A necro's suggestion for balancing scourge

[Crinn.7864]

How to balance scourge in a manner that eliminates the excessive amounts of melee hate while retaining viability. These changes also are designed to balance pvp scourge without overly effecting PvE, and without the need for skill splitting. Additionally these changes aim to create more parity between Scourge's grandmaster traits.

 

1. Sand Savant only increases the size of shades, Sand Savant will no longer increase the size of effects spawned at the scourge.

2. Shade auto attacks are only casted by shades and not at the scourge's position.

3. The healing power contribution to Sand Cascade, Sand Flare, and Desert Empowerment is increased

4. Shade auto attacks no longer apply cripple.

5. Punishment skills now only convert boons into torment, instead of torment + cripple.

6. Demonic Lore now applies Cripple in addition to it's previous effects.

7. The Shade recharge reduction component of Sand Savant has been moved to Feed from Corruption.

8. Ghastly Breach no longer applies Slow and it's cast time has been increased to 1.25 seconds.

9. Trail of Anguish now applies 3 stacks of Stability. Trail of Anguish no longer converts boons.

10. Sand Swell cast time reduced to 0.5 seconds. Sand Swell no longer converts boons.

 

The purpose of changes #1 and #2 are to make it so that Scourges now need to utilitize their shades for offense, instead of simply having 300 radius killzone perpetually centered on the scourge's position. This should make scourge less of shutout hard counter to melee classes, while still leaving Shades as a effective area denial tool.

The purpose of change #3 is to make more support focused scourge better so that scourge doesn't have to be a glass cannon all the time.

The purpose of changes #4 and #5 is because having every torment applying skill natively come with it's own cover condi is excessive, and the lack of a rate limit on how fast cripple can be applied results in current gen Scourge being able to apply so much cripple as to be able to maintain 100% uptime even against builds that are running enormous amounts of -cripple duration and impairment removing skills.

The purpose of #6 is to offset the removal of cripple from all other skills by allowing scourge to trait back into cripple access, but since Demonic Lore has a ICD, the cripple access from this trait will not be as overpowering as current gen Scourge's is. This change also makes Demonic Lore more desirable in PvP.

The purpose of changes #7 is to cut down on the dominance of Sand Savant as a trait, moreover the recharge reduction makes much more sense on 3-shade scourge than it does on Savant Scourge given that 3-shade scourge needs that recharge reduction much more.

The purpose of #8 is to tone down how excessively overloaded Ghastly Breach is as a skill, and to make the skill more inline with elites of similar power.

The purpose of #9 and #10 is to give scourge a little better escape capabilities, while cutting down on the superfluous amounts of boonrip available to scourge.

[Vagrant.7206]

I think these changes would go a long way toward solving the scourge problem without being overly punitive (especially in PvE). The cover condis problem is nuts, and when you throw slow into the mix, it's truly awful. Scourges can walk around like a giant demon of death, and these changes would force them to play more defensively or position their shades much more carefully.

 

This means they would have to set up a spike, and couldn't just spam everything and run at the opponent.

[Crinn.7864]

Adding the following changes:

 

9. Trail of Anguish now applies 3 stacks of Stability. (up from 1) Trail of Anguish no longer converts boons.

10. Sand Swell cast time reduced to 0.5 seconds. (down from 1) Sand Swell no longer converts boons.

 

The purpose of these changes is to give scourge much better escape options, while at the same time cutting down on the superfluous amount of boon hate.

[Flauvious.6195]

You put more effort into these proposed changes then anet ever puts into balance unfortunately

[Vagrant.7206]

The sad thing is that it's not hard to recognize where the frustration comes from. The agony alone is rarely lethal against decent players. It's all the other stuff that gets piled on with it and the fact that you cannot sit still against a scourge (with agony, which does double damage if you move). Crippled + agony is punishment (see what I did there?), and the cover condis make it even harder to deal with.

[xDudisx.5914]

Anet quick, put this guy on balance team

[Cynz.9437]

> @xDudisx.5914 said:

> Anet quick, put this guy on balance team

 

If they did, thief would be deleted from game. No, ty.

 

Do appreciate his feedback on scourge and attempt to fix it so +1.

[rsegames.3916]

If we only had some test servers to mess around with devs and these suggestions.

 

Anyway, nice work, on paper it looks good.

[Loop.8106]

11. Give Scourge F-skills a .5 global cooldown with eachother, making you unable to piano them.

[Morwath.9817]

> @Crinn.7864 said:

> How to balance scourge in a manner that eliminates the excessive amounts of melee hate while retaining viability. These changes also are designed to balance pvp scourge without overly effecting PvE, and without the need for skill splitting. Additionally these changes aim to create more parity between Scourge's grandmaster traits.

>

> 1. Sand Savant only increases the size of shades, Sand Savant will no longer increase the size of effects spawned at the scourge.

> 2. Shade auto attacks are only casted by shades and not at the scourge's position.

> 3. The healing power contribution to Sand Cascade, Sand Flare, and Desert Empowerment is increased

> 4. Shade auto attacks no longer apply cripple.

> 5. Punishment skills now only convert boons into torment, instead of torment + cripple.

> 6. Demonic Lore now applies Cripple in addition to it's previous effects.

> 7. The Shade recharge reduction component of Sand Savant has been moved to Feed from Corruption.

> 8. Ghastly Breach no longer applies Slow and it's cast time has been increased to 1.25 seconds.

> 9. Trail of Anguish now applies 3 stacks of Stability. Trail of Anguish no longer converts boons.

> 10. Sand Swell cast time reduced to 0.5 seconds. Sand Swell no longer converts boons.

>

> The purpose of changes #1 and #2 are to make it so that Scourges now need to utilitize their shades for offense, instead of simply having 300 radius killzone perpetually centered on the scourge's position. This should make scourge less of shutout hard counter to melee classes, while still leaving Shades as a effective area denial tool.

> The purpose of change #3 is to make more support focused scourge better so that scourge doesn't have to be a glass cannon all the time.

> The purpose of changes #4 and #5 is because having every torment applying skill natively come with it's own cover condi is excessive, and the lack of a rate limit on how fast cripple can be applied results in current gen Scourge being able to apply so much cripple as to be able to maintain 100% uptime even against builds that are running enormous amounts of -cripple duration and impairment removing skills.

> The purpose of #6 is to offset the removal of cripple from all other skills by allowing scourge to trait back into cripple access, but since Demonic Lore has a ICD, the cripple access from this trait will not be as overpowering as current gen Scourge's is. This change also makes Demonic Lore more desirable in PvP.

> The purpose of changes #7 is to cut down on the dominance of Sand Savant as a trait, moreover the recharge reduction makes much more sense on 3-shade scourge than it does on Savant Scourge given that 3-shade scourge needs that recharge reduction much more.

> The purpose of #8 is to tone down how excessively overloaded Ghastly Breach is as a skill, and to make the skill more inline with elites of similar power.

> The purpose of #9 and #10 is to give scourge a little better escape capabilities, while cutting down on the superfluous amounts of boonrip available to scourge.

 

Quaggan approves, but Foooooooo, Quaggan can't see anywhere buffs to support traitline.

[Egorum.9506]

This would gut scourge, with nothing given back. If you haven't learned how to do it yet, range a scourge or chain CC them and collect your free points

[OriOri.8724]

Overall seems like a pretty well thought out list of changes.

[BeepBoopBop.5403]

> @OriOri.8724 said:

> Overall seems like a pretty well thought out list of changes.

 

So it'll never happen is what you're saying

[otto.5684]

On a design level as long as boon corruption is scourge main theme in sPvP it will remain over powered. Reducing the rate of boon corruption is not going to solve much. Not to mention that this is nothing more than power creep to what reaper used to do anyway.

 

Scourge in sPvP should focus on barrier/condi dps without boon corruption and possibly offensive support.

[Crinn.7864]

> @otto.5684 said:

> On a design level as long as boon corruption is scourge main theme in sPvP it will remain over powered. Reducing the rate of boon corruption is not going to solve much. Not to mention that this is nothing more than power creep to what reaper used to do anyway.

>

> Scourge in sPvP should focus on barrier/condi dps without boon corruption and possibly offensive support.

 

The purpose of these changes was not to remove scourge from it's role, or to push scourge out of the meta.

 

The purpose of these changes are to make Scourge less of a total melee shutout and to push it more towards a strategic role rather than a carpet bomb role.

[Awe.1096]

I still can't wrap my head around how and why scourge is OP. I mean, in the low level of play it surely is. But at higher ranks? Scourge is so fragile and when you play vs team with even a half of brain cell, you are guaranteed to get trained 24/7. Since PoF I alternate playing between holosmith, scourge and mesmer and doing stuff with scourge is hardest by far. Even if I stay way behind, enemy team just runs past my teammates ignoring them and chase me like there is no tomorrow. Yeah, as a scourge I can do a lot of bad things but only when I can actually do something instead of trying to shake of a thief, a warrior and a druid training me 24/7. It gets easier when there is another scourge in my team but otherwise I feel I can contribute more with my holosmith where I am not relegated to be a target practice with laughable defensive skills.

[Vagrant.7206]

> @Awe.1096 said:

> I still can't wrap my head around how and why scourge is OP. I mean, in the low level of play it surely is. But at higher ranks? Scourge is so fragile and when you play vs team with even a half of brain cell, you are guaranteed to get trained 24/7. Since PoF I alternate playing between holosmith, scourge and mesmer and doing stuff with scourge is hardest by far. Even if I stay way behind, enemy team just runs past my teammates ignoring them and chase me like there is no tomorrow. Yeah, as a scourge I can do a lot of bad things but only when I can actually do something instead of trying to shake of a thief, a warrior and a druid training me 24/7. It gets easier when there is another scourge in my team but otherwise I feel I can contribute more with my holosmith where I am not relegated to be a target practice with laughable defensive skills.

 

If you play it right, you can become a fountain of death to people who are both chasing you and not chasing you. With proper team support, it is possible to endure many of these fights and wreak havoc on your attackers. The only time a scourge is truly "weak" is when its life force is low, which is generally easy to resolve as you play. When I play scourge, even when I get focused at the beginning, I'm only truly vulnerable if I get stunlocked, which is something very people can recover from anyway.

[intox.6347]

> @Crinn.7864 said:

> > @otto.5684 said:

> > On a design level as long as boon corruption is scourge main theme in sPvP it will remain over powered. Reducing the rate of boon corruption is not going to solve much. Not to mention that this is nothing more than power creep to what reaper used to do anyway.

> >

> > Scourge in sPvP should focus on barrier/condi dps without boon corruption and possibly offensive support.

>

> The purpose of these changes was not to remove scourge from it's role, or to push scourge out of the meta.

>

> The purpose of these changes are to make Scourge less of a total melee shutout and to push it more towards a strategic role rather than a carpet bomb role.

 

I just see balance from pvp where scourge is op, destroying pve, wvw options. Also i can call your balance only nerf, coz i dont see anything for exchange. You saw that anet cant do proper split... and each touch on necro is only more painfull.... look what they do to reaper ... its now only memory...

[Rym.1469]

Pretty good suggestions overall. Only small gripe is removing corruptions from some Punishment skills, the thing that was supposed to sort of differentiate it as a new utility type, but it's not like it was super interesting or original in the first place.

 

I'd add that with Scourge no longer classified as a shade, small radius increase could be moved into baseline (180->200/220 instead of max 300 with sand savant) and Sand Savant removed as a whole. It's just clogging up grandmaster spot for support trait at that point.

 

 

[Hitman.5829]

To be honest the mesmers need to be nerfed more than the necros. As a melee warrior I find it easier to fight these condition spamming scourges than the perma evade, perma stun break mesmers. As a melee warrior you can't stun them to land your damage and you can hit them because they perma dodge/evade. In my opinion, scourges are fine the way thy are, but in groups is when they are OP. One way to nerf them is to reduce the number of targets they can hit from 5 to 3 or 2.

 

[Majirah.5089]

> @Hitman.5829 said:

> To be honest the mesmers need to be nerfed more than the necros. As a melee warrior I find it easier to fight these condition spamming scourges than the perma evade, perma stun break mesmers. As a melee warrior you can't stun them to land your damage and you can hit them because they perma dodge/evade. In my opinion, scourges are fine the way thy are, but in groups is when they are OP. One way to nerf them is to reduce the number of targets they can hit from 5 to 3 or 2.

>

 

Warriors also have pretty good counter to condi damage so that might make them seem less unbearable.

 

In a 1v1 setting though I agree that I’d rather fight a scourge than a mirage. But in a team fight setting I think scourge is much worse to deal with. Just my opinion though.

 

[OriOri.8724]

> @Hitman.5829 said:

> To be honest the mesmers need to be nerfed more than the necros. As a melee warrior I find it easier to fight these condition spamming scourges than the perma evade, perma stun break mesmers. As a melee warrior you can't stun them to land your damage and you can hit them because they perma dodge/evade. In my opinion, scourges are fine the way thy are, but in groups is when they are OP. One way to nerf them is to reduce the number of targets they can hit from 5 to 3 or 2.

>

 

I'm sure that metric fucktons of resistance and FC being able to send scourge's condis right back to him don't have any factor at all in why warriors don't have a hard time with them.

[Furious.2867]

> @Hitman.5829 said:

> To be honest the mesmers need to be nerfed more than the necros. _**As a melee warrior**_ I find it easier to fight these condition spamming scourges than the perma evade, perma stun break mesmers. _**As a melee warrior**_ you can't stun them to land your damage and you can hit them because they perma dodge/evade.

>

 

Your suggestions sounds rather self-serving.

[Jackalrat.5493]

Granted, if any class is and will forever remain Scourge's b-word, it's Power Reaper. So as a PR, I am selfishly desperate to see them get nerfed. I am watching myself cheat my team out of this amazing spec, and I'm watching really clearly mechanically unskilled players present the hardest fights for me simply because of their incredible power creep on that boon-hating build.

 

I don't know how balanced these changes are, because they're something I'd have to see in action, but the reduction of boon hate seems quit appropriate. It's just too much atm. My biggest concern is that Scourges are so far above and beyond what could be called balanced atm that a pretty heavy hand is needed for whatever nerfs they finally get.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

These aren't good changes because they do not address the #1 problem with scourge which is that the instant cast times combined with no animations results in it requiring absolutely zero skill to play. The same issues also result in it being no fun to play against because you are getting hit by skills that cannot be reacted to.

 

Scourge needs almost none of the nerfs you suggested. The only nerf it needs is:

 

1. Added a 1/2-second delay and animation effect to Sand shades before they strike

2. Added a 1-second cast time and animation to the Scourges F1 abilities

 

That's it. That's all the class needs. They could even add some power damage to the shades to compensate.

 

You can try to "balance" scourge all you want by tweaking the numbers, but until the spammy nature of the build is addressed scourge will continue to be seen as a textbook example of noob-pandering.