Berserker class issues thread post Velious and GU 61

GU 61 had some positive changes, but there are still several outstanding issues, that have to be adressed to bring the class into an adequate state.
Current top issues

• Design of the the defensive abilities: The defensive effects are mostly direct heals and thus very inefficient, if your healer is a Shaman or in raid content in general
• Non-pyhsical damage: Berserkers have almost nothing to deal with non-physical damage spikes, only Perfect Counter on a 4 min timer, which is nowhere near enough
• Adrenaline: In it's current state it's pretty much a failed ability, extreme costs combined with limited usefulness
  
• Berserk proc: With the current dimishing returns curve on haste/DPS there's hardly any gain at all from this class defining abilty
• AOE autoattack: Beserkers have an abdundance of AOE attack effects, that all don't stack while the effect is itemzied more and more, granting a gain to everyone but Berserkers
• Juggernaut: The ability still has mainly effects that were useful in T7, but are no longer useful since T8 and all that with an inappropriate defensive penalty
  
• CA damage: Beserkers used to excel at melee damage and paid for it with weak CAs, now the melee buffs grant almost no gain, while the CAs stayed weak

Detailed list of problems and possible solutions
Defensive
Adrenaline

• There is no correlation between the cost of the spell and the benefit. Every single ward on you will reduce the heal amount, so the usefulness of the reactive heal will be vastly reduced by a Shaman healing you. If the spell works depends on a random proc, if you have wards on you the spell is doing nothing, yet you have to pay 1/3 of your power for it.
  The 50 % heal should be split, for example into 25 % of damage healed and 25 % of damage reduced. Or 10 % reduction, 40 % heal for physical damage and 50 % reduction for non-physical damage. In exchange the recast could be increased to 3 minutes and the duration reduced to 20s.
  Also the taunt proc should be allowed to crit again. Using the taunt will drain 1/3 of your power and this cost is not balanced with the threat amount you can generate with Adrenaline Rush.

Ward of Rage (SF AA)

• The ward is too tiny to be of any use and the ward amount can't be modified by potency.
  The base ward amount should be increased to 500+ and be modfiable by potency.

Blood Rage

• The heal proc will mostly heal for nothing because you are at full health and have wards on you.
  The heal should be replaced by a ward, so that the proc can help even if you have wards on you. Possibly the effect could also be changed to be triggered by all damage, not only melee.

Perseverance (EoF AA)

• The AA conflicts with Executioner's Fury (KoS AA). When your health drops under the 50 % and Executioner's Fury triggers the heal of Perseverance could immediately dispell it.
  The heal should be replaced by single stoneskin trigger.

Dragoon's Reflexes (KoS AA)

• You can't cast CAs while the buff runs, so you are basically stiffled for up to 20 seconds. That is not fun. All healers got their self stuns/stiffles removed, because it was considered bad design. Other fighter's avoidance buffs even increase their damage output.
  It should at least be possible to cast CAs for Warriors. Also the buff should make you strikethrough immune for the duration

Offensive
Berserk

• This effect used to be class defining. But since KoS it is easily possible to cap haste and dps and since that expansion the necessary effort to reach the cap is either nonexistent or greatly reduced with every expansion, because every year there are more buffs, more procs, more adornments, more gear, more AAs to get haste/DPS mod. Even with the new dimishing return curves for haste/DPS the gain from Berserk is almost nonexistent. There is nothing beneficial about the Berserk effect except that you need it to make Adrenaline, Vision of Madness and Unyielding Will work. It's also worthless as group buff.
  The Berserk effect should receive some additional effects that are not easily capped or not capped at all, eg small amounts of flurry, potency, crit bonus, reuse speed, cast speed, accuracy, strikethrough, hate gain or autoattack multiplier. In the scrapped fighter revamp 2.0 the Berserk effect would have differed based on the stance. This would also make an interesting addition, eg the def stance could add strikethrough and increased hate gain while Berserk and the off stance crit bonus and accuracy.
  The Berserk effect from the EoF AA tree should also receive some additional effects. Otherwise it was a pretty pointless change to turn it into a shorttime group buff, when it doesn't buff anything for the group.

Juggernaut

• Wikipedia says, that a Juggernaut is "a literal or metaphorical force regarded as unstoppable". An EQ2 Juggernaut is easier to kill than a non-Juggernaut and you get a tiny DPS boost for that. Crit chance can be entirely capped by gear. So you get small amount of CA damage for the weak Berserker CAs and 5 crit bonus (from AA) and you have sacrifice mitigation, avoidance and HP for it, a very bad trade off.
  The offensive components should be updated to be beneficial with the current combat mechanic, eg by adding a base autoattack multiplier modification or crit bonus instead of crit chance. And then it should be reevaluated if the gains are good enough to justify penalties. Otherwise the penalties should be removed.
  Also the spell name, duration and recast would make Juggernaut a great candidate for a "Berserkerish" defensive ability, some kind of "super Berserk" mode. Instead of making the Berserker easier to kill the effect should make the Berserker harder to kill. Eg a Bolster-like effect, that increases HP and size would fit very will with the spell name and could deal with the fact, that Berserkers are the only Fighter without HP buffs. Another possibility would immunity control effects (stun, stiffle, root, mezz) for the duration.

AE autoattack

• Since RoK Berserkers can permanently reach the 100 % AE attack cap as innate ability with the mythical weapon. But Open Wounds hasn't been changed to adress that fact and still buffs 100 % AE attack, as if it had an effect. The same applies to Dragoon's Cyclone (KoS tree). And there are buffs from other classes with AE attack and items have AE attack. All these buffs offer no benefits for Berserkers and the ways to increase AE attack chance are increased with every GU.
  The obvious fix would be apply the same mechanic like from multiattack to AE attack and to turn all AE autoattack above the 100 % cap to AE multiattack. Another possibilty, that requires no mechanic changes, would be to simply remove the AE attack chance from Berserker buffs. Whirlwind could become a massive area damage proc instead of an AE autoattack buff. And the AE attack chance on Open Wounds could be removed and instead the damage effect could be signifanctly improved by a factor of ~5. This way Beserkers would benefit from items with AE attack chance just like every other class and it would also help with the weak CA damage output of Berserkers (see next point).

Combat Arts in general

• Compared to others Berserkers always had rather weak Combat Arts, but compensated that with their offensive buffs, that boosted their autoattack damage. Before you could easily cap DPS and Haste, the Berserk proc was a great boost, before you could cap crit chance, Juggernaut was a great boost, before every Fighter could cap AE attack, a 100 % AE attack buff was a great boost. But these times are all long gone, every Fighter can cap these abilites without being build around those buffs like Berserkers. Berserkers have no more an edge on melee buffs, yet the CAs remain on the same weak level.
  Either the Berserker offensive buffs should be updated to boost more significantly autoattack damage. Or the Berserker CA capabilites should be reevaluated in comparison to other Fighters and brought in line with them. The base values of the CAs should be increased or secondary effects (taunt components, damage/threat over time components) should be added.

Destructive Rage

• GU 60 changed the spell to buff multiattack. GU 61 introduced dimishing returns on multiattack with a starting point, that high end raiders can already reach. This makes the buff pretty useless for them and in the foreseeable future for most people.
  The buff should receive some effects, that are not in dimishing returns. For example, there are Fighter raid buff for 5 % better heals, 5 % better spells and 5 % better CAs. It would fit perfectly if the Berserker raid buff would increase the autoattack damage by 5 %.

Misc

• EoF AA tree
  Enhance Body Check, Mutilate, Maul, Demolish, Head Crush are all meaningless enhancements.
  5 % more damage per rank should be added to all of them
• Cyclones (EoF tree)
  The effect improves the casting time of all area and encounter damage spells, except Stunning Roar, the effect with the longest cast time, that would benefit the most from an improved cast time. The spell should be included.
  Also the effect adds permanent +5m range to all spells. While there are certainly situations where this would be helpful, there are also lots of situations, where you don't want your spells to have enhanced range, for example fights where you split the nameds and adds and don't want to hit the wrong target with hate position effects. Or in general the game engine has problems with large AEs and mobs will odds through walls, floors and ceilings.
  It should be possible to turn the range enhancer effect off. Preferably only the range enhancement or otherwise the whole Cyclones effect.

Bugs

• The small damage effect on Open Wounds is not affected by the CA damage enhancement of Juggernaut
• The initial damage/taunt effects of Insolence (Insolent Gibe/Assault) are not affected by ability mod, although the spell has a cast time and the effect is not a proc.

Class Foci
You could delete 9 of 10 Berserker class foci and nobody would notice it. The Rampage focus is the only decent one. Effects like Focus Controlled Rage, that averages on +3 block while there is a permanent +7 block adornment; Focus Berserk, that adds the same amount of c/s/p skills like a treasured adornment, but not permanently or Focus Wall of Rage, that increase mitigation of Wall of Rage by 15 % can't be taken seriously. These effects shouldn't be reused and should be replaced by proper effects.

Great write-up Bremer! Couldn't have said it any better. You put alot more effort in writing this post than some of the people who destroyed this class in DoV.
Real Adrenaline covered up alot of the defeciencies this class had before. It was probably created as an easy fix rather than go through and revamp the entire line of buffs for this class. Fake Adrenaline(post-nerf) is completely and utterly worthless. I got maybe 5% heal out of my total heals parse from it. And, I was constantly using it since I was spiking like mad. Battle frenzy has become our only survival tool and that's an aa and was only used sparingly before DoV!
So, not only is adrenaline worthless as for survival the threat component to it is nerfed as well, ie., it won't crit. A squishy tank who's threat generation doesn't crit is not a tank at all. Is there a message here?!?!
If you want to be useful, especially in raids, betray. They either don't understand how this class is played or what purpose it serves. Until a new dev comes along and "gets it", play this game as a guardian, that's the flavor atm.

Agreed, great thread on the things most Zerks are thinking of since the launch of this expansion.
Sadly I don't think SoE will listen and will just point out that we have some nice AA's. Note to SoE, AA's DO NOT define a class. They are after all "Alternate Advancements"

Almost forgot about the taunt proc. I added it. Unfortunately, even without crits, it's still the best part on Adrenaline...

I know raiders don't care about this, but berserkers are the only fighter sub-class that is missing the avoidance buff after the stats consoildation. It does make a difference for low level zerkers when the avoidance from agi was taken away and no buff to replace it.

Unfortunately I can't provide much feedback on that topic. But I think that as long as you don't ask for raid balance you have very good chances for fixes as a Berserker. Just make a thread in the right forum (here or general gameplay)

Bump. Maybe it's a fruitless hope but for once I want a dev to actually acknowledge a non-whining, reasonable and well thought out post. Seriously, it is frustration like this that has caused people to quit in the past. Fix us SOE!
We are not asking to become overpowered, we just want abilities that are in line with current content and not ones that were well suited years ago.

Splendid post, thank you for putting all that together.
If only SoE had a class dev that understood the classes. Or had people that understood a single class that they were in contact with.
Feels more likely they'll post which class in any given archetype we should all be playing, seemingly overwhelmed with choice.

+1
Nice post and some very VERY vallied points made there.

Bump
Very well thought out and well put.
We don't ask for much, the suggested fixes are very much needed in today's game. Guardians got hooked up and now it is Berserker's turn.

Bremer wrote:

I know this is a trivial one and shouldnt bother me as much as it does. But i beleive this issue irks me the most. Maybe its becasue it has existed since Kunark (LU40) which released on November 13, 2007 if i remember correctly.

I agree it doesnt look good. It really does look like our poor Zerkers have taken a right battering since Dov.

Hey guys, thanks for the thread!

We've got a bunch of quick fixes for these issues on the way. They'll be live by GU60 at the latest.

Most of the changes are pretty straightforward and some are exactly as suggested here, but I did have a question regarding the Death's Door change. I put it in the detrimental effects window, but in order for it to show there, it has to be an uncurable curse. Will that cause more issues than its worth?

EDIT: Looks like I have it working so it does not display near your name, and thus won't confuse healers.

Great news.
But I think that Death's Door as curse would confuse the healers and some scripts involve uncurable curses. I guess it's not possible to have it as detrimental effect without icon without a code change?

Xelgad wrote:

Glad to hear a response on this, and here's hoping the fixes work!
Ideally, it'd be best if we just didn't have to worry about Death's Door anymore. But that's perhaps a little too wishful in thinking. How about some other detrimental type? Would incurable trauma interfere less with encounter scripts? Also, there are times when the detrimental window can also be full of effects, so much so that you cannot see the debuff. Putting the detriment as a 'top display priority' buff and mantained buff might be most ideal.
That way it doesn't mess with the healers and it's easy to find. Assuming you can set the priorites to do just that.

Update: Looks like we may have it working without it displaying as an incurable effect

That's great. That's where exploding heart should be, then.

I know this may sound obvious, but please take this into consideration when coming up with the changes:

1. Don't balance zerkers for raids and break them for groups
2. Don't balance zerkers for groups and break them for raids

And making raid geared zerkers good at groups and raids doesn't count. Heroic geared zerkers should be viable in groups as well once the changes take place.

Also, as others have said, nice writeup Bremer. Thanks for taking the time to put all this together.

Xelgad, can you give a time frame for these changes? I guess quick fixes doesn't mean it gets hotfixed. So what's the GU schedule? Test server end of April, Live servers end of May?

honestly, any changes need to get on Test ASAP - and if good, go live ASAP.
being the tank most pushed out of raids, really sucks.
our utility is junk, DPS and haste are a mile above cap, we only offer a tiny 5% reuse to the raid, and 3/4ths of our defensive buffs are pointless.
juggernaught has kinda gotten a second life, with the uncapping of crit, but that still doesnt translate to much of anything in actual use, as the DPS increase is so small, its hardly even noticeable, unless you just truely have horrible amounts of crit.
the nerf to adrenaline was to severe, for a class with almost nothing to rely on against hard hitting content, this made a already kicked around class, even more looked over.
if theres Truely any hope going to the berserker, do it early in the expansion - not at the end.
I want to enjoy every aspect of this expansion now, not 3 months from now.