The 15% of max hp spell interruption change discussion

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Originally Posted by Februs

Including Holmgang (which is part of War's stun lock utility, regardless of how you personally use it) you're looking at roughly 10 seconds of stun time if not purified. On a single target, War's actually have a slightly longer stun than Plds.

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Holmgang is a harpoon + bind not a stun. Sure it can interrupt casts by forcing movement (just like all forced movement), but it is not a stun.

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Originally Posted by Aviars

I don't see how people think it is ok to interrupt a caster by just hitting them, it is truly obnoxious and in my opinion takes no skill on the part of the dps doing the interrupting, most interrupts should be done by using abilities designed to interrupt.

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Exactly!! :)

There's no incentive to go for healers anymore. All this game is going to be now is trying to outburst the cure II's on the dDPS. If you don't have the DMG, then just go home. You don't even need to play the full 8 minutes anymore.

Pre-emptive changes in lieu of new healers. This balance team is on thin ice, surely.

EDIT: For everyone saying "USE CC" okay, there's not enough CC in this game to warrant that response. Especially with the diminishing returns, overall reductions, and then immunity. Not to mention purify. If they gave us better interrupt tools, then it'd be okay. And not to mention you have to pull someone off of the target to walk over to the healer and use your CC on it. This drops your damage on your main target.

Not to mention, all spells go off anyways after 75% of the bar is full, which was even more annoying for melee's. If you were having trouble casting, get better at kiting or call your tank over for peeling.

I r actually happy for blms. Do I still think the job is less than trash? Absolutely. For the typical blm user (just like brd), adding a 15% edge will be just like saying to a serial rapist that it'll now be 15% harder to pull down those silk...nvm. Point is...just gonna make jumping ona blm that much more enjoyable. They get to struggle now. Now if they could heavy cast while moving..would have to let Obama know about it. Otherwise...naaa. (Now watch me get my butt blown off like never before..) Seriously though...blm used to be a respectable job, especially if one brought skill to the table. They shouldve never gimped flare/swiftcast to begin with so I hope blms get to take names again..makes it funner all around. As it stands...anyone who decides to ignore them deserves to get nuked to hell anyway so this may be divine justice at work.

As for brd and mch...think the distance penalty easing really will work for mch well since they can move freely anyway during burst. With brd? Kinda like the bandaid ona bulletwound thing but w/e..grats I guess?

Heals?? Good ones were already hard to kill and therefore ignorable in lieu of squishier targets. Don't think too much change there.

Blm high dmg spells still takes too long to cast and are absurdly easy to LOS so idk that even this change will allow most of the mediocre blm out there to carry their weight in feast. One can only hope though cause I dreaded seeing a blm in party prior to this.

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Originally Posted by Jubez187

There's no incentive to go for healers anymore. All this game is going to be now is trying to outburst the cure II's on the dDPS. If you don't have the DMG, then just go home. You don't even need to play the full 8 minutes anymore.

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I believe this is what SE had intended all along anyway based on their posts lately. Their vision for Feast was never to see it be a "kill the healer first and pick off the rest after as they scramble to run away" even though many of us, including myself, did it anyway. There were too many mediocre healers out there to bother trying to out dps their healing output instead of just repeatedly killing said heals outright and cleaning up their teammates afterwards.

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Originally Posted by Dimitrii

Blm high dmg spells still takes too long to cast and are absurdly easy to LOS so idk that even this change will allow most of the mediocre blm out there to carry their weight in feast. One can only hope though cause I dreaded seeing a blm in party prior to this.

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Between sleep having a faster cast time, nightwing, and swift cast, blms have more than enough tools to set up something. The primary problem was that if you had a dps (usually a BRD/MCH) focusing on them the entire time, they were effecively out of the game in exchange for your BRD/MCH's counterplay. With the change, that's shifted a bit and now MCH/BRD has lost that niche and really can't do much outside of burst.

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Originally Posted by Dimitrii

I believe this is what SE had intended all along anyway based on their posts lately. Their vision for Feast was never to see it be a "kill the healer first and pick off the rest after as they scramble to run away" even though many of us, including myself, did it anyway. There were too many mediocre healers out there to bother trying to out dps their healing output instead of just repeatedly killing said heals outright and cleaning up their teammates afterwards.

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Except you won't be killing anything if the healer is left alone to spam heals on their target. Infact, most of my games involved going after the dps first while the healer was harassed. It works wonders on WHM, not so much on astro without stun locking. And this isn't even touching on the CCs that BLMs and WHMs have access to (which are left untouched even though they reduced the duration of tri-bind). Hope you don't have a WHM+BLM on the enemy team cause if you leave one or the other alone, someone is going to fall asleep when there aren't much means for interrupt.

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Originally Posted by Zoanir

3.22 changes has ruined solo PvP. It seems like people only raged about SMN but MCH and DRG has similars burst in addition with a pretty good self-sustain and sustained damage.
In addition we SMN get nerfed Tri-bind. How about BLM double Sleep or Freeze ?

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SMN burst is nigh instanteous and for the most part, reliable. A DRG (or any melee really) is essentially sticking their hands in a blender if they're going for the healer or ranged that's taking a passive-agressive burst. It's actually hilarious to see a monk or ninja get blown up immediately because they included B4B in their cooldowns. MCH requires proper spacing (which can already be utter hell due to LoS) and a bind, sleep or stun to execute their burst. Though I do agree that they shouldn't have left sleep alone if they were changing tri bind.

3.22 changes has ruined solo PvP. It seems like people only raged about SMN but MCH and DRG has similars burst in addition with a pretty good self-sustain and sustained damage.
In addition we SMN get nerfed Tri-bind. How about BLM double Sleep or Freeze ?

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Originally Posted by Koltik

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People cry BLM is horrible in PvP, but I am here to say that a BLM who played properly even as things are now was able to keep up with a melee DPS in damage, as well as get CC's off.

Source: Was on a BLM for an entire 4 minute match, BLM still did 72k dmg to Monk's 75k. His own melee DPS was even lower iirc.

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The BLM compared to the previous SMN was anyway lacky, that lack coulded be make less evident if you played in a party premade with a good coordination, but really in solo que after that people keep waking up the DRK that I slept and chain marked I left the job.

Actually I'm curious to see how can a BLM hit hard with full vit, and the "DPS loss" for not wearing INT jewels.
Anyway I agree with you when you say BLMs will be a pain now, but to me, still only in party premade.

For solo que I'll just fear MCH now, high burst free moves after 1st strike and no more damage penalty if under 15 yalms.

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Originally Posted by Geologo

Actually I'm curious to see how can a BLM hit hard with full vit, and the "DPS loss" for not wearing INT jewels.

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Between accs and attribute points, you can trade up to 190 int for up to 180 vit (vit cap on lvl 60 accs is 2 points lower than other stats - 29 vs 31). This would represent a HUGE hit to your potency. I promise its absolutely not worth losing that much dmg output simply to gain a percentage of a percentage needed to interrupt casting.

edit: As a disclaimer, I might be wrong. The amount of misinformation prevalent in the pvp community with regards to mechanics is absolutely mind boggling. I'd encourage anyone curious about this sort of thing to experiment and find out for themselves. Just because 25 people on the pvp forums chant something in unison doesnt make it true. Here's an excellent example. Skip to page 6 for the spoiler (Im pretty sure the vast majority of players still arent aware of this, which is kinda on SE at this point for not making it clear ingame)

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Originally Posted by Enlial

Between accs and attribute points, you can trade up to 190 int for up to 180 vit (vit cap on lvl 60 accs is 2 points lower than other stats - 29 vs 31). This would represent a HUGE hit to your potency. I promise its absolutely not worth losing that much dmg output simply to gain a percentage of a percentage needed to interrupt casting.

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180 INT and half the substats is a loss of about 30 WD (out of a total of i believe 200ish? total WD between weapons, stats and accessories? I'l check later) It's a significant drop, but you gain a ton of survivability to go with it.

e: 85 WD, 521 Int from gear, 295 base INT, for a total of 166.83 WD. Left side has another 618 substats on it, worth another effective ~12.36 WD. Right side's substats would be another 240, but you can only get a max of 141 speccing for vit.

Total WD with INT accessories: 183.99 WD
Total WD with VIT accessories: ~166.95 WD, assuming you have crit/x on all your vit accessories.

The actual loss is a bit larger, because SpS is the best by a good margin, but it's only going to represent between a 9-12% loss in potency.

For 3k health and better interruption protection? That's a pretty great trade.

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Originally Posted by Enlial

Between accs and attribute points, you can trade up to 190 int for up to 180 vit (vit cap on lvl 60 accs is 2 points lower than other stats - 29 vs 31). This would represent a HUGE hit to your potency. I promise its absolutely not worth losing that much dmg output simply to gain a percentage of a percentage needed to interrupt casting.

edit: As a disclaimer, I might be wrong.

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Wrong. Your role as BLM is not to do big damage, it's to control the enemy team through the use of superior CC, then assisting in burst.

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Originally Posted by Renault

Wrong. Your role as BLM is not to do big damage, it's to control the enemy team through the use of superior CC, then assisting in burst.

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https://media.giphy.com/media/sXZxueEj56rwk/giphy.gif

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Originally Posted by Iagainsti

https://media.giphy.com/media/sXZxueEj56rwk/giphy.gif

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Too be fair, this is a reason why the flow of the match can get out of the control if the enemy BLM is allowed to get their casts off. 12/6 seconds of bind/sleep is extremely detrimental and feels like an eternity with how fast the game moves, especially with the changes toward heavy medal.

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Originally Posted by Houston009

I'm not including Spirits Within or Holmgang because they are not stuns. When refering to stun-locking, it is the act of actually "stunning" your target into submission. I cannot express this enough.

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That's fair enough. I'm guilty of using inaccurate wording. My mistake.

Regardless, even thought the target is not actually "stunned," it is still being locked down. We're not just talking about stuns here. We're talking about interruptions to casts (the topic of the thread). Holmgang did, at one point, excel at this. The drag of the bind causes an interrupt, locks a target from moving (thereby destroying their positioning and possible lines of sight), and allows for the War (and anyone else nearby) to wail away on the caster. With two prepped Fell Cleaves, that's a solid 10 seconds in which the healer wasn't healing anything (including their actual 2 stuns), same as Pld. Before the Tank dmg nerf, a Healer was flat out unlikely to even survive a full War Holmgang Burst Combo. Now that tank dmg was reduced, they can survive, but they still weren't going anywhere or casting anything. That left your dps team plenty of time to do whatever the hell they wanted without worrying about the healer getting in the way.

The question now is if the change to the interruption threshold is going to negatively effect the likelihood of Warrior interruptions. With Pld's, it's not even a question. A Pld is lucky to get a 3k strike with Royal Authority, even if it's a crit. Outside of Spirits Within and Shield Bash, they aren't interrupting anything. War's on the other hand, have more muscle. I saw one do a 3k non-crit Fell Cleave in a Feast match just the other night (which had our healer crying bullsh*t). That's plenty of healer harassment potential, right there. Throw a Ninja into the mix and the healer isn't going to be doing much of anything during the match except running for their lives.

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Originally Posted by Iagainsti

https://media.giphy.com/media/sXZxueEj56rwk/giphy.gif

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I don't get it? What's your counter argument?

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Originally Posted by Februs

I saw one do a 3k non-crit Fell Cleave.

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This is what happens when you let your warrior take the offense buff folks.

Warrior taking offense can be very effective.

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Originally Posted by Cynric

This is what happens when you let your warrior take the offense buff folks.

Warrior taking offense can be very effective.

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We were playing games against the diamond 4s team on Aether and they gave offense to the warrior every time. While it was scary at times I'm not sold on it. Definitely get the full duration out of it though which is a plus

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Originally Posted by Renault

Wrong. Your role as BLM is not to do big damage, it's to control the enemy team through the use of superior CC, then assisting in burst.

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Maybe before 3.22, but before 3.22 if the other team knew what was up, you can easily just LOS/interrupt sleeps and save purify for when you can't avoid it. Esuna is also a thing too. BLM was just underpowered in general even for the "good" ones. I'm not going to say that BLM won't be overpowered with 3.22, but there is really nothing I see that they can do to help them without completely overhauling the class.

I'll also say this again, DPS being able to interrupt based on just hitting with ANY ability took no skill whatsoever, what square is doing is a step in the right direction. Keep in mind that they said they might even delay the season in 3.25 to continue balance.

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Originally Posted by Exira

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See the thing about blue and red, defense and offense respectively, is that they're dependent on the situation you're in. At the very start of the match if your DPS are already strong, give offense to the tank. As a Monk I don't especially need the offense buff and me taking it winds up being overkill anyway.

Early on you can have defense taken by the healer or the ranged because they will be focused, however there are situations where it can change and lead to interesting strategies. In the late game the player with the most medals should take defense in order to mitigate the focus fire. There's also the ability to give your melee defense to mitigate the penalty of blood for blood.

The boxes aren't meant to be a set in stone sort of thing imo. It should be based on your personal strategy. Of course in solo it's hard to convince people to break out the norm. But when your tank is sitting with stacks of heavy medal, and the healer is worth far less medals than them and still takes the defense buff, well that wasn't proper strategy.

Personally sleep should just straight up nerfed. I always thought that when I got a 15 second sleep off on someone with no way out it won me the game.

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Originally Posted by Aviars

Personally sleep should just straight up nerfed. I always thought that when I got a 15 second sleep off on someone with no way out it won me the game.

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I would agree, but most randoms tend to attack slept characters anyway so those 15 seconds become 2.

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Originally Posted by Cynric

The boxes aren't meant to be a set in stone sort of thing imo. It should be based on your personal strategy. Of course in solo it's hard to convince people to break out the norm. But when your tank is sitting with stacks of heavy medal, and the healer is worth far less medals than them and still takes the defense buff, well that wasn't proper strategy.

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Totally agree. The buffs should definitely be attributed on a case by case basis. There's a baseline to go with at the beginning of matches, certainly, but they shouldn't always be distributed arbitrarily, especially by the second set. It's not a common occurrence, but at 9 stacks of Heavy Medal, I don't think anyone has the right to complain when the Tank takes the Def buff.

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Originally Posted by Februs

Totally agree. The buffs should definitely be attributed on a case by case basis. There's a baseline to go with at the beginning of matches, certainly, but they shouldn't always be distributed arbitrarily, especially by the second set. It's not a common occurrence, but at 9 stacks of Heavy Medal, I don't think anyone has the right to complain when the Tank takes the Def buff.

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Honestly if your tank is ever at 9 stacks they're bad. You should never want to pick up 9 stacks especially with the new changes

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

I would agree, but most randoms tend to attack slept characters anyway so those 15 seconds become 2.

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xD this^^^^^! I've even caught myself doing it switching targets on my MCH /faceplam , you'll never get a faster typed "SORRY!!!!!!!" out of me.

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Originally Posted by Exira

Honestly if your tank is ever at 9 stacks they're bad. You should never want to pick up 9 stacks especially with the new changes

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It's just an example. I think the only time I've ever even seen a tank get 9 stacks was in a casual 8v8 match. 4v4 matches don't usually last long enough for that kind of thing.

That said, as a Tank I can tell you that I have run into PuG's in 4v4 in which your teammates absolutely REFUSE to pick up medals, allocating it strictly to the "Tank's job" regardless of how many stacks you already have. That can get a little annoying. There's also those lovely accidents in which you happen to be standing on top of a player as they die and instantly pick up an extra medal that you were hoping to save for a Dps. Normally, these kinds of things aren't a big deal, though. The vulnerability stacks aren't bad enough to make a big difference, but with the increase to the Heavy Medal debuff stacks, Tanks might start needing additional defense at a lower number. Anything over 3 stacks, maybe?

Regardless, the boxes shouldn't just be used arbitrarily and without thought. Circumstances and team composition should play a factor in who gets what buff at what time. The same goes for the adrenaline box in the middle.

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Originally Posted by MinhSa

It seems like a very dangerous change on paper, it'll make good and great healers even better. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out though.

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Tried a few matches already. It does make them feel more OP to the point you don't want to mess w/ them and just focus on melee/range DPS instead. Had that happen to me where the opposing team just went after me as a MCH player.

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Originally Posted by Februs

It's just an example. I think the only time I've ever even seen a tank get 9 stacks was in a casual 8v8 match. 4v4 matches don't usually last long enough for that kind of thing.

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It's not about lasting long, most of the time. Killing 3 members on the opposing side is 150 medals on the floor. If the tank picks up all of them, thats 9 stacks for 135% right there (before it'd be 6 stacks with 60%). Conversely, having 170 medals is 2 stacks of 30% (previously it was only 1 stack of 10%), and that's practically a death sentence for non-tanks.

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Originally Posted by RiceisNice

It's not about lasting long, most of the time. Killing 3 members on the opposing side is 150 medals on the floor. If the tank picks up all of them, thats 9 stacks for 135% right there (before it'd be 6 stacks with 60%). Conversely, having 170 medals is 2 stacks of 30% (previously it was only 1 stack of 10%), and that's practically a death sentence for non-tanks.

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That's a good point as well, and there's not really anything that can be done about those kinds of circumstances.

Consider the second example. If someone dies with 170 medals, it's not like the tank on the team is "bad" for picking them up. It's that there's really no other option. Anyone else will be signing their death warrant by doing so. You definitely don't want the casters to do it, cuz they get enough heat already. Melee is a better option than casters, but you're potentially reducing your teams offensive power because that player won't be able to withstand attacks while they are trying to kill people. That leaves the tank. Highest defense, and least dps lost when they have to pull out and avoid getting ganked.

It's definitely not something I see happen often, but the HM stacks can add up quickly depending on the circumstances of the match.

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Originally Posted by Februs

That's a good point as well, and there's not really anything that can be done about those kinds of circumstances.

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You can mitigate it a bit by having the medal pickups be distributed across, but if the idea was to make it to punish tanks for stacking excess medals, the line between 150-200 is already too much of a burden for non-tanks picking up medals (because honestly, you needed at least 6+ stacks to be able to punish a tank for such a play before the change).

To put in perspective, if you kill someone, they get raised and you kill them again, that's 75 medals dropped. A single person picking it is already inflicted with a 30% vulnerbility buff. Likewise if you drop someone that has 200 medals and you pick up their 100, that's 100+ added to your total. Assuming you didn't die, that's immediately 200 medals and 4 stacks for a 60% vulnerability, assuming you didn't pick up anything else beforehand. If you did, that's another stack for every 10 medals after 200 (starting from 4 stacks)

I think this change is harsher than any of the other changes. I understand that casters didn't exactly have a chance before, but now we have a problem where it is very difficult to kill through all of the uninterrupted heals. Culling Time has gone from a passive-play countermeasure to a necessity to get a kill in many situations, even in 4 v 4 matches.

As a tank I feel useless outside of the 10-20 second window where I can set-up a kill with Full Swing, and Holmgang + Brutal Swing or Shield Bash. Most casters now simply ignore me as my attacks are not bursty enough to consistently interrupt their casting.

I would suggest changing it to either the same system but with diminishing returns (lower HP% while they are being attacked consistently) or something like WoW's system where being attacked while casting just sets back your cast bar a little bit, effectively slowing cast speeds but not stopping them outright.

15% cast interrupt is way too high. This crap needs to be lowered.

Sounds like the meta changed to you want 3 people to burst someone throught heals.

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Originally Posted by PLitz

As a tank I feel useless outside of the 10-20 second window where I can set-up a kill with Full Swing, and Holmgang + Brutal Swing or Shield Bash. Most casters now simply ignore me as my attacks are not bursty enough to consistently interrupt their casting.

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I've been having some trouble finding a purpose as a Paladin since the patch as well. Before the patch I had a very clear goal (slow down the healers and be the team's coin vault) but now once the healer has grown immune to my stuns I feel there's not much else I can do to slow the enemy's heals so I switch to being a sub par dps or a sub par healer. With the increased damage penalty from Heavy Metal I also can't stash the team's coins as effectively as before.

I understand the need to change things for casters, as constant interruptions shut down their entire game, but at the same time I feel the patch took away my role in the group. I'd be interested to hear what strategy other Paladins are using.

They should rebalance tank combos in PvP following the interrupt change... Granted I'm only thinking of Dark Knight here, but give us;

Damage combo (Souleater)
Utility combo (Delirium)
Interrupt combo (Power Slash)

Does that translate over to Warrior and Paladin well? Warriors has Butcher's Block/Storm's Eye/Storm's Path, Paladin has Rage of Halone/Goring Blade/Royal Authority... Are any of those as worthless as Power Slash, though?

The interrupt could do a number of things... Silence, light knock-back, perhaps even Paralysis? If it can work for all the tanks, I'd say one of the three should be Pacification, too... All three having a tool for shutting down mages would be boring, one having a tool to shut down melee/tanks would be much more interesting... Or perhaps that wont work with the new meta, I've not opted to ruin three peoples day by trying out Dark Knight since 3.22...

I think an interrupt combo would work well, though... It would actually let us adapt our approach depending on the situation, rather than all crowd control being locked behind resists/cooldowns...

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Originally Posted by WellFooled

I've been having some trouble finding a purpose as a Paladin since the patch as well. Before the patch I had a very clear goal (slow down the healers and be the team's coin vault) but now once the healer has grown immune to my stuns I feel there's not much else I can do to slow the enemy's heals so I switch to being a sub par dps or a sub par healer. With the increased damage penalty from Heavy Metal I also can't stash the team's coins as effectively as before.

I understand the need to change things for casters, as constant interruptions shut down their entire game, but at the same time I feel the patch took away my role in the group. I'd be interested to hear what strategy other Paladins are using.

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Much as I have hated pld these past 2 years for its uselessness outside healer pestering, your words actually make me feel sorry for em for the very 1st time.

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Originally Posted by Vaeria

Much as I have hated pld these past 2 years for its uselessness outside healer pestering, your words actually make me feel sorry for em for the very 1st time.

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Our uselessness outside of healer pestering is something I've hated as well, but at least it provided a reason for us to exist in PvP. In PvE tanks, dps, and healers have clearly defined roles and dps and healers keep those roles in PvP, but we tanks lose our purpose. There is no enmity (nor should there be) in PvP and there are precious few options to guard our party. Cover and Testudo are great, but they're so minor when measured against all of our skills, most of which aren't as effective in PvP because tanks are the least likely to be attacked.

I wish we had more ways to guard our allies. Where as dps and healers always have some skill at their disposal that allows them to dps or heal, tanks only rarely have an ability available that allows us to guard our allies. To that end, I wish we had more defensive abilities that could be shared and more ways to divert damage to ourselves so the defensive abilities we already have could be more useful to the group. That way we could function as tanks in PvP instead of, at best, healer harassers.

That's just it, our role as tanks in PvP came down to being able to heckle either the casters (to prevent them from killing our teammates) or the healers (to occupy them while our teammates set up kills) without that we are tougher to kill but weaker damage dealers. As it is now, having a tank in the Feast is arbitrary, a second melee would do better.

It has always been tough to design PvP with tanks in mind as it is hard to convince other players to want to attack them. Most PvP MMOs don't even use the holy trinity anymore partially for this reason. We sort of had it going for us before 3.22 where the Heavy Medal debuff, while detrimental, would not stop us from hoarding the medals and trying to become the target, just to switch to tank stance and pop defensive CDs.

I like the new changes. Before it was impossible to cast with a tank on you. Now at least you can get a few casts off with some running in between.

The % needs to be lowered. Good healers are bored or annoyed at the changes, anything they learned pvping the last 2 years gets thrown out of the window when a newbie WHM can just stand there and spamcast. WHM has so many guaranteed cast windows now its stupid. Swiftcast, Surecast, Presence, Prism, Thrill of War/Tetsudo, defense kit (to some extent), Aetheric Burst etc etc. All on top of being able to regen on the move and CC the crap out of people if you only leave 1 guy on them. A WHM + BLM comp is pure toxicity as unless you have a BLM too someone is going to CC your team to high heaven as you cannot interrupt two casters easily. 5% would allow for some leeway, no tomahawk cheese etc; yet still synergise well with WHM skills and adlo (if it works on losing actual hp, not sure on this).