Beastlord dps progression issues...

[Skratchen]

You could even add beastlord only AAs/gear that work with this.  A self buff that helps procs more or lowers aggro or imbued procs with a recourse.  Sigh, it doesn't even have to be a huge change in many places.  With a few changes to spell and AA data and re-working of a few higher end weapons beastlord dps could easily be inline with where it should be and most classes wouldn't even know about it.  Heck some beastlords would complain if they looted a 20/25 weapon out of tacvi, but once they actually saw how it worked you wouldn't hear too much complaining hehe.

I've mentioned something like this several times in the past.  And I agree, there are several ways the developers can go with this.  One way that I would suggest is have an *ancient* type spell for beastlords that is a self-buff which would imbue that beastlord's own weapons with a healthy dd proc (with a de-aggro component to it) that would boost beastlord DPS in line with where we should be.  By virtue of the spell being an ancient spell, it would of course drop in a raiding environment.  

I mean after all, beastlords still don't have as many Oow spells as other hybrid classes, right?

[wolverine9981]

The self-only spell shouldn't be an ancient and should come before lvl 70.  Why would a guild give a BST a ancient rune just to get their up DPS to an acceptable level.  Now they could put in self only spells that ramp up at lvls 66,68, and 70 - non ancient.

[Skratchen]

The self-only spell shouldn't be an ancient and should come before lvl 70.  Why would a guild give a BST a ancient rune just to get their up DPS to an acceptable level.  Now they could put in self only spells that ramp up at lvls 66,68, and 70 - non ancient.

Read what I wrote more carefully.....

One way that I would suggest is have an *ancient* type spell for beastlords that is a self-buff

I never said precisely how it should be implemented or at what level.  But it should come as a product of raiding so that it affects the targeted range of beastlords who need the DPS balancing the most.

[Iskandar]

With 18 buff slots (3 purchased with OoW), I usually have to click off at least one or two buffs on a big raid, sometimes more. Multiple mob ae's, ae heals, resist buffs, spell shield, druid/shaman overbuffs, plus normal raid buffs can eat up the spots fast, which would make a self-buff a pain to both keep up and to find a spot for to begin with. If a change is to be made, I would suggest it be either gear or AA related (or both) and leave adding more buffs out of it.

[Skratchen]

With 18 buff slots (3 purchased with OoW), I usually have to click off at least one or two buffs on a big raid, sometimes more. Multiple mob ae's, ae heals, resist buffs, spell shield, druid/shaman overbuffs, plus normal raid buffs can eat up the spots fast, which would make a self-buff a pain to both keep up and to find a spot for to begin with. If a change is to be made, I would suggest it be either gear or AA related (or both) and leave adding more buffs out of it.

Normally I would agree with you.  But if you try to make the developers solve the problem with gear and aa's, it's not simplifying the solution, rather we're asking the developers to do 3 or 4 times the work by creating more aa's and more gear than if they just simply implemented a self-proc type solution.  

Besides adding AA's isn't really a solution for high-end raiding beastlords, anyone could get aa's whether they raid or not.  Sacrificing a spell slot is the least of my worries if it can bring our DPS in line with where it should be.

[Dummkopf]

What surprises me most every time something bst usable drops is the fact that we share most weapons with monks. I always wonder why, its the same as if knights would share all theyre weapons with rogues and warriors. Its way past the point that devs should realize that there needs to be a new weapon class for beastlords and bards instead of beastlords and monks. Yes, bards are no hand to hand users so for all its worth give us more beastlord only hand to hand weapons, but dont ever let us share weapons with monks.

[jitathab]

The concept is to create a mechanism to give a DPS boost to the higher end raiders, that is not available to those who have not followed this route.

The high end bst does not get a sufficient DPS boost in comparison to what the other classes recieve.

Whatever mechanism is derived is somewhat moot as long as it provides the benefit.

Some things would be easier to implement than others, but it must be tied directly into what the top end people do and have achieved that others have not.

examples
100 dmg 20 dly wep bst only
Super Charm - adds a damage mod the more you kill
Special Buff - upgraded each target you kill
AA unlocking by zone, say additional BF level each zone.

There are issues with any method devised, itemisation for example will be shouted out from all other classes as the weapon will *look* overpowered. And you have to be lucky enough to get it.
Buffs - well tbh at this level you dont use a number of the buffs but yes it is a buff slot, and can be stripped by AE's.

If just in this thread we can think of different methods to achieve it, then a solution can be found.

However, as Tastian has eluded to, SoE is not yet convinced that the problem even exists. This is the major hurdle to getting changes, and needs sorting before we can even realistically discuss what to do to fix it.

[SilvermaeneRZ]

reading thru this post.. and I seem to sense that tastian really thinks beastlords should be getting weapons with better procs... I think a quick easy fix without more itemization would be for soe to give beasts say gear like the gloves from vt that has a right click call of fire..

They could give a bst only right click proc effect..

they could put it on say quest armors from the appropriate zones.. much like focus effects... they wouldnt need to make a ton of new bst only weapons.. and they could just be cheap and easy and add in a wee bit of a better proc on new gear to help boost our dps increase as progression occours...

/shrug.. thats just my thougths.. hit me back with some replies and let me know what everyone else thinks.

[Tastian]

Well there's a few things.  The procs are just an obvious answer.  Some people keep mentioning giving us 100 on 20 weapons and things others would complain or think "looks" broken, but no one I know of would complain about a 20dmg 25del 600dd proc weapon out of tacvi.  Yet that weapon would own even a 30 on 19 for us or whatever other numbers I calced out above.  Also it would add a bit of uniqueness to the beastlord class.  We have always been the most caster of the hybrids with our pets and buffs accounting for a lot of our dps (my non-melee atm out dps' my pet lol), so procs kind of fit with that.  Also you see sony making the ber class built around 2h weapons, so making a couple tweaks that allow procs to better suit beastlords kind of goes with that.

You already have warrior only procs for aggro on LDoN moerchants, some bst only procs like timelapse - 300hate could work.  You already have some class or group specific procs like 100 blows, so adding a few beastlord only procs that fit a line kind of like the new freezin strikes would work.  

What going with procs does though is it allows itemization to solve most of the problem without anything "appearing" broken or having to rework a lot of things.  More AA skews things at the lower end, more innate defense or whatever skews things at the lower end, pet changes can upset mages, weapon ratio changes can upset monks, etc.  I just want to be fixed lol (boy that's gotta be top 10 on the things you wouldn't expect a vah shir to say lol).  Seriously though there's tons of ways to handle this, but I want a solution that fixes things how they currently are and is understood so that going forward we don't see these issues ago.  There's no need to re-itemize the entire game, but fixing a few weapons like the tacvi bst only weapon and some of the omens weapons atm would help a lot.  

Also realize that although these issues are at the higher end atm, they are shifting down, so say next expansion you might see more weapons like we are talking about now showing up as attuneable or tradeable.  Again though you can have the solution fit the problem.  Dps benchanmarks should be done for all stages of progression for all classes.  If I had the resources I'd gladly do it, but I simply don't.

[Xennova]

I would like a type 8 LDON augment bst only with 300-600dd+ -xyz de-agro but it would make Time weapon 2 good maybe and maybe not good enough for GoD-OOW weapon

[Iskandar]

The problem with tying our progression to LDoN augs is that not everyone does or even has LDoN. And if the focus on the improvements is to be the raiding Beastlord, then it would be best to tie new augs/gear to the drop tables of level-appropriate raid targets instead of LDoN's that can be done by anyone with a couple of bots. Our existing class-specific weapons/gear could be easily tweaked to further improve dps without affecting anything else, and new loot drops could easily be added to existing mobs.

I still don't feel a buff would be a good path to take though... aside from the spell slot hassles, there's stacking issues, drop rates of the spell, and the fact that it can be dispelled. Especially dispelling -- if it's going to account for a noticeable part of our dps, it should not be something that can be so easily nullified. AA could still be a viable option though, assuming they can tie AA to character flags (which they seem to have done with the Anguish trials). Backflagging would cause issues with it still, if the AA is tied to a mob/event that folks don't normally raid except for the flag, so AA alone is not a perfect solution either.

Before we get too caught up in discussing what needs to be changed, I think it would be a good idea to find out exactly what SOE sees as our role in the end-game and contrast it to what we perceive our role to be. A clear and concise focus on where we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to be doing will help everyone, players and devs, to determine what needs to be adjusted to put us in that role.

[Hereki]

Adding to what Iskander said...

I don't think we can promote a raid progression for beastlords if we don't have the baseline numbers for a non-raiding progression.  In other words, I'd like to know what the ratio of power between a raid and a non-raid beastlord is, and between various levels of 65 and 70 beastlords (avg versus high LDoN/Omens gear, low versus mid and high AAs).

The reason I am asking is because non-raid should always remain a viable progression; and because I can only see a comparision between 65 high AAs, high Elemental, and 70 the same, then upwards.

[Dummkopf]

Non raiders at the moment have an even steeper progression than raiders in my opinion. With OoW we see gear and weapons of a quality that was previously only available for raiders (time+ quality) and therefore the dps problems begin to reach the non raiding players as well.

However there will and was always a gap between what you can aquire raiding and non raiding. The biggest upgrades and the best gear is only available if you raid but will be available to all in one or 2 expansions later, so the problems we have at the moment in the highend raiding dps will be for sure the problem for all beastlords within the next year (during the next one or 2 expansions).

Since the non raiding beastlord can get all the aa upgrades a raiding beastlord can (and most probably faster because more of his game time can be directed towards xp grinding) the only difference is gear. With all the weapon and equipment related research as well as all the aa-parsing done in this community we should have a very good idea where a non raiding beastlord is compared to the raiding one.

The thing we need to know therefore is what role and position SoE thinks we should have in this game. At the moment i see lots of friends quitting due to the issues with this class and have reduced my own playtime by a lot, i still like being a beastlord but the response time from SoE to very big problems is just way too long.

[Tastian]

Like I said lots of ideas have been gone over on these boards and other places about how to fix beastlord dps, but until we get a response that it isn't what they want it's more noise and clutter than anything unfortunatly.

Also I have said this problem is shifting down and it is going to be a problem for more and more beastlords.  Itemization doesn't just have to be on raid mobs though.  Plane of fire pet weapon is just amazing.  It's not even a "raid drop" and it is beastlord only.  SPFs give me hope they could do more things right.  Yeah you need a flag for fire, but that marks a progression point.  There's no reason there can't be similiar KT weapons as needed or whatever.  RS has a 17/19(ish) claw drop that isn't so hot for beastlords, but there's no reasons other zones and places can't have drops as they are felt needed to help progression.  AAs can be used to give an overall boost as needed, but they can't be the only answer without causing other problems.

[Hereki]

I have to say that I appreciate both of those responses.

I am curious as to what the scaling is from a 65/0 non-raid beastlord to a 70/0 non-raid beastlord.  This is one of the theoretical progressions that people should be following, and gut instinct tells me that increase in power will be very low.

Fortunately, this is an academic interest only.  But if it drives the 70/0 beastlord into unusability...