With the changes to headshot and assassinate so that they work on some current content, doesn't the shaman "feralize" line of spells actually lower the damage done? The spell effects increase melee damage done to the mob and decrease the mobs accuracy, but also change the mob "body type" to an animal. This seems to prevent headshot and assassinate from working. Shouldn't this be changed? I don't think it was considered during the retuning of the assassinate abilities, as these abilities weren't really in play for non-trivial content when the feralize/skin to plant/etc. spells were introduced. These spells basically penalize only rangers and rogues, but berserkers can receive the full benefits.
1.) Unless doing a tough named, Feralize is a waste of time and mana. It can be easily argued that it's a waste on nameds too since most don't live for longer than a minute and a half anyhow and a 4% reduction in accuracy is like 2 missed hits - if that. If you need an extra 10% DPS... have the shammy cast two fast DoTs instead of feralize. That's like 5-10k DPS right there. 2.) HS, Decap and Assasinate - looks nice on a 30 second parse... combine an entire mission / group session and it's like 1k DPS if that DPS wasn't overkill... which it is when it usually fires. 3.) No one cares about headshot, assassinate or decap. Seriously... it's a parlour trick that no one cares about. *IF* it fires, it's like "Oh that was nice"... but then you think "Why is this ranger not meleeing?" and kick him out of the group lol. It's not often you're fighting mobs that have the right requirements, and even less likely you're grouping to kill sub level mobs. Really... SOE should just refund the AAs and give each of those classes one more rank in Combat Fury and spell casting fury. Or another extended <insert burn here> AA so it lasts a couple of ticks longer.
I agree that Ferlize is a waste of time mostly. 2. HS, Decap, and Assassinate even though not spectacular are still an increase. 3. Lots of people care about it, just because you don't doesn't mean it is irrelevant. Yeah if your ranger is so worried about it that he is only ranging then it could be a problem, but decap, assassinate, and even headshot can trigger in melee range. Increases are increases and many were very happy about the changes to the skills and how they are far more useful now in more current content than previously.
I agree that the main "intended" effects of feralize/skin to debuffs are marginal. I am more concerned with the "unintended" effects of the changed body type. It didn't matter before because HS/Assassinate didn't work on current content. Now they do. The spells were not designed with this taken into account, and they now "break" the way HS and Assassinate work on current content.
I'd like to see enchanters get a spell called "Anthropomorphicism" or something to that effect, that allows us to make any mob seem human. Vegans and tree huggers will love us, and rangers/rogues will want us around.
It was a parlour trick in it's old form - exploited for power-leveling for profit. Now it's a "tool", but best used wisely. One good example of HS being a tool in it's own right, is if you catch Xioulos Scouts as the "middle set" of MoBs in the Gribble HA "Scouting Ahead. (You can check this on "track" at the beginning). If they are indeed Scouts - they are blue and therefore subject to HS. If I see this, I save the discs for that section, pop an "archery burn" and pretty much mow them down. The burn itself is plenty of DPS, and under those conditions the HS procs go up a bit - making it all the faster. I've gotten 7+ HS procs out of that section of MoBs several times. -Rat
