I think the problem with trying to explain my build back to me is I already know how it works. Dropping an aoe every few seconds that does the same damage as a Great Axe light attack is fine on paper. In fact so fine im okay with using it now and why it was my main build of choice when aoes stacked.
However there are some problems I have with the comparison
Gravity does not hold people as they jump exploit to escape
you can now i-frame ice shower as well as jump exploit to escape
The damage can be blocked by a shield
During latency it often doesnt do damage
Missing it means you have lost any hope of a rotation
You are still a free kill if anyone decides to attack you
Again when there was a system that allowed this to be a range DPS options even though the aoe was less damage than a properly built rain of arrows this was fine. When melee decided to go for me I could happily fight in melee with ice gauntlet as I would have emtombed, ice shower and could even use ice storm.
So then their plan is:
lower entombed health
+10 second CD on ice shower
5 second intermission on heavy freeze
you can still jump out of ice shower
40%+ nerf to damage
cant be healed in entombed
whilst making pillar of fire easier to hit, drastically lowering the damage and ease of landing singe procs
removing fire ball crits (yes it does currently crit)
slowing down heavy attacks
removing the 10% damage buff storm gives to be whilst under 50% health
So whereas before I had a high risk with mild reward dps weapon and a side tool that was a little bit overtuned that destroyed melee we now have a high risk very low reward âdpsâ weapon and a incredibly underpowered tool that mildly inconveniences people as they might get rooted and receive 1 heavy attack.
Yes we shouldnt compare all melee to Great Axe but we should consider great axe further since the resilience fix. Gravity serves no purpose as a 3 second inconvenience that can be jump exploited out of to avoid aoe damage, if you dodge the initial burst you can freely walk through it and with the latency issues of 1.04 people often walk through without dodging. So naturally I have swapped to maelstrom as it is a very wide aoe that allows for huge burst, plus pull and applies weaken to everyone hit by it. Soon to be buffed along side reap to apply a root. So you can use reap to interrupt people, cluster them up to then apply a group weaken that in all unless people have 150 constitution or close to it with heavy armour do not survive your two damage burst rotations. This means we do not even need gravity as one great axe can solo burst kill multiple people as it now has two damage rotations instead of 1 which added with the path of destiny spam/shockwave spam adding further debuffs people often cant dodge so you actually kill people through the no longer stacking healing.
In wars I am still doing over a million damage as a great axe user. Unlike a fire staff which is spreading out very low damage to multiple people, I am applying high burst to smaller crowds which then actually die: Great Axe DPS Build For Wars 1.1 million damage - New World - YouTube
Yes sure spear, rapier, hatchet and hammer have tracking abilities. But they all have very good abilities that when paired with another weapon can still be played with great effect. However what does fire staff and ice gauntlet now have? Their niche of one being good at range and one being good at melee (briefly) is now gone. Even in current meta it is a struggle to suggest bringing one of these over a sword+life staff, GA+WH or a LS+GA/WH in war but after the nerfs? As you seem to agree not much use.
Do these still apply on PTR? Because the patch notes include this:
Jumping and traversal are now disabled when navigation is disabled (e.g. Root).
Everything has been kind of unplayable since the last patch so I can understand you not wanting to rely on CC abilities and just going for raw damage trading, but if we operate on the assumption that things will actually work at some point in the future (May be wishful thinking) then CC enables ranged damage and peels melee. There are clear advantages to being able to deal damage from range which I think youâre glossing over, but at least we agree that PTR Firestaff looks like a waste of a weapon slot.
The balance of different options fits together into a large puzzle and there are variables weâre not discussing that make a big difference, like Lifestaff healing. The only reason we consider a lot of ranged damage to be pointless junk damage is that the Lifestaff heals through it all for free, so that only the damage within the 2-3 second burst period that kills someone is actually meaningful. Reducing LS healing would change that, and the more you reduce LS healing the more relevant that junk damage becomes. In a hypothetical scenario where there is no healing whatsoever the Musket reigns supreme from 100 meters away, so letâs not forget that if we do have a Greataxe meta right now that is strongly influenced by the power of the Lifestaff.
The other elephant in the room is Path of Destiny, we can prepare to complain about that the moment all of the casters in wars swap to Hammer next build.
For gravity with the gravity perk you cant jump. You know because it needed buffs a long side the other 2 abilities getting roots.
however
in line with the current nerfs⌠you can still jump out of ice shower.
I have very much been converted to the great axe / war hammer meta using 300 strength as I know how to fix the ability bug (holding right click). I use the Great Axe for high burst and the hammer (along with 9+ hammer buddies) spamming path of destiny, wrecking ball and shockwave onto clusters of enemies. Which get this. IS MORE EFFECTIVE IN LATENCY. People rubberband back into abilities they clearly avoided often taking huge damage spikes and dying.
People atm are unironically saying bow rain of arrows plus penetrating shot on live is a better dps option than fire/ice and that even the developers must agree as they are also nerfing the rain of arrows radius.
Testing on PTR a heavy healer can still freely heal through multiple ranged opponents, especially with some carefully chosen dodges but two hammer or two great axe or any combination can actually burst kill a healer now if using the maelstrom/reap combinations. A few US servers are using this with gravity by dropping charge. It seems the developers really really want people to only play GA/WH with some combination of LS support as it works well with Hammer, Sword and now void gauntlet.
Dont even get me started on the infinite stagger/sleep/cleave cap when we have only 1 aoe dot allowed to apply at a time
Making me regret buying this game. How do you nerf something without knowing how gimped mages are at PvP. The passive magic resists on heavy armor itself is broken enough to make mages useless not including the fact that mages need to manually aim at its target. Heavy Malee has a huge advantage just left-clicking with free included movement that scales at the size of a dodge.
I can only believe they have no idea how the game itself works. The meta was already 35 / 40 GA/WH, now with the nerf on the magesâŚ
And at x1, any class is superior to the mage, even the archer.
No more damage in area, now also no single target damage and no critical, if you want to kill the mages, delete the weapons.
And yes, I will stop playing this game if this update materializes. Because the mage wasnât so useful anymore and I donât want to have to level up other benches and change weapons.
I donât think comments like this are helpful. Devs are clearly struggling with a tricky game engine and several high-profile issues. You have to give them credit for trying to fix the issues, and the PTR showed that they need some extra help from the community.
No, what it showed is that after several failed updates their management have issued some directives.
The Team have gone to pains to setup the PTR Forum to âshowâ they are trying to gather feedback, but are actively disengaged with the process showing me that they are doing this purely to avoid heat coming from overhead.
They have plenty of time to respond to nonsense everywhere else on the forum, but defend their terrible decisions? CricketsâŚ
The fact itâs gone this long with no correction on the PTR or even proactive discourse on the subject shows me that theyâve made a decision and feedback be damned.
I donât think using a Angry Earth is a good example. You have a 30% bonus at least, and much more if you have the oil and staff bonuses. PVP is nothing like that.
People forget this ⌠these nerfs are based purely on PVP perceived impact based on âlook at the mage damage - so OPâ on the final screens of OPR and War. Forgetting that AOE does a little bit of dmg to a lot of people.
Big numbers when people are clumped are meaningless as actual killing power is low in those circumsances - knocking everyone down for 1-2k dmg while a healer heals that off in 1-2 ticks using the same sized AOE is just damage padding, not effecitive killing power. This had some teeth when 5+ mages could overlap that damage and actually kill people but that nerf has already killed that strategy.