Radiant Destruction

evedgebah · January 2015

I want to love this ability. It looks cool, does lots of damage, and addresses the Templar execute issue. However, the drawback animation and the global cool down at the bookends of the skill are far too high. I waste two seconds (I know it says 3.6 and a 3 sec channel), but its more than that practically. As it stands, I can't justify using the skill at all, even in execute scenarios.

Kevinmon · January 2015

This skill does 13,000 damage per hit in PvP. Absolutely ridiculously overpowered.

timidobserver · January 2015

Im not sure why they keep doing that global cooldown thing to Templar abilities. It makes focused charge pretty useless.

tinythinker · January 2015

Kevinmon wrote: »

This skill does 13,000 damage per hit in PvP. Absolutely ridiculously overpowered.

The damage output varies depending depending on a few things:

1. Max magicka and percentage of Max Magicka. As a magicka-based ability it makes sense that it scales off of this resource, but, it also scales off of how much you have left if you use the Radiant Oppression morph. If you are at 100% magicka, the base damage is scaled up 40%.

2. Spell crit chance and crit damage. Again this seems obvious, but if you are using Radiant Magelight you will be at 95% of potential Max Magicka, so it is a trade-off of potential damage for potential crit.

3. The target's health. The base damage + Max Magicka modifier can be amplified up to 300% versus low health targets.

So, if your character is wounded, and someone has a decent crit chance/crit damage multiplier with a full magicka bar and a large magicka pool, and they are using the Radiant Oppression morph, they can deal a lot of damage.

There are also new factors to consider for damage mitigation as well, such as the new scale for armor types and the way crit and crit resistance works. People posting here about PvP have been noting increased numbers of critical strikes/higher damage as well as the fact that player health pools have been reduced across the board. On Live 13,000 damage would be 1300 damage, which is a large crit but comparable to what some get with Snipe using a bow and not as huge as some damage reports that are coming.

Whether the increased number of crits/critical damage in PvP is a bug or just a learning curve for the new meta has yet to be determined. However, I tried hitting people with Radiant Oppression for a brief time last night, while having a large and full magicka pool and a really high magicka recovery rate to keep the pool topped off, and while some wounded players did take significant damage (meeeeeellllllt), a couple others seemed to just shrug it off like it only tickled.