True enough. But it doesn’t help either. Toning it down would still reduce powercreep even if it’s only by a little, and this topic is about the stagger-damage system and how it should be changed after all, not about how to reduce powercreep most effectively. And for me personally: The main argument to simply get rid of the staggr-damage talent row wasn’t so much powercreep as it was bad, contraproductive, and redundant design. (As per my first reply in this thread.)
In any case, thanks for all the replies everybody, and sorry mine is so late. I’ve just had a very busy week.
@alsozara : Good point about needing to know exactly how this version of Bulwark works. Maybe one of the modmakers could clarify all the exact details? I’m very curious as well.
@Sleezy : Fair point about a non-famished Firesword benefitting from Bulwark. Your personal melee damage would be about the same or a few insignificant percentages higher, so you’d trade off some ranged power, a little damage vs. CW and Monsters, and extra stagger in exchange for a teambuff. I very much disagree with the notion that your personal damage as a shield user is “miniscule”, however! If you don’t play like some dumb staggerbot you can do very respectable melee damage with any shield weapon, moreso on a class like Mercenary. (And everybody is sleeping on FK with M&S who can do suprisingly good damage. He uses Mainstay as well, by the way, and I’d strongly consider using EP over Bulwark on him if this mod as-is would be live.) The damage of a shield user can be really high as well when you factor in ranged weapons like the MP or Drakefire weapons, which would further favor Enhanced Power over Bulwark.
As for toning down values “too much”: Like I said, I think the entire talent row should be removed to start with (with a tiny bit of compensation to enemy health, maybe). And if you just nerf the values by a lot like I suggested somewhere, I don’t think any niche build will suffer disproportionally like Incan suggested might happen. And that’s what I asked for an example of: Which niche build would suddenly not work anymore without the stagger-damage talents / with nerfed versions of those talents?
What I must concede to you all, however, is that in my mind I was still thinking of Bulwark with the old requirements instead of the 5s debuff this mod changed it to, which indeed massively increases its relevance & usefulness to the other players in your team.
Regardless, I still feel like you all overestimate the usefulness of the debuff a little, especially on shields. It’s still not exactly a 15% bonus damage aura. Does the bonus damage for teammates to enemies that I’m already attacking really effectively - and significantly - reduce the time it takes for them to die? And if so: Does that situation really happen enough during a normal Legend or Cata run to make a difference? It’s kind of hard to put to words exactly, but based on personal experience I’m still sceptical the team damage buff would really affect the run in such a significant way as the feeling of the words “15% damage buff” evokes.
My reasoning is a bit like this: You guys just scrapped Mainstay because you felt it was so weak it was useless, basically. So adding a 20% damage teambuff - which I feel wouldn’t be super impactful because of practical reasons - on top of the old Mainstay wouldn’t be very excessive. Especially if you buff Enhanced Power as well. And buffing Bulwark would mostly favor weapons that are on lower rugs of the meta ladder rung anyways. Increasing their worth relatively to the weapons that are top of the power curve - even with the rest of the changes in the mod - isn’t nescesarily a bad thing.
