Since crit damage was hard-capped the crit-class (nightblade) has problems finding its ways.
PvE DDs, which were the reason of this change suffered immense, while Tanks and healers as well as PvP-blades were nearly unaffected. This led to balance changes buffing the PvE-Nightblade which in fact did buff PvP-blades immensely (on certain specs).
I am talking about Conceiled Weapon (CW) and Incapacitating Strike (Incap) and the problem with buffing burst-abilities for DpS.
Status quo as I see it:
PvP-Blade: Vampire, Balorg/ Titanborn/New Moon and Incap from stealth gameplay has always been viable and does not need a buff at all. Brawler blade is a bit more difficult but still viable and magicka ranged blade is unplayable outside Draugrkin+Asylum staff.
PvE-DD lacks in single-target and AoE and thus is still in desperate need of a buff.
PvE-Tank occasionally used in Raid-comps but still does its job and brings strong self mitigation as well as Minor Cowardice
PvE-Heal wonderful healer for Ult-gen and pillager - good heal output and utility
Buffing CW and Incap brought back melee magblade in pvp, pidgeonholed PvE-DD into melee magblade (which is still not comparable, in fact it was never magblade -> more a stamblade which used CW once every 7ish casts). All in all it seemed to miss the mark and instead made the melee stealth pvp playstyle even more powerful than it already was.
I will throw two different suggestion out here for all us nightblade lovers to discuss:
1)Instead of buffing active skills I would rather recommend tinkering at the passives nightblades bring. In its passives nightblade was the furthest to have the classic three roles as class trees:
- Assassination passive Pressure Points: "Increases your Weapon and Spell Critical ratings by 438 for each Assassination ability slotted."
- Shadow passive Dark Vigor: "Increases your Max Health by 3% for each Shadow ability slotted."
- Siphoning passive Soul Siphoner: "Increases your healing done by 3% for each Siphoning ability slotted."
Sadly the active skills mostly do not reflect these roles and thus those passives are wasted because DDs use shadow and siphoning skills, healers use mark target (assassination) as well as Path of Darkness (shadow) and only rarely Strife and tank is all over the place.
SO rearrange the skills
- Assassination: Blur moves to Shadow, Teleport Strike moves to Shadow, Mark Target moves to Siphoning
- Shadow: Veiled Strike moves to Assassination, Summon Shade moves to Assassination
- Siphoning: Cripple moves to Assassination
This would add 2-4% average crit chance to PvE DDs while not messing with with the other play types
2)What is the most useless offensive stat in PvP? Right; crit chance! So the other idea would be instead of version 1 we remove major berserk from CW and reduce the damage multiplier from Incap to 15% for 6s (same bonus - bigger uptime than DK Standard) and buff Pressure Points to not only work on Assassination skills but on all nightblade skills (similar to Sorcerer's Expert Mage). This way nightblade would once again feel like THE crit class.