**Obsolete** Summary of GU51 Changes (As of Jan 27, 2009) - Image Heavy

Here's a quick summary/run down of exactly what's being changed.
For the following images, the spells on the left are as they are on Live, and on the right are as they are on Test (as of Jan 27, 2009). There are a few minor discrepancies with the numbers, largely because my test copy and my live characters have slightly different gear.
Keep in mind that several spells are getting consolidated and removed altogether, but spells that get merged will take the higher of the ranks (except Master II). In other words, if you have War Fury Master I, but Rouse Adept III, the new Rouse will be Master I after the merge.

Summary: Aggressive Nature + Berserker Rage + Abandoned Fury = New Abandoned Fury
* DPS and Haste are upped for Berserk portion
* Added +Base Damage for Berserk portion
* Increased physical damage taken
* Decreased Hate Gain
* Cannot apply taunt effects (Direct taunts do 0 hate. Abilities that are both damage + taunt do not apply the taunt portion. Unknown by me if threat procs from gear are affected.)
* Threat portion of Aggressive Defense is not applied
* Aggressive Nature AA is not applied
* Stance Mastery AA only removes the Defense penalty. It does not remove the hate decrease, damage increase, and taunt remover
* Added a 5 second cool down (this is done to prevent quick switching to Defense stance)
* With the new Rouse, if both berserks from both are up at the same time, Abandoned Fury berserk will overwrite.

Summary:
* Increased base casting time from 0.25s to 0.5s
* Decreased base recast from 20s to 10s.
* Significantly upped hate
* Increased power cost

Summary:
* Added a massive hate component

Summary: Instead of a percent gain, it's now a straight skill gain. This improves Defense, Parry, and Aggression on the defense stance.

Summary: Determined Will + Berserk Rage + Aggressive Defense = New Determined Will
* DPS and Haste from Berserk are reduced
* Added hate gain to Berserk
* Added base hate gain to the stance.
* Aggressive Nature applies to defensive stance, and the threat amount is increased (approximately doubled)
* Decreased Melee Damage Multiplier means your auto-attack does 30% less damage.
* Damage portion of Aggressive Defense is reduced.
* Stance Mastery only removes the Slashing, Piercing, and Crushing penalty. It does not remove the Melee Damage Multiplier decrease.
* With the new Rouse, if both berserks are up, it will take the higher of the Haste and DPS mods, and not affect the hate mod.


Summary: Since Bloodshower now taunts in addition to straight damage, the taunt portion gets modified by this AA as well.

Summary: Since the self berserk has been merged into the stances, the corresponding AA now modifies the stances. No change in effectiveness.

Summary: Since Rouse and War Fury have been merged, the corresponding AA now adjusts the appropriate buff. No change in effectiveness.

Summary: Picture says all. As of GU51 this will be one of the only ways to improve Taunt Critical Chance.


Summary:
* Hate is significantly increased. (5 position hate increase is due to the Mythical, and not part of the ability normally)

Summary: Dramatically upped the taunt amount (by about double)

Instead of a percent gain to the skill bonuses to the fighter stance, it's now a straight numeral gain. This still only improves Crushing, Slashing, and Piercing.


Summary:
* You must now cast Perseverance, much like Reversal. It stays active until you die, and self refreshes after some time has passed.

Summary: Rouse + War Fury = New Rouse

Summary: Added a large threat component. This ability CAN be used in Offense stance, it just won't apply the hate portion.

Summary: Slightly upped the threat amount, and gave it a spread.

Other noteworthy changes:
* Aggression now decreases resistability, and increases threat amount to taunts. The higher the Aggression, the better the resistability.
* If your Aggression is 10% higher than your target's, the taunt is unresistable.
IE: A level 80 mob has 400 Aggression. If you have 440 Aggression, your taunt is unresistable to that mob.
A level 88 mob has 440 Aggression. If you have 484 Aggression, your taunt is unresistable to that mob.
* According to the patch notes:
* "Hate gain mods will no longer affect taunt adjustments." I presume that means Hate gain mods do not affect taunts at all.
* "Area of effect spells and combat arts will no longer spread hate to encounter members when damage is applied." It means that damage to one mob in an encounter won't spread hate to the rest of the encounter recursively. It makes it harder to hold aggro, but it also means group members will have a harder time pulling aggro as well.
* Stances have a 5 second cool down. That means you can't instantly switch from O stance to D stance, you'll have to wait.
* Taunts can critical. You start out with a 1% chance to taunt, with the only current method to increase this being Executioner's Anger AA. In the future, Taunt Critical gear may be added, but not at this time.
* There is dynamic data in the UI for Taunt Amount Modifier. You can presume that in the future there will be +Taunt gear, much the same way that there is +Combat Art Damage gear.
* Just to re-emphasize, the WIS end ability ONLY removes the Slash/Pierce/Crush penalty from Defense stance, and ONLY the Defense penalty from Offense stance. It does not remove the melee modifier penalty, the hate gain penalty, and the damage penalty.
* Combative Rage M2 (the level 64 M2 choice) is more DPS than Relentless Rage Adept 3 (Level 73 spell).
* Master 2 choices are now: Frenzied Hits, Mock, Trample, Bloodshower.
* You can still dual wield in Defensive Stance; you are not locked into using a shield.
* A few spells have been moved around level wise.
* The mythical is unchanged.
* Concentration cost is altered. With all of our buffs going, we go from having 5 concentration slots used, to 3 concentration slots used. That leaves 2 slots open (specifically for items with clicky buffs that require concentration slots, like a few items out of Shard of Hate).
* Due to the buff mergers, rebuffing is significantly faster: Instead of having to cast 7+ buffs (not counting AAs), we only have to cast 4: Rouse, Relentless Rage, Blood Regeneration, and Offense/Defense stance.

Very nice summary. I had missed quite a bit in my testing time obviously. Interesting about Perseverance. I'll have to look at that more closely. It will be rather annoying if it's too long a refresh time.

Yeah, I'm not sure on how often Perseverance refreshes. My guess though is that it won't be uber fast like it was early in TSO Beta (ie: instantaneous), but more like every 15-30 seconds.

Great summary, thanks!

I know it's been tossed around but I'm not sure I fully understand the spell mergers. If I have Berserk Rage M1 does that mean I'll have both Off and Def stance M1's after the merge?

TumpieBrell wrote:

Yes.

"Perserverance is now a buff and works in a similar fashion to Reversal with a hidden spell that can only trigger once every 15 seconds" So instead of a passive buff that refreshes every 15 seconds you cast it now (icon won't turn grey like all other buff icons if casted) then it's a permanent effect that can trigger every 15 seconds.

Great post, thanks. It looks pretty solid to me considering the amount of changes.

Since bloodshower is now fairly integral to our role, I'd like to see it's hit bonus go up to 40% from 25%. We pretty much have the worst CA's as far as to-hit goes, so a bone here would be nice.
I'm also getting a 40ish% resist rate with aggressive nature vs. higher level mobs which is really annoying since it would actually be some decent AE synergy with provoking counterattack (you'd proc threat on blocks or on being hit). It's resist rate is so high however, that it's probably not worth the 5 points.
I don't think anyone is going to take the consumate defender/offensive prowess AA's if all they are doing is adding 1 point to skills....
Perseverence looks more interesting now, I'll be checking that out.

AoEs in general have a lower hit rate than single target attacks. This applies not only to Berserkers, but every fighter, mage, scout, and priest with an AoE attack or spell of some sort.
40% resist rate with aggressive nature should go away with sufficiently high Aggression, in theory.
I'd probably end up taking Consumate Defender, for lack of a better choice in that tree. More points in Parry/Defense also means I can focus my gear and buffs on it less. But also keep in mind that Consumate Defender adds 5 to Aggression (and Aggression gear seems pretty hard to come by), which not only decreases resists but also increases the raw taunt amount.

Here's how Aggression increases your taunt amount, using Mock (Master II).
400 Aggression - 4003-4892 Threat (Base)
408 Aggression - 4166-5092 Threat (20.375-25 Threat/Aggression)
416 Aggression - 4311-5269 Threat (19.25-23.5625 Threat/Aggression)
421 Aggression - 4392-5368 Threat (18.52-22.66 Threat/Aggression)
424 Aggression - 4437-5423 Threat (18.08-22.125 Threat/Aggression)
429 Aggression - 4506-5507 Threat (17.34-21.21 Threat/Aggression)
So in other words, it's on a diminishing returns curve, presumably all the way up to 520 Aggression (the hard cap at level 80).
Also, having less than your levels Aggression does nothing to your taunt amount as far as lowering it goes. IE If you're level 80 and you have 399 Aggression, it should be the same taunt amount as having 400 Aggression. But having 401 Aggression will be more taunt amount than 400.

Anyone else appreciate the irony that Aeralik insists on buff merging to lower buff casting on death... then they turn a passive spell(Perserverance) into a buff?

Airbornee@Crushbone wrote:

At least it's instant cast, instant recovery, instant recast!

Xalmat wrote:

I was more referring to the fact that, for example, Guardians have high hit rate single target attacks like Exact Strike (75% easier) and Decimate (100% easier). I know two of their AE's (Siege and Slanderous Assault) are also at 40%. I'm not sure where brawlers are in this regard, but 25% seems weak if they are attaching our threat to it, IMO.
Good point regarding aggression, it will be nice if it works that way with the proc taunts.

I wish Off Stance was more that +8% CA base damage. Zerks do maybe 30% of total damage from CAs (our yellows use autoattack damage) so this is really only a 2% damage buff while we lose 30% of autoattack damage (or about 20% of total damage) in Defensive. I am not including the bonuses to slash/crush/pierce because we had that already.

Airbornee@Crushbone wrote:

I seriously considered posting something about that change making it take too long to buff, but he ignores me anyway. Why waste good sarcasm?

I knowticed that the adept 3 Abandoned Fury has better slashing, piercing and crushing (49) then the new master 1 spell does (48 ). I knowticed that on some of the T1 and T2 shard gear that the heroic set has some stats that are better then the champion set. Other then that I am glad to see that Aggressive Nature is used in both the defense and offense stances.

Aggressive Nature, the AA, is only used in the Defense stance. Aggressive Defense, the buff, is used in both, with tweaks depending on which stance: Offense only has damage, Defense has damage and threat.
I hadn't noticed the reduction in SCP myself, but it's relatively minor.

So here's a question for you since you've been doing so much research and checking out the AA trees (thanks a lot, by the way):
How do these canges effect the Berzerker AA Bulking line that ends with the 'clicky 'zerk'? I assume that most of it is the same, but the top/first enhancement is to the berzerk spell and the third is the group berzerk spell. With these being merged, how is that going to work? I assume the third one (group berzerk) will stick with the new merger, but the top/first one (berzerk) is being split instead. I guess it could be a buff to both stances instead, but I doubt that since that tree emphasizes on enhancing the spells/coombat arts individually.

I believe the berserk enhancer AAs affect the appropriate buffs, but I'll doublecheck for you with exact details.
*EDIT* And here's your details (and it's been added to the first post)
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So yeah the appropriate buffs are being modified, and the AAs have been modified to match.
Effects are as follows.
Abandoned Fury, 0 AAs.
100% chance to berserk on death blow.
2.0 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
Abandoned Fury, 5 AAs.
100% chance to berserk on death blow.
3.0 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
Determined Will, 0 AAs
30% chance to berserk on incoming damage.
2.0 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
Determined Will, 5 AAs
35% chance to berserk on incoming damage.
3.0 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
Compared to Live, Berserk Rage, 5 AAs
100% chance to berserk on death blow.
35% chance to berserk on incoming damage.
3.0 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
Rouse, 0 AAs
5% chance to berserk on incoming damage.
3.0 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
50% chance to berserk on death blow.
Rouse, 3 AAs
8% chance to berserk on incoming damage.
3.6 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
53% chance to berserk on death blow.
Compare to War Fury on Live, 3 AAs
8% chance to berserk on incoming damage.
3.6 times/minute to berserk on any successful attack.
53% chance to berserk on death blow.

Xalmat wrote:

Thanks. I've just seen a lot of AA updates posted, which is great to know so I can plan accordingly. You're awesome.