These changes I am going to propose are aimed to have a minimal to no impact on grinding, while hopefully making PvP MUCH more balanced, skillful, and fun again. I am suggesting a MASSIVE warrior nerf, however keep in mind, I AM a warrior, and most warriors would agree with what I'm saying anyway (in addition to everyone else).
The Shield
The shield is very op in its current state. Not only does it give you more defense, but it also prevents you from getting knocked down (aka "stun locked"), which is a very important tactic for PvP. Not only does it allow you to bypass one of the main tactics to kill specific builds, but it also allows you to not only avoid 22% of attacks (theoretically), but also deal damage BACK to the attacker on those attacks. I have not met a PvPer who would not agree that this is insanely op.
Changes to shields:
- Remove the "reflect" part of the skill, and just change it to "block", no longer doing damage to the attacker.
- Nerf the block chance down to 15% (at max level)
A 15% chance to avoid an attack, stun-prevention, and extra defense + resistance is more than enough to make shields still very viable, while not making them required anymore.
(For anyone who's going to reference the Economy data to say shields are not highly used, I'm talking PvP only here. Shields are essentially required in order to compete in PvP, ask anyone who has stepped into PvP in the last 4-6 months)
The main topic of this post: The Warrior
As I said above, the main issue here is the insane amount of defense you can get, while also having the shield combo. Now, nerfing the shield will definitely help to some extent, however it still won't be a big enough change, because sure I won't do reflect damage anymore, but If I still take hardly any damage from attacks anyway, why does it matter?
Changes to warriors:
- Stoneman Defensive increase nerfed to 30% at max level (currently 60%), speed reduction reduced to -7% at max level (currently -15%)
- Cautious Rage defensive increase nerfed to 100% at max level (currently 225%)
Now, this is definitely a very big nerf, however it is much needed. Take a look at the image below of my outputs (with rage active) and tell me why there is any reason at all to have nearly 1million defensive output? I essentially take damage from nothing, including other players. Keep in mind, I also have nearly 1million damage output at the same time, and I've only got 1 level of pure rage upgraded! (I'm also NOT a max defense warrior, my defense could be MUCH higher if I trade damage output for it). To compare, look at my defensive output while holding a staff. Same exact set, same defense stat.
That is a 600,000 difference in defensive output. 600,000 difference, while not even having to sacrifice my damage for that output! Sure, while holding a staff I still have a very high amount of defense, however my damage (if I was a mage) would be incredibly low, aka an at least somewhat balanced trade off. As a warrior though, there is basically no trade off, since even with such low strength I can still very easily achieve plenty of damage output to kill virtually any other player or build.
To show how strong the warrior + shield combo is, here's a video of GonDup with a MAX hazard bow shooting full arrow hoards at me (24 arrows per hoard). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h1J91IPWzs
Because of reflect + my defense, we each take essentially the same percentage of damage from his hoards, except I don't even have to do anything. Keep in mind, he's doing 11 poison damage per arrow, and with 24 arrows, even being very conservative and assuming only 15 out of 24 of the arrows damaged me due to reflect (which theoretically it should be much higher than that, making this even worse), that's 161 poison damage. Considering I took only 300 damage from the first hoard, that means the arrow damage + fire damage + electric damage (remember it's a fully max bow) did less than half of the total damage. Even on the 2nd hoard it still only did 400 damage (which in my experience was a high roll for him), it's still virtually nothing considering most of that is just poison and it's pretty much impossible to land the full 24 arrows on someone in PvP unless their afk.
The mage:
The recent changes to mage have actually made it quite viable in PvP, especially if you are a skilled player. Ultimately, I don't really want to nerf anything here with the exception of removing the knockback effect of magicbreathe & storm breathe, much like was done to bullets and arrows a while back. This is presenting a similar experience to a pellet spitter pre-knockback adjustment, where the breath streams attack so quickly that the knockback basically makes you stuck in place and can't move at all. This is just quite annoying especially because the storm breath is an auto-aim attack, and it just makes it pretty annoying to fight mages since you basically can't move. I don't really this is as so much of a nerf, more of just a PvP experience improvement for everyone else, since I'm sure could be imagined it's not fun trying to fight when you constantly just physically can't move.
In addition to this, there are a couple of bugs that should get fixed:
- You can activate storm breathe while moving & while dead (just hold M while doing either, and the breathe will work)
- Storm clouds do not despawn when the player who spawned them dies (tornados on the other hand, do)
The Cowboy:
The cowboy, while being the "king of grinding" (except for bosses), is absolute trash in pvp. They are still completely reliant on poison damage, making the optimal pvp build a p5 pellet spitter, even for a maxed out-max level cowboy. Not to mention, the drone skill is still completely useless. It does quite literally no damage at all, it's just a big waste of MP.
Suggestions for cowboy:
- Nerf Poison Zone to 120% poison boost at max level (currently 180%)
This is going to be a controversial one, but I'm not doing this just to nerf cowboy, I want to buff REAL cowboys, while making it so that a level 23 with a pellet spitter is not just as powerful as a level 150. My thought here is to nerf the poison reliance of cowboy, while buffing its damage skills to offset that for REAL cowboys. With P5, max element boost, and max poison zone, it does 63 poison damage, that's pretty insane considering the RPM you can get with some guns, especially some low-level guns.
I suggest to nerf poison zone to boost poison damage by 120% at max level (currently 180%). This will reduce the max poison damage from 63 down to 42, which even with full 6 pieces of P5 resistance, still does 12 poison damage, which is fair in my opinion.
To offset this, a new skill, the grenade drone.
This skill would be basically just as it says, the drone would shoot grenades instead of bullets. These grenades would do the same 900% damage that normal grenades do, PLUS they will activate poison zone as well. So essentially it would make it so poison zone is used more often (automatically spawns the zones from drone grenades), just at a lesser damage, but the drone itself would actually do quite a lot of damage and be useful as well. Keep in mind, with warriors (hopefully) getting a major defense nerf, that is already a buff for cowboys and every other class. Adding more damage on top of that will hopefully be what the class needs.
The Whipmaster:
The whipmaster is mostly fine in my opinion, but there is one thing that I think should be buffed. The whipmaster is very much a glass cannon, but since it still requires being so close to other players to attack them and requires the player to be stationary for its 2 highest damaging attacks (tornado and whirl), I don't think its fair blind tip gives a full 20% defense decrease. I would suggest changing this to -10% defense at max level, I think that would be much more reasonable.
