It seems grossly overpowered compared to other rogue covenant abilities and we still have no info on it’s duration in PvP?
For reference:
Bone spike tooltip reads 60% attack power damage every 3 seconds when things like Garrote (108% over 18 seconds) and Rupture (@ 5CP 25% ap*6 over 24 seconds) do significantly less.
Spikes = 60% ap damage every 3 seconds. Rupture = 18.5% ap damage every 3 seconds. Garrote = 18% ap damage every 3 seconds.
Seems like you could nerf this ability down by 2/3rds of it’s current damage and it would STILL be very strong just because of it’s 10 energy cost, CP generation potential, and range.
Am I the only person seeing how nuts this thing looks?
Lets attack this from another angle, and you are not wrong.
What Blizzard has done here is nerfed the classes to push this garbage.
Why is this you might be curious?
Well its very very simple, they nerf the class down to dirt crawling rat level and then buff the class with an idiotic abiliti.
Sounds kinda counter intuitive right? Its not because now they can basically buff and nerf your class without directly buffing and nerfing your class. If rogue over performs with one ability? NERF the ability not the class.
Effectively the ability IS your class now, and your class is only window dressing for the Ability you pick, effectively your class no longer really does much other than carry the ability around and use it for the covenant that you are borrowing it from.
To me WoW is the victim of it’s own success. If all us customers didn’t just buy up whatever they keep dishing out maybe we’d have WoW 2 or World of Diablo by now.
The fact we players keep buying and paying for…whatever means they have no real capitalist drive to innovate or do anything better. It’s all just about being good enough. They know we don’t really have another option. It’s basically WoW or nothing right now.
yeah but for some reason blizzard is allergic to class balancing now days and instead just chooses to tweak the borrowed power here and there, and not like they really give a darn about class balance any more any way.
They love to provide this illusion of viable, but we all know that’s been a myth and the reality is you play the meta if you are in a top guild or you’re not in one.
As for the counter to that, playing off meta has ALWAYS been possible and always worked, its just less optimal and will require the players be better to accommodate for the off meta specs. That’s a way of thinking entirely contrary to the way people look at skill on the Skill-O-Meter.
That isn’t exclusive to WoW or Blizzard. Meta in top guilds is a factor in literally every game with any kind of choice in your build. And that always will be the case. Top guilds pushing content are not, nor should they be, accommodating to your desire of fun if it is detrimental to progression.
And putting that side, there will always be a better/meta spec despite great balancing efforts. Even if all specs within a class can output equal damage they still have different utility to offer.
And in what way do you look at the Skill-O-Meter?
Are you implying that PvE is a grand display of extreme skill ceilings?
Correct, my point wasn’t that its wrong to play meta, but why should blizzard even bother trying to give players the illusion of choice.
Why not instead just embrace the inevitable and build the classes with specs designed and tailored to a specific task, like older versions of wow where subtlety is designed for PvP, Combat for Raid and Assassination for a blend between.
I’m also not saying that other specs wouldn’t function, but are just less optimally configured to play outside of their intended areas.
I was actually talking about the thought process and mentality of the players who only care about things being razors edge balanced game play and their confirmation biases about the state of balance in game being not always how they like it, and we all know that game balance is never gonna happen. They way I handled it was a bit abstract and a jab at those who think WoW is balanced or even close, because it can never be.
On the beta videos I have seen, in pvp it still lastts forever, and rogues can legit sit in stealth against another dps to let it kill them if they want. It is really op. Especially against class specs.
I for sure see it getting nerfed.
Though I would like the others to be buffed more.
A big problem I see is that Slaughter and Sepsis seem to almost require their potency conduit to be competitive with baseline Bone Spike, and that Bone Spikes own potency conduit seems rather poor in comparison essentially giving necrolords a “free” potency they don’t need to still do very high damage with their skill.
IMHO they need to Nerf the damage of Bone Spike a considerable bit, determine a duration against players, BUFF the bone spike conduit (really change it altogether because RNG chance for more damage is dumb and boring)…and then potentially slightly nerf the potency conduits for Slaughter and Sepsis while Buffing the base abilities themselves.
I agree with you here in all aspects to be honest. Some things I want,
Making slaughter in general do damage as shadow would help with armor at the very least. Allow it to be used out of stealth somehow so it is actually useful for outlaw and sin. (Looking at you warrior ability for execute.)
At the moment, venthyr has very strong soul binds. I may end up rolling them regardless, but that depends on if bonespike gets nerfed or not.
I’m actually surprised at the damage types of the abilities to be honest, however looking at the conduits and legendaries I can see why they are what they are. If we had a shadow damage ability it’s power would need to take into account all the other buffs one could utilize with it. With several ways to buff the damage of something things could get out of hand rather quickly.
One of the things I’m actually considering at the moment is giving Sub a go with Venthyr just because I think that Nightblade and Slaughter will stack (as different debuffs often do). Giving us an effective 30% reduction in healing (-15% reduction and -15% stolen).
Sub actually benefits from keeping SnD up unlike Sin and so it won’t feel so bad slotting Recuperator for Sub which is a double plus.
Sub also looks like it has more interesting Legendary and Conduit options than Assassination at the moment.
There are other big problems I dislike though. Many legendaries simply force or strongly encourage Shadowstrike use, which diminishes the effectiveness or appeal of Slaughter.
It’s like you’ve got the option to go Sub + Slaughter for 30% heal debuff, but then would need to use a less interesting / impactful legendary (cause why go Akaari when Slaughter would do more damage than Shadowstrike at that point)…
…or…
You could go Sub + Sepsis and use “Deathly Shadows” and have a SICK synergy between Sepsis and your legendary power.
That or I find some decent combination that works for Assassination. Either;
Just kinda sucks that Assassination is so much more…boring. Right now going either direction basically already means you’re 2 potency slots are just GOING to be a covenant ability potency + Maim cause nothing else comes close. Sub at least has some interesting interactions / directions you can take a build.
