Storm of Steel - outdated.

Discussion in 'Swashbuckler' started by ARCHIVED-tatercake, Jun 30, 2011.

  1. ARCHIVED-tatercake Guest

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    Thanks for making this ability bow friendly. It's nice to be able to yell out 'Storm of Steel!' once more, but back then used to at least be somewhat close to thrown weap auto attack. It's funny to use though, it can take you from a 200k parse on trash mob A to a 15 - 30k parse on mob B. Looking at just solo buffed / using on a training dummy, the 30s duration of Storm of Steel is equivalent to essentially 9 seconds of bow auto attack, and thats without using any combat arts eitehr. For this test I did not use any temporary effects / knowledge book castables, solely static buffs / stats with item & innate procs.
    If we could please get this ability revamped or replaced with something else, that'd be awesome. The name sounds cool, but everything else about it smells like a ratonga's armpit.
    Thanks,
    Kat

    edit ~ accidentally put Hail of Steel in topic name
  2. ARCHIVED-Baus Guest

    There are several ways you can go to change an ability like this. You can take the direct approach and make it a normal CA that hits decently hard from range, or you can change it into a raidwide beneficial ability such as an extreme debuff (one noticable) or completely revamping the ability completely to being a short term range dmg buff or something along those lines.
    With the current state of the game being so range dps heavy, giving rogues some ranged debuffs of some sort would definitely be a welcomed change if the debuff itself was actually effective. Would love to hear some more comments about a change such as this and where the rogues would stand about it. Our debuffs are outdated and need to be brought up to speed in some way or another.
  3. ARCHIVED-tatercake Guest

    Would be cool to see viral / chain debuffs, massive debuff on main target, every tick infects surrounding targets with a slightly lesser version (intended to debuff main mob / infect adds as they spawn). But, this would require debuffs actually mattering / being noticable...
    Straight forward way, would be just make it ranged AoE like rangers hail of arrows. Alternately, just make it a temp buff, swashy main abilities are mostly temp effects that either buff auto attack or proc damage on combat art. Or some sort of debuff that stacks with itself, for example: 5min recast / 30s duration, on successful melee hit lasts 3 seconds, debuff target auto attack modifier by 0.02.
    Honestly I forgot about this ability for the longest time. It's worthless, and yet they took the time to make it bow castable too. The only practical use for this ability is that one raid mob that must be ran around in a circle, if all of the following applies:
    A: out of ammo
    B: nobody can spot you any ammo
    C: your healers are bad and you can't trust them to heal as you chase the mob to melee
    Other than that amazing situation happening on the circle run mob, this ability isn't worth the cast.

    Regardless of how they do it though, this ability is way too outdated to the mechanics. No damage based combat art should lower your DPS 67%.... that is just stupid.
  4. ARCHIVED-tatercake Guest

    [IMG]
    more Storm of Steel goodness!
    30 minute run, using Storm of Steel when ever it was up, with ranged auto attack in between. Factor is 5:4, 30 seconds of Storm of Steel to 24 seconds of Auto Attack. Again, no abilitites were used during to improve the damage of auto attack, nor other combat arts that would of made it even more dps to not use Storm of Steel.

    This ability really needs to be redone completely, auto attack did 3.6 times more damage while used in same parse as Storm of Steel, if I hadn't used Storm of Steel at all, I could of done approximately 24,000 dps over all, before even factoring in the the lost Combat Arts as well...
  5. ARCHIVED-Maddawger1217 Guest

    Not that we will see a large change to any of our ranged attacks now that SOE has desided it was time to give back the use of our bows.
    Hail of Steel has been a turd so long I think I placed it on the farthest rear page in my knowledge book so I would not look at it and giggle, that attack was cool when it was our version of the triple shot back before we seen the 1st x-pack. Then some nutjob of a Dev. thought it would be neat to have diversity in the game for all the scouts and we got the short end of the straw all wrapped in a poop glazed protector.
    I have no trouble with classes being unique and diverse, but when a class gets splashed with a freash coat of paint, it does not mean that everyone is going to like running around in that color.
    The fact that Hail of Steel not only roots you but also stifles you out of any type of auto attacks, combined with the lack luster damage it accomplishes just goes to show no swashy ever should ever have a reason to use it. I personally have not used that attack in so long I forgot about it till the Drunder x2 boar fights and that crazy amount of aoe damage anyone even close to the mob recives.
    The only thing outside of changing Hail of Steel completely may be to just make it a buff that gives the Swashy some added dps to each ranged auto attack (based off of the damage Hail of Steel already produces) for those rare few fights you need to set back ranged just to keep from eating the wards,reactives, and heals going to the tank.
    Maybe even going so far as to add a ranged debuff to reduce damage to party members within a certain distance of the targeted mob. This way a Swashy at range can still add some debuffs that help the course of the fight. I do not condone a Swashy ever going ranged if it can be avoided (thats a rangers job lol) but if SOE is going to keep implamenting a few fights that everyone outside of the tank needs to be at a ranged position then all classes should be able to add something to the ranged fight table other then straight, slow, boring dps.
  6. ARCHIVED-tatercake Guest

    It would be cool if they'd do like... anything to this ability. It has multiple layers of crappiness to it...
    -> daze: cannot auto attack ; auto attack is 3 to 4 times more dps since the MA change came in this xpac, and will be even more when dps mod / haste are uncapped
    -> stifle: cannot cast other CA's ; similar damage per hit, but you can use two CA's in the same time it takes per each hit from Steel Hail, which means more damage - and also more procs.
    -> root: cannot move ; prevents adjusting for mob movement, if tank loses agro - KICKBACK - have to move.
    -> the damage: in all, it's not too terrible solely looking at damage solely on a one on one basis for CA's. But when you add in fact that this ability replaces ALL OTHER outgoing damage, it becomes comparing Storm of Steel versus a 30 second combat art rotation. This is where Storm of Steel's damage goes from 'tollerable' to 'laughable' - you can't complete Dance of Metal chain with it, you won't proc counter attack as much, you won't trigger daring attack as much, you're missing out on debuffs, and if the tank is depending on you for hate transfer, you're letting him down too.
    -> the duration: This ability is WAY TOO LONG, 30 seconds? Things can change on a fight in under 5 seconds. A tank can die, AoEs can stack requiring you to cast advance warning, mob could turn towards raid and you get hit by frontal because you couldn't move.

    Did I miss anyhting? But yea, essentially every part of this ability is bad.
  7. ARCHIVED-Synj Guest

    Primarily swashbucklers are a close combat, (dps 1st, debuff 2nd, utility 3rd), melee damage dealing class. Any ability that roots and stifles a swashbuckler is counterintuitive to the nature of the class. We need to be able to move, for flanking attacks, rear attacks, jousting out for aoes, falling back to aoe protect the group and moving to spot x for certain encounter scripts. All this can't be disputed and I'm sure the devs are aware of this.

    The real question is what do they do with it? Storm of Steel is currently a ranged attack, however, it doesn't necessarily need to stay that way. The options are nearly unlimited to what they "could" do with it, but, what does our class lack atm?

    Our first role is dealing damage, and we are weak on ranged dps without a doubt. With the strong presence, and the ever increasingly more prevalent unpreventable aoes, due to scripting, we definitely could use more ranged dps. A boost to our ranged dps would make our class much more acceptable for a greater number of encounters. Here's a couple ideas to start.
    1) A temp buff that increases the ranged auto attack damage mulitplier (think combat mastery for our ranged, make sure this doesn't overshadow rangers)
    2) A ranged CA that does high damage without any roots are stifles. (could be a blue or green aoe as well)
    3) A static buff that adds damage procs to ranged attacks.
    4) A combat art similar to the dirge turnstrike. While this doesn't fall under the "ranged" theme, this ability would allow us to maintain our dps by staying in a bit more.

    Moving on to our 2nd role, most of our debuffs associated with our combat arts are "nearly" redundant, save for a select few, but most of those come in the form of AA's. With all the new mechanics, (crit mit, crit bonus, crit avoidance, stat changes, hit point debuffs etc.), we have a lot of options where this ineffective combat art could be converted to an effective debuff. A couple ideas to start.
    1) Debuff that reduces a mobs crit avoidance.
    2) Debuff that reduces the mobs trigger chance. (Think hexation, defiler ability)
    3) Debuff that reduces the range of the mobs aoes.

    Our last and smallest role we fill is utility. Storm of Steel could be anything in this category. Some ideas..
    1) Temp group buff to one or all of the following: dps mod, melee skills, haste, ability mod, mutliatk, etc.
    2) A second aoe prevent? /shrug

    I think it's a good idea to spitball some ideas around, and hopefully come up with some we all like, including the devs.
  8. ARCHIVED-tatercake Guest

    Storm of steel has an 'umph' to the name of it, sounds like a cheesy anime or something 'special attack' you know? Like the protagonist in an epic fist fight or something is like 'STORM OF STEEL!!!!' in an over produced sound, and all of a sudden it's a flurry of kick butt.

    Anyways, spitballin!
    DPS:
    -> Something like perpetuality(?), as we hit either our (a) auto attack base goes up a small bit (0.02 per), (b) flurry improvement, (c) Crit Bonus, (etc.)
    -> maintained buff proc, triggers a random effect that will last 10-15 seconds:
    35% chance: improve flurry chance by 5% (10s)
    20% chance: target will take 5% more damage from all attacks (10s)
    15% chance: apply debuff: 25% longer weapon delay (10s)
    10% chance: transfers 50% of caster's hate to target of hate transfer (immediate)
    10% chance: reduce group's recovery speed by 20% (15s)
    05% chance: improve auto attack base multiplier by 0.10 (10s)
    05% chance: remove dual wield delay detriment (10s)
    Yea, just listed random crap on that one :D
    -> Temp effect (5 seconds duration / 240s recast), records all damage dealt for 5 second duration, divides by 2, and AoEs the immediate area (~10meter range) for that value.

    Debuff:
    -> Temp buff, 5 sec duration / 240s recast, on combat attack reduces current target's health by 1% (CA/AA hits) self stacking, lasts until target dies and places an immunity to this ability on expiration of the temp buff.
    -> ranged CA, reduce target's Multi Attack by 50% for 15 seconds (effects epics).
    -> CA, reduce target's potency 10%
    -> poisoned mist - spawns on caster's location, the closer to the center an enemy is, the more allies' debuffs will affect him.

    Utility:
    -> maintained buff proc, chance to improve group's recovery speed by 25%
    -> temp effect, improve potency of all hate based abiltiies by 100% (doubles taunts / detaunts)
    -> single target group only buff: grants raid wide siphon (something like 3% transfer from everyone in raid)
    -> group buff: improve group's multi attack by 20% or something (/shrug)


    Well, there's my input for randomly thought up stuff! Wee ~ put most thought honestly into the 'what you gonna do?' proc buff lol, like the avatar wrist. To sleep!
  9. ARCHIVED-Synj Guest

    There have always been alot of encounters where you need to joust out, or even stay out and range. And it seems like it is becoming more prevalent. I would like to see this ability turned into something like turnstrike, w/ the aoe immunity, that dirges get, allowing us to do what we do best, more often. That would be my first choice. My second choice would be something that greatly increases are ranged prowess.
  10. ARCHIVED-Kyouri Guest

    Maybe a thought for this ability is a conversion to a debuff...I've kept this on my swash's bare for AGES but never used it b/c it brings nothing to the table, like an unhappy puppy...

    If it were converted into a Debuff, maybe an AoE debuff that's symbolic of our class' nature anywho. Toss the daggers around the battlefield, cutting the enemy's feet out from under them, and decrease mitgation by like...10% for 40 seconds, maybe?