There doesn't seem to be a consistent theme followed with the weapon balance when factoring in Mastery Attacks. Could you please find out and let us know if Mastery Attacks are suppose to hit harder, the same, or less than non-Mastery Attacks. Because right now it is inconsistent and a bit confusing.
Two-Footed Slam is stated to be single target in Shiny's thread but on Live it's a cone AoE tick. I use Shield a lot now in PvE/PvP and didn't notice it till I started using it.
From my observations and usage of WW, 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 tap hold is single target and 6 / 7 tap hold is frontal conal.
To Mepps, please note this confusion applies for PvE. New players using powersets that need weapon precision attacks atm to dps in PvE eg Earth, Sorcery, Nature, Elec use WM attacks and get confused when they notice that non-WM attacks like Flip Slash, Smokebomb etc hit harder, yet the tooltip explicitly states that WM grants greater weapon attacks. Right now in Pvp, as noted by many, it looks inconsistent. The tooltip needs to be updated quickly so new players don't get confused.
Since WM was first introduced the combos leading up to a weapon mastery into a different weapon were given increased damage when specced into weapon mastery. I believe this was always intended.. Yeah. the masteries are supposed to hit harder than the non-masteries, so it's confusing why some of them do and some don't
I thought it was the opposite. The mastery versions were lower in damage because they had a strong WM move, and the extra crit magnitude it gets, that could be chained into afterwards. The non-mastery version holds do not have a WM combo after it and so they were higher in base damage (and they could be clipped) to make up for the lack of WM. I think Tunso referenced it in this post, even though yes I do realize is a PvE post talking about PvE subjects but it details the differences.
Mastery combos originally did more damage. After GU47, they did less damage. I believe the intention was for mastery combos to do more damage in all circumstances, but as far as PvP is concerned I think they should do the same damage. The same combo should do the same damage regardless of whether mastery is unlocked or not.
Personally, if its a 70% reduction as noted by others, I am fine with it even if it seems too big a reduction. Switched to HB after using only 1-H or MA primarily in PvP ever since starting PvP. Will be glad to see those weapon switchers dropping both HB and/or Shield. I will be rocking HB for a bit unless something changes for my favourite an dsecond favourite weapon in DCUO.
Is this reduction applied only to 2 tap hold Uppercut Mastery from HB? Is the same applied to the Uppercut Mastery from MA (2 tap hold hold)? Non-WM Uppercut is unaffected?
Nerfing the mastery combos makes sense.. but if the reduction on uppercut was 60-70% for mastery and 30% for regular that seems a bit excessive. Handblasters is a short combo weapon, a broader sweeping reduction that applies to weapons with multiple combos won't apply particularly well to it since all there is is uppercut, a lunge and blockerbreakers. A 40% on mastery and 20% on regular will make it viable. By the way, shouldn't shields 6 tap hold split? Because currently it hits for 11-13k on a single target. That damage should be AoE or conal like smokebomb from MA or dual fury from dual wield. After these changes hit handblasters, literally everyone will just switch to shield. The flat % adjustments are just OK, but you have to factor in what is single target and what splits. Apart from shield, we don't really need to reduce weapon damage anymore. At this point it's turning counterproductive relative to the support classes.
Sure. I'm just isolating what the issue is. It's different to say we missed a change or something went wrong with it, versus fine-tuning the numbers, which wasn't what this initial update was. Masteries were reduced by 70% across the board, while the long combo non-WM were reduced by 50%. These reductions undo previous buffs and then go further to bring the damage in line with what feedback dictated.
That's fair. Is there going to be an eventual fine tuning of the weapons? People in the general population seem to want weapon diversity but top-end PvP never really had that. We've always narrowed it down to about 2-3 weapons max. Right now on live the best weapons are the ones that deal the best single target damage. This includes handblasters (pre-nerf), rifle and shield. Previously viable DPS arena weapons were: martial arts (elbow-drop is still good, could use a small buff), one-handed, dual wield and brawling. These are out of the picture purely because a) they don't have a good single target combo and b) the AoE damage from those combos splits too much and takes too long to get off, especially with CC effects. There are options to bring weapon diversity into the mix but we'd have to change some of the combos around. For example: flip-slash for one-handed could be made single target again. Launching uppercut from brawling could be single target. Stunning swipe from dual wield could also be single target. Add these changes plus the already viable weapons and keep the weapon damage for DPS within that 4-6k range and you have instant diversity just by tweaking combos that are otherwise useless now. Our health pools are too large to compensate for AoE combos, we'd just end up breaking something down the line.
Shield's 6 tap hold is conal. I was incorrect in assuming it was single target. Also the non-mastery handblaster's uppercut combo wasn't reduced and it doesn't need to be.
