We are fortunate enough to have devs that read our board and tend to act on suggestions every now and then, so I think a consolidated list of what we think is wrong would be nice - both for us and them.
The information is spread across three posts as this was the only way I could get links to work. Clicking a TOC title link will take you to the appropriate post.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
General Issues:
- Avoidance vs. Mitigation
- T1-T6 Itemization
- Offensive Stances and Procs
- Weapon Selection and New Skills
Combat Arts:
- Knockout Combination
- DPS Buff Scaling
Alternate Advancement:
- Strength Line
- Lack of Defensive Advancements
Avoidance vs. Mitigation
Under construction. Feel free to post comments below while I find the time to cover this huge issue. Specific things I would like to cover are avoidance's uselessness vs. higher level mobs, mitigations inferiority vs. lower level mobs (seems to be an overall scaling issue with the two), the lack of tools for some/all healers to cope with the huge HP jumps avoidance tanks make without blowing through all of their mana, and the "luck" factor playing a major roll in combats.
T1-T6 Itemization
In short, the leather itemization of tiers 1-6 when compared to that of plate tanks is simply horrible. There are only a few non-rare crafted armors of any value throughout the entire span of 60 levels, and what is there is meant to be shared by both tanks and wisdom casters. T7 appears to have corrected this but something still needs to be done for all the up and coming bruisers. Suggestions: More common leather drops all around. Some common monk/bruiser only items. More leather gear with +sta.
Offensive Stances and Procs
Under construction. Feel free to post comments below while I find the time to cover this issue. Specific things I would like to cover are the disparity in usefulness between the monk offensive stance and the bruiser offensive stance due to the proc change, hate gain due to the proc change, and the general weakness of our current offensive stance proc in its overall addition to our damage. Currently I am parsing Engulf as 1% of my damage. Any more parsed evidence to agree or disagree with these numbers would be great.
Weapon Selection and New Skills
Bruisers have been given the Piercing and Slashing skills, and *some* (but not all) new weapons actually use these skills. Many still use the crushing skill and simply use the slashing or piercing damage type. The main issue, however, is that unless there is some retroactive "unlocking" of piercing and slashing weapons to us by changing the restrictions away from setups like "Berserker, Guardian, Paladin, Shadowknight" - the only net effect to the Bruiser is that we have to work up two more skills. There is no real benefit to this change.
Message Edited by Cornbread Muffin on 03-16-200610:53 AM