List of Swashbuckler issues/enhancement requests.

Since the old post has faded away and is no longer being maintained I am starting a new one to keep our issues/enhancement requests listed for the developers. I encourage as much constructive input as possible from everyone. The more people support an request the better chance it has.
Post your issues and enhancement requests here and I will keep the main post updated. I have a similiar post on EQ2flames asking for input from those that are not able to post on the official forums, that is located here. Anything posted in that post will be moved here if its relavent.

Issues/Requests List

1. Inspired Daring Line: Request meet with Sundered Frountier AAs
   1. Casting time on this line is too long.
2. Epic Weapon:
   1. The damage proc effect should be changed from a DoT to a comparable DD.
3. Bravado Line:
   1. The "Dispels when target takes any damage" condition should be removed.
      1. Too many mobs have damage shields when render this buff ineffective in a lot of cases now.
      2. Proc rate could be lowered some to compensate for this change if there is a reason it cannot be passive at this point.
4. Enfeebling whirl:
   1. Casting time should be lowered to be in line with the Lucky Whirl AE line.
      
   2. The debuff effect should be changed to be more useful.
      1. Maybe an AoE Lung bleed or bedazzling steel type debuff (doesnt have to be to the extent of the single target version of these 2 abilities.
5. Hurricane:
   1. Upgrade this ability, increase the percentage and the the maximum number of targets the ability can effect.
6. Blame Blade:
   1. Add "If Target of Attack is Fighter" to this abilities debuff effect.
   2. Increase the duration of the debuff.
7. Wisdom Line:
   1. This AA line needs a complete overhaul, it is no longer useful due to continued mechanic changes as a result of continuing expansions and updates.
8. Traumatic Swipe:
   1. As a result of continued mechanic changes this ability has become a mediocre damage ability with a useless debuff. The ability no longer effects the majority of AoE effects in raid encounters within SF.

Acknowledged requests:

1. None

Rogues have little to no natural spell crit which other classes enjoy, rogue procs should be changed in this manner:
1) Poisons used by rogues need to crit based on melee crit rates and not spell crit rates;
2) Rogue epic/myth procs and other weapon procs need to crit based on melee crit rates and not spell crit rates;
3) Rogue Offensive stance has a change to proc interrupt, that should crit based on melee crit rates and not crit based on spell crit rates;
4) Proc gear needs to either crit either on spell or melee crit rates (whatever is higher) or rogues should be given spell crit AA lines.

The issue with Inspired Daring runs deeper than just the cast time. It needs to be relooked, it used to be a decent boost in DPS, but now it's nigh worthless.
I suggest the following:
Keep the cast time the same, add a flurry chance and temporarly increase hurricane to 100% during the duration. This would make it slightly less useless, while not making it completely overpowered.
Other issues are Perfect Finesse and Ruthless Cunning, since the cap is drawing closer and closer to even heroic instance players.
Hurricane doesn't really need to be upgraded. But I (albeit, slightly apathetically) agree with the rest.

I wouldn't focus too much on the crit issue most of us are aware of, it seems they will be consolidating crit types into one critical type.
Aeralik:
This one is a bit more complex. Right now we have 5 types of criticals, Melee, Ranged, Heal, Spell, and Taunt criticals. Instead of having so many different critical types we would move to one generic critical chance. Take rangers for example. We need to create a certain amount of Ranger specific items to appeal to their effect needs. However, if you are grouping or raiding and your ranger has these items already then the item is often deemed as worthless. This also solves a number of other problems like introducing Taunt criticals, itemizing properly for bards and crusaders and a whole host of other issues.

I want to see Hurricane upgraded because its such an old ability and actually has room to be upgraded. It doesnt have to be a massive upgrade, maybe 10% and an increase to the maximum number of targets the ability can effect.

As far as Ruthless Cunning and Perfect Finesse, what are you looking to see as far as changes to improve them?

Maybe an accuracy buff on Perfect Finesse or a temp increase to CA base damage on either? I personally am pretty capped on Crit, Double Attack, Haste (when Bravado isn't down), about the only thing I'm not capped on is DPS mod but that depends on the group I'm in.

I have two big gripes with our class.
1. Mythical - Take away the Dot, the aggro transfer, the traumatic swipe and give me something that adds to my DPS. DD, Melee crit, DA, something useful.
2. Slight of Hand - Erase this useless ability and give me a backstab that hits harder than 2500 damage. We should have something that hits around 7500 @ level 80. Tired of being 2nd to Assassins because some dev decided that his class should be the kings of DPS.

Thunndar316 wrote:

We aren't meant to compete with Assassins on the parse that's not our job.
As for the Mythical it's all fine except for the Dot, change it to a direct damage proc.
Slight of hand is also great now I understand it. I love going form 90%+ hate down to 2 or 3 % with this ability.

We're still listed as a Rogue. A Rogue is supposed to be high DPS. Not a Shaman with a dagger.

Thunndar316 wrote:

We are high DPS, just not the highest.
It's unusual for me not to be in the top three zonewide for my raid force. I can compete happily with the Wizzies, Warlocks and Rangers just not the Assassin.
PS. And no I'm not in some hardcore raid guild.

Please keep things to constructive input in this thread, if you have an issue with our DPS give an example and a suggestion to fix it.

just thought about this .... what if they made "Tease" (which is our taunt + dispel for those who don't know) capable of dispelling mob cloaks, i.e. avatar cloaks, boss cloak effects etc. even if it's for a short period (10 seconds? 5 seconds?) imo it would make our class highly desirable on raids again, as of now aside from our dps (which isn't saying much compared to "T1" dps classes) we have nothing else really to bring to the table just my .02 as an idea that could substantially increase the role of a swashbuckler in a raid guild and revive the class

Something that going through my mind :

Inspired Daring: Doubles the dmg or the duration
Tease: How about putting a buff on the target (15 sec maybe), with the effect that an incoming taunt would be doubled
Bravado: Adding 10% flurry would be nice
Hurrican: Give Offhand a trigger chance too (maybe half of the main hand)
Disarm: Give us back 20m range or change it into a charm (i find it more fitting for our class)
Blame Blade: I would find better if the effect triggers from a taunt as from a CA

I suggest some of these are to good.

PS: I have Hail of Steel in my mind too, but ............ well ......... a new style/buff would have more potential as to make something good of it

Sarka wrote:

Inspired daring could use a damage boost or a duration boost, maybe not double but something would be good.
I know the Bravado request would be a big no...
Hurricane, they nerfed this a long time ago I doubt they will give it back.
Disarm, dont really use it enough to give an opinion on what we should do to improve it.
Blame Blade, I think the duration of the debuff on the mob should be increased, it has a 1 minute recast so increasing the duration to something like 20s would help.

I know, i know ........ its hard to improve Bravado without overpowering it, but i see only two choices to make it better.
1. Making it a perma buff without hategain
2. Increase Improvement/Penalties to some point when you can say it is a real double-edged sword (for example 10% flurry/50% hategain)
In my opinion, it would be more fun with the second.
To Disarm: Back in the days it was a really nice ability (20m range and a longer duration as recast), that i often used.
To Hurrican: It proced from offhand ? The only nerf i have in my memory was gu13 when it was nerfed from 100% to 50%. But maybe i have missed that, i started to raid at the end of DOF and mid of KOS i change to wis-line.

Sarka wrote:

I think with what I currently have up for Bravado would be sufficient, the hate gain is minimal. Maybe remove the "drops when takes damage", lower the proc chance some and make it increase hurricane % when its up.
I do remember disarm being longer duration and longer range. I don't see an issue with getting that back personally since its only a single target mez.
LU18 removed procing ability for offhand for any applied effect, only procs on the weapon will proc when it swings.

Only thing I wish they kept with was blue aoe for mythical =\

Yeah, my problem with Inspired Daring is that you have to wait to cast it until you are in battle. If you pre-buff and the tank doesn't pull right away (waiting for wards or a roamer to move, etc) it expires and you are toast. However, the long time to cast makes it negative DPS if you don't cast it before the fight. Make it in line with casting time for the rest of our temp buffs since it adds a comparable amount of DPS (actually less).
I would actually love to see our temp buffs go away completely and the rest of our abilities just improved to compensate. I love the fact that while the assasin and the wizzy are bursting all over the place, my DPS is nice and even. I would love it be even more steady. As the go-to class to feed hate to the tank, it makes sense to have our hate output as steady as possible.
2. 100% agree. Get rid of the DoT for a class with their own mezz. I don't know why this wan't done in the first patch after it was introduced.
It would be nice if they added a class modifier to Blame Blade so that the next Fighter hit would incur the hate gain, since every class and their brother wants to hit the mod these days. There are plenty of the CAs with class modifiers on them.
Stat debuffs: These are useless in TSO, even against heroics. I mean seriously 'lowers targets WIS by 56'? Why should I bother? Can we look at stat debuffs across the board and either increase them to be in line with the current non-linear game progression, make them a percentage, or else change them to some other kind of debuff? I love my MIT debuffs (kidney stab, bound) but the stat debuffs don't do squat against the current over-powered mobs.

I thought about this some more and I think Blame Blade would actually be better as a positional proc. There was a post on here a while back from someone wanting to duo with his GF or whatever, basically tanking as a swash. In that case the swash should get the hate proc off Blame Bade and position is the way to decide, I think, in all cases. Of course, this also means you will have to watch hitting Blame Blade, then spinning them mob into a Templar with Walk the Plank if you are flanking instead of directly behind.
Seriously, though with all the damage shields and other procs going off on NPCs you can't always guarantee the next thing the mob hits will be the tank. There are much better ways to ensure the tank gets the hate proc off this CA. However, this is definitely one of the more minor issues facing our class, as at least our hate transfer still works very well and far outclasses this minor ability. I try to get this one off just after the tank gets aggro, but I've haven't counted on it doing much good for 30-40 levels.

I Think it would be nice if

A) Hurricane was increased?
B) Daring was increased (duration would be fine)
C) THE WISDOM AA LINE was fix to be useful !!! take off the weapon requirements.. or the lack of a weapon...

Prisk wrote:

There is already a plan to change the wisdom line to be more useful, here is a link where Aeralik posted this.

GIVE US REACH BACK!!!!!
Ever since reach was taken away by SOE, swashbucklers have been dropped to the bottom of the totem pole in the scout department for pvp. On top of this SOE decides to add items to the game which allow OTHER classes to HAVE reach. The pvp item boomerang, necklace off of the avatar, and the charm slot item all give classes an improved reach ability. So not only has our one defining ability get taken away for pvp but now we must be weiry of other classes having this ability while we simply can't even use it....
Each class has certain abilities that define it.

Brigand- THREE class specific stuns, a dazing root, elite debuffs, dps temps, and not to mention cheap shot and walk the plank.
Assassin- 7 second pvp stifle, 5 second pvp root, also cheap shot, and assassinate which often times hits for over 5k in pvp.
Ranger- Knockback, 2 roots, 6 second recast 71% snare, and lets not forget sniper shot.
Troubador- Mesmerize ability
Dirge- Fear ability
AND finally the Swashbuckler.. What defines us??
Swashbuckler... Is it our temp buffs that take a total of 5 seconds to cast all of them?? Mesmerize ability?? A nice thought but the fact is it only lands about 40% of the time and has a 5 meter range (not to mention the troubador mez is about 100 times better considering duration/range/resists/etc).... What defense do we get when we're jumped by any other class??? The answer is NONE... Our one defining ability WAS reach. If we were jumped we could use our cheap shot and snares to skillfully kite other scout classes around. So I say what gives SOE?!?!?! You have the balls to take away our one great ability and then you go ahead and make that ability available to everyone else in the game.... Since the day you took that ability away I haven't talked to one other swashbuckler that hasn't cringed at the question, "So how do you feel about not having reach anymore?" I ask only that you consider re-instating our abilities so that once again we can compete with everyone else....