Bootae has quit because of it. Sad days.
Blaq puts it at the top of his priority list in his post WAR on depreciation
Zizlak get’s Doomflayered Right in the Face.
Whilst Taransula rejoices at getting into Doomflayer in The Big Ding claiming Doomflayer is everything she hoped for.
I can’t help feel that I am being contrary with my point of view that I am not feeling the power gap pain, perhaps being blindly optimistic, so I am left revaluating what I said when I made the point that I still thought the Sov 8-piece abilities would retain their tactical advantage over DF.
In order to try and compare the gear I have used the cost of the first rank of the renown ability to work out an equivalent renown point cost of 5 pieces of each armour set. Basic stats like Str & Tough cost 1 renown point for 4 stat points. 2% Melee Crit is 5 points. For armour I have used the value on talismans – 164 armour is equivalent cost to 23 STR.
Doomflayer is as much above Sovereign (33% more renown points cost) as Sov is above Invader. This is a big step up in terms of stat points but Sovereign get an 8 piece bonus ability that Doomflayer does not.
Let’s look at the abilities that a Full Sov group could have available to them over a Doomflayer group.
2 Healers - 2 x Absolute Preservation – the party cannot be crit for 20s
1 Offensive Tank - Leading the Charge – 60% movement speed increase for everybody
1 Def Tank – Inexorable Force – 5s CC group immunity
MDPS -Desolation - Area effect morale strip
RDPS – 50% increased AP for enemies
The morale strip Desolation and two Absolute Preservations are key for me. Immunity to crit for 20s will reduce incoming damage by a huge amount , maybe 30% overall but a lot less spike damage. Being able to drop your morales but denying the enemy theirs is another biggie.
Of course this relies on a high level of organisation and teamwork to pull off, and I guess herein lies the problem. The vast majority of encounters between two sides are not between super-organised groups. I’d be foolish to claim “if you get super organised in your Sov it will be okay”. Errors will always be made on both sides and the margin for error between Sov and Doomflayers is too much.
A PuG group in Sov would get tramped on by PuG Doomflayers – but you could say the same thing about gear throughout the four tiers of Warhammer.
So the question is – should a group in Full Sov stand a chance verus a group in Full Doomflayer? And if so, how much and in what circumstances? 1 in 10 chance if they get lucky with crits, or manage to get the first KD in?
Likewise, what chance should a group in Invader stand against Sov?
I don't know. If you have a thought on this please do reply.
The real bad news for me is that Warpforged gets the same abilities as Sovereign does and as a 5-piece bonus, not 8 like Sov. From my graph Warpforged to Sov is equivalent to Sov to Anni. This is seriously Eek.
Mythic do need to make adjustments to the gear. I think for starters they could change the structure of both DF and WF to make them 6-piece instead of 5 to prevent grabbing the Sov 3-peice bonus. The set bonuses could be granted at 4 and 6 instead of 2 and 4. I would also remove the Sovereign-style abilities from Warpforged. I think these changes would not upset anyone who has worked hard at getting the gear already, at least not as much as downgrading the whole set.
The aim would be to give the player a real choice between awesome personal stats or valuable group abilities.
Mythic have also released details on plans to allow your RR to level over and above your XP level which they estimate seeing people around RR60 when they hit R40, which will help even things out a lot, especially if Warlord gets a little revamp with an eye on the type of group-abilities that Sov has - how about a group-wide Cleanising Wind for Tanks in 6-Warlord?
Don't forget that you can wear those silly green, blue and purple rr80+ gear..
ReplyDeleteWhy silly? The stats are..just ridiculous. To summarize them: It's everything + a talisman slot.
This outranks the loss of the sov 8 pieces bonus, because people get enough power to not have to rely on crit, moral, etc..
This is imho a hidden power increase when switching to doomflayer and above, which just adds to the obvious one and makes it more surprising if you get hit by it.
As Zizlak said, you're sacrificing a lot for that 8 piece Sov bonus. I'll wager that the increase in stats on DF along with the abilitiy to stack other pieces or bonuses outperform the Sov 8 piece bonuses.
ReplyDeleteYou're talking about morale dumps, they rarely happen in small scale these days because the TTK has despite Mythic's best intentions gone down. People die faster and the fights tend to swign in someone's favour earlier. Not to mention that a morale dumps aren't that powerful when you can only stack two or three of them.
The only Sov 8 piece bonuses I can see being valuable enough to sacrifice stats for are Absolute Preservation (anti-crit) and group-wide resolute defence. The rest are just not worth it.
Also with the population decrease and some of the big guilds leaving (on KN at least) you just don't see warband sized groups going at it. When such big groups do show up they usually don't have anyone to compete against and just steamroll everything.
I'd really love to see a redesign for other sets in the vein of the Sovereign redesign, giving the player a choice of going for either a healing/dps or offensive/defensive version of warlord and invader at least. Full armor bonuses would be nice aswell, I know that for Slayers and Choppas this already applies somewhat with the awesome corrosion proc on them.
Oh and you are forgetting one issue I forgot in my list aswell (well one of the two) the defensive sets for melee dps. They're absolutely overpowered because they offer insane survivability without the player having to sacrifice too much damage (see the unmitigatable 7 piece bonus). This issue just becomes more apparent with DF.