Why take away one of the only good things about social distancing just after making it useable?
If you want the ability to be about zoning why take away a zoning ability in place of more dmg??? that makes zero sense. You could literally nerf the dmg and it would be much better and more in line with the view of making this a zoning ability. The stagger actually made hatchet viable in so many more scenarios.
This is just an unnecessary tradeoff for something that should already be apart of the abilities toolkit in the first place, the fact that I could choose if I wanted to dodge back or not should’ve already been in the game, but having to tradeoff such a vital part of the ability for something I can already animation cancel is just not a good tradeoff at all.
From what I have seen Social Distancing ends up being used primarily as a combo starter, not a zoning tool. The animation can be dodge cancelled into an offensive ability to guarantee big damage. I think the idea is to remove the stagger so that that type of setup is no longer possible.
I’m in agreement, removing the stagger from social distancing seems like a knee jerk reaction, when you using the social distancing offensively, you take away ur ability to escape until the cooldown is up so it is already a trade off… The stagger is probably one of the only things going for the hatchet tree in general, I’d say up the cooldown and reduce the damage over changing the stagger.
To add to that, if you miss or if the ability is dodged, you lose your escape for 18s, the cooldown reduction from perk and your only real means of declumping (ie avoiding certain death), so nerfing the ability when it’s already balanced around more factors than just the stagger seems unfair.
With greatsword rapidly becoming another grit heavy meta weapon, leaving hatchet with at least some tools in it’s arsenal seems balanced as anybody ‘stagger-able’ will be covered by a team of unstaggerable, rooting, slowing cleaving machines.
I don‘t personally play Hatchet, but I think this is, once again, a super random change that will impact the weapon negatively for no reason whatsoever. AGS terrible balancing team strikes again.
Social Distancing was one of the only redeeming qualities on Hatchet and removing the stagger removes the main part of why people use it. The extra damage does not nearly compensate for the loss of a stagger that can be used to interrupt Healers or get you out of pressure scenarios.
It seems like they‘re moving forward with their agenda to turn New World into a heartless leftclick simulator without any skillgap.
I didn’t mention this but you are 100% correct that it is one of the only abilities that you can use to interrupt a healer full healing himself with a divine embrace every 3 seconds.
Removing interesting gameplay mechanics that counter other builds in specific situations is just overall a boring and unnecessary change.
if we look at Scream another ‘anti healer’ ability, it staggers everyone in a 5m! radius and roots them for up to 3s, for social distancing the root needs 3 skill points, is 1 second and for only one person 6m away…
is there not the option to reduce the stagger like when the leaping strike was nerfed as to not completely annihilate the skill?
Combos are literally the only way to kill healers at this point. It still doesnt explain why they want to make this more about zoning by of all things, buffing something that has nothing to do with zoning while taking away something that can be used to zone.
AGS seem to be quite the best at constantly making changes to things that nobody has any issues with while completely ignoring super obvious major balance issues that are brought up all the time. It‘s truly astonishing.
I dont know how a dev team can hit the nail perfectly on the head on some issues, then completely ignore or do things that would baffle anyone whos played the game for more than 5 min. Like, they did such perfect nerfs to great axe, while overtuning bows hitbox, or how they made hatchet throwing tree usable, then do this. or how they have yet to address how blatantly flawed rapier is, where one tree is absurdly good for evading, while the other is unusable, while neither can be used for fighting.