Brutal Mutations
Ahoy! So given some very good discussion on WHA regarding the Warhammer Online class, the Marauder, I thought I’d give my 40 pence regarding how to revamp the current Brutality tree.
If you’re not interested in neither the game or the career, then no need to read the full article!
First of, let’s get some ground covered as to what the Brutality mastery tree is supposed to do for the class;
“A Mastery path focused on inflicting heavy damage to a single opponent.”
In short, it’s a tree meant to burst down opponents, or a PvE tree aswell if you will. And looking through the career builder, it’s easy to tell that the utility on this is rather low.
However at it’s current state it does lack utility, but it also lacks damage to make up for it. There are some easy changes to this and they don’t quite require much to change;
A close to useless skill in the Brutality tree. It’s supposed to give the Marauder some ground for attack when he’s not in any position to use either Impale or Guillotine. However, as it stops your Auto-Attacks it also drops your damage considerably, along with having rather low damage aswell. But it’s easy to revamp into a better version;
- 3 Attack hit, instead of it being channeled it can actually work as a burst ability, making it hit the enemy three times along with allowing Auto-Attacks in the process.
- Keeping the current base damage, would that be overpowered? Hardly, as the current damage is equal to that of Flail (monstrosity’s spam button skill).
- 45-55 AP cost per use, as it would be a great boost towards the skill in general, a higher AP cost would ensure that it would be handled with care.
- No Cooldown – But as it would become the main attack of the Brutality tree, a cooldown would be a bit much over the top when adding the high AP cost to it.
And that is my suggestion to making that skill a lot more useful. But, we still got some ground to cover, so bare with me!
Growing Instability, it increases your Critical Hit damage by 10% per 10% HP lost. But it’s too situational to be worth it in all fairness, and if we are going to balance mirrors more towards each other, it would most certainly be a good idea to let this ability mirror Pack Synergy (a flat 50% Critical Hit damage increase).
A would-be good skill, but tied to a horrible ability. And here the answer is simple; Turn it completely around and make it into a 50% Auto-Attack speed increase that is only avaible within the Brutality stance/mutation. In short, a mirror towards the Pack Hunting tactic. And it would actually work well with our stance/mutation proc.
Only one situation where I can consider Wave of Terror to be usefull; Chokepoints. Keep sieges mainly. Why it’s also located so high up in the Brutality tree, I truely cannot tell. And another thing that I’m uncertain of is how to balance this skill to work in a PvP situation. Any suggestions would be greatly appriciated!
And the rest is the rest. In short, these key abilities and tactics should be changed into something that’s actually viable. And while some may argue that these changes would be OP, you still have the stance system to keep in mind. While in the Brutality tree, there is no utility, just like in the monstrosity tree there is no damage.
Feel free to add any thoughts or comments on the matter!
Good post. Best looking mutation, utter turd abilities and pointless to use. I couldn’t say if what you’ve proposed would be OP, but something needs to be done to make that mastery at least vaguely viable.
Good post. Best looking mutation, utter turd abilities and pointless to use. I couldn’t say if what you’ve proposed would be OP, but something needs to be done to make that mastery at least vaguely viable.
+1
Good suggestions although you need to be careful with adding a 50% AA speed increase as well as a flat 50% crit damage bonus, it is very easy to overbuff the damage when handling numbers like this, and a flat 50% crit damage bonus is quite massive, especially becouse a well Geared Marauder can easily get his crit rate over 60% with Feeding on Fear slotted.
60% crit rate with 50% crit damage is probably way to much damage than the class need.
Yeah I agree that the 50% crit tactic would be a bit over the top, but I would like the 50% AA-speed to stay on the suggestion list as it would work very well with our Brutality Stance proc (which in it’s current state doesn’t do much).
I like the growing number of Marauder players’ blogs! Hopefully someone in a position to make things change will see this, combined with the lack of activity on the forums save for the justified ‘WHAT THE MARAUDER CLASS NEEDS’ threads, and see something must be done.
I believe that the recent occurance in blog entries by the Marauder community could be the player base’s way of sort of expressing themselves and posting feedback for people to see, and actually gaining something in return (i.e viewers, people commenting and much more), instead of the feedback never reaching it’s intended destination.
Thanks for taking your time to read through and commenting!