Stats Revamp 1.8: Nature

Hello! As mentioned before, many experimental changes have been made made throughout the stats revamp. We try things, see if they stick or not, and make decisions from there. The previous version of Nature reflected some changes we wanted to try out. As with some other areas, when our experimental changes are met with mostly negative feedback, we decide to move a little closer to what we have on live. This is the situation we find ourselves in with Nature. This update to Nature brings the power set a little closer to what we have on live, though still adjusted for Stats Matter standards and with some upgrades.

Oh! Before I forget, we are going to be taking a deeper look at shapechanges and give them a little bit more spicing up. Please let us know how you feel about these changes and what you think. We will be keeping an eye on things.


PHEROMONES: Returned to 3 stacks (Bloom, Cross Pollination, Metabolism)

• Blossom - Increased cost to 250; No longer consumes Pheromones but continues to exploit for group healing
• Flourish - Now a burst heal; No longer consumes Pheromones, but spreads and refreshes them
• Roar - Decreased cost to 150; Now consumes Poison for burst damage and Pheromones for burst healing
• Bloom, Cross Pollination, and Metabolism healing has been adjusted to account for unique Pheromones

POISON: Returned to 3 stacks (Vine Lash, Briar, Serpent Call)

• Vine Lash - Deals single target Poison damage over time
• Briar - Decreased cost to 100; Deals single target Poison damage over time, with an AOE burst component
• Serpent Call - Deals Poison damage over time
• Savage Growth - No longer consumes Poison
• Harvest - No longer consumes Poisons, but spreads and refreshes them
• Thorn Burst - PBAOE burst; No longer consumes Poisons, but spreads and refreshes them. These effects will not show until next build

Very nice improvements here, now just bring back Savage Growth esq ability for healing please . Will report back soon how it plays out.

This is a step in the right direction, however, you need to return savage growth back to the HoT stack. Bloom is a terrible heal because it roots and it's vulnerable to interrupt.

The metabolism heal is really bad. I still see myself gasping for power. The changes are still very underwhelming. It heals for like 30s/40s.

Bugs:

• Metabolism still doesn't heal the caster but does applies the pheromones
• Roar sometimes ticks a fourth time, I would proc this every other roar but not consistently, I would think it's giving itself a pheromone stack but when looking at the combat log, it's just another entry of roar healing.

Feedback:

• Changes to Roar are decent, rewarding if you can get all 3 stacks off and not get interrupted.

• Flourish, either you've made this ability even worse or it's bugged, before 1.8 it gave a burst after applying pheromones as well as a HoT, now it just gives the burst which is pathetic for the cooldown and power cost, at CR201 I was averaging 2.5k-3k non crits. I don't see any leveraging of pheromones, just a singular small burst. It refreshes the pheromones as intended.

• Blossom leveraging the healing doesn't seem strong, at a stack of 3, the average was 2-2.5k healing, if this is the only healing that gets applied to the group Nature is going to struggle big time.

• The healing reduction for the 3 abilities mentioned doesn't seem to take too much away from ability strength.

Thoughts/Concerns:

I think you guys are trying to be too careful around the pheromone system and it's really hurting the power set, despite how you're trying to regulate the pheromone healing it's not powerful enough to contend with Electric or Celestial right now. If I recall, you reduced the duration from 40s to 12s, this therefore has effected the powers the leveraged the healing and has really hurt the strength of it.

Blossom leveraging pheromones needs to be stronger, Flourish needs to be buffed, remove the pheromone refreshing but let it exploit the pheromones like Harvest does on live and increase the base strength of Flourish, I don't understand how you can have this ability, a 6CD 300 power cost ability which only heals for 3k max at CR201 and then have a power like Celestial's Consume Soul which has a 1.5CD 300 power cost which has a burst at a similar strength as Flourish but then massively stronger HoTs following it. There are so many inconsistencies in the strength of the healing it's hurting what you're trying to accomplish by revamping powers that didn't need it to this degree.

Switch how Blossom and Roar interact with pheromones to compensate for the increased strength (let Blossom consume and Roar exploit)

Savage Growth needs to be re-implemented, it won't solve the major issues Nature is facing but it will help; Savage Growth and Consume Soul are basically the same ability so just make it so again now, instead let Savage Growth be a pure HoT with the slightly less strength as Consume Soul on test now accounting for the pheromone system

Overall, the issues nature is facing is due to the reduced potency of it's pheromones, nature was the compound ability to which the pheromone stacking was the source of healing. This has been reduced and I think it's power hasn't been distributed enough to the rest of it's abilities. Instead of buffing everything, pheromones need their power back through duration so the leveraging of pheromones can become stronger.

Also after Sorcery receives its update, I will highlight more companions of inconsistencies between power sets, the Consume Soul ability blows many things these other power sets have out of the water but there are more issues...

Flourish is healing enemy combatants.

DoT damage is really low compared to other powers. It seems pretty lackluster. The DoT stack needs a significant buff.

First impressions and Feedback: (I'm no Nature Expert so.. excuse me If I say anything wrong)

• The Poison Dots are too weak. I was expecting them to be really powerful; but at this rate the damage is so weak It feels like I can get better dps just by getting a PI going and setting up Voracious plants. If you guys really need a reference point for how powerful the dots should be, look at electricity right now; the dots do great dps on that powerset. I feel like Nature should come close to it.
• Serpent Call has bad targeting or something, I casted it against the AF Part 3 trash mobs during the seeing shades solo and it missed quite a bit. The enemy would be still be stunned, but there would be times when I needed to recast it because no yellow numbers were showing up.
• I like the pacing and setup that nature has, but the dot DPS aspect I still lacking compared to something like Electricity.

Hi there, I have to be honest and say that Harvest is doing ridiculously low damage, at 21526 might I get 2.600 to 5.700 hits , the 5.7k one is a crit ...

Shin-O-B have you compared healing out of Blossom,Cross Polination,Metabolism and Flourish versus similar celestial healing powers?

Dps wise it seems good.

Lol healer side my pheromones are healing the enemi npcs and metabolism wont heal the caster unless they use flourishis is metabolism intended to be that way?

Just speed up the DoT application and make the DoTs tick faster and nature will be fine as far as dps.

Flow changes that would make this work better...

Roar and Savage growth needs to change places... Not only is Roar lackluster visually... it's also awkward to use and combined with bloom .Grrr Why are y'all pushing so hard for Roar to be on our loadout?

Blooms animation is way to long... No one uses this ability for that reason... The animation time needs to be sped up to finish the animation in half the time.

I'll do a damage and heal # assessment later today.

All of this.

So from a dps pov im pretty happy, I haven't got into deep science with the power yet but from the few 2-3 hours i spent with it this is the best version of nature yet. Thumbs up

Some things i would like to see are...
1. The burst damage harvest does be brought up a bit, for the power cost the damage it does is a bit low.

2 The initial hits of vinelash and briar be brought up some. One of natures issues is setup time and if these powers had a better burst that would really help out. I'd say raise the power cost of these two powers to 200 and give the initial hit some more burst, don't mess with the dot damage though cause from my primary testing it seems to be ok.....i think, maybe just a tad low but i won't know for sure till i run more tests.

3. Serpent call. It would be great if this power had some kind of initial hit or a extra few dots at the beginning. Something to help with the setup cause just casting dots that do no initial damage is one of the issues why nature falls behind. And again please don't mess with the dot damage as it seems to be ok.

Those above things are my concerns as of now and are also things that have kept nature down in the past, long setup with no damage while setting up. Just some decent burst on the initial hits of the dot powers will take care of that. The burst doesn't have to be crazy hard hitting but there needs to be some form of burst on the setup.


I'm holding the rest of my feedback for a few days till i compare it with other powers to see where the damage sits but im pretty happy with how the power functions. Its back to playing and feeling like nature again. I used a variety of loadouts and they all got me to roughly the same place dps wise so it has good flexibility and i like that cause it makes crafting loadouts for different situations viable.

One more thing thats on my mind bring back savage growth as a healing ability please

Well, crappy is actually semi satisfied, so you know nature is doing a lot better

i'm afraid To try nature healing on the test server.. is harvest not a healing power anymore?

Nature is at a point right now that is untestable or not even something worth testing. It's a pile of horse manure. The damage is horrible and the healing is horrible.