These forums have been alight, even after the 50% damage reduction, with posts about huge damage and 1-shots (or 2-3 shots that give little time to react). Everyone's posts ask to nerf this ability, or nerf that ability. In the last week I've read multiple posts asking for nerfs to Snipe, Surprise Attack, and Crystal Frags. You guys seemingly don't mind the 20k+ DK heavy attacks/15k+ leaps, but let's just pretend that we don't want to be 1-shotted even by DKs for the sake of this discussion.

My suggestion is not to nerf the base damage of the above mentioned abilities, but to adjust the mechanics of damage modifiers in a way that does not "break" when min/maxing. There are many damage modifiers in this game - just to name a few: Mighty/Thaumaturge/Elemental Expert (CP passive, up to 25%), Empower (ambush, WB, might of the guild, etc), Death Stroke debuff (20% inc damage), Grim Focus (8%), Molten Weapons/Armaments (40%, up to as much as 150%). All of these modifiers share one very important mechanic - they modify your final damage value, after calculating all damage adjustments from resource pools and weapon/spell damage. This wasn't necessarily a problem early in the game when we couldn't very easily stack extremely high resource and spell/weapon damage values, and CPs were not further amplifying the effect.

These days, damage can be stacked to very high values, then modified by large %age values. Some of you might remember another game called Age of Conan, which crashed and burned early in its life largely due to a very similar mechanic. You could stack weapon damage gems in crafted armor, then stack % damage modifiers and 1-shot people. Funcom let the game crash and burn before adjusting things, but they did eventually create some restrictions to how much damage you could stack, and much more importantly they changed the way that damage modifiers function.

Here is what I am proposing: Make % damage modifiers modify your base weapon/spell damage that is granted by your weapons ONLY. As an example, let's take a 2her that gives you 1400 weapon damage and a 20% damage modifier. Instead of letting the 20% damage modifier directly increase your final damage by 20% (making a 10k hit into a 12k hit, for example), apply it only to the base weapon damage of 1400, making that 1400 into 1680, to be used in the calculation of your final damage. This would account for more like a 3-4% overall damage increase, and would not "stack" on top of already stacked values from min/maxing damage stats. Multiple %age modifiers should stack additively based on that base damage, rather than multiplicatively (in the example above, another 20% modifier would still only apply to the 1400, not the 1680).

Now I understand that this makes damage modifiers less valuable and it will change many builds, but I believe it is very important for the combat system in this game to be balanced. With the current system of modifiers, no matter how much you nerf individual abilities, there will always be cases where players can cause incredible amounts of damage, and other players who don't realize how the stacking works will be hitting like limp noodles and underperforming. Once this change is made, abilities that grant modifiers can be revisited, and class balance can be revisited. Anyway that's my 2 cents on the matter.