Hi all, I found myself with some spare time so i downloaded the PTS so I could tackle a current hot topic: Stamina Templar.

There has been a lot of feedback regarding it, so I decided to try it myself rather than accepting the hearsay being passed around currently. As a disclaimer, I am going to say some things in this post that disagrees with some of it, but others I agree with. Don't worry, I have CMX reports to back up my findings I'll link directly below.

Some housekeeping before we get into it. Both parses on live and pts were done with perfected relequen, deadly strike, and selene's. Deadly strike outperformed lokkestiiz on target dummy even pre-nerf. it definitely does now. Same traits on everything across the board. The only thing that changed is that bloodthirsty now gives scaling weapon and spell damage below 90% versus a flat % increased damage below 25%. Also i forgot to equip poisons on the pts parse. I equipped poisons and went to parse again but PTS server was being laggy and selenes wasnt proccing on cooldown and the parse ended up being 85k and I just didn't want to do it again. Fight me.

It's looking like a pretty noticeable nerf.

This Parse is from the current Live Servers.

This Parse is from the Currrent PTS

burning light nerf is awful and will completely ruin everything

While it's almost certainly true that this burning light change will be heavily felt in pvp where it's incredibly rare to land all 4 tics of jabs per cast, it actually appears to be a buff in pve. Maybe I got super unlucky on my live parse, but even on my scuffed laggy 85k parse burning light still did over 10k dps. My live parse it only did 9200. My burning light procced significantly more on PTS than live.

Jabs/Sweeps timing adjustment

Reading the patch note for it was confusing. it reads "Reduced the tick frequency of this ability and its morphs to 333ms, down from 300ms, to better sync its damage with its animation

I wasn't sure i they meant increased, or reduced from 333 to 300. I'm still unsure exactly which one, but it doesn't matter. weaving and animation cancelling jabs didn't really feel any different. I just did my rotation. The window where you can light attack weave, queue up another jabs, and have the final tic be pushed out may be smaller, but what I found with an earlier parse is if you slow your light attacks to guarantee it comes out, it results in a dps loss because light attacking on cooldown is too valuable.

Maybe a minor nerf. my jabs dps from live parse was 33k, on pts it was 31k. Still, if the timing change is responsible for this dps loss, it really sucks, but i doubt it. If the timing on jabs damage tics were 300 before, it still would have taken 1200 ms to push out the final tic, which is longer than the time in between light attacks.

The dps loss is probably from the overall nerf to dps associated with the shadow mundus, and the smaller hits from the old sub25% bloodthirsty, nothing else.

Ritual of Retribution change sucks

Yeah it does. They took away its healing and gave it a stacking damage buff to compensate...except as you can see my RoR on pts did 200 more dps than on live. No thank you, please give me the healing back. As many have stated, stamplars class based healing is already weak compared to other stam classes. RoR healed for less HPS than something like crit surge or siphoning attacks, plus we had the caveat that we needed to stand in it's circle to get the heal. yes, it has a quite large radius but combat is rarely so stationary, even in pve, that we just often don't get the choice of standing in it.

reee empowering sweep cast time

Ree indeed. Cast times on ultimates are unfun. They often bug out. If you have to block or roll dodge something, they don't come out and consume your ultimate.

Overall, I think most of the damage nerf we're seeing comes from the shadow nerf as well as the relequen nerf. my rele did 2500 less dps on PTS than it did on live, and the shadow mundus, even with the new divines, only gives a maximum of +17% crit damage, down from +19%. I still think it's better than thief and warrior, however. But I believe these nerfs are going to be shared across all stamina dps.