Ok let's get started...

[Bengali]

Man, I can't believe I forgot the PC heal issue.  That's important, and I've posted why I think we should have either an equivalent direct heal or a smaller heal coupled with a beastlord-appropriate heal over time.   That post is around here somewhere. :p

Pet heal issue (an explanation, for those who asked) is that at 9 seconds, you a) lose so much dps that it's not worth it if you are using your pet for dps, b) are at extreme risk of losing your pet to a mob, if you are using it to offtank anything dangerous and c) pet heals are spouted back at us whenever someone talks about how powerful we are and they're spells that none of us ever use.   If people are gonna hate us for having them or claim that we're "balanced" because of them, then they should at least do something. ;)

Weapon caps: All of them should be the same as hth, not just piercing or 1hb or 2hb.  That way you can just compare ratios and know (mostly) whether you're getting an upgrade (2hb is a little more complicated, but we'll cross that bridge later).   A lot of people talk about "the vision" is that beastlords rely on certain types of weapons above others and my response is that it's *already* taken into account because we can only use 4 weapon types, which is tied for second fewest in the game, and the simple fact of itemization (we can't use every piercer, 1hb, etc.).  It's a double penalty to gimp the weapons that we do get.

Note this is a "general" issue because it applies to warriors and rangers too, but they aren't hit nearly as hard as they only have one lower skill, and it's only 10 points behind.  But in any event their caps should be the same as well.

DoT aggro:  I'm not wedded to any particular value, but I know that for some reason people with DoTs have excessive aggro and SOE has made us very dot dependent (check out how many of our spells and planned spells from 60+ are dots), again they should address this for everyone, since there are numerous reports of DoTs doing more aggro even when they do less damage (like on critical ticks, etc.)

[Konji]

Weapons caps on 1HB,2HB,Piercing changed to 250
And some form of agro reduction for raids.

Im a simple cat thats all i ask.........for now  :)

[Gimrol]

What I would like to do is first address some "general" EQ issues.  I don't want to get into AAs with this thread, or OoW issues, or whatever.  I've read over the previous threads and talked with a bunch of people so let me give you a couple examples of what I'm talking about and looking for.

-  Beastlord weapon caps.  HtH caps 25 points higher and by going with a 1hb or piercer with identical stats a beastlord loses ~5% dps currently.  

-  Beastlord aggro.  Between our nukes/dots/procs we are aggro mongers for the amount of damage we do even if we aren't slowing.  I know a lot of beastlords that dread tank switches or the MT going down.  Melee classes are...

Beastlords simply don't have any form of aggro control outside of "hey don't cast SV it'll get ya killed" or "put your ED in your off-hand or bag it for a CoW for now", etc.  

So, lets hear um, what do you think are some general beastlord issues and possible solutions to those problems...

I agree on the weapon skill caps.  Personally, i think we should make this a high priority issue because it's win-win for everybody and (theoretically) a simple coding/database change on SOE's side.  There is no way I can think of that anybody is hurt by raising piercing or 1hb skillcaps.  Are we including 2hb in this, or just one-handers?

Aggro control is not as clear cut of an issue.  I agree that Beastlords can generate way more aggro than we want, but the problem comes in designing the solution.  Personally, don't want SCS AA because of it's always-on nature.  I don't really want Jolting blades either, as IIRC it takes up a buffslot and they are in short supply.  This leaves us with two options, either a spell-based solution or an itemization-based solution.  Getting jolt or a similar spell is good because it lets us choose when to use it, but the downside is that we have more competition for the 8 spell slots we are allotted.  This leaves us with itemization.  Beastlords can already use the Dagger of Distraction , and if we get the increase in weapon skills, this seems to be a good solution.  Maybe we just need more attainable weapons with aggro-reducing procs.  I'd be interested to hear what everyone thinks of this.

As for heals, I personally don't really want more heals.  This incluces pet heals.  Sure chloroblast sucks, but I only use it when i'm soloing anyway.  I dont' want a raid quality heal, for fear that I'll be asked to use it (/rs Beastlords join the heal-of-bestiality channel -yuk!).  I so rarely even mem my pet heal as it is and I don't think that having a better one will change that.  If I want more healing, i'd get weapons with lifetap procs or augs.

Here's my new input:  I'd like to see (1) a high level disease dot that doesnt' suck and (2) lower recast times on nukes or more nukes.

While I *do* use plague fairly frequently, it's a level 49 Shaman spell that is balanced around them having cannibalize and better heals than we get.  I'd really like to see something like an upgrade to Malaria that has no DD component and a fairly short acting DoT portion.  Note that the proposed level 70 BST spell doesn't really fit this description, as it is still 2 minutes duration, and fairly low damage (72 per).  I'd much rather see something like 144 damage/tick for one minute, perhaps with slightly adjusted mana cost.

As for nukes, there are several fights that you can't melee in, for whatever reason.  While these fights are going on, I usually mem 2 disease DOTs (plague & malaria), 1 poison dot (scorpion venom), and 2 DD's (frost spear and blizzard blast).  Note that I dont' have the ancient frozen chaos.  Yes, you can chain-cast blizzard blast, but it's a shaman spell, so it's mana costs are balanced against having cannibalize and heals.  This means it's not efficient at all.  I'd much prefer to have a shorter-recast version of Frost spear, or a poison based nuke that we can chain-cast, just for those times I can't melee.  As it is, i'm willing to bet that high-end beastlords lose dps by casting, so this would really only be important for times that you can't melee or are trying to stop a runner,etc.

All of this is from the point of view of a pre-elemental bst (3 kills to go), so the issues may change slightly as you get into time/god.  If this is the case, feel free to point that out.

Gimrol

[jitathab]

If take agro from the dots, give it back some other way. Why? I need dots to tank.
EQ isnt only about raiding and agro on raids, and often I tank or offtank in groups, taking away agro generating dots will cause serious problems and be a nerf unless agro ability is replaced.

We are suited to off tanking over monks and rangers because they do significantly more damage than we do and our tanking DPS goes down the least, because its lowest to start with. Changing the dots without a direct equivilant replacement will be bad.

[Aneya]

Weapon Skills Caps

Raising our weapon skill caps would definately be nice. As it stands, for max dps we are limited to h2h weapons. No other class melee is so severely limited. Time enabled Rangers, Monks and Rogues can use either Cudgel of Wrecking and or Dagger of distraction to up their DPS but these weapons don't do much of anything for us. Our melee DPS is already lower than those classes by 50% or more due to the fact that we don't have the Dual Attack skill, why penalize us even more by giving us a lower skill cap?

On the other hand, we have slow and a pet which supposedly makes up for this. However, slow mitigation and mobs resisting the pets stun proc effectively remove a large part of this advantage.

Agro

In Raids I often have a full bar of mana. This is a question of self preservation. If I cast any spell, despite my inferior melee dps I run the risk of stealing agro. There are many reasons for this. Part of it is due to the fact that we generate a lot of agro and have no way to loose it. However, this may not be the only reason. In my experience, most raiders do not put out max dps so even if theoreticaly they should have more agro then us, they don't. If this is the problem, then there is not much we can do but lower our dps to avoid agro.

If we got some way to lose agro, I would go with a dicipline.

Healing

I would like to see a heal over time spell. It doesn't have to be too big 600 or 800 hp is fine by me, it just has to be mana efficient. I'd even go for a Stoicism like spell.

Mitigation

I don't think we need any improvement in mitigation. The question is what are you willing to give up for better mitigation? Slows? Our pet? We are a leather class. Deal with it. For better mitigation, play a Shaman :P

Pet Heals

They plan on giving us slightly improved pet heals so I don't see the need to push this point too much. It would be nice if we could Heal other peoples pets but that would be too easy to abuse.

Slow Resist
I beleive they are playing around with the idea of giving as a new lvl 70 65% slow with -20 or -30% to resist. So there should not be much need to push on this point.

[Coprolith]

I'll add this one:

Make the pet's buff box work the same way as our own, giving us the ability to click off certain beneficial buffs in favor of others. I.e. the ability to change from Sp.o.Flame to Sp.o.Snow without having to summon a new warder

/hugs

[Chubaka]

Note that the proposed level 70 BST spell doesn't really fit this description, as it is still 2 minutes duration, and fairly low damage (72 per).  I'd much rather see something like 144 damage/tick for one minute, perhaps with slightly adjusted mana cost.

Gimrol

Huh?  Scorp Venom is 149 damage for 48sec (8-ticks), how would 144 for a minute be so much more useful?

[Chubaka]

I'll add this one:

Make the pet's buff box work the same way as our own, giving us the ability to click off certain beneficial buffs in favor of others. I.e. the ability to change from Sp.o.Flame to Sp.o.Snow without having to summon a new warder

/hugs

You can dispell your pet.  But yes this would be very useful.

[Aneya]

Frenzy line spells are working as intended.

Ferocity is related to the Shaman Avatar line that also has long casting delay/short duration and I'd consider it working as intended also.

I agree with Jataan that we are fairly balanced. It says a lot when all we complain about is pet shrink and backwards claws when other classes are whining about all kinds of crap.

As for BST only h2h weapons, won't work they tried that in Ssra and that rather popular uber class whined and complained so hard that they made it MNK/BST.

They tried again with Immaculate Elven Dagger which was a good idea except that with a lower weapon skill cap it looses a lot of its appeal.

To add insult to injury they added Darkened Stone Bludgeon in GoD, a MNK/BST 1hb.

IMHO weapon skill caps are the single most important issue for us apart from pet shrink and backwards claws. Everything else is extra icing on the cake. If we want to show the rest of the community how special BSTs are then we should go to the devs and say you're doing a great job, all we want it to raise weapon skill caps and a few cosmetic changes. Keep up the good work!

[Kylaz]

I'll add this one:

Make the pet's buff box work the same way as our own, giving us the ability to click off certain beneficial buffs in favor of others. I.e. the ability to change from Sp.o.Flame to Sp.o.Snow without having to summon a new warder

That's even more important for people having pet affinity (will perhaps work towards it soon). Imagine a ranger in group.. Imagine he casts SoT... I do not remember the number of buffs our pet can have (15, I'd guess), but atm there is no way to select which buff we want to keep on pet in a raid - I usually click off 4 or 5 MGB/group buffs on myself until I get what I want.

DoT Aggro is a issue for us, but I believe it is much more a problem for shammies.

Pet heals cast time is, I agree, too long, but I'm afraid that if we ask for an upgrade there, mages & necros will cry for nerf, unless they get the same kind of upgrade

Pet DPS is something that should be increased on par with the weapon ratio or the spell damage, as levels & expansions go. We have to make sure we don't get forgotten there.


In my opinion, the lack of aggro reducing or movement control abilities is one class defining limitation of the Beastlord. We can do so many things that I don't believe we need to be better at those two.

[Jkal_Shihar]

Gimrol wrote:
Note that the proposed level 70 BST spell doesn't really fit this description, as it is still 2 minutes duration, and fairly low damage (72 per). I'd much rather see something like 144 damage/tick for one minute, perhaps with slightly adjusted mana cost.

Gimrol

Huh? Scorp Venom is 149 damage for 48sec (8-ticks), how would 144 for a minute be so much more useful?

I believe he is referring to the disease dot. Disease dots for some reason always do lower damage then poison ones and upping the damage on those that use both dots (where mobs can be resistant to one type but not the other) really isnt too much on asking.[/quote]

[Tastian]

Just want to reply to some things said so far.  Let you know my take, my issues, my further questions...

"I have an issue with Frenzy: After I cast it, my ENTIRE spell bar greys out for 30 seconds. I cannot cast ANY other spells until 30 seconds have passed. I can rt-click items with effects, I just cannot cast any other spells. I am not aware of any other spells that do this. "

That's how frenzy works.  The other spells in the line do the same thing.  Originally these spells gave huge hp regen and drained your mana as they ran on you.  This was changed awhile ago though and we are left with the spells as they are now.

"I also do not like the 2 min recast time on Ferocity/Savagry. I would rather see a higher mana cost, or grey out my entire spell bar for 30 seconds (like Frenzy curently does) than have to wait on the 2 min. What ends up happening is I have to start timing my Fero rotation way before any raid targets are hit, get into a rotation, and stay in that rotation...for 4 hours! If it is just me, then no prob...if I am trying to keep it on 2 or more people, and miss a rotation, then they are SOL for 4+ mins. Other than decrease the recast time, a longer duration or making it a group effect would be nice. It is too much a PITA to bother with if trying to keep on more than 1 person. If it is sooo unbalancing, remove the ability to cast on others. "

The problem with fero cast/recast is that you walk a very fine line on balancing it.  For some people fero is a bigger dps boost than getting vallons.  The resists are huge in places and it also throws on some stamina which means it can replace a buff for some.  It's not "that" hard to keep it on 1 person imo.  The spell would definitely be easier to keep on more people if it lasted longer, but you have to have a break point.  What if they increase it's duration to 12 minutes, but someone else now complains they can still only keep on 1-2 people, meanwhile some people are keeping on 9.  What about just raising the recast, the duration, the mana.  Not excessively, but maybe making it a 3 minute recast time with a 9 min base duartion.  That'd mean you could still keep on 4 people, it'd be easier to keep on others, the mana useage would stay about the same over time.  You wouldn't be casting so often, but at the sametime if someone got dispelled or ran out of range then it'd be longer before you could get it back on them.

"Haven't seen it mentioned, but I would also love if pet procs overwrote one another (including Hobble). If Hobble stacked that'd be even better, but just allowing us to change procs without annulling would be enough for me. My apologies if this has been mentioned already. "

That's an issue I think could use looking at because some procs overwrite one way, but not the other.  Such as going from rellic to hobble, but not back to rellic.  The ability to click off buffs on pet would be very nice.  Your pet does have 30 buff slots like an NPC so he doesn't fill up on junk buffs easily, but perhaps you'd want the extra attack of tunare or the extra hps of brells, etc.  This is also an overall pet issue, not just beastlord specific so we'll see.

"Beastlords are simply put, THE single most balanced class for all 3 areas of EQ, ie: Solo, Group, Raid. I have played 5 classes over 50, 2 of those are Time/GoD flagged."

I agree I think beastlords are in very good shape.  However, they do have some issues that don't make sense, don't need to be there and to be honest my hopes are that other classes that do need tuning and balancing more will get it.  As such it's important to make sure that beastlord concerns are heard to so that we don't just get ignored or left behind.

"1. Healing...Chloroblast is works just fine with a few AA's. I do not want the roll of spot healer. I have plenty of responsibility now. If we get a Torpor type spell crammed down our throats please please please make it self only. "

Chloroblast simply put doesn't work fine.  In spots in GoD you have people with heals much bigger than ours still having problems using them for much of anything.  Also you have the ranger issue where simply put we were even healers, tied for dead last.  This went on from luclin, through PoP and everything else right up until GoD.  Instead in GoD beastlords got a group version of a spell they almost never use.  If SoE suddenly wants to throw "parent class" issues into healing then explain to me why rangers get chloroplast at the same level beastlords do when shaman get it before druids.  The reason is that it was balanced around the classes, around damage doing hybrids, not around on again, off again "hybrids have parents, no they are orphans, no they got a crazy uncle charlie".  I don't want beastlords to have great single player heals, I don't want them healing close to paladin levels.  I want them healing even with rangers just like they have been.  A HoT sounds nice, but you have issues with buffs and duration and simply put you can't drop a HoT on a dieing enc, you just have to blast them.  If people truely want a HoT to bring them about even with rangers again then I'll pass that along, but please realize what you are asking for and what you are giving up.  

"Aggro...This is the whole key to the game on a raid. DO NOT steal aggro from the MT. This is a difficult job. Some of our tanks allow me to go full bore, when others MA i know i need to hold back a little bit, maybe wait 4-5 seconds longer before going "Beastly" on the mob. "

Yeah, but the point is there is no justification for this.  Beastlords generate far more aggro per damage dealt than just about any other class currently.  Imagine if back in the old days bows did a lot of aggro for pulling reasons, etc.  Then EQ/AM3 hit for rangers and they were buying it for doing their damage, but their damage was still less than a rogue was doing.  How do you tell the ranger to "just don't attack for 5 seconds" well still doing less damage than someone else.  In a group where you are slowing early I can see getting aggro sometimes, I can see not being able to use dots for various reasons, but when you are in the pure dps role it makes no sense to be drawing aggro over people that are doing more damage than you when you aren't slowing, you aren't debuffing, you aren't crippling.  DoT aggro is part of it, but not all of it.  I am againist a flat, always on, SCS type of answer to this.  I'm also againist an itemization response to this.  Are beastlords suddenly supposed to carry around more weapons for when the warrior is under geared.  How often do you rangers swap to a different bow, when was the last time you saw a rogue put a slasher mainhand because their piercer and backstab was just drawing too much aggro.  I do think procs on weapons are an issue and I think that is one very good spot to make some changes, but having to take a dps to stay lower on aggro when you are already doing less dps than others doesn't make sense to me.  Keep the ideas coming, let's see what others think.

"Skill Caps...Being limited to 1 type of weapon is one of those negatives we have to endure for the very long list of positives that we enjoy. But the problem is NOT that we only have 1 weapon skill at 250, it's that we share those weapons with a very popular class that just happens to also be the melee class that churns out heinous DPS from any direction and has the best de-aggro ability in the game. The solution isn't raise our piercing or 1hb...make a couple bst only weapons"

The bards that you mentioned above got their skill caps put to 250 awhile back.  They've tweaked other class skill caps too.  There are already a *TON* of great items in the game that beastlords simply won't use or gain very little from because of the lower skill cap.  I still laugh at the immaculate elven dagger.  It's a very nice weapon imo, but it's piercing and simply behind some "inferior" hth weapons because of this.  By raising skill caps you make gear choices more obvious, you instantly add several dozen viable new beastlord weapons to the game, etc.  This seems to be very high up people's lists and has been for awhile.  It just makes sense that skill caps are even and there is precidence for it already in my opinion.

"Pet heals...Sometimes, some fights, pets die. "

Yeah they do, but it's an issue for pet classes that have some of their damage in their pet and are tuned around having it.  Also beastlords constantly get told about how great their pet heals are, but almost no one uses them after a certain level of solo'n.  I have used them to kill stuff in valor, even HoH, but even if it works it's just slow and very inefficent compared to tanking the mob yourself and CB'n yourself.

"If take agro from the dots, give it back some other way. Why? I need dots to tank.
EQ isnt only about raiding and agro on raids, and often I tank or offtank in groups, taking away agro generating dots will cause serious problems and be a nerf unless agro ability is replaced. "

Beastlord aggro isn't just an issue for raiders, but grouping as well.  Are you telling me you've never heard a group make fun of the beastlord that always pulls aggro?  I mean when we aren't tanking.  There are already spells like listless power, flash of light, drowsy, etc that generate hate quite well.  Also if you read some of my posts you'd notice that I'm in favor of having dot aggro tied entirely to landing the spell and removing it all from ticks.  This would allow SCS to fully effect the aggro the dot generates, it'd allow focus/aa to effect dot damage without messing up aggro and it'd allow people to chain the dot for aggro generation purposes if that is what they were after.

" In my experience, most raiders do not put out max dps so even if theoreticaly they should have more agro then us, they don't. If this is the problem, then there is not much we can do but lower our dps to avoid agro. "

I'm talking fact and parse and fight data.  When a wizard is doing 400 dps to a time god and rogues well over 300 seeing a beastlord that parsed out under 250 (counting pet) pull aggro off the main tank is just silly.  Especially because of how streaky our aggro is.  How many of us have ever run into a fight, clicked auto attack and had back to back procs or something and taken aggro.  I once had proc, proc, crit DoT, proc LOADING PLEASE WAIT...  I'm sure I would have had more, but I was at my bind point lol.  What's funny is even with those procs and the crit tick on the dot my dps was STILL below what some other people were doing.  However, non-melee aggro is quite high in terms of aggro per point of damage and we are a melee class so we can't stay way back out of range to help with aggro.  

"If we got some way to lose agro, I would go with a dicipline. "

Diciplines don't come into the game until later on.  Also they tend to have a decent refresh on it.  Heck protective spirit is a discipline that has saved me from pulling aggro a lot, but even with it mob can turn right back on you later.  I don't think the answer to beastlord aggro is one specific thing, but rather a few general changes like DoT aggro and then seeing where things are at.  I'm not certain we need an evade type of skill, but I am certain we simply generate too much aggro when not trying to.

Sorry for the long response, but I want to keep this going and keep getting feedback.  I'm keeping an open mind to everyone else's suggestions and thoughts so please do the same for other people.  8)

[flush]

Weapon Skill max - yep, i agree, huge issue, don't tease us with a 1hb when our skill caps are that low.

Also in consideration is double attack (or lack thereof)

How about throwing us more double attack skill (via AA or even the skill itself) with a 175 cap ?

I'm ok with leaving the poison dot lines with huge aggro, sometimes you want it. More disease dots with no dd component that does equal or better than Scorp Venom or Turepta Blood.

[Lorathir]

Raising weapon skills is definately a great idea.

Also..

We get a 100pt heal at lv39. Next one is 300pts at lv57. Now, I'm not disputing the amount we heal for but...a 100pt heal at lv56 when you have 2 to 3k hp? Could we not have a 200pt heal at, say, lv49? SOE could throw that at Rangers too so it doesn't unbalance classes too much.

A 200 heal shouldn't aggrevate any other classes as it really isn't gonna step on anyone's toes, and, let's face it, it would just be nice to have. Not game breaking, it won't threaten Dru's or Shammy's, certainly wouldn't bother Clr's, just a general 'leg up' for us.

[Kotasz]

1.  I don't want the aggro solution to take a spell slot.  I'm very limited as it is.

2.  I want to still be able to aggro just as well as before if I so choose.

That is all.