Like i said previously, i dont think FM intended a skill like Heightened Senses to be active ALL THE TIME. With the new nerfs casting Heightened Senses needs to be timed when you need to get away from being mobbed, or to take down priority targets like pults and rocketeers. It shouldnt be allowed to be active all the time like we had it before. In most games, cooldowns are being utilized. Since FM is trying a new system without cooldowns, these nerfs they implemented effectively adds a pseudo-cooldown to these sustained skills. There's also multiplayer which becomes more interesting when one cannot be invulnerable for the whole fight for example, or none of your units can take on the enemy units coz he constantly slows everything fighting for you.
Also, the post I made above only makes sense if we assume base weapon speed is similar. If a nonboosted elf dagger actually attacks twice as fast as a nonboosted scythe, THEN we've got something. But I don't think that's the case. Bascically, going from a 0% aspd weapon (ie scythe or pick) to a 40% aspd dagger, you lose about 10 damage, 10-15 AP, and 40-50% crit. This is nowhere near worth it. Each point in crit gives you 2x "extra" damage, and "3.5x" for elves in particular. Attack speed cannot make up this difference.
Its not all about raw damage... I use 2 fast daggers because it procs my Legendary Rune that gives 20% Vampirism/15% Wide Angle a TON. It also procs 'Warlock Blast' a ton as well, which is not effected by weapon damage because its value is static, but can be proc'd more often with higher attack speed, thus giving you a very consistent AoE capability. Right now I am trying to find epic armor that has high Armor and at least 12% Vampirism as well to make the build work even better In fact, I rarely use heightened senses unless I come across more than one Siege Troll. Most of the time I just carve through everything and pop Damage Channel on anything big like Mummys or Siege Trolls. Most of my mana goes to Elven Arrows, because 4 Elven hunters can clear the whole field in a hurry with that and Fast Shot...
I understand. There are a lot of potential upsides to attacking fast. Elves can proc warlock blast, dwarves can proc any of the 3 runes (which I actually use now!), and humans proc that one thing that everyone only put 1 point in because magic damage use to suck. I'm not saying it's useless, i'm saying it could be better balanced. I'm not comparing aspd to raw damage as much as I am comparing it to crit. As it stands right now, the game seems to see attack speed as being 2-3x as valuable as crits, which they clearly are not.
Seems like you really have a problem with other people having different builds than what you think is perfect.
It in fact does do more damage because of the volume of procs. Yes, you wont crit as often, however, with 0 stam cost, you can use all your stamina for running and attack endlessly. With a scythe, the cost is 20 to 30 stam per swing, so you will only be able to get 4 or 5 swings off while moving. You can't CRIT if you cant HIT. Plus, with dual daggers you hit with both weapons 40% of the time. So, make sure you factor that in as well. Also, AP is pretty worthless to an Elf with the first tier talents in Grandmaster.
My issue is specifically with mana regeneration during a skill. So they want to make it cost more, ok, so they want to make it shorter, ok, so they want to cut mana channel in half...mmmmm....ok. But to on top of that to prevent mana regen during a skill...well..I'm not ok with that. It really comes to bare in the case of Bark Armor where it is enacted for 55 seconds and even after 55s one's mana pool is still at the same level just after it was enacted. And that is completely ignoring other mana skills.
Yup... It's definitely limiting now. My caster knight is actually struggling in mana management since i dont often normal attack as i do "cast" more Sword Strikes, and with taunt active, the situation becomes a bit stickier without the mana regen.
What's your issue? Why so P-A? Rending blow is quite good now actually. I find myself skipping heigtened sense altogether though. Does anyone know whether offensive stance/counter blow/quickstrike works with ranged weapons now? Runic curse doesn't seem to work on walls anymore. Nice
Ummmmm.... no A max level Elf with all stamina talents only has 273 Stamina. Assuming you never run at all you will only be able to get 13 attacks off before just standing there. Seeing as the only thing scythes have over daggers is the higher Crit% but that is negated by the very slow attack speed as well as the high stamina cost. When you factor in procs like Warlock Blast that can hit 3+ targets the damage scales considerably higher off attack speed. Incase you didn't realize, in the same time frame, a scythe will only get 3 hits where as dual daggers will get 7. That equates to 2.33x more procs. So, when you include procs like Vampirism, Nature's Touch, Warlock Blast, AND Rending blow, the scalability is much higher. Plus you maximize Vampirism, because its a flat 20HP per proc, so running a rune and armor with it will yield 40% chance. This results in a flood of passive HP regen that no 2 hand weapon can match.
Damage Channel is good for giving a potentially crap load of extra damage... that is good in many scenarios. As for spells, again, we also rebalanced initial cost as well. In the grand scheme of things, the only way that this could be impacting players as much as they claim, is if they constantly were mostly using these handful of OPed duration abilities, essentially proving that they were in fact OPed to begin with as nothing else was good enough to spend mana on. Re: rune on elf, not sure how thats possible, but I'll check it out. What wave are you on? I dont think the changes were that significant, unless I'm missing some things with a specific combination of units. Yeah, so Bark Armor costs 65 mana, essentially - just about exactly what that ability is worth related to its power. Unless I'm missing something, there is only some very small differences between costing 65 mana up front vs cost 10 mana up front and 55 over time. In fact, in some instances its better this way. For ex, with only a 10 mana cost up front, you can now cast bark armor and then immediately use another active skill or 2 because you have more mana in your queue. In the old way, the higher up front cost actually gives you less flexibility to use a variety of spells at the same time. Thats actually the ironic part with all these complaints. Remember, we greatly reduced the mana cost on most duration abilities (except the OPed ones like Juggernaught), so overall mana usage is more often than not on par with what it was before - people are blowing this way out of proportion. If you just do the math, except for a handful of abilities, you can use abilities at almost exactly the same rate as before, in fact more often in some scenarios as I mentioned above. Ultimately its more as it should be - if you want to be able to spam abilities, you have to go for a more magic based mana build, which means getting some additional max mana from druid for example if you're an elf. In regards to heightened senses, its duration being shortened isn't necessarily a nerf in this new system. Now it means that its overall mana cost is less. As it stands, mana channel was one of those things that allowed an offensive, half magic based class to really almost spam abilities. No other class could do that. And yes, it was that potent. There are also things that got buffed, which are conveniently not noticed Such as Grandmasters rending blow got a HUGE buff, to name one. Yes, skills are perks, not individually the be all end all... with 20 skills and multiple levels on each, they add up to create a cohesive character. We don't want players to cherry pick the 5 most OPed abilities from the 3 classes and call it a day, we want them to end up with well balanced characters and to think about the big picture. Its clear that some of these abilities were OPed if minor adjustments seem to be making that big of a difference. Re: axes, they weren't changed afaik... their overall dps is in fact a bit higher than a swords thanks to their innate critical attack %. Also, many of these changes actually BUFF lower level players, as the static damage increases tend to give bigger buffs earlier on. As someone else mentioned, attack speed is great for a number of things, including many skills and perks, and it improves other stats like AP and crit. Also, lower stamina usage goes hand in hand with attack speed, so its a double buff. And because stamina also affects your heavy attacks, it actually is a big deal (scythe for ex, has a lackluster heavy attack). It also depends on your build... if i am decked out with damage skills and +damage perks, I would much rather have +attack speed to get a bigger damage buff from those skills than a weapon with +raw damage. Again, same with critical... critical stat becomes better only if you're decking yourself out in pure damage or get that elf skill, otherwise, base damage is actually slightly better. Also, elves are the only race with increased crit damage, so yes, if you go that build you will be more reliant on critical than on attack speed - is there something wrong with that?
if you are using a 2h Bow then you cannot block. Offensive stance requires you to have a full block bar and Counter Blow is after a block. From what I can tell Quickstrike and Counter Blow are for melee weapons and Offensive Stance is a flat modifier that should* work with 1h/short bow.
Exactly There are a LOT of different things you can do, and we tried to make this game so that it was always more about how you wanted to build your character and play, as opposed to "this is right/this is wrong." Prime example right here of how an attack speed build can definitely be viable. But then again, if you build a different way, so can raw damage, or high critical. And thats not even including the other important factor of your army. We always wanted it to be that if you wanted to specialize in something (like AP for example), you could then focus your army on raw damage output, for ex. Also, we're going to let the update sink in for a bit before we do anything. There are a LOT of changes and for anyone to claim OPed or UPed right now I think is way premature, especially when looking at things across the board, and as a whole. Again, no one is mentioning any T3/T4 buffs at all for ex, and just seem to be focusing on the nerfs on the low level T1/T2 abilities - which I'm glad to see actually. It means that these abilities that everyone was previously focusing on (which was stupid for early tier abilities), are now probably more in line with what they actually are: low level perks.
Don't WS and ARM both refer to block rates? Yes, I've been running around the past hour with a pair of 40% aspd daggers with both elves and dwarves (they seem to benefit the most). The increase in % based procs are definitely a boon; in particular, like I mentioned rending blow is great stuff. Rending blow is not too useful with higher damage/crits, so it masks the lower dps of the aspd weapons. @Master_Quack14: You're comparing dual wield daggers to single wield scythe. I think a better comparison would be dual wield scythes, but like you said stamina could be an issue. However, if that's the case, there are 8 damage 45% crit 1 hand axes with like 8 STA if you want to make comparisons off those. Can you confirm if nature's touch works with melee weapons? I could never tell. @FM: I think the general complaint is more in line with the fact that the skills just aren't possible to use anymore. I won't disagree that the skills were OP. All of them. It wasn't just juggernaut, or heightened sense, it was everything. It was bark armor, it was holy shield, it was vengeance aura, it was heal for christ sake. But simply, I don't mind nerfing them, but with the current change it makes using actives not really all that possible. In a sense, you're forced to resort to skilling passives because you simply cannot use more than 1-2 actives. You can't have a toolbox of abilities and pick the correct one. I'm all for balancing, but you just can't use the spells anymore (and it's not due to balance). I know you said "some classes aren't meant to be casters", but it seems like most classes are reduced to passive normal attacking heroes that rely heavily on passives. It's hard to standout. Juggernaut is 60 mana for 20 seconds. I'm totally down for that ratio if that's what you're going for. But something like 15 mana for 5 seconds makes it usable and maintains the same "power". I think lower mana and lower numbers across the board should make the actives more viable.
Also I've run into an extremely strange bug. I crafted armor with +25 2 hand sword damage. I went to forge it with another armor. Now basically every time I load up the character screen, the "2 hand sword damage" becomes a different weapon. It'll do this nonstop. It's axe damage now. Bow now. Spear. ...
@FM I love the changes from a ton of percentile modifiers to flat modifiers because my Elf was Dual Wield since I started, and it just got better! I would like to see Vampirism changed from a flat 20 to a percent of your HP. This would make it scale significantly better. On my 300HP Elf it is amazing, but, for my 1000HP Human it is not even a viable option.
