In general, ZOS makes balance changes way too infrequently. Balancing is an iterative process, and it's hard to converge on a solution when you only iterate a couple times per year.

There should probably be monthly balance patches in between major updates. That would allow us to get real balance, instead of long periods where obvious balance issues go unaddressed for months or years, followed by large changes that overcorrect and produce new balance issues that also go unaddressed for months or years. More frequent updates would allow ZOS to make smaller individual changes and achieve balance based on real data instead of relying on inaccurate spreadsheet balancing.

Faulgor wrote: »

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

In general, ZOS makes balance changes way too infrequently. Balancing is an iterative process, and it's hard to converge on a solution when you only iterate a couple times per year.

There should probably be monthly balance patches in between major updates. That would allow us to get real balance, instead of long periods where obvious balance issues go unaddressed for months or years, followed by large changes that overcorrect and produce new balance issues that also go unaddressed for months or years. More frequent updates would allow ZOS to make smaller individual changes and achieve balance based on real data instead of relying on inaccurate spreadsheet balancing.

Unfortunately people were crying about too many changes, so now we are stuck with suck for years.
And it's not like they made changes as frequently as they should have before.

I think most people were complaining about too many excessively large (undesirable) changes, and ZOS misinterpreted it as too many changes more generally. If anything, most of the problems from that time could have been resolved by more frequent smaller changes and timely course corrections when changes went wrong, instead of the even less frequent updates that we have now.

It's easy to complain about "too many changes" when every change you get is a massive adjustment that forces everyone to completely rework their build while also creating new problems that then go unaddressed for years.

Yes, buff it 5% to make it an even 20% buff to dots. Dots base values are very low and % buffs use the base value of the skill. Thus a spammable doing 10k will get 1000 from 10% or 2000 from 20% a large difference. However Dots which do 1000 to 2000 a second or 3000 to 4000 every 2 seconds only see 100 to 200 or 300 to 400 dps gain from 1 second at the same 10% buff. Though the total value of the skill might increase a large number seeming to make it even with its burst damage counterparts, when divided out for its delivery system it becomes quite a small buff. And damage is rated by DPS or damage per second....not damage per 20 seconds, thus why you can stack dots with huge buffs and see little dps gain.

After buffing the bonus, simply make it castable without a target. There is no need to get rid of the animation. If you can cast it before a battle it puts the buff there, and then your recasting 3 seconds before the buff ends making sure the buff is always active. It puts a tiny bit of skill into using it and lining it up right in your rotation. But not enough of a challenge to make it suffering for new, casual, or lower dps players. This will also elminate the bulk of the clunkiness the skill carries....you could up the buff to 24 seconds (like mage guild and DK skills) as to make it work very pretty in a 20 second dot rotation with recast time.

The only other way I see making it viable is to make it a static skelly that rises at a target location and then explodes...as to make it viable for ranged builds while the stamina morph moves with the player instead and chases target, which is better for stam or high movement encounters. And of course move it back to its burst damage.