Templars, Channels, and the Elsweyr Changes

Jabbs_Giggity

ecru wrote: »

My very first test of Sweep had me at 48 channels in one minute, your usage of it isn't representative of what the ability is actually capable of. I honestly don't think it's any more difficult to weave at this point than an instant ability after the recent change to channels/cast time skills.

My initial test, literally the first parse on my magplar that I rarely play:



And after a bit of practice:




It's important to keep in mind that if jabs/sweep were instant abilities instead of a 1s channel they would be 30-40% stronger than just about every instant spammable in the game. Some comparisons on a stamplar build:

Rapid Strikes: 14,287
Wrecking Blow: 13,695
Dawnbreaker: 17,115
Biting Jabs: 19,428

It's a really really good ability, and I know templars aren't going to be happy when I say this, but it's bordering on overpowered at this point if you can actually use it properly.

What other abilities can we compare Jabs/sweep to in terms of damage? Necro's blastbones, Warden's shalks. Yes, it does that much damage. Yes, when you get hit by shalks or blastbones, a templar could be doing the same amount of damage every 1.1s. Templars don't seem to realize how good this ability has become and if I were maining a templar, I'd probably keep quiet about my 1s channel that hits like blastbones/shalks/dawnbreaker.

The biggest fundamental issue with your data and statement about Jabs isn't the "on paper science" of the ability; your data is pulled from a non-moving AI that doesn't attack back. In theory, yes Jabs overperforms. However, in reality during combat Jabs is poor. Before even factoring in things like Lag or Latency, Jabs/Sweeps is first and foremost affected by a flat 25% reduction from Evasion (and CP, if applicable). Second, the hit-rate of Jabs/Sweeps. due to a wide AOE conal area with an extemely poor Hit-Box is RNG at best with most Templar players actually hitting targets less than 50% on average, before factoring things like speed. The OP wasn't going on about DPS versus other skills. The OP was clearly defining the loss of DPS of channeled abilities, due to poor weaving LA's in comparison to instant-casted abilities. This holds true 100%, as a NB can easily hit a 5K Surprise Attack (In PVP, mind you) while adding quite a bit of additional damage from LA weaving.

The other aspect of Jabs/Sweeps, specifically (but also applies to other channeled abilities) is the fact that you have zero form of defense while channeling. You cannot block-cast or animation cancel with dodgeroll/block/cloak/shield, etc. One second can make all the difference in a fight while not being able to defensively posture yourself. For instance, in one second a NB can easily land a Incap+SA+LA = dead. Or a Warden can easily time a Shalks+DB+Executioner in under 1s all while getting Evasion mitigation against our Jabs/Sweeps...

As @Minno points out (Thanks!) you are sadly misinformed and ignorant to the class, as you yourself pointed out that you rarely play.

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Delparis wrote: »

Another issue with puncturing strikes and their morphs.

Is there any raison to slot this skill anymore ?

Yes. One channel of jabs does more damage than the higher damage morph of Dawnbreaker. It's the highest damage spammable ability in the game by a substantial (like 40%) margin.

You have a spammable ability which does, in one second, equal damage to basically all stam dots/bleeds (which happens over 10 seconds), more damage than dawnbreaker, more damage (40% more) than Snipe, more damage than warden shalks, more damage than blastbones.. uh.. do I need to go on? You can use this ability every second and get the same damage out of it that a necro or a warden can only get, at most, every 3 seconds. Think that over for a minute.

This is with the same gear:
Biting Jabs: 18,864 damage
Subterranean assault: 15,941 damage
Blighted Blastbones: 17,282 damage
Dawnbreaker of Smiting: 18,580 damage
Relentless Focus: 20,742 (only 10% more damage, only usable every 5th gcd)doe

I'm even a bit confused on how it made it to the live servers in it's current state. When it was only usable every 1.3s, I guess that was fine, but now that it's 30% faster it's hard to find any other ability in the game that it's comparable to.

edited to include another ability lol

Lol spread out in four attack while you can't defend with all those other options letting you have anything to dodge roll/bar swap to a defense. DBoS does A LOT more DMG than sweeps you conviently left out the dot, and paired it up against a weird mix of single target/aoe/burst.

Yes, I'm comparing the direct damage portion of dawnbreaker, which still required 150 ult to use. The point is that there isn't any ability in the game that is in any way comparable, channeled or otherwise, that does the same amount of damage as jabs. I'm comparing it to those abilities because they're only usable every 3-5 seconds, whereas jabs is spammable. Nothing else does similar damage, so there are no "instant" abilities to even compare them to.

If you want me to compare it to abilities that are usable every 1 second, the numbers are going to be a lot smaller and the disparity a lot higher. Snipe with the same gear has a 12.5k tooltip. Wrecking blow is the same. So a 1s channel of jabs does 50% more damage than a 1s cast of Wrecking Blow or Snipe.

My earlier post was meant to answer the question of "should I just unslot jab/sweep?" The answer is yes. Please unslot it. lol..

edit: The closest ability would actually be Flurry I guess, since it's also a channel. Tooltip on Flurry is 12,152 or slightly higher due to the slight increase of Rapid Strikes (probably almost exactly 12.5k like Wrecking Blow/Snipe). So yeah, it does 50% more damage than Flurry too.

You can't compare a locked channel that requires you to hit 4 times to things like 3s burst you can hold until the right moment lol.

I mean, even landing three of those hits is still almost 20% more damage than Flurry. I've been playing my magplar in BGs lately and it's not hard to land or weave at all IMO, but I'm used to playing melee and using Flurry.

The comparison to shalks/blastbones/dawnbreaker is because they're typically seen as higher damage abilities. It's used to show how the damage of jabs is a bit of an outlier. The comparison to Flurry, Snipe, and Wrecking Blow reinforce that with Jabs being roughly 50% stronger.

So forgetting other benefits:
- Wrecking CC's and has ability to proc enchants/poisons
- snipe has defile in addition to cause poison which has additional DMG outside the tooltip. Can also deal more DMG as you are far away and hit targets with light attacks.
- flurry is ass I agree lol. But even that has access to procing enchants/poisons in addition to extra DMG when stunned/silenced/etc along with extra DMG on low health.
- jabs has 4 hits, last hit snare, burning light every 2 hits, minor protection on cast (crit if jabs).

You aren't looking at the entire picture, just Lazer focused on jabs. First saying it's in a decent spot then saying it's overloaded. You also forget that jabs is reduced by major evaison, wrecking blow/snipe/flurry are not. So your 18k tooltip example, now deals 14k against that flurry user running blade cloak lol.

Khivas_Carrick

ecru wrote: »

CatchMeTrolling wrote: »

If jabs are so strong you should question why there isn’t that many stamplars in pvp. Let’s not go tooltip flaunting because those numbers don’t back the reality of actual pvp. Especially considering the fact jabs can get double mitigated, you can miss, anyone with mobility can strafe to avoid them or that you can get stuck in a clunky animation.

Stamplars can be strong but there’s a higher ceiling to play at a high level.

Because it was only recently changed to be that strong. It already did a ton of damage, but it was a lot slower before Elsweyr. Now that it's 30% faster to cast, the huge tooltip is a lot more "noticeable".

edit: I also think stamplars are rare in general among the playerbase as a whole because most people roll a Templar to heal.

Just chiming in to say Stamplars are not all that rare in PvE =P

Altyrann

Bumping in the hopes that this gets some visibility and a fix.

Cinbri

zos treated skill half-way. OP is right - it problem of its animation, specifically animation of last tick. Apparently after last changes of animation cancelling long ago, whatever year it was, and swaping of prioritizing animations seriously affect skill.

Based on pure assumptions:
Despite skill now is 1.0s and don't have 0.2s post-cooldown to blend animation, its last tick animation still automatically prioritizing over light attack, and taking nearly 0.5s to complete:

^^you can see even on duration of channel by several addons that last tick is unblendable animation and thus when it finished it already 0.5s of next jab that why next jab sweeping animation skipping itself. Duration of minor protection shows that it goes to 2.0s then properly refreshed, as jab itself take 1.0s but its full animation takes like 1.5s to complete.

And this last tick animation is not actually represent time when last hit was registered because while last hit take more than 1.0s to land, its last hit actually registering at +-0.9s (plus before change, minus - after) meaning that this animation of last tick, after removing of post cooldown is simply not needed. smth like this:

^^ as potential result of it, it is possible to manually cancel its jabs duration to weave next light attack without waiting base post cooldown to end, and thus allowing to properly weave next jab. smth like this:

^^ by activating light attack within 0.9-1.0s of skill to prioritize it over animation of last tick in registering hit. But doing it literally impossible anywhere outside of tests on target dummy as it has only 0.1s window to do it and it impossible to do in any real content.

Another prove that last tick don't inherit registering damage of last tick is glitch that allow to automatically lock your last jab on target within range, no matter your camera or character or enemy position:

^^ last tick not registered not snare will apply even tho last tick automatically locked on target because when it should be actually registered enemy is not in the area of effect. This glitch itself possible because animation of last tick is not belong to skill and thus inherit glitch of light/heavy attacks. You can see by addon that icon of heavy attack that procing this glitch.

And now can compare to very old 1.1s jabs before it got unblendable last tick animation and with old animation cancelling rules (~2015year). Apparently animation bug it was showing is reason why channels got 0.2s to blend animation (very bad quality):

^^ as it shows it last hit stun was applying properly when game registering last tick, not when animation of last hit completes. Also you can see that animation still force playing but it didn't had post cooldown to blend and priority that caused visual bug of you light attaking when there is still jabs in your hand. It result of patch 1.1.3 that "Reduced the post global cooldown on this ability", making it animation longer than actual cooldown. Apparently to prevent those visual glitches there was added 0.2 cooldown to blend long animations. But back than you could properly weave jab-light attacks because last hit animation didn't force-playing and since 1.1.3 we got change to post cooldown again yet no change to skill animation or prioritizing.


Tl;DR: Change to jabs this update is failure. We were promised to get easier channels to weave yet change was disfunctional (activation la within 0.1s is same as don't even have this option).
If zos don't want us to properly weave channels - just tell it clearly instead of hiding behind misleading statements.
If it wasn't the case - than properly fix it instead of doing half-way changes: either remove or speed-up last tick animation so skill actually takes 1s to play, or make it blendable (doublty since it was what originally caused fix in old patch)
If unable to fix its animations - speed-up total animation and cut damage and duration to 0.6s or cut beginning sweeping animation and last hit animation and will take same 0.5-0.6s duration, like duals Flurry that has overall duration+unblendable animation still playable within 1 sec and thus can be properly weaved.

Altyrann

Cinbri wrote: »

zos treated skill half-way. OP is right - it problem of its animation, specifically animation of last tick. Apparently after last changes of animation cancelling long ago, whatever year it was, and swaping of prioritizing animations seriously affect skill.

Based on pure assumptions:
Despite skill now is 1.0s and don't have 0.2s post-cooldown to blend animation, its last tick animation still automatically prioritizing over light attack, and taking nearly 0.5s to complete:

^^you can see even on duration of channel by several addons that last tick is unblendable animation and thus when it finished it already 0.5s of next jab that why next jab sweeping animation skipping itself. Duration of minor protection shows that it goes to 2.0s then properly refreshed, as jab itself take 1.0s but its full animation takes like 1.5s to complete.

And this last tick animation is not actually represent time when last hit was registered because while last hit take more than 1.0s to land, its last hit actually registering at +-0.9s (plus before change, minus - after) meaning that this animation of last tick, after removing of post cooldown is simply not needed. smth like this:

^^ as potential result of it, it is possible to manually cancel its jabs duration to weave next light attack without waiting base post cooldown to end, and thus allowing to properly weave next jab. smth like this:

^^ by activating light attack within 0.9-1.0s of skill to prioritize it over animation of last tick in registering hit. But doing it literally impossible anywhere outside of tests on target dummy as it has only 0.1s window to do it and it impossible to do in any real content.

Another prove that last tick don't inherit registering damage of last tick is glitch that allow to automatically lock your last jab on target within range, no matter your camera or character or enemy position:

^^ last tick not registered not snare will apply even tho last tick automatically locked on target because when it should be actually registered enemy is not in the area of effect. This glitch itself possible because animation of last tick is not belong to skill and thus inherit glitch of light/heavy attacks. You can see by addon that icon of heavy attack that procing this glitch.

And now can compare to very old 1.1s jabs before it got unblendable last tick animation and with old animation cancelling rules (~2015year). Apparently animation bug it was showing is reason why channels got 0.2s to blend animation (very bad quality):

^^ as it shows it last hit stun was applying properly when game registering last tick, not when animation of last hit completes. Also you can see that animation still force playing but it didn't had post cooldown to blend and priority that caused visual bug of you light attaking when there is still jabs in your hand. It result of patch 1.1.3 that "Reduced the post global cooldown on this ability", making it animation longer than actual cooldown. Apparently to prevent those visual glitches there was added 0.2 cooldown to blend long animations. But back than you could properly weave jab-light attacks because last hit animation didn't force-playing and since 1.1.3 we got change to post cooldown again yet no change to skill animation or prioritizing.


Tl;DR: Change to jabs this update is failure. We were promised to get easier channels to weave yet change was disfunctional (activation la within 0.1s is same as don't even have this option).
If zos don't want us to properly weave channels - just tell it clearly instead of hiding behind misleading statements.
If it wasn't the case - than properly fix it instead of doing half-way changes: either remove or speed-up last tick animation so skill actually takes 1s to play, or make it blendable (doublty since it was what originally caused fix in old patch)
If unable to fix its animations - speed-up total animation and cut damage and duration to 0.6s or cut beginning sweeping animation and last hit animation and will take same 0.5-0.6s duration, like duals Flurry that has overall duration+unblendable animation still playable within 1 sec and thus can be properly weaved.

How do we actually get this acknowledged and looked at? There is really great information in this thread on what is wrong, the impact it has and potential fixes but unless this is actually on the radar somewhere it doesn't change anything.

Altyrann

Bumping this given the change to Uppercut on PTS. Hoping they give other cast time spammables the same treatment.

Altyrann

Bumping again

Iskiab

Drdeath20 wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Delparis wrote: »

Another issue with puncturing strikes and their morphs.

Is there any raison to slot this skill anymore ?

Yes. One channel of jabs does more damage than the higher damage morph of Dawnbreaker. It's the highest damage spammable ability in the game by a substantial (like 40%) margin.

You have a spammable ability which does, in one second, equal damage to basically all stam dots/bleeds (which happens over 10 seconds), more damage than dawnbreaker, more damage (40% more) than Snipe, more damage than warden shalks, more damage than blastbones.. uh.. do I need to go on? You can use this ability every second and get the same damage out of it that a necro or a warden can only get, at most, every 3 seconds. Think that over for a minute.

This is with the same gear:
Biting Jabs: 18,864 damage
Subterranean assault: 15,941 damage
Blighted Blastbones: 17,282 damage
Dawnbreaker of Smiting: 18,580 damage
Relentless Focus: 20,742 (only 10% more damage, only usable every 5th gcd)doe

I'm even a bit confused on how it made it to the live servers in it's current state. When it was only usable every 1.3s, I guess that was fine, but now that it's 30% faster it's hard to find any other ability in the game that it's comparable to.

edited to include another ability lol

Lol spread out in four attack while you can't defend with all those other options letting you have anything to dodge roll/bar swap to a defense. DBoS does A LOT more DMG than sweeps you conviently left out the dot, and paired it up against a weird mix of single target/aoe/burst.

Yes, I'm comparing the direct damage portion of dawnbreaker, which still required 150 ult to use. The point is that there isn't any ability in the game that is in any way comparable, channeled or otherwise, that does the same amount of damage as jabs. I'm comparing it to those abilities because they're only usable every 3-5 seconds, whereas jabs is spammable. Nothing else does similar damage, so there are no "instant" abilities to even compare them to.

If you want me to compare it to abilities that are usable every 1 second, the numbers are going to be a lot smaller and the disparity a lot higher. Snipe with the same gear has a 12.5k tooltip. Wrecking blow is the same. So a 1s channel of jabs does 50% more damage than a 1s cast of Wrecking Blow or Snipe.

My earlier post was meant to answer the question of "should I just unslot jab/sweep?" The answer is yes. Please unslot it. lol..

edit: The closest ability would actually be Flurry I guess, since it's also a channel. Tooltip on Flurry is 12,152 or slightly higher due to the slight increase of Rapid Strikes (probably almost exactly 12.5k like Wrecking Blow/Snipe). So yeah, it does 50% more damage than Flurry too.

You can't compare a locked channel that requires you to hit 4 times to things like 3s burst you can hold until the right moment lol.

I mean, even landing three of those hits is still almost 20% more damage than Flurry. I've been playing my magplar in BGs lately and it's not hard to land or weave at all IMO, but I'm used to playing melee and using Flurry.

The comparison to shalks/blastbones/dawnbreaker is because they're typically seen as higher damage abilities. It's used to show how the damage of jabs is a bit of an outlier. The comparison to Flurry, Snipe, and Wrecking Blow reinforce that with Jabs being roughly 50% stronger.

So forgetting other benefits:
- Wrecking CC's and has ability to proc enchants/poisons
- snipe has defile in addition to cause poison which has additional DMG outside the tooltip. Can also deal more DMG as you are far away and hit targets with light attacks.
- flurry is ass I agree lol. But even that has access to procing enchants/poisons in addition to extra DMG when stunned/silenced/etc along with extra DMG on low health.
- jabs has 4 hits, last hit snare, burning light every 2 hits, minor protection on cast (crit if jabs).

You aren't looking at the entire picture, just Lazer focused on jabs. First saying it's in a decent spot then saying it's overloaded. You also forget that jabs is reduced by major evaison, wrecking blow/snipe/flurry are not. So your 18k tooltip example, now deals 14k against that flurry user running blade cloak lol.

I guess if everything that can go wrong goes wrong (lag, missing half of your channel every time, your target blocking and dodge rolling at the same time [somehow], major evasion up 24/7, etc) it's not that great. Most targets won't have major evasion and you really only need one second of uninterrupted damage for each channel. You make it sound like it's some absurdly long channel, but it's just 1000ms. You also get the snare which makes it really, really easy to stay with that target.

But even two uninterrupted channels back to back is like eating three wrecking blows in a few seconds. Everyone knows that's a lot of damage. It has a really high damage ceiling compared to just about anything, and when it reaches that ceiling (as it often does), it's really really good. Then you have burning light procs..

I'm switching my magplar over to stam for a reason.

Cant wait to see your videos posted of all the decent players you kill and even 1vX against with your magplar. No cheese

I main a magplar, if you can’t kill decent players on a magplar that’s purely a L2P issue.

1vX is hard though because Magplars are squishy. 2 is doable, 3 only if they’re potatoes, 4+ I’ve never been able to do.

Hardest opponents are magsorcs, followed by stamwarden and stamnecro. Everyone else is pretty straight forward.

Altyrann

Iskiab wrote: »

Drdeath20 wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

ecru wrote: »

Delparis wrote: »

Another issue with puncturing strikes and their morphs.

Is there any raison to slot this skill anymore ?

Yes. One channel of jabs does more damage than the higher damage morph of Dawnbreaker. It's the highest damage spammable ability in the game by a substantial (like 40%) margin.

You have a spammable ability which does, in one second, equal damage to basically all stam dots/bleeds (which happens over 10 seconds), more damage than dawnbreaker, more damage (40% more) than Snipe, more damage than warden shalks, more damage than blastbones.. uh.. do I need to go on? You can use this ability every second and get the same damage out of it that a necro or a warden can only get, at most, every 3 seconds. Think that over for a minute.

This is with the same gear:
Biting Jabs: 18,864 damage
Subterranean assault: 15,941 damage
Blighted Blastbones: 17,282 damage
Dawnbreaker of Smiting: 18,580 damage
Relentless Focus: 20,742 (only 10% more damage, only usable every 5th gcd)doe

I'm even a bit confused on how it made it to the live servers in it's current state. When it was only usable every 1.3s, I guess that was fine, but now that it's 30% faster it's hard to find any other ability in the game that it's comparable to.

edited to include another ability lol

Lol spread out in four attack while you can't defend with all those other options letting you have anything to dodge roll/bar swap to a defense. DBoS does A LOT more DMG than sweeps you conviently left out the dot, and paired it up against a weird mix of single target/aoe/burst.

Yes, I'm comparing the direct damage portion of dawnbreaker, which still required 150 ult to use. The point is that there isn't any ability in the game that is in any way comparable, channeled or otherwise, that does the same amount of damage as jabs. I'm comparing it to those abilities because they're only usable every 3-5 seconds, whereas jabs is spammable. Nothing else does similar damage, so there are no "instant" abilities to even compare them to.

If you want me to compare it to abilities that are usable every 1 second, the numbers are going to be a lot smaller and the disparity a lot higher. Snipe with the same gear has a 12.5k tooltip. Wrecking blow is the same. So a 1s channel of jabs does 50% more damage than a 1s cast of Wrecking Blow or Snipe.

My earlier post was meant to answer the question of "should I just unslot jab/sweep?" The answer is yes. Please unslot it. lol..

edit: The closest ability would actually be Flurry I guess, since it's also a channel. Tooltip on Flurry is 12,152 or slightly higher due to the slight increase of Rapid Strikes (probably almost exactly 12.5k like Wrecking Blow/Snipe). So yeah, it does 50% more damage than Flurry too.

You can't compare a locked channel that requires you to hit 4 times to things like 3s burst you can hold until the right moment lol.

I mean, even landing three of those hits is still almost 20% more damage than Flurry. I've been playing my magplar in BGs lately and it's not hard to land or weave at all IMO, but I'm used to playing melee and using Flurry.

The comparison to shalks/blastbones/dawnbreaker is because they're typically seen as higher damage abilities. It's used to show how the damage of jabs is a bit of an outlier. The comparison to Flurry, Snipe, and Wrecking Blow reinforce that with Jabs being roughly 50% stronger.

So forgetting other benefits:
- Wrecking CC's and has ability to proc enchants/poisons
- snipe has defile in addition to cause poison which has additional DMG outside the tooltip. Can also deal more DMG as you are far away and hit targets with light attacks.
- flurry is ass I agree lol. But even that has access to procing enchants/poisons in addition to extra DMG when stunned/silenced/etc along with extra DMG on low health.
- jabs has 4 hits, last hit snare, burning light every 2 hits, minor protection on cast (crit if jabs).

You aren't looking at the entire picture, just Lazer focused on jabs. First saying it's in a decent spot then saying it's overloaded. You also forget that jabs is reduced by major evaison, wrecking blow/snipe/flurry are not. So your 18k tooltip example, now deals 14k against that flurry user running blade cloak lol.

I guess if everything that can go wrong goes wrong (lag, missing half of your channel every time, your target blocking and dodge rolling at the same time [somehow], major evasion up 24/7, etc) it's not that great. Most targets won't have major evasion and you really only need one second of uninterrupted damage for each channel. You make it sound like it's some absurdly long channel, but it's just 1000ms. You also get the snare which makes it really, really easy to stay with that target.

But even two uninterrupted channels back to back is like eating three wrecking blows in a few seconds. Everyone knows that's a lot of damage. It has a really high damage ceiling compared to just about anything, and when it reaches that ceiling (as it often does), it's really really good. Then you have burning light procs..

I'm switching my magplar over to stam for a reason.

Cant wait to see your videos posted of all the decent players you kill and even 1vX against with your magplar. No cheese

I main a magplar, if you can’t kill decent players on a magplar that’s purely a L2P issue.

1vX is hard though because Magplars are squishy. 2 is doable, 3 only if they’re potatoes, 4+ I’ve never been able to do.

Hardest opponents are magsorcs, followed by stamwarden and stamnecro. Everyone else is pretty straight forward.

Can we keep this thread to the channel / cast time issues?

Altyrann

Still broken. Still no word on addressing.

Altyrann

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_BrianWheeler - any chance this can get a look?

ZOS_FalcoYamaoka

Greetings,
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