Changes coming in next patch that will affect TLPs

The testing showed only a 5-6% drop in DPS from the AA nerf. Do you have numbers or testing on what banestrike does? or testing that shows the DPS nerf was bigger?

The thing is banestrike doesn't affect raid targets, and it will be some time before we can really parse to see how often it will proc. I doubt it was tested in all circumstances on test.
Some cool titles go with slayer achievements too, so it will give us plenty to do when raid targets are all dead, and spread the population out more.

It is also a way of having new required unlock goals for tlps going forward.

Believe the #s are
@50 - 150DD (3.33dps)
@65 - 300DD (6.66dps)
@75 - 600DD (13.3dps)

Assuming you manage to proc it on cooldown (45s) which you are unlikely to actually do but lets assume for calculations sake. At 75 most melee could reliably sustain at least 2k dps, so 13.3 is around 0.665% of an increase in dps. If you want to throw in chance to crit and whatnot you could maybe bump that number up to 1% but it's still not close. This is also assuming that you can actually proc banestrike on the target.

Again not complaining that Banestrike is coming in and the melee changes are for the most part justified, but I don't believe one caused the other.

Yeah no way there was enough testing done. Hard to do that when you are given a week notice. Most changes in other games would have been on test for a month or longer.

With it not affecting raid targets that could be their plan to make those a little harder by nerfing the innate dmg AAs and then restoring that DPS via banestrike for group content. Seems like a lot more work then tweaking MoTM but who knows what the whole story is or if there are complications.

Thanks. Yeah its a nice addition regardless. It would just be nice to have the dev team or product team share with us the direction and you know, get feedback. But who knows, maybe they haven't made the leap to agile software development and need to buy more Jira and agile coaching.

The salt over melee nerf cracks me up, should have never been boosted.

The hugely inflated DPS issue isn’t limited to pre-GoD raids. Mighty buff doesn’t exist on GoD+ content so modifying MoTM wouldn’t impact those expansions worth of content.

I’m still a bit disappointed the AAs weren’t simply flagged to unlock in TDS but I guess this slight DPS reduction will have to do. I would like to see some EXP increase on TLPs impacted to account for slower kill rate and accelerated server progression though.

From Zam for the original Banestrike

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/eq:Slayer_System

So at lv60 that is 230 free damage every minute.

That is more DPS than you will get from weapon procs atm on Coirnav, and for every player in a group.

Lets take a small example. A low level 30s group. Mobs have ~2k hps. Killing 1 mob every 30 seconds (probably would count as fast killing group)
So of the 4k of damage, 6x60 damage (360) will come from various banestrikes which you can't time.
So at low 30s if everyone has banestrike, exp will now be faster.

It doesn't work so well for the solo player who might take 1 minute to kill each mob, so 60 damage of 2k is only ~3% of the DPS, but if you take longer, it is a bigger percentage.

If you have parses for higher level exp groups show us the math

so will non epic monks still have fists as bis at 60?

I did some testing of bane strike and there isn’t 45 second cool down on the proc. Had it proc twice within 10 seconds. Thing is, once you get the bane strike ability (I suggest skunks, they only take 5 kills) it will proc. You can see the proc rate on the test dummy, it just doesn’t do any DMG. So testing the proc rate is not difficult. It seems to have a decent rate, and it not limited to once every 45 seconds. Also, at 60, when I did get it to proc on the skunks (yay for super low necro weapon skills that allowed the level 1 skunks to live long enough to get a proc off) it was procing for 300 dmg.

The proc doesn’t have a cool down. I got it to proc twice in 10 seconds on the test dummy.

Yeah I was thinking the proc rate would have to work different and the proc values would have to change, because triggered boxing 4 toons back in early RoF I was killing 1 mob per minute or so, but the kills themselves were only taking 30 seconds or less, so applying the damage to a fixed dps over 60 seconds would be wrong... for the old system.

If the proc has been increased from 230 to 300 then that is great, and it being random, maybe it is like other procs 1-2 per minute but random.

Also I was wrong, my experience with it was beginning of RoF, when I killed 15,000 Iksar otw to being 1st or 2nd to lv100 on Vox. From looking at some of the slayer achievements, it is quite likely it WILL work on raid mobs as well.

Hopefully we will find out in an hour. This sounds promising though.

I think the previous version specifically said it would not work on raid mobs. Unsure if the new proc version will or not.

I don't think anyone is arguing against the innate aa's ever existing on TLP's but they were and coupled with MoTM it's simply what everyone has gotten used to. Had there never been such to begin with, there would be zero feedback now.

The complaint is simply why change it? Why now? It is only an annoyance. I understand the necessity to change it for live servers but how hard would it have been to leave the boosts in higher levels but don't touch lower tiers. It does seems silly to argue but when you put the amount of time into a game/hobby to simply have in your eyes, your hard work reverted, it will upset people.

The other side of this is that since we didn't know it was coming, by the time it hit the test server, it was too late to do "before" parses. Unless people happened to have test dummy parses from just before the change, it makes it pretty difficult to compare before/after accurately.

Are you bored today Machen?

??

I've posted like 3 times. No more bored than most days!

Are you asking why the innate aa's need to be pulled? Do you not see the big class imbalance by keeping those in game?

My level 50 shaman on Coirnav just got banestrike granted last night. Hurrah!

Question: How to best get it to activate? Is there anything I'm missing to get it to work better?

If I melee, it will activate. I tested it to make sure it was working. However, as a shaman, I do not melee much in group or solo. I'm busy with mana regen utilizing the Cann-Dance or preserving hitpoints for it.

I use DOTs for damage. The DD portion of our DOTs did not look to activate it. DDs are so extremely mana inefficient that using those for banestrike activation seems rather pointless and self defeating in purpose. Plus, DDs break root, and when root-rotting solo...

It's nice that the banestrike feature was added to all servers instead of being locked away. However, at this point, I'm thinking that the new banestrike auto proc is a fancy feature that just isn't useful to shamans (yet).