Impale/Killer's Blade Nerfed?

ennuid

On PTS, the two morphs of Assassin's Blade are doing significantly less damage than on Live. I tested this on 3.0.1 and 3.0.3.

Impale is doing 3.08x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (3.65x (!) on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

Killer's Blade is doing 3.52x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

These ratios are the same for crits and non-crits. They are not affected by Major Breach/Fracture, and they are not affected by champ points.

Was this change deliberate? Why aren't they all 4.00x, including on Live?

Tiitus

ennuid wrote: »

On PTS, the two morphs of Assassin's Blade are doing significantly less damage than on Live. I tested this on 3.0.1 and 3.0.3.

Impale is doing 3.08x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (3.65x (!) on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

Killer's Blade is doing 3.52x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

These ratios are the same for crits and non-crits. They are not affected by Major Breach/Fracture, and they are not affected by champ points.

Was this change deliberate? Why aren't they all 4.00x, including on Live?

just another nail in the coffin for NB, trying so hard not to give up on the class but d*mn they are making it tough.

Izaki

I think that its more of a bug than intended stealth nerf, so maybe try reporting it. I just hope they see this and fix it.

There are plenty of bugs with the CP system too.

Avran_Sylt

Target Skellies have damage resistances. make sure not to use the tooltip value, but rather the on screen one that you get. went out on live and tested against overland mobs. crits dealt 5782 against senche tigers above 25% hp, and 23,128 crit to them below 25%. That is 4x damage.

Edit: ***. just went ahead and used major fracture on a guy and tested it... still the same numbers. I retract my earlier statement.

Double Edit: Make sure your passives and weapons are not enough to cause you to overpenetrate

DHale

We are aware of the problem that we have no intention of fixing.... ever... Unless we can place it in the crown store.

LegacyDM

Impale sucks anyways. 9 times out of ten my opponent in pvp just dodges it. Last night I tried impaling a guy 4 times in a row while in execute. He dodged, not dodged roll but dodged every single one. Even damage is laughable. I've seen Templars heal through it and sorcs just shield against it. Why does mages wrath seem to instantly kill me and never miss, but impale just is laughable in comparison. Is this a joke?

stealthyevil

LegacyDM wrote: »

Impale sucks anyways. 9 times out of ten my opponent in pvp just dodges it. Last night I tried impaling a guy 4 times in a row while in execute. He dodged, not dodged roll but dodged every single one. Even damage is laughable. I've seen Templars heal through it and sorcs just shield against it. Why does mages wrath seem to instantly kill me and never miss, but impale just is laughable in comparison. Is this a joke?

Lol...mages wrath plus a passive class execute..lets not even start getting into this crap.

ennuid wrote: »

On PTS, the two morphs of Assassin's Blade are doing significantly less damage than on Live. I tested this on 3.0.1 and 3.0.3.

Impale is doing 3.08x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (3.65x (!) on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

Killer's Blade is doing 3.52x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

These ratios are the same for crits and non-crits. They are not affected by Major Breach/Fracture, and they are not affected by champ points.

Was this change deliberate? Why aren't they all 4.00x, including on Live?

I did not test this on PTS, if you want to include some screencaps of combat logs logs that would be great for the thread to show some proof of real damage numbers

Lum1on

ennuid wrote: »

On PTS, the two morphs of Assassin's Blade are doing significantly less damage than on Live. I tested this on 3.0.1 and 3.0.3.

Impale is doing 3.08x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (3.65x (!) on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

Killer's Blade is doing 3.52x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

These ratios are the same for crits and non-crits. They are not affected by Major Breach/Fracture, and they are not affected by champ points.

Was this change deliberate? Why aren't they all 4.00x, including on Live?

Because of additive factors. Let's say, you're using Merciless resolve and Inferno staff. Your damage is not TOOLTIP * 1,08 * 1,08 * 4,0 (8,0% Ancient knowledge passive, 8,0% Minor berserk, 400% Impale tooltip), it's:

DAMAGE = TOOLTIP * (1 + 0,08 + 0,08 + 4,0)

So the multiplier is actually 4,16x. And if you test this:

1000 * 1,08 * 1,08 * 4,0 = ~4665
1000 * 4,16 = 4160

So the more you have additive factors (percentage damage multipliers) the "less" damage you're actually doing. This works for champion points also: TOOLTIP * (1 + ELEMENTAL_EXPERT + THAUMATURGE) for example. Same for Minor and Major slayer (5,0% and 15,0%).

pcar944

killers blade/impale never worked properly to begin with, especially in PVP

Edziu

I thought it is maybe cp problem when I was testing it, on live on training dummy selfbuffed I had mmax 50k crit hits from killers blade while on pts with same setup I had just 40k....this is very big difference....but at all difference in main spammable skill..suprise attack is low..only 2k...from 27k hit sIm down to 25k hits so in killers blade ithis difference in damage is to huge if it will be problem only by cp but now I see this isnt only by cp damage nerf to this finisher

Kay1

I won't be impressed, they tend to nerf the worst skills from Nightblades.


Why they don't entirely remove it and add a Necromancer class? At this point Nightblades will loose a duel against a Mudcrab.

BohnT

@ZOS_GinaBruno are you aware of this bug?

ennuid

Lum1on wrote: »

Because of additive factors...

Thank you for this. I went back and re-tested without an inferno staff or minor slayer:

Impale is doing 3.20x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

Killer's Blade is doing 3.52x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

There's still a nerf on PTS. Impale and Killer's Blade are doing 20% and 12% less damage than they should, respectively. I'm really hoping this was unintentional, so I submitted it as a bug during 3.0.1 and now again in 3.0.3.

For others who have asked about methodology, I logged crits and non-crits both above and below 25% with FTC's combat log and took their ratio. Tested with no buffs (except minor savagery which is unavoidable), with and without Major Breach/Fracture, with and without champ points. The ratios are always the same (except for additive damage factors which Lum1on helpfully pointed out).

ennuid

I did some more testing, and it seems that champion points now have their damage additive with other damage bonuses on PTS. This is not the case on Live, so it tripped me up when comparing the two.

On Live, your Impales do 4x damage to low health targets (with no inferno staff or slayer buffs). On PTS, that bonus is reduced to as little as 3.14x (22% less damage for your executes) when you factor in champ points.

This seems to be true for every damage bonus for every class. The 8% you expect to get from an inferno staff (like you do on Live), is reduced to less than 6% for typical champ point setups on PTS.

Since it's every damage bonus, I'm thinking this change was deliberate, with the unintended consequence of making everybody's executes substantially worse. And even if the nerf to executes was intended, this change makes the tooltips extremely misleading (in this case, Impale's +300% damage bonus is really less than +200% with an inferno staff and minor slayer).

ljb2k5_ESO

Tiitus wrote: »

ennuid wrote: »

On PTS, the two morphs of Assassin's Blade are doing significantly less damage than on Live. I tested this on 3.0.1 and 3.0.3.

Impale is doing 3.08x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (3.65x (!) on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

Killer's Blade is doing 3.52x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

These ratios are the same for crits and non-crits. They are not affected by Major Breach/Fracture, and they are not affected by champ points.

Was this change deliberate? Why aren't they all 4.00x, including on Live?

just another nail in the coffin for NB, trying so hard not to give up on the class but d*mn they are making it tough.

Not giving up on the class, giving up on the game altogether. I am enjoying the last month of my NB being good and wrapping up Dark Brotherhood quests. Then I am off to greener pastures.

Bladerunner1

ennuid wrote: »

I did some more testing, and it seems that champion points now have their damage additive with other damage bonuses on PTS. This is not the case on Live, so it tripped me up when comparing the two.

Did this change make it to the PTS notes anywhere? It seems like a big one worth bringing up or they need to tell us whether it's a bug.

GilGalad

The bonus dmg used to be additive with other dmg increase sources, which is a bug I reported on the last PTS. With the changes to CP being additive this gets even worse, since only the base dmg gets increased, meaning that 75% of the skills dmg during Execute is not affected by all your CP and dmg buffs (minor & major Berserk/Slayer, staff passives, ...).
This skill would be so much better if it was fixed...

Kalebron

ennuid wrote: »

On PTS, the two morphs of Assassin's Blade are doing significantly less damage than on Live. I tested this on 3.0.1 and 3.0.3.

Impale is doing 3.08x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (3.65x (!) on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

Killer's Blade is doing 3.52x damage to a target skeleton below 25% health (4.00x on Live, 4.00x expected from the tooltip).

These ratios are the same for crits and non-crits. They are not affected by Major Breach/Fracture, and they are not affected by champ points.

Was this change deliberate? Why aren't they all 4.00x, including on Live?

It is the same for ps4. Seems to have made it into live.