Percuvil wrote:My take on our Debuffs. Honestly, I do not see/experience much of a difference whether I use them or not. Based on the type of encounter, the mobs go down just as fast, or just as slow whether I mash the debuff icons or not. The amount of healing I need to afford the MT seems to be more dictated by the level and the gear the particular MT has at the time, not whether I debuff the encounter. Never took the time to parse all this - I am just talking real time experience. If we do not notice a real difference when using our powers then they should be adjusted.
My major concern are our class defining powers:
Zealotry - Very rarely use it. Seems a waste to just stand there stifled doing nothing.
Convert - Not even on my hotbar. It uses all my mana to the point I am useless.
Verdict - I am not level appropriate to use yet, however, everything I have seen thus far suggests that mobs are usually dead by the time the spell actually goes off. It sounds like it will be rarely used.
Just once, I would like to have something that makes others take notice or give me a reason to say " yeah, yeah I'm bad"
Not sure why you put convert in there. Might just be your experience, but in regard to your first comment on just going with whats noticable, convert is HUGE. Forget the fact that I can parse 15%-20% higher on a raid, but even in a group, grinding from 60-70 I often times opted to solo heal a grind group and take a 5th for DPS. Convert was key to us killing mobs 4-6 levels higher than us. You really NEED to offset it though with inquest and high regen drinks/gear.
As for the visual impact thing. If you look at parses, which is I suspect SOE does to some extent in playtesting certain changes, you will notice that many of these things that aren't directly noticable have a significant impact. To change them to a degree that makes them noticable would make some of them overpowered.
As an example. I find it tough just watching on the speed of a mobs death in group or solo if Sentence has any effect (and this is at master 1 mind you). However if you scroll back through your combat logs and look at 2 fights against identical mobs, using the exact same damage spells, one with sentence up and one without, you will see that the damage numbers are larger with sentence up. Will this make the fight noticably shorter, likely not but it is a significant impact. If it was made large enough that you noticed the fights being shorter it would be overpowered. The key is in the overall usage over time. Either a raid mob, or in a few hours of combined use grouping. For instance, in an hour of dungeon grinding, how many extra encounters do you pull because you saved 2-3 seconds on this encounter or that. Thats likely another 4-5 encounters and another percent xp without vitality or a few percent with.
On raid mobs you can see it as the agrigate of 24 people all using little tiny spells that by themselves don't seem to have much of a noticable impact, but together are huge. I've seen the autoattack output of a raid mob drop from 7k-9k to 2k-3.5k solely based on the debuffs of an entire raid landing. Any ONE of these debuffs in a solo setting likely won't even be noticable, but when they add together and suddenly the mob has 200 less strength and its offensive abilities dropped a bunch, it becomes significant.
I guess the frustrating thing in all these comments about debuffs and DPS is that my feeling is that we 1) aren't a DPS class, why do people want more DPS, we'd only get it at the detriment of one of our core abilities and 2) its not that our debuffs couldn't maybe use some work, but even if they DO need work, I'd say they are about 95% of the way there and why waste all the time and effort getting them just perfect, when there are HUGE pieces of our core intent, that aren't even close to 100% .
As with anything, diminishing returns would seem to imply that you focus the same amount of effort (man hours) on the areas with the largest room for improvement, to get the greatest overall gain. Sure the devs could spend 20 hours getting the debuffs that are 95% of what they could be to 98%, or they could spend that same time getting our special skills from 50% of what they could be, to 85%. (yes I just totally made those numbers up, its just to get the idea across, we need to prioritize. I feel that we have some severely broken areas, and to focus on debuffs would be at the greater detriment of those areas)