Possible changes for Feral Swipe...

[Jkal_Shihar]

Well started thinking and seeing everyone's post (mine included somewhere else).
We all agree the range is riduculous with feral swipe. I know this might get tossed but how bout replace this with our kick. Same timer and all as our kick with a deaggro added too it. That way we wouldnt have to worry bout the 1min usage and pray that the deaggro took effect.
Message could be you swipe your opponent into short term memory loss or some such. (im still on my first cup of coffee).
I dont know just a thought as i slowly come into reality its friday  :D

[Choppin]

I have not taken Feral Swipe so far for the following reason:

I am hard pressed to find a hotkey slot for it on the first bank, where I can easily access it, I have kick there already.

If it would replace kick with a 4x stronger attack and same reuse, I would get it asap.

[Jkal_Shihar]

If it would replace kick with a 4x stronger attack and same reuse, I would get it asap.

That's kinda what I'm suggesting. (Mug of coffee finally kicked in, yay)

Anyways, if it had damage up above kick and same reuse as kick and maybe with the deaggro component added to it (cause who is gonna mem another spell for aggro control) and also kinda make kick I dont know but unusable if you have feral swipe.

It might be a better option.

[Caali]

I like the deaggro idea, makes alot of sense if you can put it into the context of roleplaying. Though I don't know if a skill with a 1 minute reset is really going to offset a minutes worth of damage and hate buildup.

I don't think there is any question of reducing the reuse time if it is to be of any use as a deaggro skill. The only other option I see is to make it a massive deaggro that would be situationally useful, i.e. would put you to be the bottom of the list, on a long reuse timer.

[Sharrien]

While a de-aggro ability or spell would be a nice thing to have, I don't want it tied to Feral Swipe.  This is an aggressive, damaging attack, usually for more damage than my normal attacks (when the darn thing lands anyway).  Let's figure something else out for de-aggro, maybe a hate reducing proc buff thru spells or a new aa.  I tank a lot in groups or I will fill the role of saving a screaming healer from an out of control add in camp.  I don't want anything reducing my hate tied to an ability that is there to increase dps, I want more damage, not less hate.

As for what I would want on Feral Swipe, my wish list is that we could add two more tiers for successively lower re-use timers and I would want to see a stun component.  It doesn't need to grey out kick.  If you want to save a button just make a social that triggers both abilities.  Sure, it doesn't grey out while kick refreshes, but if you are a beast that still uses kick you've probably got the timing pretty much burned into the nerves of your clicky finger by now.

[Oneiromancer]

A lot of people want to give it a separate hotkey from Kick.  My first inclination would be to make a new hotkey with the first line as /doability # for kick and the second line as /alt activate ### for Feral Swipe.  Perhaps some delay just to be sure it works.

Now, the biggest problem with that is, now your hotbutton doesn't stay depressed until it's ready to use again, since it's a custom one.  But there's a way around that...since you need to make an Actions window button for kick anyway in order to put it in a custom hotbutton, just keep that tab selected all the time.  You'll be able to see Kick refresh and still use it as often as you want, and every minute Feral Swipe will happen also without having to pay attention to that too.  For a second I thought that there might still be a slight disadvantage to this...unfortunately I got distracted and lost it.  I'm sure someone will point it out if necessary. :)

Personally, I still have a hotbutton slot open and so if I do get Feral Swipe sometime soon it will probably go there.  Doubtful I will get it soon, but always possible.  My bard friend is bugging me to get Hobble...I keep doing LDoNs with him where he's the only snarer and he hates doing it...and in Ruj it can be death to let those bastards go unsnared.  But that's for (and has already been discussed in another thread).

Game on,

[Tastian]

A lot of custom UIs have data in that window or on a different tab.  You'd have to keep checking back or change UIs or something if you did that.  Also one of the big upsides to feral swipe was this "big damage potential" for things like runners and the like.  If you tie it to the button then you can burn it when you don't want to.  Would suck to accidentally burn feral swipe then activate BF/Frenzy.  Minor, yes, but issues still.  Hehe just have your bard friend buy you a bunch of SBDs lol,  with the changes I think hobble has moved even further down the list for most.

[mythral]

either drastically reuse the reuse time, or make it land EVERY time if its gonna be a minute long reuse. tie it with kick, up the damage a bit, make it hit every time you use it, and keep it at a minute reuse and i think itd be fine.

[Kunriis]

A lot of people want to give it a separate hotkey from Kick. My first inclination would be to make a new hotkey with the first line as /doability # for kick and the second line as /alt activate ### for Feral Swipe. Perhaps some delay just to be sure it works.

What us the /dobility # for kick??  Better yet is there a complete list with all the /dobility commands???

[Tastian]

The /doability is tied to where you have it in your skill selection.  For some it'd be /doability 3 or /doability 5, etc.  Try it out some and you'll have it.  8)

[Iskandar]

I would prefer to keep Feral Swipe as a pure dps move -- dps is the only reason why I bought it, even if it is unreliable. Instead of adding a deaggro component to it, I would rather see an increase of accuracy with it so it connects more often (a parse from yesterday shows it was 72% misses in a five hour run in Kod'Taz... weee, 9 AA well spent :roll: ) and a minimum damage set for it.

I use it in conjunction with kick, so personally I'd rather have it work with kick instead of greying it out for a minute -- if it can be made into a more reliable form of dps then I could live without kick, but I would prefer to maintain both :)

The range definately needs some work, especially on large mobs. On smaller mobs (ie, a Noc in GoD), I can be well outside of melee range and still land a Swipe, which seems like a bug to me. On larger mobs (ie, gods in Time/PoP), max melee range is too far away for it to connect.

If it is decided to push for a change to a non-damaging deaggro move, then I would suggest that the AA points be refunded so we can each decide if we want to keep it or not. Personally, I think a deaggro ability should be added as a separate ability from Feral Swipe, but that's just me :) One possibility is to have a second AA for deaggro that is tied to Feral Swipe -- if you use one, the other is greyed out (maybe even for twice the normal delay), thus you can't have your dps and your low aggro all at once. I'm sure there's lots of ideas for it :)

[Moslow]

I do not want to see Feral Swipe lock out kick or changed to a deaggro.  I focus primarily on dps and although agro can be an issue it is something I have learned to work around.  As stated above, Feral Swipe has a chance to miss, and even if the damage were increased to compensate for locking out kick this would not really be a true fix as you would still have the same chance to miss.  I would rather have kick and Swipe.

I do believe that the range, reuse and percentage of hits should be looked at.  Although, I doubt there is any way to fix the chance to hit with how much melee mitigation NPCs have now so perhaps adding an AA to lower the current 1 minute refresh timer would benefit most.  Would still have same chance to miss, but at least we would have more attempts.

[Fibbs]

I'm with Moslow on Feral swipe.

I don't have a problem with it missing, i do have a problem with it hitting for less than kick, min 100 dmg would be ok with me. It would be nice if the reuse timer was maybe the same as our nuke refresh (lower is even better of course)

If agro is a problem, (which it isn't for me) well we need to look at other ways of controlling it. I personally believe the spell casting subtlety AA would be sufficient as an ability to loose agro or rather, not get it in the first place. After all most agro issues will be caused by our DoT's and slow.

Don't get me wrong but yes other classes have these abilities, but I honestly don't think we need them. Just my take based on my playstyle.

If we are going to get an agro lowering ability, please, no more hotkeys or spells. My spell slots and my hotkeys are under big demand as it is. Furthermore If the beast 'evade' ability were to be given to us, i'd like to requrie some skill to use, not just simply push a button. I'm starting to ramble so i'll leave it there......

Cheers again Tastian for your work in our community.

Fibbs

[flush]

SCS is not a solution, tell me if you know of any Shadowknight that has Spell Casting Subtlety AAs. A passive, always on AA isn't an answer.

What we need is the option to reduce aggro when we want to.

[kukana]

I posted else where these thoughts, but I'll put it here for proper ridicule.

I've given FS a lot of thought and frankly I'd rather see it stay as a DPS skill.  If we need deagro, we should be given a deagro discipline (preferred) or AA that fixes that problem.

My dream for FS?

FS1 - High Damage replacement for Kick
FS2 - High Damage replacement for Kick that never misses
FS3 - High Damage replacement for Kick that never misses and has the stun effects of slam
FS4 - 20% chance to double FS, otherwise same as FS3
FS5 - 50% chance to double FS, otherwise same as FS3

We're a DPS class, this'll let us DPS more-better  :D