Factions Preview Observations

[WarBlade]

Okay, so we've had a look and made a number of comments either in game, in the complaint thread, or specifically Ritualist related in the Ritualist thread, but those have given me little opportunity to say a few things I wanted to say.

Firstly, I'm a bit sorry I only had a limited opportunity to participate. Saturday nights are damn near impossible for me to get away from work and I had the Sunday night shift as well. In the end I had to make do with a couple of all-too-brief morning sessions and most of Monday (NZ time) to have a look around.

Where to begin?

Professions?

Monk

I like some of the new skill selection. There are a few like Heaven's Delight that I'll sit back and wrinkle my nose at, but overall I found a number of new toys to play with.

Healing Light is an interesting one. It seems that Factions is loaded with several Orison-like 5-point heals, but this little oddball elite with it's energy recharging side effect falls into "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" territory and is practically only worthy of a shrug until you start thinking about bonders. When I had a look at this one with a monk I made, the energy recharge from it was 4. So cost 5, change 4. Not too shabby when you consider the possibility of running 4 bonding enchantments and getting presented with an alternative to Signet of Devotion for active healing and gaining a passive bonus from Divine in the process.

Healing Whisper I'm not sure about. This one strikes me as another Orison, but with the short range and my experiences getting dragged around the place trying to shoot Ice Spears I can see a whole lot of dislike surrounding it. Still, I can see an application whereby Whisper becomes effective to a close group of casters battling near the healer as long as there's some other support spells with some range to reach party members further afield.

Life Sheath intrigues me. I don't know how well it would stand against other protections in general, but when I think of the number of protection spells and other skills that operate by reducing a percentage of damage and how they might mix with Life Sheath's potentially large flat figure for a combo protection I can see it being a significant missing ingredient.

Signet of Rage. Oh, ow! As if Warriors didn't already have enough troubles with the smiting monks they now face, here's a skill targeted specifically at smiting down warriors. Eek!


Warrior

I really wish I had more time to play around with the Warrior I made in the preview. I did play around a bit with...

Signet of Strength. All it does is add +5 damage to your character's attacks which seems like a minimal advantage, but for a couple of useful points: Firstly, it's completely fire and forget and secondly it costs nothing. The second part means very little. The fire and forget aspect however is the real advantage. Just hop out of town, trigger the signet and next time you smack something it's benefits become realized. Refresh it in combat or between fights as desired. Quite a handy addition to a max-Str Warrior IMO.

Renewing Smash looks interesting. I never actually tried this skill, but at a glance I'm thinking that runners with a hammer stashed away in another weapon slot will have a handy way to get Balanced Stance back into working order when the recharge bites and avoid all that messy downtime that makes Beacon's to Drok's so tricky up the north end of Snake Dance. Oh wait. The devs just made the Drok runs easier? Hmm.


Elementalists and Ritualists I've already mentioned in the complaints thread. I mostly just played a Ritualist in the time that I had and overall I quite like the class. I read all sorts of negative things in-game and can see how people might have been tripped up although in my case at least I found that the mix of differant areas to specialize in, or even generalize in, created a basis for a very versatile character. In that regard they seem more like a Ranger or Mesmer in some ways than the Monk/Necromancer that they appear to be at a glance. I really need more time playing them though. A LOT more time. 8)



Armour Adjustments

Wanderers
AL60, +10 versus Elemental?

I saw this at the Kurzick armour crafter and must confess to a bit of surprise at the time. If this comes in then what happens to all the existing Wanderer's and Saintly armours with their +5 vs. Ele bonuses in the current game?

Knight's Kurzick Helm
AL80, +? versus Physical
Reduces Damage

Oh... Wow...

When I saw that my eyes bugged. Truely. The existing Knight's Helm has +1 Strength instead of "Reduces Damage" and I found myself wondering why they'd bother putting in Reduces Damage seeing as most warriors pick that up from the global effect of another armour piece whilst retaining their helmet attribute bonus or whatever and then it hit me. I can't be certain of course, but I think this is fairly convincing evidence to suggest that "Reduces Damage" on Warrior armour pieces might become the location based affair that it really should have been from the start, even if for nothing better than to provide incentive to complete a Knight's or Ascalon set. My other observation to support this theory is the proposed 100AL Sentinel's armour. Who'd want to let a Setinel's Armoured Warrior with Knight's Boots, a Superior Absorption rune (in the boots) and a damage reducing shield into the game? The combo effect of the gear alone would be bad enough before even considering extras from the skill side like Dolyak Signet!

So yeah. One or two of you pointed out in game (and rightly so I think) that my evidence is not proof, however I still maintain the mod change on that helmet makes a fairly convincing case for a theory that global Reduces Damage (aside from Absorb runes) might well be given the boot.

[FoxBat]

So yeah. One or two of you pointed out in game (and rightly so I think) that my evidence is not proof, however I still maintain the mod change on that helmet makes a fairly convincing case for a theory that global Reduces Damage (aside from Absorb runes) might well be given the boot.

Well, Factions is also introducing alot of conditional armor modifiers, and we all know how mesmer's Courtly attire currently works, granting the conditional armor as a global bonus. This *must* change, else we would see monks and rangers with nearly 90 AL vs physical before any possible skills bonuses! One would hope they might fix the damage reduction stacking while they are at it. This may have the opposite effect people are hoping for, while right now only the boots are useful from an ascalon/knights set, theres only a few situations where a -2 damage set is better than extra armor or HP, and these basically boil down to solo farming where you've got a ton of armor vs certain monster and only modest self-healing. 0 damage from Armored Cave Spiders FTShard!

[Zed-F]

Here's another random observation/question:

Perhaps AoEDoT = not so bad any more, under the right circumstances? The right circumstances being:
(a) spirits, which don't move anyway... since a spirit-user will necessarily be pretty focussed on summoning/exploiting spirits, it may be a good way to shut them down.
(b) in conjunction with AoE knockdown, bringing to mind the "None Shall Pass" shout, Thunderclap, or something similar. In particular I had been thinking about using Ranger PBAoEDoT traps to blind or ignite foes in an area and then "None Shall Pass" to knock them down once they started running. Presumably if they are currently being enganged by a friendly warrior, the warrior will just move up and re-engage, but what if they scatter a bit? Will they still come back to the closest foe, or will they try to run around and find a soft target even after being knocked down?

I was thinking about a hybrid interrupter/trapper build with Barbed Trap and Viper's Nest as the main traps because they don't cause AoEDoT and trigger AI scatter, but if I could swap out Viper's Nest for Flame or Dust trap and toss on None Shall Pass... would it be worthwhile?

[WarBlade]

Perhaps AoEDoT = not so bad any more, under the right circumstances? The right circumstances being:
(a) spirits, which don't move anyway... since a spirit-user will necessarily be pretty focussed on summoning/exploiting spirits, it may be a good way to shut them down.

"Perhaps"?

DoT definitely has a newfound purpose! The Earth Wardens sat down with me and told me as much with their convincing arguments about Churning Earth!

My spirits were so owned.

[Zed-F]

So I was thinking about R/A vs. A/X.

R/A (running with daggers) will never do the kind of spike damage an A primary will do. R/A lacks critical hits and the ability to get assassin runes for >12 dagger mastery. However, a R/A has better armour than a A primary, and has some good defensive stances and skills to help with survivability in close if he should come under attack. So it seems likely that a R/A is more of a pressure-oriented build than a A/x. This is especially clear given that Zealous daggers and Expertise 13 reduces most dagger attacks to 1 energy cost. Even so, a R/A dagger pressure build that focuses on damage will still probably lose out to a A/x build that does the same, if raw damage (and not survivability) is the primary consideration. As such, an R/A build is benefitted more by focusing on condition-causing skills, as they are relatively unaffected by lack of >12 DM or criticals. If you want to kill quickly with daggers, take an assassin primary. If you want to mess opponents up and make them ineffective while you whittle away, an R/A is a good option.

On the flip side, I don't think a A/R can be as good a bowman as a R/x. Someone posted an A/R build that used Barrage, Critical Eye and Sharpen Daggers (arrows) as the basis of their build, with lots of other stuff to fill it out. Which is fine, as far as it goes, until you realize that since a critical at Marks 12 is essentially equivalent to a regular hit at Marks 16, the R primary is able to do a lot more damage flat out on every shot and occasionally critical up to Marks 20. Moreover, while an A/R can cause bleeding pretty easily, the R primary still has a second class to boost damage further with, e.g. using Conjure or Judge's Insight or what have you, and rangers have little difficulty causing bleeding anyway.

[FoxBat]

So I was thinking about R/A vs. A/X.
Even so, a R/A dagger pressure build that focuses on damage will still probably lose out to a A/x build that does the same, if raw damage (and not survivability) is the primary consideration.

One major thing Rangers have going for them though, is tiger's fury. Only an R primary is going to have the mana avaliable to spam that skill and keep up assassin combo attacks. You have enough mana that you can even just keep hitting repeating strike over and over for much longer than an assasin can. Still hard to spike through healers and it assumes your enemy is sitting still, but these are usually not big issues in PvE anyway. In the PvP weekend using this combo, I recall making a ranger about equal the damage of an assassin this way vs still targets.

[Zed-F]

Thoughts on Rt/N or N/Rt... There are some good synergies to be had here.

One spell that springs to mind are Explosive Growth (does damage whenever you create a creature to foes near the created creature.) Combine this with Boon of Creation which gives energy and life when you create a creature. Both of these are Spawning Power-based, so you probably will only want to go this route with a Rt/N. Although an Rt/N will create minions with a fair amount of life due to Spawning Power, those minions will not be very powerful as they will be lower level, giving less AC and damage. However, Death Nova + Explosive Growth seems like a good deal for a minion bomber. With any luck, Animate Bone Minions will double up on the damage from Explosive Growth and the gain from Boon of Creation. There have been reports that minionmancer Rts are lacking on the energy front, so the elite may need to be saved for an energy management skill. On the other hand there are also a couple non-elite energy management possibilities available.

The other spell that drew my attention is the elite Clamour of Souls. This spell does a ton of damage to nearby enemies based on how many nearby allies there are. It seems to be fairly inexpensive and to recharge fairly quickly, like many elites. And of course with a minionmancer who intends to keep his minions around to deal damage, such as a N primary, there can be a lot of allies nearby at any given point in time. Of course for this to work, the N will have to be fairly close to his minions and their targets, so something like Dark Bond would be required as well, and you'd have to watch for enemy strippers and the like. Clamour of Souls doesn't look like it will require targeting, so if your team is doing a reasonable amount of damage, most likely something will drop when you use it, meaning it's time to whip out that animate spell...

As an aside, it's worth noting that some of the Rt spirit skills will work on/using ANY spirits, not just ones you've cast yourself or your allies'. Especially the ones in the channeling line. This lets you use enemy spirits against their casters. However, generally you have to get close to them (the spirits) for it to work.

[Zed-F]

One major thing Rangers have going for them though, is tiger's fury. Only an R primary is going to have the mana avaliable to spam that skill and keep up assassin combo attacks. You have enough mana that you can even just keep hitting repeating strike over and over for much longer than an assasin can. Still hard to spike through healers and it assumes your enemy is sitting still, but these are usually not big issues in PvE anyway. In the PvP weekend using this combo, I recall making a ranger about equal the damage of an assassin this way vs still targets.

There is an assassin elite, Way of the Empty Hand, that lets you use off-hand and dual attacks for free, though. That seems tailor-made for an A/X pressure build using Repeating Strike (even A/R if you want Tiger's Fury). Also don't forget that dagger attack rate depends on Dagger Mastery level as well. A DM16 assassin will naturally be faster than a DM12 R/A, plus do more damage per hit, and with WotEH, Zealous daggers, and critical strikes should have no problems keeping up with the mana cost, even while using TF. Alternatively you could go A/W for Tiger Stance and/or Wild Blow.

I used the R/A Repeating Strike assassin in the PvE event, and it worked well, no question. I just don't see it competing damage-wise to an assassin with their pick of skills intent on maximizing damage with either a spike or a pressure build. (Now throw in survivability as a criterion, or switch focus from damage to disruption, and that's another matter entirely. In those areas I think an R/A has an advantage.)