The Bottom Feeders: Moves You Never Use and Why.

[Iagainsti]

I think the only ability paladins have which I feel needs a big viability boost is Clemency. It -should- be class defining but its implementation makes it stupidly hard to use.

Not a Paladin myself, but when I read the tooltip at xpac launch, I thought right away Clemency should have an additional affect, "Grants any party member within a 5y range of target Protectra, preventing damage totalling 50% of HP restored". Now that would be class defining.

[AI_wass]

One man's trash, another man's treasure. I've been finding uses for pretty much all my buttons, even the seemingly contradictory ones. Unleash for low-cost AOE to grab with, Abyssal Drain spam to burn mobs down. DA Dark Dance/DA Dark Passenger is expensive as hell, but 10 seconds of something like 50% dodge rate against a big pull is way too good to pass up. Sole Survivor's a nice pick-me-up and helps with AOE spamming.

DRK has a lot of neat tricks to pull in 4-man content.

[AlmightyDook]

Awareness should be a stat on gear - as an active skill, it's terrible.

Just literally laughed out loud. DA + Dark Dance/Dark Dance + Awareness alternating, Awareness + Raw Intuition, Awareness + Bulwark...

You need to learn your cooldowns lol

[Sapphidia]

Just literally laughed out loud. DA + Dark Dance/Dark Dance + Awareness alternating, Awareness + Raw Intuition, Awareness + Bulwark...

You need to learn your cooldowns lol

Noone here is arguing with HOW to use Awareness. The issue is that it's BARELY NOTICEABLE. Even in those situations. This is a thread about "Bottom Feeder" skills. Mobs have about a 5% crit rate. Crits do +50% damage. Popping Awareness results in 2.5% less damage taken on average if you dont factor in Block/Parry. Even if you pop it with Bulwark/Raw Int so it removes the low chance of crits, it's still only a few percent of damage reduction, with some RNG added in. Technically it might even do nothing if none of the rolls would have been crits anyway. Add in the fact that big tankbusters (that you can still block/parry) cannot crit...

Awareness isnt useless, but the actual impact it has when it's up is TINY. It's by far the least impactful cooldown we have. Even Foresight on average reduces almost twice as much damage as Awareness and that's generally viewed as a weak cooldown. Rampart is a flat 20% less damage taken. Foresight is 7-8% less physical damage taken. Awareness is... maybe 3% less damage taken on average, possibly. Yes it prevents the spikes in certain moments, and has some use, but overall its impact is small.

Just add a "cant be crit" element to Raw Int, Bulwark, Sheltron and Dark Dance, or a passive effect on the tank stance. We're talking here about Bottom Feeders, and that's what Awareness is - it's a button you press at specific times, but the IMPACT of that button is absolutely tiny. Physical Auto Attack damage that can crit do not generally make up a significant portion of damage on most encounters, and crits themselves are only +50% damage. It's not useless, it's just -minimal-.

[Iagainsti]

Noone here is arguing with HOW to use Awareness. The issue is that it's BARELY NOTICEABLE. Even in those situations. This is a thread about "Bottom Feeder" skills. Mobs have about a 5% crit rate. Crits do +50% damage. Popping Awareness results in 2.5% less damage taken on average if you dont factor in Block/Parry. Even if you pop it with Bulwark/Raw Int so it removes the low chance of crits, it's still only a few percent of damage reduction, with some RNG added in. Technically it might even do nothing if none of the rolls would have been crits anyway. Add in the fact that big tankbusters (that you can still block/parry) cannot crit...

I completely concur; I did macro Awareness with RI, but I can't recall the last time I took a hit from the flank or from behind so it is moot. I still stick to my statement that RI itself is a glorified auto Wrath Stack CD anyway.

[Februs]

We're talking here about Bottom Feeders, and that's what Awareness is - it's a button you press at specific times, but the IMPACT of that button is absolutely tiny. Physical Auto Attack damage that can crit do not generally make up a significant portion of damage on most encounters, and crits themselves are only +50% damage. It's not useless, it's just -minimal-.

I can agree with this, though I think you're short-changing the actual percentage a little.Given that each block can defend as high as 30% dmg on Pld, additional Blocks proc'd by Awareness removing crits would most certainly stack above 3 %. The only problem is, as you pointed out, that it is impossible to tell exactly how much of a return we are seeing off of the move, because impossible to now how many Crits were nullified during the time Awareness is up. Given that it's an RNG issue, it could be as low as 0 (though, by that logic it could also be 100%, which would be a substantial increase in defense). The real issue with Awareness's seemingly small defensive gain is that we simply don't, and can't, know how much it is actually doing for us in the background.

I suppose it would be possible to give very rough values with some testing... For Pld, someone would be have to willing to Tank and identical set number of mobs (say 3 for the sake of replicating an "average" pull) of the same type 4 times using 4 different methods:

1st run would be a dry run with no buffs. Count up the total blocks during a set time (say 5 minutes). 2nd run would be using only Awareness only to test efficiency of increased Proc rate. Count up the blocks over the course of 2 casts of Awareness (2 casts within 5 minutes). 3rd run would be with only Bulwark. Same deal as the Awareness run. Unfortunately, Bulwark's absurdly long CD means only 1 cast within 5 minutes. Count up the blocks. Last run would combine Awareness and Bulwark (used together), followed by a second Awareness on CD within 5 minutes. Count up the blocks.

After that we'd have to compare the results to see a very rough estimate (because RNG of Crits/Blocks precludes the notion of universal results) of how much utility Awareness actually gives us in practice. If you wanted to be really thorough, you'd also count up the crit dmg from the dry run and compare that to the crits dealt during the downtime of Awareness of the other 3 runs.

Without at least doing this much, though, it's really difficult to weigh the full value of Awareness, especially because most Pld's don't really pay attention to Proc'd Blocks. I don't know about most of you, but I don't spend a lot of time watching for every single "block" text that comes onto the screen, especially now that Shield Swipe is off of the OGCD. My only reason for actively paying attention to my blocks has been tossed out the window.

[Februs]

I completely concur; I did macro Awareness with RI, but I can't recall the last time I took a hit from the flank or from behind so it is moot.

I don't think I've ever been hit on my side or my back during a Boss encounter... but I think the risk of IR comes in during mob tanking, not boss tanking. It's not difficult to keep your mob positioned in front of you, of course, but in bigger pulls mobs tend to shove each other around a little. Mob's can't overlap hitboxes, so once you get a pack of 5 or more they run the risk of shoving each other out of position and can, rarely, get pushed to the range of your hitbox that is considered the "flank." It's not common though, and I think I've only seen something like this happen when there's a few big mobs mixed in who squeeze the little guys to the sides. It's kind of funny to watch them shove each other around for the sake of positioning.

[Iagainsti]

I don't think I've ever been hit on my side or my back during a Boss encounter... but I think the risk of IR comes in during mob tanking, not boss tanking. It's not difficult to keep your mob positioned in front of you, of course, but in bigger pulls mobs tend to shove each other around a little. Mob's can't overlap hitboxes, so once you get a pack of 5 or more they run the risk of shoving each other out of position and can, rarely, get pushed to the range of your hitbox that is considered the "flank." It's not common though, and I think I've only seen something like this happen when there's a few big mobs mixed in who squeeze the little guys to the sides. It's kind of funny to watch them shove each other around for the sake of positioning.

I know exactly what you mean xD especially in A2 SA2 or when you run unsynced content and pull the whole place. I found that the easy fix to this is to target as best as you can the "middle" mob of the pack and slowly back pedal as theyre being burnt down. It's almost like the system constantly reshuffles them and the system registers their hits to the front of your hitbox.

[Februs]

I know exactly what you mean xD especially in A2 SA2 or when you run unsynced content and pull the whole place. I found that the easy fix to this is to target as best as you can the "middle" mob of the pack and slowly back pedal as theyre being burnt down. It's almost like the system constantly reshuffles them and the system registers their hits to the front of your hitbox.

Exactly lol. This is one of the only uses I've ever found in the game for the "target lock-on" function (besides the Demon Wall boss). Only time it's even an issue is if over-eager Dps start dropping ground based AoE's, but I am not turning the train around for that. Sorry they wasted a CD, but no... just no...

[Shurrikhan]

Exactly lol. This is one of the only uses I've ever found in the game for the "target lock-on" function (besides the Demon Wall boss). Only time it's even an issue is if over-eager Dps start dropping ground based AoE's, but I am not turning the train around for that. Sorry they wasted a CD, but no... just no...

Same. "...I could take 7 crits or screw over melee positionals while I rotate these mobs for your flaming arrow... or I could just keep parrying everything while slowly being overrun... at a controlled pace." Still have 'lock-on' bound to a convenient button, though mostly for chasing down mobs as melee while lagging, and it does look pretty cool in that situation...

I remember an LS of mine discussing findings on avg crit chance of mobs across HW dungeons. Just can't remember what that number was (albeit fairly consistent). 8... maybe 12%? That'd give you a good average 6% mitigation in the latter case, more with DD or Bulwark up, which isn't too bad given that it also has the safety net factor of preventing RNG spike damage.