Well I have tested every DoTs (Sever Force, Force Breach and Mind Crush) with and without those skills. Nothing changes. It's the same base damage with or without it. The tooltips seem to change though.
As for Mind Warp, I'm afraid that if everything was working as intended, the fact that it would give 33% damage bonus on the Mind Crush DoT ALSO would make it too good!
Huh. Ok, well, we shall dig into it further directly on the test server then, and see what might be going on.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SalvorHardin
Balance Shadow:
Drain Thoughts: broken
Force Focus: broken
Mind Warp: broken
None of those skills increases damage (may it be Mind Crush, Force Breach or Sever Force), which translates in a 6-7% DPS loss, which brings back our DPS to live values... (don't know about Assassins though)
The PROC for Spinning Strike is great though and the 100% PROC chance on Force Strike makes everything runs much smoother. If you could fix the 3 skills I talked about, we'd be set...
On another note, is Mind Warp supposed to only increase the initial damage of Mind Crush or the periodic damage also? Either way, it doesn't do anything right now, regardless of how it's supposed to affect Mind Crush.
There is definitely a bug in the 2nd point of Mind Warp (but the first point works) that we just found (thanks for the report!) and fixed internally. However, we are not seeing any problems in Drain Thoughts or Force Focus (neither of which were actually touched in the patch). I've got my guys banging on them a bit more to confirm my results. Note, even the Mind Warp bug only applies to Shadows, the Assassins appear to be ok.
As for what Mind Warp applies damage too, yes it was changed to affect the entire ability (both initial hit and DoT portion). That note was missed in the patch and should be edited in shortly.
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Ok gang, I can now verify something is really screwed up on the PTS server with skills applying bonuses to abilities. We are looking into the issue, but I have no more news at this time. I'll get Tait on here to get the known issues worked out, and make sure he (or I) is keeping people in the loop.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by znihilist
Is this a problem restricted to the class or every other one ? Because we are seeing some really weird numbers everywhere.
It looks like this is a widely affecting issue. That said, I am about to make a stand-alone thread regarding what we're going to do to address it.
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Hey Gang,
So far we are pretty happy with where these guys are on PTS. One thing that we are still going to do is lower the Phase Walk cast time to 0.5 seconds and (probably) extend the maximum duration a bit. I know everyone is asking for it to be instant cast, but that gets us into a territory where we lose some verification on player position (since suddenly you can activate it while flying through the air, or jumping over things, etc.). This is also the same reason that we don't let players simply ground target out where their Phase Walk destination is, we need to make sure players are always going back to a good spot on the ground, or badness can ensue when we do the return teleport.
Speaking of Phase Walk, I know we had talked a little in the first thread about extra things we can add to PW to help bring some raid utility, and I still want to do that (for both DPS specs), but I'm not sure if that is going to make it in for 2.8. I'll give it a solid maaaaybe.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MKnightRider
I've asked this before, but have you thought about giving us Cloud Mind as a threat drop and tying the DR from Mental Defense to Cloud Mind so that we can retain the ability to use our AoE Taunt in certain situations? If you have, could you please explain your reasonings for not giving us Cloud Mind?
We talked about it, but we like the feel and power of the AE taunt to be a more "tanky" thing, versus the single target taunt being more universally usable. We feel like Mass Mind Control can still be usable as a AE taunt (that's why we made the change to stances to not require 100 force), but now it has a consequence when your non-tank classes have to break it out. It also works a little better conceptually, where the AE ability is either an AE taunt or an AE detaunt depending on your stance, instead of sometimes being a single target ability and sometimes being an AE ability. I strongly suspect we will continue to roll out this stance-based switch to PTs/VGs soon, but as they have a stand alone detaunt ability, it is a slightly touchier change.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MKnightRider
Are there any plans to help make Infiltration more viable in the sustained dps department? I have a feeling that's a "no" most likely followed by "not until 3.0" but it would be nice to know for sure.
There are some plans to help out Infiltration/Deception in situations like raids, but probably not in 2.8. We would love to fix everyone's issues every patch, but we there is only so much time in the day to design/make/verify/playtest changes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MKnightRider
Have you guys ever considered reducing the base cost of Whirling Blow or increasing the number of targets it can hit? I think it is an almost completely useless move with it's current cost even if Lambaste is talented and even if you hit the current max amount of targets with it...
We have "on the books" a pass through a lot of the AE skills in the game, as many of them, quite frankly, not very good. Unless we get to earlier, it would definitely get looked at in this pass, but I can't say when that might happen yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MKnightRider
One last thing, why is our force depleted when we respec but do not change stances? To me, that seems a bit unfair and unnecessary. Especially if I was previously speced in Balance and respec just to swap a couple points around in Balance, while never dropping or changing from Force Technique.
I'm not really sure, I will have to look. If I had to take a totally blind guess, I would say it probably has something to do with how the system actually removes the skills from the character, it likely actually automatically turns off and back on the stance. I'll have someone take a poke at it and see if they can figure out what is going on, and if there is anything easy we can do to fix it.
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Hey Gang,
Doing the rounds early this morning because I haven't really been spotted anywhere posting in a longer bit than I would like. Mostly, I want to just thank everyone for their discussions and feedback in here. I really feel like, from my end, that these focused feedback threads really resulted in a lot of solid feedback, discussion, testing, and verification of things. I know we can't please everyone, and there is an infinite list of things that we could continue to do, but I hope everyone agrees that we really got this spec into a pretty good spot, and a huge part of that is you guys. Thank you for all of your effort.
(PS: I agree that our capacity to really easily tell when/if your particular DoTs are on targets is pretty rough. We have some ideas on how to adjust that kind of thing, but honestly they are probably still a long way out. Some day, though, some day.)
