ranger vs sin aa change imbalance with 8/10/11 patch

[jjlo69]

assassin

Enhance: Exacting will modify Exacting to increase all of its affected abilities' Crit Bonus while Exacting is active.

vs

ranger

Enhance: Escape now also reduces the power cost of Escape.

REALLY a boost to a temp buff that effect 4 out of the 8 abilities of a assassins concealment chain, as well as other buffs where we get a power reduction to Escape im sry but how is that balanced.

[Nevao]

Uncle@Mistmoore wrote:

assassin

Enhance: Exacting will modify Exacting to increase all of its affected abilities' Crit Bonus while Exacting is active.

vs

ranger

Enhance: Escape now also reduces the power cost of Escape.

REALLY a boost to a temp buff that effect 6 out of the 8 abilities of a assassins concealment chain to include fatal follow up where we get a power reduction to Escape im sry but how is that balanced

My guess is that they will say, but you get Crit Bonus on Snaring shot and that's up a lot more often than Exacting... Mathmatically it might even be true, but it's impossible to tell with the AA trees jacked up on test right now. I'm guessing though that the for it to work it's going to have to be one really large crit bonus...

But this isn't the only place they have done something like this. Look at Swash vs Brig. Brigs get sneak/hate improvements (neither relevant since positionals are the only thing that really helps and it's Stealth Speed!) while two of Swashies better temp buffs get Crit Bonus...

[jjlo69]

yeah guess i'll have to wait and see now that aa's are messed up on test atm i do enjoy seeing beastlord as an aa tab though.  

[Talathion]

everyones a monk on test..

[Gaige]

The arts exacting affects don't really hit that hard.  It'd be hard to tell which is the better dmg increasing AA since snaring shot recasts so quickly.

[Uryu]

SOE should stop playing around and give rangers some utility.

[Davngr1]

come on uncle..  

 if you want to get a better fix you don't have to throw assassin under the bus for it.

[Nevao]

Give us some utility that we can point to that isn't subject to AoE's killing it or short durations and longer recasts (hey look assassins provide 6% sustainable Max Health Debuff with 4% Burst and a Hate Transfer!) and I think you'll find Ranger's would be much less likely to jump on thing like this.

[jjlo69]

Ok so im throwing sins under the bus. I logged in to test made a buffed sin and a buffed ranger so the gear and stats would be even. I tested the sin and ranger combat arts that would be effected by AA changes currently on test all combat arts are at expert level, zero aa's spent, all gear removed.

sin combat arts that will be effected by excacting

with out excacting running

                                  recast        da mage                                           

ambush                        10           746-1243                                                                                                     deadly shot*                20           508-864                                                                    death blow**               45           972-1620 or 2917-4862                                        death mark +                30           2060-3435                                                               gushing wound***      30            470-784,  101-168 every 4 sec fo 24 sec               impale***                    20            300-501,  82-137 every 4 sec fo 24 sec                  improvised weapon     18             544-902                                                                  masked strike              10             500-833                                                                 nox enfebalment****  45            529-794                                                                    quickstrike***               10            315-525 63 damage every 4 sec for 12 sec             touch of the nightshade  45         1800-2700                                                            

with excacting running

                     recast time with excacting up   damage with excacting up    ambush                                     7.7                    969.8-1615.9  deadly shot*                           15.4                    660.4-1123  death blow**                          34                       1263.6-2550.6  3534.7-6320.6death mark+                           23                        2678-4465  gushing wound***                  23                      611-1019.2        131.3-218.4impale***                                15.4                   90-651.3 106.6 178.1improvised weapon                   7.7                    707.2- 1172.6  masked strike                            7.7                    650-1082.9  nox enfebalment****              30                       687.7- 1032.2  quickstrike***                            7.7                     409.5-682.5 81.9 touch of the nightshade          30                       2340-3510

 

vs

ranger

snaring shot                           10                           349-581

Ranger dont get a comparable temp buff to excactring so it dosent get buffed any higher damage wise then you see here.

 

Example as to why it is OP and imbalanced.

Masked strike alone out preforms snaring shot that with out casting excacting and doubles snaring shot when excacting is up alone  even before any aa's to include the excacting and snaring shot CB changes are even factored in.

*= combined damage since it hitstwice
**= dmg is based on if the mob is over or under 33% health
***= has a DOT component
****=damage does not enclude DOT component inclused with 10 points spent in heroic tree  += combined 5 death mark triggers 412-687

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

[Jaraab]

18+ CAs I'd rather use than Snaring Shot. Recast don't matter if it ain't worth casting. From a parse from a 14 min HM Tormax last night, used snaring shot 6 times. woot CB on a useless CA! But now I can sprint away for my life and still have enough power to evac. See all the bases are covered.

[Uryu]

I think SOE is doing this on purpose. Starting to really dislike them. i think they look at post with the word ranger in them then turn away. If they give us some utility and really balance the classes. Rangers can finally say their asssassins counterpart. knowing SOE though that may never happen.

[Sprin]

Apart from the balance issues asside, seriously SOE? I mean Seriously?  Less power on escape?  That has easily got to be the most worthless thing Ive ever seen...

I mean... seriously?

how about turning the worthless hate loss buff into a hate transfer... SOMETHING that might be usefull, lower power usage on something that takes you out of combat anyways thats only useable every 10 minutes?  I mean Seriously?  Is this a joke?

[Sprin]

Ghettoblaster@Nagafen wrote:

Apart from the balance issues asside, seriously SOE? I mean Seriously?  Less power on escape?  That has easily got to be the most worthless thing Ive ever seen...

I mean... seriously?

how about turning the worthless hate loss buff into a hate transfer... SOMETHING that might be usefull, lower power usage on something that takes you out of combat anyways thats only useable every 10 minutes?  I mean Seriously?  Is this a joke?

Seriously!?!?  I mean....

seriously?

[BigDaddy28]

Ghettoblaster@Nagafen wrote:

Apart from the balance issues asside, seriously SOE? I mean Seriously?  Less power on escape?  That has easily got to be the most worthless thing Ive ever seen...

I mean... seriously?

how about turning the worthless hate loss buff into a hate transfer... SOMETHING that might be usefull, lower power usage on something that takes you out of combat anyways thats only useable every 10 minutes?  I mean Seriously?  Is this a joke?

QFE

[Sprin]

Pedialyte@Permafrost wrote:

Ghettoblaster@Nagafen wrote:

Apart from the balance issues asside, seriously SOE? I mean Seriously?  Less power on escape?  That has easily got to be the most worthless thing Ive ever seen...

I mean... seriously?

how about turning the worthless hate loss buff into a hate transfer... SOMETHING that might be usefull, lower power usage on something that takes you out of combat anyways thats only useable every 10 minutes?  I mean Seriously?  Is this a joke?

QFE

I mean just about the only tanks that can really hold aggro against a ranger with the silly stupid DPS they do nowadays is a Pally with a dirge and / or coercer in the group..... give rangers the BEST hate transfer in the game, because they provide zero utility to the group, so might as well make them desireable for the group in something...

Sins do as much, usually more DPS then rangers, have hate transfer, apply poisons.....

Change the worthless bird into a beastly "until canceled" hate transfer ON TOP of the hate loss rangers currenly have, make people WANT to take rangers into their groups because they make any tanks look good at holding aggro.... SOMETHING ffs

[cawalton]

Enhance: Escape now also reduces the power cost of Escape

this really was "huh?" moment

of all the useful things that could have been done for rangers this should never have been one of them

[jjlo69]

cawalton wrote:

Enhance: Escape now also reduces the power cost of Escape

this really was "huh?" moment

of all the useful things that could have been done for rangers this should never have been one of them

YUP not only is this aa out there but it is so imbalanced that it reminds me of something that the previous machanic dev for so many expansions.

[Seiffil]

cawalton wrote:

Enhance: Escape now also reduces the power cost of Escape

this really was "huh?" moment

of all the useful things that could have been done for rangers this should never have been one of them

I don't think there's ever been a single moment in this game where I've been like, oh man, wish escape cost less power so I could have cast it before we wiped.

[Aerinn]

I get the strong feeling, as a ranger, that there is simply no representation or lobbying (sensibly) with SOE.  Assassins have Gaige to advocate assassins...and he did a very good job getting them bumped up during DoV beta.

It appears that, from a dev/designer perspective, that rangers simply aren't broken.  They are arrow slurping, poison eating, hate generating moderately high dps that can do 80% of their max dps from range.  Think of us as a lower dps, higher consumable eating, lower utility version of a wizard, warlock, etc.

And if you look where the top players sit, rangers may be fairly balanced.  Balance is, and has been for as long as I can remember, based on the highest potential of each class...not the reality of where the bulk of players are actually sitting.  Living in the timezone I do means I never get the top level gear...ever.

Yet, I play a ranger, because I like the 'idea' of a ranger.  And maybe that's what SOE uses to determine whether a class is 'balanced' enough.  Relative numbers being played...popularity...over a reasonable time period?

Who knows, but I'd really like to know from the guys that make the decisions...what drives the decision to enhance or 'fail to enhance' (aka. nerf) classes.

[NardacMM]

The real problem is not that assassins are getting an upgrade to a temp buff.. The problem is that somebody at SOE thinks it would benefit rangers to reduce the mana cost of Escape, which is completely insane.  I can't think of a single situation in which this would be a beneficial way to spend AA. It's obviously extreme laziness and lack of creativity that's driving this.

There are a few Mystic AAs which made me scratch my head, but nothing compared to this.

As an assassin, I welcome the change to exacting, but should point out that it does have a moderate recast, so it's not like we're able to do that increased damage constantly.  No need to take this change away, but let's give something useful to rangers, too.

[Nevao]

Deverel@Antonia Bayle wrote:

The real problem is not that assassins are getting an upgrade to a temp buff.. The problem is that somebody at SOE thinks it would benefit rangers to reduce the mana cost of Escape, which is completely insane.  I can't think of a single situation in which this would be a beneficial way to spend AA. It's obviously extreme laziness and lack of creativity that's driving this.

There are a few Mystic AAs which made me scratch my head, but nothing compared to this.

As an assassin, I welcome the change to exacting, but should point out that it does have a moderate recast, so it's not like we're able to do that increased damage constantly.  No need to take this change away, but let's give something useful to rangers, too.

I think what is driving things like the Escape change is not a mind set of "Hey Ranger's really are getting screwed over on their Escape power cost" but rather a desire to take AAs whose primary benefits could be capped (mostly dealing around cast and reuse speeds) and add some secondary effect to make the AA point spent more meaningful. Good job in this case on Snaring Shot, head scratcher on Escape. I'm also guessing they aren't too worked up about the balance descrepencies since in most cases 5 or 10 CB to one ability is a drop in the bucket when you have 170 CB just off of EM Raid gear. Of course mileage will vary on how small of an effect it really is when comparing classes.

[jjlo69]

as a sin i would happly accept a boost to 12 of my combat arts but as a ranger to accept  the changes to one ca which last night snaring shot parsed out at 1% of my zw. Where over half of the 12 ca's effected by excacting are 3% or higher of a sins ZW is grossly imbalanced plain and simple. escape power cost is garbage if you really want to balace the 2 AA's give crit bounus to focus aim and  deadly focus while it is up. Just about anything better then what on test.

[Nevao]

Uncle@Mistmoore wrote:

as a sin i would happly accept a boost to 12 of my combat arts but as a ranger to accept  the changes to one ca which last night snaring shot parsed out at 1% of my zw. Where over half of the 12 ca's effected by excacting are 3% or higher of a sins ZW is grossly imbalanced plain and simple. escape power cost is garbage if you really want to balace the 2 AA's give crit bounus to focus aim and  deadly focus while it is up. Just about anything better then what on test.

All I was saying, especially about escape, is that it was not a target for balance but rather "you triggered this criteria, change it". Doesn't mean I like it, I was just commenting on how I figured it came to be.

As for Exacting vs Quick Shot I honestly haven't said much simply becuase I can't get on test at the moment to do any kind of basic math. We don't know the CB amounts yet,  I don't know the damage ranges on the CAs affected for Assassins and simply haven't had a chance to play with it. My initial reaction is annoyance, but reserving judgment until I can see the actual post AA numbers, especially since Exacting is a short term buff with a 2 and half minimum recast on it.There's also the school of though that in general these are small tweaks relative to the CB pools most of us have access to. I just don't know yet, and won't until I can get into test.

That said though I'd personally rather fight to get the utility side of the argument addressed at the moment than the damage. Assassins have the much loved hate transfer, the 6% sustanined + 4% burst Max Health debuffs and a poison proc buff. Until we can point to meaningful utility on our side having the same level of DPS will still be irrelevant since you can bring a 'sin and get the rest.

[jjlo69]

Nevao wrote:

Uncle@Mistmoore wrote:

as a sin i would happly accept a boost to 12 of my combat arts but as a ranger to accept  the changes to one ca which last night snaring shot parsed out at 1% of my zw. Where over half of the 12 ca's effected by excacting are 3% or higher of a sins ZW is grossly imbalanced plain and simple. escape power cost is garbage if you really want to balace the 2 AA's give crit bounus to focus aim and  deadly focus while it is up. Just about anything better then what on test.

All I was saying, especially about escape, is that it was not traget for balance but rather "you triggered this criteria, change it". Doesn't mean I like it, I was just commenting on how I figured it came to be.

As for Exacting vs Quick Shot I honestly haven't said much simply becuase I can't get on test at the moment to do any kind of basic math. We don't know the CB amounts yet,  I don't know the damage ranges on the CAs affected for Assassins and simply haven't had a chance to play with it. My initial reaction is annoyance, but reserving judgment until I can see the actual post AA numbers, especially since Exacting is a short term buff with a 2 and half minimum recast on it.There's also the school of though that in general these are small tweaks relative to the CB pools most of us have access to. I just don't know yet, and won't until I can get into test.

That said though I'd personally rather fight to get the utility side of the argument addressed at the moment than the damage. Assassins have the much loved hate transfer, the 6% sustanined + 4% burst Max Health debuffs and a poison proc buff. Until we can point to meaningful utility on our side having the same level of DPS will still be irrelevant since you can bring a 'sin and get the rest.

well ive already crunched the dmaage number and masked strike alone even before the knowing cb number with if it goes like the other classes have seem 5% cb usally the max with 5 points so yeah pretty easy to crunch numbers off that

[Nevao]

Test is back up. Looks like 5% bonus to Exacting affecting arts and a 7.5 CB bonus to Snaring.

[jjlo69]

7.5 CB for one medicore ca compared to 5% for 12 ca's every 2 minute 20 sec on top of they all out parse that ca with out the increase to CB is beyond fail

[Davngr1]

i don't know what ranger AA are but i do know that rangers have better aoe and auto attack AA's/abilities than assassin. 

  you can say all you want but the assassin EoF tree is junk, everything in it is useless and becomes more and more useless with every passing expansion.   

 this change was to balance the AA so they won't be useless not to balance rangers alone.    would you be happy if they just plain took our AA away?  would that make you happy?

[jjlo69]

Davngr1 wrote:

i don't know what ranger AA are but i do know that rangers have better aoe and auto attack AA's/abilities than assassin. 

  you can say all you want but the assassin EoF tree is junk, everything in it is useless and becomes more and more useless with every passing expansion.   

 this change was to balance the AA so they won't be useless not to balance rangers alone.    would you be happy if they just plain took our AA away?  would that make you happy?

actually yes remove both the sin and ranger aa changes and put something in that is balanced imho

[Davngr1]

Uncle@Mistmoore wrote:

Davngr1 wrote:

i don't know what ranger AA are but i do know that rangers have better aoe and auto attack AA's/abilities than assassin. 

  you can say all you want but the assassin EoF tree is junk, everything in it is useless and becomes more and more useless with every passing expansion.   

 this change was to balance the AA so they won't be useless not to balance rangers alone.    would you be happy if they just plain took our AA away?  would that make you happy?

actually yes remove both the sin and ranger aa changes and put something in that is balanced imho

 you can ask for fixes for your class with out throwing assassin under the bus uncle.     this type of whiny thread that calls for nerfs to another class is why this game can't improve.

[Nevao]

Ok, as promised I did the math to see what the damage difference was between the two AA's. Like Uncle I created two new toons on test and and buffed them, but in this case I went ahead and geared them (since they came off the buff bot the they had the same base stats), cast their self buffs, and did a standard AA setup for both.

Assumptions:

• Since we balance off max potential (or something close) that the assassin is capped on reuse (presumably through gear, AA, and temp buffs).
• I looked at Max Damage only and multiplied it out by the CB % to see how much "extra" damage they would get on top of everything else.
• I assumed that the mob was in fact below 30% and the extra damage of Death Blow was in play.

First Round: For the first test I did just a base comparision of if you cast Exacting and only cast the 12 abilities once (and they run full duration). That should take rougly 6 to 8 seconds (depending on lag) so we'll assume that the Ranger gets Snaring off twice.

• Assassin Extra Damage: 6,071.30
• Ranger Extra Damage: 571.73

As Uncle pointed out earlier Masked Strike with only one swing is more than the extra damage generated by (233.20 extra damage vs 190.58 for Snaring). But it, like Quick Strike will both be doubled due to the Dexterous Attacks AA. Either way, we're looking at 10.6 times the extra damage for Assassins in the simplest of tests.

Second Round: So we all knew that in the "single cast" scenario above would make the Exacting AA bonus look better but what I wanted to see is how it played out over the course of the full duration and recast of Exacting. For this test I assumed that abilities would be cast as soon as they were back up, even if they still had some duration on the DoT components (and therefore in my calculations I counted only the tics that would happen during the recast). I also assumed the Ranger would keep cast Snaring as soon as it was up for the full duration + recast of Exacting.

• Assassin Extra Damage: 21,958.95
• Ranger Extra Damage: 4954.95

So as I suspected the "longer view" does even it out a bit, but the Assassin' AA is doing 4.4 times as much damage as Ranger's. But that's with the ranger continue to cast Snaring shot for 90 seconds after Exacting is down. If you look at it just for the 40 seconds that Exacting is up it is a 14.3 ratio in favor of the Assassins.

Now granted this scenario two may not be completely realistic. The Assassin in question probably will not have fully capped reuse and their cast orders may make casting everything as soon as it's back up not quite feasible. But it shows that if itemization takes us to that point (which with them implementing effective caps on MA is possible) how far apart the difference is in effectiveness of the AA. And this is not even counting the fact that they got a second CB bonus to Sinister Strike.If you want these to be balanced then it's going to take giving a boost of 25 (assuming non-perfect conditions) to 33 (assuming best conditions for the Assassin) CB to Snaring to get to the same rough damage output. Though the Assassin will still get the advantage because they can put those numbers up in 40 seconds as opposed to the 130 it will take the Ranger. If you want to match just over the 40 second duration then you're looking at needing 100 to 110 CB for Snaring. Personally I think that's too extreme and provides too large of a long duration bonus to the Ranger, though I do think they should get slightly more damage just because of the extra work and 90 seconds needed to get a fair "efficiency" comparison. Personally I think I would shoot for a 40 to 50 CB bonus for Snaring.If people want I can post a link to the spreadsheet so people can look for errors. I didn't really think people would want to try read all the numbers in a post though.