Both the Merciless Resolve change and the Master Assassin change is a significant nerf to magblade as far as PvP is concerned. Let me explain how.
Lets talk about the Merciless Resolve change from 10% damage mitigation to 10% crit dmg+heal.
The mitigation from this skill essentially covered one very big hole in magblade's defensive kit, i.e. squishyness. Keep in mind that, unlike Stamblade which alternates between Cloak+dodge combo to avoid damage, magblade has just Cloak which is not at all reliable, especially unless you mix it with dodge. This means, we are getting hit a lot more and need the mitigation to survive. And in case of Dark Cloak magblade, the mitigation is very necessarily as Dark Cloak blades rely solely on HoTs to survive, which got nerfed by 20% due to the Battle Spirit change. The extra damage does not mean much as it does not apply to our main damage skill, which is the bow proc itself. Also while critical heal buff is nice, it is nowhere as reliable as the mitigation. Also unlike Stamblade, which uses Rally as a burst heal, magblade does not have access to any and has to use Annulment instead, which is a shield and hence can not crit anyways. Also the crit buff is useless for any build using Malacath.
Now lets talk about the change to Master Assassin, i.e. 10% extra spell/weapon damage in Stealth to 258 spell/weapon damage in flank.
Now, while on paper the change looks fine but in real fights, not so much. Let me explain how. Generally the closer you are to an enemy, the more likely you are to flank an enemy. On a melee stamblade, you flank with just circling the enemy and occasional dodging, which is something stamblades do without anyways. As such, you are looking at a high uptime on the passive.
However, on a ranged character, flanking is relatively rarer. You can not circle around the enemy in ranged fights and usually the enemy is always facing you casting their own spells. Flank only occurs in three conditions, i) the enemy is running away from you, in which case, you have most probably already won the fight without needing the buff ii) the enemy is repositioning and iii) in the short windows when the enemy does a lateral/backward dodge to avoid your big hits, which means you probably just had your bow proc dodged and are about to get counter-burst. While we don't have the passive yet in live, we have Camo Hunter, which provides Minor Berserk on flank, so we can use its result to get a relative expectancy of how high or low the uptime on passive will be live. For my ranged magblade, Camo Hunter has 38% average uptime from combat logs of 10 duels which is abysmal compared to the 84% uptime I have from ten duels on my stamblade. Even on a melee ranged Zaan-calu magblade build, the uptime is only 51%. Also keep in mind that Camo Hunter stays active for 5 secs after the flank unlike Master Assassin, which only works on flanked hits so the uptime on Master Assassin will be much lesser than Camo Hunter.
On live, I get between 25-45% uptime on Master Assassin depending on how much I use Cloak and it increases my healing as well making it ideal when I am trying to reset with Cloak, which plays great for magblade due to their perma cloaking capabilities. This is higher than my flank uptime in fights for magblade. Also the percentage modifier results in higher spell damage for magblade as they lack other percentage modifiers to spell damage except Major Sorcery, as long as they have around 3k unbuffed spell power, which is easy nowadays with things like Master Destro backbar. With the new flank change, it will no longer affect heals like Rapid Regen and the flat damage lends itself more to stamblade which has a lot of percentage modifiers between Major Brutality, MA passive, FG passives, etc.
Discus plz
Edited by nsmurfer on August 5, 2020 2:36PM