after the class refresh? Despite all the assurances that the mastery system will be "iterated" on, the change to the Pyrebrand set shows that they have no intention to get rid of this after the skill lines are evened out.

So to answer your question "Do you feel this system helps in allowing for more player agency in a post subclassing play environment?"
NO. It completely destroys player agency. The whole point of subclassing was to let players play the way they want. The class refresh is necessary to balance out the skill lines and keep everyone on a level playing field. Class mastery makes that blatantly impossible. As long as class mastery exists, its going to keep pure classes at a higher power level by default, which means that subclassed builds using the ideal combinations of skills will continue to be tolerated as long as they don't exceed that power level, removing zos' incentive to properly balance the skill lines. If they did balance the skill lines evenly, then pure class builds become the only viable builds, since they erroneously have massive buffs from class mastery. How exactly did zos think that them shoehorning players into specific builds was "player agency"?

Did Class Mastery help in providing a meaningful boost to power for playing as a solo class?
Specifically testing out the Warden healer I came to find that while the passives sound good on paper they don't provide a meaningful increase in power for the reasons listed below

Do you feel this system helps in allowing for more player agency in a post subclassing play environment?
Depending on the class you look at it opens more highly specialized playstyles which can benefit a group in more than one way, specifically when looking at the boost for competitiveness of the Dragonknight healer

What are the things you like about Class Mastery?
That it has the potential to positively impact build crafting diversity and the potential of expandability without impacting other systems too invasively

What places do you think could use improvement with Class Mastery?
Specifically looking at the passives of the warden and my personal picks being: Tundra's Maw and Nature's Bounty both of which being potent on paper but fall flat in actual gameplay.

Tundra's Maw: First things first, on paper this is an amazing passive which gives a spotlight to an otherwise rare Buff only being found on Nunatak, this has the potential of completely opening up the world of Late Game PvE for more people by providing more Critical Damage to one Potential target constantly or a tightly stacked group via clever utilization and it almost works as intended. Though what I found is that even when applying Chilled status effect every 1-2s this passive would fail to proc until the next application, I don't know how much of it has to do with lag or how to fix this grave issue but it has to be said none the less. Maybe an increase in duration could fix it but I'm not so sure how this would affect certain scenarios in PvP, tough still long story short the buff sometimes doesn't apply even though the target is being hit with the status.

Nature's Bounty: While the Buffs in theory are great to provide to a group from a PvE Healers perspective it doesn't feel like it can proc often which makes it feel useless in most situations. A PvE Healers task is to not only heal and provide buffs but also prevent damage via the application of damage shields. Long story short. Overheal doesn't proc the original warden passive and thus by extension the Class Mastery. We don't know yet what changes will be made to the warden in the coming updates but it would be nice to see it being able to activate from Overhealing also to be able to actually provide buffs to the group. It would even be fine if the values were reduced by a bit to account for the uptime, but some benefit to the group would be better than no benefit

(Also WIld Adaptation is very PvP focused in the healing aspect, it would be nice to see that the healing would also increase on negative effects on a target to make it more usable in PvE since you cannot get status effects on you by regular enemies)

Any other general thoughts around Class Mastery?
It has the potential to even the playing field between pure and subclasses but you shouldn't be afraid to buff the effectiveness across the board especially if nerfing other parts of a class and by that also the pure class is part of it

Butterbauch wrote: »

Did Class Mastery help in providing a meaningful boost to power for playing as a solo class?
Specifically testing out the Warden healer I came to find that while the passives sound good on paper they don't provide a meaningful increase in power for the reasons listed below

Do you feel this system helps in allowing for more player agency in a post subclassing play environment?
Depending on the class you look at it opens more highly specialized playstyles which can benefit a group in more than one way, specifically when looking at the boost for competitiveness of the Dragonknight healer

What are the things you like about Class Mastery?
That it has the potential to positively impact build crafting diversity and the potential of expandability without impacting other systems too invasively

What places do you think could use improvement with Class Mastery?
Specifically looking at the passives of the warden and my personal picks being: Tundra's Maw and Nature's Bounty both of which being potent on paper but fall flat in actual gameplay.

Tundra's Maw: First things first, on paper this is an amazing passive which gives a spotlight to an otherwise rare Buff only being found on Nunatak, this has the potential of completely opening up the world of Late Game PvE for more people by providing more Critical Damage to one Potential target constantly or a tightly stacked group via clever utilization and it almost works as intended. Though what I found is that even when applying Chilled status effect every 1-2s this passive would fail to proc until the next application, I don't know how much of it has to do with lag or how to fix this grave issue but it has to be said none the less. Maybe an increase in duration could fix it but I'm not so sure how this would affect certain scenarios in PvP, tough still long story short the buff sometimes doesn't apply even though the target is being hit with the status.

Nature's Bounty: While the Buffs in theory are great to provide to a group from a PvE Healers perspective it doesn't feel like it can proc often which makes it feel useless in most situations. A PvE Healers task is to not only heal and provide buffs but also prevent damage via the application of damage shields. Long story short. Overheal doesn't proc the original warden passive and thus by extension the Class Mastery. We don't know yet what changes will be made to the warden in the coming updates but it would be nice to see it being able to activate from Overhealing also to be able to actually provide buffs to the group. It would even be fine if the values were reduced by a bit to account for the uptime, but some benefit to the group would be better than no benefit

(Also WIld Adaptation is very PvP focused in the healing aspect, it would be nice to see that the healing would also increase on negative effects on a target to make it more usable in PvE since you cannot get status effects on you by regular enemies)

Any other general thoughts around Class Mastery?
It has the potential to even the playing field between pure and subclasses but you shouldn't be afraid to buff the effectiveness across the board especially if nerfing other parts of a class and by that also the pure class is part of it

The Warden heal could be even worse than that.

The original Nature's Bounty passive is time-gated at once per second. So if the Mastery follows that same time-gating then it is almost useless in a group due to the heavily restrictive condition that you must heal real damage and that it can only fire once per second.

It would be dead for anything other than solo play, basically.

Feels odd that some of the masteries have reduced effectiveness in pvp but not others. Battle spirit already cuts damage vs players, so judgements brand honestly does not look like it will do enough to help pure plar damage in pvp.

But for above and beyond's +15% crit damage and healing, 7% vs players... isnt ALL healing on players? Or is it still +15% crit healing on players in pveland?

The class mastery for sorc "Conservation of Energy" doesn't work for streak. It works for ball of lightning, but not streak.

hoangdz wrote: »

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

Conservation of Energy: worse compared to Heart of Flame which now provides 15% of max health which is better than the Bloodmagic passive.
A static ressource restore like it was shown at the first time (1k mag and stam each) or bumping it up to 3% or adding 2% of max health would make it more considerable than just subclassing Ardent Flame for HoF

Font of Power: the scaling is a bit too harsh. The previous scaling at 1% per 1.5k max resource would be reasonable

Calculated Defense: considering you would have to slot the Bastion CP in order to make it somewhat valuable at least its duration could be adjusted to persist for a Global Cooldown turning it into a small additional layer of defense rewarding execution from the player

Lol no, Sorc is already OP and on par with pure DK on PTS. Using your values would just make it the defacto best class in the game.

Yeah because bonkers 50% projectile mitigation and a better form of CoE on a delayed AoE burst skill are worse..

The damage passives have to be so high that they become more appealing than the power you get from subclassing/ crit dam bonuses, etc. And the utility passives have to be so good that you would forsake stuff like minor toughness, etc. Most of these masteries fail on one or both targets, aside from the DK which is receiving some pretty wild buffs on top of their class refresh.

I really hope we see some massive swings on the numbers and/ or utility benefits over the next few PTS cycles.

hoangdz wrote: »

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

hoangdz wrote: »

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

Conservation of Energy: worse compared to Heart of Flame which now provides 15% of max health which is better than the Bloodmagic passive.
A static ressource restore like it was shown at the first time (1k mag and stam each) or bumping it up to 3% or adding 2% of max health would make it more considerable than just subclassing Ardent Flame for HoF

Font of Power: the scaling is a bit too harsh. The previous scaling at 1% per 1.5k max resource would be reasonable

Calculated Defense: considering you would have to slot the Bastion CP in order to make it somewhat valuable at least its duration could be adjusted to persist for a Global Cooldown turning it into a small additional layer of defense rewarding execution from the player

Lol no, Sorc is already OP and on par with pure DK on PTS. Using your values would just make it the defacto best class in the game.

Yeah because bonkers 50% projectile mitigation and a better form of CoE on a delayed AoE burst skill are worse..

I'm not saying DK isn't OP, evident by my 3 threads requesting for DK nerfs in U49. I'm saying that with just 2 class mastery passives, both stamsorc and magsorc are currently on par or at least very close to DK's power level on PTS. DK's 50% projectile mitigation isn't going to do much when magsorcs can indefinitely kite them with infinite sustain and eventually kill them with a well-timed combo. Stamsorc is also able to dish out 4k-6k DPS in the right setup and actually has the healing to tank up to 10k DPS. Yes, 10k DPS, and I have the screenshots to prove that.

All of this is enabled by 2 class mastery passives. If you request for them to be buffed further, Sorc will become the next defacto BiS class and it would actually be worse than a DK meta because you cannot run away from them (Magsorc with infinite sustain and high tankiness/damage). Look back at how Hardened Ward magsorc made so many people complain lol. This wouldn't be any different.

This is a bit too hypothetical the part with infinitely kiting and eventually bursting through 50% damage mitigation. No one with a brain would die to something they have 50% damage mitigation to on top of being the tankiest class in the game. And DK themselves have infinite sustain, so this is just far too theoretical for me to believe.

I think caution is required in general. In some aspects, these talents are still underpowered. In some they are just right, and in others even too good. At the least all class mastery talents should be allowed to go Live as is, even if no further buffs are intended.

hoangdz wrote: »

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

hoangdz wrote: »

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

Conservation of Energy: worse compared to Heart of Flame which now provides 15% of max health which is better than the Bloodmagic passive.
A static ressource restore like it was shown at the first time (1k mag and stam each) or bumping it up to 3% or adding 2% of max health would make it more considerable than just subclassing Ardent Flame for HoF

Font of Power: the scaling is a bit too harsh. The previous scaling at 1% per 1.5k max resource would be reasonable

Calculated Defense: considering you would have to slot the Bastion CP in order to make it somewhat valuable at least its duration could be adjusted to persist for a Global Cooldown turning it into a small additional layer of defense rewarding execution from the player

Lol no, Sorc is already OP and on par with pure DK on PTS. Using your values would just make it the defacto best class in the game.

Yeah because bonkers 50% projectile mitigation and a better form of CoE on a delayed AoE burst skill are worse..

I'm not saying DK isn't OP, evident by my 3 threads requesting for DK nerfs in U49. I'm saying that with just 2 class mastery passives, both stamsorc and magsorc are currently on par or at least very close to DK's power level on PTS. DK's 50% projectile mitigation isn't going to do much when magsorcs can indefinitely kite them with infinite sustain and eventually kill them with a well-timed combo. Stamsorc is also able to dish out 4k-6k DPS in the right setup and actually has the healing to tank up to 10k DPS. Yes, 10k DPS, and I have the screenshots to prove that.

All of this is enabled by 2 class mastery passives. If you request for them to be buffed further, Sorc will become the next defacto BiS class and it would actually be worse than a DK meta because you cannot run away from them (Magsorc with infinite sustain and high tankiness/damage). Look back at how Hardened Ward magsorc made so many people complain lol. This wouldn't be any different.

You posted already what Pyrebrand is capable of. Sorc sticks with dogwater Monolith. The 600 damage dont even transfer to backbar..at best you kite away from a DK for endless stalemate

Some initial thoughts after having spent some time looking at Warden and Arcanist which are the main classes I'm familiar with...

I am both excited and concerned about the source of Major Brittle from Warden Mastery, excited because I want to build around it, but worried because this will be really strong in PvP. I am excited though because I miss playing a pure warden in PvP and will be doing so again when this goes live.

I would have liked to see more crux interactions with the Arcanist, but perhaps this will come later with a full rework.

Basically, I want more things to scale based on crux and for that scaling to be more extreme so that we actually have to care about and consider this mechanic a bit more. One example of this is Fulminating Rune: I think an interesting possible change would be for it to only grant additional synergies based on crux; so, if cast with 3 crux, then 3 allies could synergize and if cast with no crux, then no synergy. It's a very strong synergy for coordinated PvP and that's the context I'm approaching this from, as currently you can easily slap this skill on anyone with subclassing, and it performs at full strength.

More on the Arcanist Mastery passives... two of them grant max crux and one grants a crux, but these feel really weak to me, and I'd rather see those do something else (generating crux is already so easy!). What about a brief window where Crux is "not depleted when consumed" (keep the player's crux counter from depleting while casting abilities that would consume them while still providing the bonuses to those abilities as if the crux were consumed)?

With the influence of some skooma, I also considered for a moment how cool it would be if one of the Arcanist Mastery passives changed the crux mechanic slightly... specifically increasing the maximum amount of crux possible. I figured that such a change:
1) Would almost certainly be overpowered
2) Could either increase to 4 and allow abilities to get buffed by an additional crux, or increase to something like 6 but add provisions that cap consumed crux for bonuses at 3 or 4.
3) Would need to consider the visual effect on the player from >3 crux... if 4, the visual effect on the player might not look as good as with 6, etc.

Anyway, I like the idea behind the system. I think only being able to choose 2 is fair, though I wouldn't have minded a sixth choice (could have done two Mastery passives per skill tree, or one per tree and three others for total of six). If 6, then it'd be easier to expand this kind of system in the future if you want to:
- could have 3 points distributed across 6 Mastery passives
- allocated points based on number of base-class lines equipped (at pure class, you have 3, two lines 2, fully subclassed 1)
- if you tie a mastery passive to a skill line, then perhaps you could gate that passive if the line is not active (example, if a warden went animal companions + green balance then could not benefit from a mastery passive that was tied to the winter's embrace line)

Why does Templar have Battle Spirit limitations on stuff that’s just cool for the class. The good damage mastery is fine but I don’t see Templar being able to complete with other pure classes nevertheless someone who is Subclassing. Also the Wrathsun battlespirit debuff is a joke.