I am, to say the least, flabbergasted about the mechanic decisions that are made in this game. I have been playing this game since before Desert of Flames launched. I am the leader of one of the top raiding guilds in Norrath. I try to be positive as I have committed so much time and energy to this game. But some of the mechanic decisions that are made - especially this one - boggle my mind to a point of utter and sheer disbelief. To start, I enjoy the content in the contested. Tons of stuff to do. The actual scripts on the named encounters are great. My concern - wards do not apply to the surge damage from the nameds or the new trash buff they implemented. I am not talking about bleed through. I am talking complete bypassing of wards. It would be one thing if the wards were bypassed by a specific mechanic in the buff (such as if you have a det you get no wards; or ae "blast your face" doesn't get stopped by wards but can be avoided by something else [distance/ae block etc]). But when the primary force of damage from any encounter is not blockable - I just don't understand. For example: That is from the T3 genie. Invasive Species is its surge damage. No wards are applying at all. By comparison, Invasive Species contributes to 67% of the mob's outgoing damage: Apart from the mob's auto attacks, the surge damage is the highest incoming damage: To make it worse, now EQ2 decided to incorporate this same unwardable (Shaman Primary Mechanic) mechanic on trash: Now, the solution is "don't pull so many." And that is correct. Being more careful is always an option. However, that isn't the issue. The issue is that a healing archetype's primary method of healing is completely invalidated by the most prevalent damage done by the mobs. Maybe the answer is simply that they can't balance wards. This may be. They have tried throughout the years by increasing health pool of players (TOV); to implementing bleed through. Maybe they have given up on it and just said the damage is not wardable "suck it shaman." I mean if this is the decision, i guess this is the decision. But I will tell what is not fun. Having your primary abilities for your class do absolutely nothing. ** Apparently two of my images didn't paste into the page - the 67% number came from an ACT image with the breakdown and the following paragraph was an image of the mob's top incoming damgae sources. @DEVs, How is this even a thing? If you don't wards to work then at least tell us, but you just severly hampered a healer from being in here, especially solo healing.
They also seem to completely ignore 100% damage immunities, like the Guardian epic spell death save, for what it is worth. Making the only saving grace to the mostly useless epic spell completely useless in the contested.
I've observed the same when starting the heroic 3, my wards were not appearing at all in act until I reached very high stats. I believe what we see is the end result of this stupid oppressive sand buff, mechanicaly I believe it acts as a substraction of all our stats (cb, fervor, potency, abmob) but also as a hidden substraction to all our wards by a fixed number that is increased at every tier. The problem is most probably that the substracted value applied to all wards is way higher than the amount of our wards that we could get with the entry stats we have. Let's say our wards are at 10T and the oppressive sand is reducing all our wards by 10.5T, then we see no wards appearing in the parse. Then we increase our stats and our wards goes other 11T then we now effectivly ward by 0.5T. Except a few wards that seems to bypass this mechanism for some reasons, As long as oppressive sand is not actively monitored and revised regularly to meet real values we are doomed. Combine with the fact that max hp have not increased in the same range that the damage we received, we now have only 2-3 healers class that could heal effectively everything and all the others that needs to be overgeared or required specific group setup to run high end content. You could try to exchange crit bonus bardings to potency barding and see if you get better results, it did help me when starting heroic 3.
It's already been answered by a DEV in DM's that it's intended to bypass wards, (the surge that is) which is complete BS as this is the primary tools for shaman.... So i put it here to see what the other DEV's think that read it and maybe fix the fact that surge damage ignores wards... something that is complete just ignorance of the healer's mechanics.
H3 sustained damage (Invasive Species III) can be modified, unlike the other heroic versions, so they should also be wardable. This fix is in now for Takish contested. The damage from the trash buffpackage is scripted, and is giving me problems with wards so still looking into that. In the meantime, I've lowered that damage a tad.
The scripted damage on the trash buffpackage is removed and you should see the change as soon as the mobs respawn. In the next update, they'll trigger damage through a more reliable system.
