Update 66 Preview 1 - Epic Destiny Refresh

[Dunspartacus]

Year of the dragon? More like year of the drag on draconic right out of the meta.

Joking aside I do think draconic was a bit too prevalent among endgame casters, but I kinda feel like it should retain its identity as the big AoE nuke button. I don't think these new numbers will reflect that, and I would have rather seen the single target strikes brought up to surpass it in focused damage, or maybe add a bit to breath's cooldown instead of taking its numbers down if it has to be nerfed.

Hopefully the devs will look at the criticism, even if some of it isn't exactly constructive, as making more viable options are always more enjoyable than removing existing ones.

 

[Monkey_Archer]

I was testing the aura to see how effective it is. I wouldn't suggest only using it as your sole killing mechanism outside of running Butcher's Path. The answer is that the aura is completely ineffective. Circle strafing the pirates in a legendary R1 Saltmarsh quest and I spent more SP healing myself while waiting for the aura to kill them than if I had stood still and facerolled my spell hotkeys. I never used the epic moment, because everything about it looked terrible. With a PERMANENT epic moment, it was terrible. Maybe the current Lamma version of the damage is very badly bugged and it's not hitting anywhere near where it should be. I can't say. But I can say that what it does now is weaker damage than the Archon, and at least the Archon spreads LGS/Dino bone procs, where the aura doesn't.

It's quite possible that the mantle is not functioning as it should be. I know in some respects it isn't - right now you can toggle the mantle, pew pew an enemy to get the laser swords circling, cast an archon, and then switch to another mantle and the archon will keep the EA blades spinning indefinitely even after you switch to a different mantle. I doubt that's intended behavior.

After testing it seems you are correct that it doesn't crit. I hope that's a bug, otherwise it completely kills its effectiveness endgame. I stand by my opinion that this will be great for leveling though whether that gets fixed or not. The damage dice seem to be correct with no max caster level and 100% proc rate. Unlike normal blade barrier it doesn't proc on exit though.

 

[Elves United]

Draconic Incarnation: Dragon Breath damage damage reduced by 52%. Tier 4 dragon breath damage reduced by 61%.
Exalted Angel: Holy fireball damaged reduced by 32%
Exalted Angel: Pillar of light damage increased 20%
Exalted Angel Mantle: Changed to something completely different.

So tested the mantle moving blade barrier. It's pretty lackluster compared to the previous mantle abilities.
1) There appears to be a timer of a few seconds applied to any enemy hit with it that prevents them from taking damage from it again until that timer expires regardless if you move them in and out of the barrier.
2) It did not heal fire elementals when they were hit by it. They only took light damage and for fire I saw an "immune" pop up.

Since Magus chill aura is now being multi-selected with the chance of additional damage on spellcast can Exalted Angel also get a multi-selector and getting what it used to do? I can see a lot of builds that were using this destiny disliking this new mantle.

I worry that the primal avatar mantle will get similar treatment.
But on the primal avatar epic strike I'm glad to see that the fire spring to summer has much better range than I remember. I don't know if that was fixed earlier or with this update.

 

[Fisto Mk I]

It is a nuclear nuke in the purest SSG style, its habit is to make the object of its nerf absolutely useless instead of retouching appropriately.

Anyway. They never learn.

Exactly as i predict before, lol.

 

[Lotoc]

• Carrion Swarm gains a saving throw interval to remove the dot.

This really concerns me, Carrion Swarm is currently seeing most use in either tank builds or low life builds that have low DCs.
Carrion Swarm currently has an issue where it is weakened significantly in group play if multiple people have it because the stacks of Carrion Swarm are shared between all players, there can only be ONE carrion Swarm damage over time on a target for an entire raid group.
But at least each person casting CS gets the up front damage at 3 stacks.. at least...

Unless the shared stacks thing is fixed this effectively kills the entire spell as it means anybody with a low DC will drop those 3 stacks for everyone.

 

[Fisto Mk I]

All the changes look and sound like complete garbage.

And it's clearly not kwll! 8)

 

[Krell]

No. Add the spell to sorc wiz spell list and leave the SLA in shadowdancer.

I disagree. I think the spell is good enough that it should require a commitment, like committing to a tier 5 in a destiny. But the cooldown should be addressed.

 

[Kielbasa]

Divine Crusader

Needs a real Epic Strike. My suggestion- Sundering Smite (a frontal cleave attack)- the basic strike is initially similar to the fatesinger melee strike but counts as a smite evil so Paladin smite bonuses, enhancements, and certain filigrees boost it in appropriate ways. Sunders your targets, Cowers them at lv26 when consecrate gains that effect as well, added light damage and fort debuff from core 4 in DC. A nice strike for non paladins but in the hands of a full paladin might be good enough to draw some people away from using fury of the wild.

Consecrate- is a great support skill for raids but should not be flagged as an epic strike. The cooldown is too long and with how most combat flows the static nature ploping down a circle to fight in is not great during most normal questing. (see firewall and its drop in popularity compared to years ago, the game has changed)

Fatesinger

Tier 2 Master the Acoustics- Can this ability grant AoE to Sonic Blast and Reverberate as well? Sonic Blast woefully under performs since the nerf and Reverberate has always been terrible.

Exalted Angel

Is the flame barrier always a static distance from the character?? or does it pulse like a warlock aura? If it were to pulse on cast I think that would be easier for people play around as a mechanic than if it were static. It would be much more forgiving to get mobs and friendlies to move in and out of more reliably.

Grandmaster of Flowers

This and Fury are the most expensive epic destiny APwise could squish some of the 3ap stuff down to 2ap. If all the t4/5 3 pointers were 2ap instead the destiny would be 64 ap which is still expensive but in line with some of the other destinies rather than being an extreme outlier.

Shadowdancer

Consumed by Shadows - Should be comparable in power to other t5s. My suggestion - make it AoE around the player and have the enemies shadow root them in place and sap the target. Reduce the cooldown to 45 seconds. Still not as good as Weird but now it is at least far more comparable to something like cut the strings.

Fury of the Wild

This and GMoF are the most expensive epic destiny APwise could squish some of the 3ap stuff down to 2ap. Spirit of the Beast and Primal Force buff these until someone says they are too good and decides not to use adrenaline.

Quick Cutter needs to raise your dodge cap and max dex bonus by 6 for the defensive bonus to be useful. Will need to test this thoroughly but even with it being AoE 3 stacks at 3d6 may not be enough to convince people to not continue to use Adrenaline due not enough damage here being front loaded. Need some math wizards to see how far behind other epic strikes it still is.

Primal Avatar

Spring to Summer- Can this get a slightly larger hit box? I always feel like I need to jump cast this on somethings head to use it.

Shiradi Champion

Fey Lights- Can the damage be based off your Mantle choice?? or just a multiselector? I would be nice to open this up to force, light, sonic, and poison users. More flexibility is a good thing.

Beguiling Charm- Can this also proc an AoE damage of force, light, sonic, or poison and taunt the enemies on your charmed target?

Healing Spring- Remove Wild Empathy cost it is already on a 30 second cooldown.

 

[droid327]

OK so I got a chance to playtest and here's my experience...

You completely killed my really fun solo cap paladin. Here's what I lost off her:

- Auto heal from EA aura
- Leap from EA since I was invested in the destiny for the aura
- Experimental Tumble

So now, instead of a fun, dynamic solo mission runner who could actively move quicker between fights while autohealing to keep topped off out of combat...I have a slogfest. She moves slower and all I can do is just hold W and watch. I have to manually top off HP between fights now, which means waiting for the Reaper self heal penalty to clear after every fight so I dont waste SP spamming penalized heals.

This is not fun. This is not engaging. And, most importantly, this is not solving any problem that existed, this is a completely arbitrary nerf. No one was complaining about the EA mantle as it was.

Bring back EA self-heal aura tick. Bring back experimental tumble controls, or something equivalent as an unrestricted turbo button. For all your talk of "we dont balance the game around one thing", you sure seem to be focusing only on certain playstyles and ignoring the impacts on others, like soloists.

 

[4slight]

Please add Negative healing to the Negative Destiny tree (Magus) It's really weird that negative auras don't heal, and there's effectively no negative healing beyond level 4 wizard spells. Legendary Pale Master feels unloved

 

[Soulcial]

Please add Negative healing to the Negative Destiny tree (Magus) It's really weird that negative auras don't heal, and there's effectively no negative healing beyond level 4 wizard spells. Legendary Pale Master feels unloved

core 6 pale master gets the big aura..

 

[Glargfest]

Losing experimental tumble feels really bad. I’m not having nearly as much fun moving around. Losing it altogether on live is gonna dampen my experience. I get that it was an experimental feature and thus tentative and maybe I shouldn’t have gotten attached to it, but it’ll really really suck to see it go.

After playing with blue dragon breath a bit, it’s doing about as much damage as Very, Very Vocal boosted greater shout, even though I have 130 less sonic spellpower than electric, and 30% less spell critical multiplier. That feels very wrong, especially considering Greater shout has a much shorter CD than 12 seconds

 

[Soulcial]

So ... are devs gonna shut off the plat/shards cost for resetting ED trees?
Cuz I don't feel like going plat-broke cuz of having to rebuild my ED trees on multiple toons.

[Rhetorical question; I know devs don't do things benevolent for players.]

it costs almost nothing. run a quest and sell the vendor trash

 

[4slight]

core 6 pale master gets the big aura..

requires full wizard though, I've never built a full wizard to know how much better/same it is to death aura. My main point is it's arbitrary which negative spells heal, which feels like a bug that's been ignored for a long time. There are effectively two spells for a wizard (3 counting greater SLA, 4 counting lesser DA) + inflicts if you multiclass. Macrotechnic has a heal for robots, negative healing gets nothing from destinies besides amp.

 

[SpardaX]

Please include a buff to the Grandmaster of Flowers' healing ability. As is, it's cooldown is huge and it's healing doesn't scale off anything. Move it to T2 if you have to, but please at least do one of these two things. (Make it scale or Lower the cooldown). I tried very very hard to make a character Grandmaster of Flowers focused, and I just could not stay alive.

 

[Kielbasa]

Please include a buff to the Grandmaster of Flowers' healing ability. As is, it's cooldown is huge and it's healing doesn't scale off anything. Move it to T2 if you have to, but please at least do one of these two things. (Make it scale or Lower the cooldown). I tried very very hard to make a character Grandmaster of Flowers focused, and I just could not stay alive.

Agreed. At a minimum it should be as useful as renewal or rejuvenation cocoon. Given the cool down and resource cost it should just be a full heal comparable to reborn in fire. In its current state a heal scroll might be more useful.

 

[mikarddo]

If it were up to me, I'd nerf all the level 9 spell equivalents (multivial, meteorswarm, etc..) down to 1d6+9, make dragon breath 1d6+10 (ie an epic level spell) and then remove the 33% reaper nerf entirely.

Secondly, specific reference was made to R10 push raiding, you may have missed that.

Now you are taking what I wrote out of context. I did infact mention the R10 raid but very much also noted that it was the most extreme example and that the same principle did apply to raids on lower difficulties and quests. Please reread the post in question before going out on a tangent about R10 raids

 

[mikarddo]

I play with people that delete packs in seconds... any single target build wont get to hit more than 1 or 2 mobs
Your shadarkai is not a "melee dps" its just another AOE spammer.

That really shows rather clearly that whoever clears packs is less important than whoever clears specific mobs. The kill count means little. Even so, those that clear packs the faster are also melee, not ranged and not casters.

 

[ChickenMobile]

I was just playing around with the new mantle for Exalted Angel and oh boy, I no likey.
The reasons:

• It damages enemies. This will just get healers in higher reapers killed (and it is part of the mantle now, no subsequent feature or toggle to turn it off)
• Players have to move through the barrier to get healed. This just f's over ranged characters with archers focus. I can guarantee they won't move to get this heal lol xD.
  Is it expected the healer or allies to constantly move backwards and forwards through the barrier to get the heal effect? What a pain.
• Strong single-target heals only produce the barrier effect for 3 seconds. However if you cast something like meteor storm it lasts for 40 seconds+ (small pack, note this is prob bugged as desc says it caps at 30 seconds). This encourages offensive AOE spells on a previously mainly supportive tree.
  It's a cool concept for an offensive aura though! Perhaps may need to fiddle with this a bit more.
  Mass cure gets the +3 seconds stacking time for every friendly healed in it. So that's good as is I think.
• No passive self-healing anymore. In a group with only 1 main healer, this is honestly a life-saver.
  Was this too strong? For normal-elite diff... probably. Reaper doesn't matter tbh.

It should just passively heal inside the circle like it used to. If it really needs a nerf: perhaps have it happen once or lessened?
Have an option to make it hurt enemies if the player wants to.

 

[MisterVan]

Here are some of my thoughts and feedback. Bear in mind I am not a min-maxed high reaper player with tons of past lives, but I play ~20 different characters in nearly every class.

Draconic Incarnation
This tree is all about spell damage. You pick an element and hyper-specialize in it. I think it's okay if it produces better damage than other spellcasting destinies, because that's clearly what it's been designed to do, often at the expense of utility.

I do think the nerf to the Dragon Breath epic strike damage is excessive, and also uninteresting. If the idea is that its damage output has been difficult to balance against, here are some other things to consider when looking for a solution:

• Is the ability too available? Consider keeping its immense damage, but increasing the cooldown (which is already well above other spell epic strike cooldowns)
• Is the damage too front-loaded/instantaneous? What if it dealt reduced base damage, but inflicted a lingering DoT on all targets? Maintains great damage output, but also avoids insta-gibbing an entire room
• Is it too easy to fit into builds? Adrenaline has all its boosts sprinkled throughout the tree, which demands that you invest heavily to get full benefit. Maybe this is a similar situation?
• If it's damage must be brought way down, what utility can be added to still make it feel worthwhile? Different dragon colors are associated with different things, maybe they can inflict different effects on the strike in addition to the damage.

Fatesinger
Fatesinger is in a decent spot I suppose. The changes are fine, though there are a couple things that bother me with the tree as it exists today:

• There's quite a lot of enhancents that strictly benefit spellcaster bards, it'd be nice to have some stuff for swashies/warchanters in them too. As it currently stands, warchanter/swashbucklers only go deep into this tree to buff their bardic ballad.
• The epic strikes are okay, the 'spender' follow-up attack is cool holdover from the initial builder/spender system proposed in the ED revamp. My only gripe is the spell epic strike should do more damage, but have a higher cooldown. It's currently like a 2 second cooldown, which makes it feel like all you really have time to do is keep spamming it instead of casting other spells, or you feel like you're wasting it.

Magus of the Eclipse
Magus is in a pretty bad/boring spot right now, only really known for Time Stop. I'm excited to give some of these changes a shot, but skeptical it will help its situation.

• Chill Aura is cool as a mantle concept that's unique from most of the other spellcasting mantles. However, its meant to be used for damage, but the damage cannot crit, which makes it fairly useless and underwhelming.
• I wish Chill Aura could also self-heal pale masters.
• The alternative mantle to Chill Aura is welcome.
• I really like the extra opportunities for SR shred, and gaining bonuses for doing so. Cool idea!
• Without true foundational support for summons, the enhancements for it in this tree will remain pointless fluff that takes up space for more useful stuff.

Machrotechnic
As a newer destiny, this doesn't really have any problems. It's feature-dense and supports many different styles of play. It's difficult to feel like DP is wasted no matter where it gets spent, which should be the goal for all trees.

Divine Crusader
Actually very surprised this one has gone nearly untouched. It can be quite nice if you happen to be a paladin, and has some very nice T5 enhancements, but otherwise is very 'meh', compared to what other melee-oriented trees offer:

• It'd be nice to have Consecrate rolled into just being 1 rank. The 3-rank 3 DP tax for it feels rough.
• I also feel like Crusade should be built into the base Consecrate
• A multiselector for an alternative epic strike to Consecrate would be nice. Consecrate is good and has a lot of support in the tree, but it is also a redundant ability if you're in a party with someone else using it. The only benefit is additional healing.
• Not to keep talking about Consecrate, but it is a high cooldown epic strike that also has an sp cost. I'm not sure the sp cost should be removed/reduced, but maybe there should be a source of temporary sp in the tree for melee/ranged builds? This helps classes that may not have much of an sp bar, and also synergizes with paladins who are regularly spending sp on their paladin spells.
• The sword-and-board support in the tree is nice; it's a shame that shield bashes are heavily bottlenecked by internal cooldowns, so it all kinda becomes moot.

Exalted Angel
Hm. Not really sure what the goal is with all these changes. Exalted Angel was in a weird spot before, and it still is even after all this.

• If Holy Fireball is getting its damage and cooldown reduced, please also reduce the SP cost. 40 SP is quite a lot for an SLA, moreso if you're now using it more frequently.
• These mantle changes are perplexing. What's wrong with what's on Live today? Is it the healing aura?
• To this day I'm not sure why there's an option for selecting a Flaming Sphere SLA. I thought it was a joke, or perhaps a placeholder option, but it's been there all this time.
• The Ascendance epic moment on Live is bad. This new one is not much better. I like that it's oriented more towards support and healing, but this ain't it. Given this ED splits priority between heals and offense, this seems like an opportunity for an epic moment multiselector for each role. It's a destiny channeling divine power, there's lots of creative options there for finding something that is truly an epic moment.
• On Live today, Stand and Be Judged's only problem is that it is very slow to cast, which is not great for an ability that's meant to single out and disable a high priority target. If it was fast like Horizon Walker's mark, it would be much more fun to use regularly.

Grandmaster of Flowers
This tree needs more than just adjustments to the epic strikes. It's a very DP hungry tree that doesn't actually offer much until the T5 abilities. It feels like it was designed more for addressing the inherent weaknesses of monks than anything else.

• The T1 Gain Strength (Heal vs gain ki) abilities have a really high cooldown which makes them not very useful on a moment-by-moment basis. Sometimes I take them, but to be honest I can use them so rarely I kinda forget about them. These abilities essentially assume the character is centered and using Ki to some degree, so it already limits who would benefit, it'd be nice to buff them by lowering the cooldown to something more reasonable.
• The T3/T4 enhancements are boring, and numerically fairly unimpressive. The absorptions are nice, and the extra bonuses for being in the matching stance are cool ideas. These abilities should have more going for them, they're just uninteresting.
• Support for ki spells would be nice, for both Henshins Mystics and Sacred Fist builds.
• Maybe have an ability/enhancement that scales off of current ki or maximum ki? Some builds end up with more ki than they can constantly spend, it would be cool have something that incentivizes a monk to spend time building up ki, and blowing it all in one devastating ability. Flavorful food for thought.

Legendary Dreadnought
No notes, great tree. If I had one complaint, it would be that dire charge is sometimes very finicky in its ability to actually hit things. It seems to have the same problems of Great Leveler where it has difficulty targetting, and also grazing hits a lot. A different type of attack animation(or inherent to-hit bonus) would be stellar.

Shadowdancer
Hmm. Shadowdancer is currently a nice supporting tree but has a lot of problems for characters that want to invest deeply into it, especially for kinds of builds it was designed for!

• The tree actually works great on Live currently for Illusion DC casters. I don't think any of the proposed changes around this stuff are needed.
• The problems this tree has is support for sneak-attack oriented builds:
  • The epic strike upgrades give you nifty extra damage based on your sneak die.... except it has a harsh ICD, so builds that attack quickly (read: Any rogue or sneak attack damage build) gets terrible mileage out of it. This would be THE epic strike for TWF builds if it didn't have this problem. The dark imbuement damage also scales off only 100% MP/RP, when it really should be 200% if it wants to match other trees.
  • Consumed by Shadows is straight up bad. It requires stealth, is very slow to use, and its effects are redundant at best because players are already inflicting those debuffs anyway. Considering its restrictions, I expect so much more from a T5 ability, especially when spellcasters are getting Weird from the same enhancement. If a player is sneaking around nearby enemies, they're almost guaranteed to be a rogue assassin, in which case they'd prefer to just be killing things outright instead of using this silly ability.
  • The Shadow Mastery epic moment could be tweaked. It's alright, I suppose. The unbreakable invisibility is cool, but there's also the effect about instakilling stuff when it misses me. Do I want to be noticed by enemies or not?
  • The new T5 sounds cool, that temp hp should be useful -- I hope numerically its enough. I almost wonder if it should be 10 temp hp per SA dice.

Fury of the Wild
Pretty great tree honestly. It just needs to diversify a bit, I think.

• With some of the other changes in mind(and having better alternatives for melee DPS epic strikes) I'm not sure the nerf to Adrenaline cooldown is needed.
• The changes to Quick Cut and Cutter are nice. There needs to be more support for it throughout the tree just like Adrenaline does.
• All the multiselectors that have you choose between more Adrenaline damage vs something else do not have appealing-enough options in the 'something else' option:
  • 3 Raging STR, 75% Adrenaline damage vs.+4 Attack, Rams Might + Animal Growth doubled
    • This one isn't too bad, how about the right one also allows your character to be affected by Animal Growth regardless of current form? Or, Animal Growth now also has a duration of 1 min per caster level.
    • Right option should probably have perks for Quick Cut so it has support within the tree
  • +3 to hit, 75% Adrenaline damage, free helpless KD on Adrenaline hits vs.+3 to hit, 6% fort bypass, 2% bonus damage while animal form or dual wielding
    • Currently this is no contest. Numerically, the right option just does not compare. Beefing it up will give more opportunities for TWF builds.
    • The bonus damage needs to be somewhere around 5-10%, not 2%, if the choice is supposed to be Adrenaline burst vs. sustained dps
    • I recall the old Fury ED gave TWF/Animal builds a no-save knockdown on natural 20s, maybe that should be brought back here?
    • Or extra perks for Quick Cut, since the other choice boosts Adrenaline
• Love the boosts to Great Leveler, it still feels clunky but it at least its worth taking and using now.

Primal Avatar
Honestly, the only thing I think is wrong with Primal Avatar is that the cold/lightning stuff is pretty bad. It's why Machrotech was so exciting to see, because at least electric casters finally had something worth using outside of Draconic.

• Carrion Swarm does not need a DC, much less one that is checked as the DoT ticks down, no other damage over time effect works this way as far as I can recall. This ability single-handedly saved acid/poison builds, it would be a shame to see it ruined with this...
• Will have to see how the Storm Catcher changes affects it, but the Thundersnow spell ability in T3 is just not good. The fire/acid ones are great, but this one just deals lackluster damage, has poor targeting, and possibly has DC issues? Stuff seems to evade/save on it REALLY often.
• The T5 summons are not exactly equal. The fire one is great because it heals the party, and slings lots of high damage fire spells. The acid one stacks its own Carrion Swarm, which is great. The cold one uh... is very slow to cast spells, most of which are fairly low-power, such as frost lance. I think that air elemental needs to be supercharged a bit. I'd have to double-check, but I don't think any of their spells crit. It would be nice if they could.

Shiradi Champion
The changes are okay. It's in a good spot for ranged builds. The support for charms/enchantments are kinda laughable, to be honest. It does feel like regardless of playstyle, you end up 'throwing away' DP just to get to the T5's, which isn't good.

• Whirling Wrists should be in T1 or T2. It's really weird that one of the core abilties that make thrower builds worthwhile isn't acquired until level 26. They are very annoying to level because of this.
• The whole Wild Empathy/Healing Spring stuff on the right side of the tree is kind of worthless. DP spent here is thrown away just to get deeper into the tree to the 'good stuff'.

Unyielding Sentinel
Don't have much to say here, its a good tree, albeit expensive.

• Considering it's the tank tree with no real alternatives, it'd be nice to have some of the ranks/DP costs reduced, which opens up room for more flavorful choices for secondary trees for tanks.
• I also support the calls to make Celestial Mandate have an inherent attack bonus. Tanks struggle enough and are rare enough as-is, we should be making their lives easier!

There's lots of good opportunities for interesting changes to the current EDs. I want to have difficulty choosing between things! I don't want to 'throw away' DP in trees just to get to the next tier! And I just don't get that with our current EDs and what they offer.