Updates on Abilities for Wardens and Furies

[Darln]

On all the Beta updates for abilities I see none for the wardens or furies. Is there no love for either class anymore? Oops, I put this under the wrong heading..sorry!

[Duffy]

Well, I sure do hope that there is still some kind of class balancing going on. And the clerics feel probably the same, because their 'balance' is resolved around the shaman. Seriously, balancing a class around another as if they didn't deserve one in their own right, this feels so wrong in my books..<br /> <br />And it still does nothing for us non-shaman to prevent one shots, nothing to make us a solo healer as viable as a shaman. If we don't get a real balance to make druids and clerics at eye level to shaman, then change at least the ridiculous one shot mechanic and make it again a punishment for failing scripts.

[Curmudgeon]

If they aren't going to remove the high spike damage that is one-shotting unwarded tanks, cleric/druid prestige abilities need to change to alleviate it. On another thread I suggested replacing inq/templar left side abilities with stoneskins with a high trigger threshold, similar to the SK's Hateful Respite. Another option would be a reactive that gave 50-75% DR instead of healing, limited to hits greater then 50% of the tanks max health. Smaller hits clerics can handle just fine with their reactives. <br /><br />And druids, since they are HoT based, give them an ability (again limited to big hits) that would absorb the damage and spread it over 10 seconds. <br /><br />The devs have pretty much maintained the ratios between HPS output and mob damage without maintaining the ratio for mob damage vs tank health. The first one is essential and needs to remain a primary balancing tool, but you can't ignore the second without problems such as we were seeing in ToT. I suspect lowering heal values and mob damage is gonna be far too much work to be implemented any time soon, so some other major change needs to happen to correct the damage/max health ratio problem. And by major I'm thinking it's gotta be prestige change. Many of the prestige trees are totally ignored these days because they are ineffective compared to the other side. Replace them with something that works.

[ZUES]

Welcome to Swashyville.

[Sogapa]

If sandstorm had a 20% damage reduction attached to it, that would probably fix wardens. Or just increase the damage reduction available via aas on the group and single target hots. Currently that DR is either 2 or 4%.<br /> <br />Could alternatively attach a one shot stone skin to hots, though if the stoneskin route were to be taken it would have to absorb only damage greater than 80% of target's hp to avoid the problem of small hits being absorbed and the one-shot hits still wiping out a tank or group.

[Curmudgeon]

I'm really curious what the devs are thinking on this subject, if it takes much longer to find out what's going to happen there won't be time enough for the normal playtest/comment/adjust cycle to occur before everyting goes live. First weekend after release there's gonna be a lot of healers going into heroics and getting the shock of their lives. That is, if they can get a group at all. "Sorry, we need a shaman for this dungeon, why don't you reroll?"