Copied from the test server feedback: There are some issues game-play wise that are standing out to me from testing 4s and 5s the other night. The things I'm noticing is that pet spam will come back into the game. The damage mitigation and splitting you can get from a guardian and/or brick is significant enough to imbalance a team using no pets. Instead of a 5 target damage split, you could be dealing with an 8 or more way split depending on the number of pets summoned. I think this is counter-productive to the overall goal of ending stalled matches. I believe this is one of the only lingering problems from the past that these updates aren't addressing. The choices would be to reduce the health of these pets to be on par with the watcher's survivability or have them on a timed expiration that matches the duration/power cost. Summoning one pet that can survive an entire 5s match with monster damage does not make any sense. Ideally I'd like to have no pets in any competitive arenas, but that might be controversial. I'd definitely advocate restricting them in scrims though, most of us would love that. Another main issue is sorcery. It will be the new electricity/eburst spam simply because of the changes. Great HoTs, good single target healing and it costs nothing to pull these powers off in comparison to the others as Yziah pointed out. Nature, celestial and electricity either need to be buffed to match sorcery's healing potential or the power costs for sorcery need to increase by a significant amount. The reason why I'm singling out sorcery is because all 4 healers last night were sorcery, and preferred to play nothing but it. It is not balanced for this season at all. Additionally, the guardian pet is broken and has an endless CC effect as seen in the video below. If it'll have an endless CC effect, I'd like to not pay anything power-wise to break out. This currently does not make sense. Debuffs: I literally don't understand what's going on. If a tank debuffs a controller on test, the bolt indicating PoT does not turn red. The same is the case from when a healer debuffs a tank and controller debuffs a healer. These need to be worked out before the update comes out. Role advantages and confidence boosts: Some iteration of this needs to come back to reinsert a bit more strategy into the game. Arenas feel very rudimentary right now on the test server. Based on the gear stats healers are currently king. They can hit as hard as DPS and pull outstanding healing numbers with literally no threat. I believe support classes like controllers and healers should have their base prec/might capped either throughout the game or limit it to arenas and scrims. Tanks should have their resto/vit capped and DPS should have a cap on toughness/dominance. Controllers: All controller debuffs and PoT should ground a target. Breaking movement modes to address the issue of grounding doesn't make sense. Acrobatics can currently fly all over the map with little to no worry, it's a bigger issue than super speed. The vitalization role boost to a controller should come back at a weaker percentage at around 30% and should ONLY be removable by tanks. Healers: Similarly, healers should regain their role bonuses similar to controllers and have it only removable by controllers. The damage potential, however, should definitely be capped as indicated above. Healers are the most imbalanced class in the game currently for arenas. Tanks: The cleanses need to be revamped on all powers. It should have the range and efficacy of instant power from controller powers. LoS cleanses doesn't make sense, it's a waste of power and an annoying part of the game currently. This would also be useful in PvE. Tank cleanses should remove counter role debuffs COMPLETELY, from all teammates, and should be the only class to do this. Toughness should increase based on role and be susceptible to being stripped away by healers. DPS: For the massive damage potential that DPS have, they should be a weaker class (as is tradition, sup Spytle?) like other MMOs tend to follow. DPS should receive a damage bonus in arenas only removable by controller offensive debuffs and should have a reduction in toughness/dominance on the role. The reason I want role advantages to come back in some way is because there is genuinely something missing from what I played the other night. I like the overall changes, I think it's going somewhere good.. but there's something missing. It's like giving me a super car with an automatic gear box.. when I want manual. Players should be responsible for their individual wins and losses, not which powers and pets stack best to survive a DPS race. It's silly, and this game is better than that. It just doesn't feel sexy yet, make it feel sexy.
I respect your opinion, but I'd like to see what you are talking about with the acro kiting capabilities. Last time I checked, the rock-assisted glide was dreadfully slow while in combat. Am I.missing something?
I have a suspicion he's talking about the grapple line you can get from glide along wall lines (even though it depends on..having walls). I'm currently SS but acrobatics has always been my favorite for pvp, especially after they reworked the movement. The increased grapple line distance and the glide up without depending on buildings makes it really flexible albeit not as fast as SS in general. I haven't compared the two yet, but I'm not sure if grapple works slower if you're in combat, and if that'd be slower than SS pre-nerf or not.
Please see below, you can spam this endlessly in arenas unless you have someone dedicated to permanently grounding the player.. Which is not viable at current power costs. This is worse than super speed in my opinion. However, I don't think you should nerf movement modes when the real issue is fixing grounding and power costs. It's creating a problem that you have to fix with a solution that degrades overall gameplay.
It works just as well as super speed flywheel before the nerf. I agree that all of the movement modes are balanced(Unless superspeed is nerfed) but the counter to movement modes is not. Soe needs to take another look at power consumption and grounding.
As for healing powers, Nature, Celestial, and Electricity need buffed a bit. This also means that Sorcery doesn't need a nerf, in my opinion. If the other powers were put onto the same plane as sorcery, competitive PvP would be perfect. I really enjoyed the 4s/5s we did on test the other day, being able to spike someones health like that was amazing. I don't think I've been in a 5s match where kills seemed as well-earned and satisfying as they were in those matches. (BOOM HEADSHOT) Again, the only thing that I think needs to happen is the buffing of the other 3 healing powers and the re-working of grounding and power consumption.
There is nothing wrong with guardian. It's the CC in the game that's broken. These pets are meant to be tanks in PvE and PvP. They do little damage and take up a power slot.
