Is smash really that OP?

sounds like all the butthurt is coming from your end bro, perhaps you should be the one to l2p?

Players on the PTR told biofail the following :

Changes to smash were too much
Changes to MS were too much

Game hacks were a joke

Changes to resolve were retarded

Did they listen.....no........they kept deleting the posts.....on the bright side tankasins were nerfed a bit which made them less retarded..........and then there were lots of lvl 10 maras running around the place..............

Welcome to 9K stun wars

to be fair, rage jugg is not only the most overpowered, but also the easiest rotation in the game:

Enrage, Leap, Smash, Choke, Push, Leap, Smash.

and if you spec into unstoppable, nothing is going to interrupt your smashes after each leap.

But yeah, lolsmash and stunbubbles really are ruining pvp, it's a joke now, you don't need skill at all, you just need to press 3 buttons/keys and you're going to take off 25-50% of somebody's health, and not just somebody, but somebody and the other 4 people around that somebody.

not sure how they'd fix smash without breaking jugg dps though, making it single target or a cone in front of you would be a little better in terms of balance, since it would still be viable for pve and somewhat less bad for pvp.

As for the stunbubbles, simply make them break on damage, like every other freaking extra CC in the game aside from the primary. No idea why the hell they changed that. Imagine if agents/smugglers flashbangs didn't break on damage (don't get any ideas bioware). Realy stupid changes in 1.4.

But yeah, lolsmash doesn't require skill and few people play the tank or middle tree in pvp and even fewer are actually skilled at them, but, since lolsmash will basically 2-shot those specs as well, even tank spec, no point in really even wasting time trying anything other than lolsmash as a jugg/guardian.

Not 1 vs 1 but in a team enviroment such as normal warzones where the skill span is as wide as the galaxy, people inevitably will stack and there will be several smashers on each team. Even if you can avoid it you can be pretty sure that atleast four people on your normal warzone team will die over and over again from smashes. It's simply not a reasonable ability for the enviroment. It's kind of like offering people rocket launchers in the Halo games, 4 our of 5 would pick that class.

I admit the rage spec is easy to play with an easy rotation but are the other classes really that much harder to play? I hardly think so...also the reason you don't see us using the the other two trees is because they are severely lacking in pvp. Rage is really the only viable spec to pick for a jugg. Mara on the other hand have it very good, if smash gets nerfed it's no big deal to them they still have two other very good trees to choose from.

hah, yeah....nerfed tankasins, so now they're useless in pve and in pvp if they use tank gear, while the dps tankasins are pretty much unchanged, just a little less mitigation/self healing, exact same damage though.

I actually wouldn't mind more tanky stuff on my sin, like the damage reduction stacks/aoe damage reduction from the deception/infiltration tree to the tank tree, then move the buffed shocks/force regen from the tank tree to the infiltration/deception tree.

I mean really, if the whole problem with darkness sins with dps gear was that they did too much damage, then simply nerf the damage, don't nerf the survivability, now they're pretty terrible compared to the other tanks. They hold aggro great, but take a ton more damage with 2000-2500 less armor than the other 2 tanks.

This...

You overestimate smash cooldown.
Anyway lets calculate dps on ur rotation against 13xx expertise medium armor.

Enrage 0
Leap 700-900 dmg
Smash 4-6k
Choke (prolly get interrupted but still) 2-3k
Push 500-700 dmg
Leap 700-900 dmg
Smash 4-6k
Overall about 13-15k dmg
Its gonna take 0+1,5+1,5+4+1,5+1,5+1,5 = 11,5 sec for full rotation
14k dmg over 11,5 seconds. Any vanguard/powertech can stay and spam flameburst for 2-3k ELEMENTAL ! dmg (not kinetic as smash) every 1,5 sec. 1 button vs 7-8. You dont care about stuns or range (smash 5m range).

Yes. Most people who try to minimalize the effect of smash in PVP are overlooking one thing, the effect smash has on healers. I am an ops healer in half recruit half war hero gear and I have no issues healing myself through and eventually outlasting most DPS classes trying to kill me 1 on 1 regardless of gear UNLESS they are rage jugs or maras. Leap-smash combos force ops healers to NOT stay in close contact with the melee classes which many want to do to avoid being targeted by the all the snipers and powertechs in the wz. On top of this, our aoe heal has a relatively small range (not that I'm complaining) but many ops hug melee so they can gain the ticks of the heal themselves. Both of these are valid WZ behaviors not seriously discouraged by any other aoe ability (most give some warning like orbital cannons reticle or are simply not damaging enough to be a serious concern) besides CCs like flashbang, but if worst comes to worst you can blow your cooldown to get out of an aoe cc.

Leap immobilizes you and cant be removed by escape, forcing you to take the smash or burn your debilitate (assuming it's off cd) or risk getting a heal interrupted when hots and surgical probes inevitably cant get your health up fast enough. Then you have all the extra damage you caused your melees by hugging them when you were smashed that you have to heal, and then it all happens again 15 sec later, or sooner if the right talents are taken by the jug/mara in question.

Moving on to other, less mobile healers like mercs and sorcs, both of whom have fewer hots, a potential leap-smash-interrupt combo forces them to remain even farther from the fray and use more los techniques to avoid snipers and PTs (which works better for these classes) but opens up team mate los issues and doesnt eliminate the risk of a jug leaping to you and then smashing you again and again until you die. My main point is few will argue that a class offers more hair-tearing out frustration to healers than rage specced maras.

That combined with the relative difficulty of stacking comms as a healer compared to a fotm DPS class is making more and more pvpers choose noob classes like rage jugs/maras instead of healing or playing DPS sorc or ops or mercs, exacerbating the problem. Smash cheapens the mara/jug classes by making them one trick face-roll ponies in the worst sense of the word, and most of the people defending the skill are maras/jugs themselves. I don't care if their damage stays the same overall in a more sustained or even multiple skill based burst manner, just as long as their instacrit 6k aoe skill is changed significantly. Jugs would likely need a DPS boost to stay relevant, whereas maras will be fine if their precious smash only did 4-5 k damage to the primary target with unchanged aoe damage.

TLDR: no ability in the game has the ability to influence the way a healer plays and what course of action they can take like smash, which in conjunction with its position as the single highest target nuke makes it silly and, imho, OP.

P.S. yes most of these problems can be avoided by playing with a team of good players, but a rage specced smasher needs no help from anyone to be a bane to any and all healers on the battlefield. And if your argument is based on "Yes but if this EXACT set of criteria is met, it isn't a problem" you aren't helping anyone, and i would suggest you remove your head from your anal passage before you post again.

Think you're confusing 1300 expertise war hero with augmented war hero, stock war hero gear with no augments gives you what? 17k hp? That's what most of the pvp population is gonna have with the influx of f2p players. Also, don't think choke ticks for that much, but after the second leap, you can use either ravage or dispatch, so far in mostly tank gear, got 5500 smashes and 4500 dispatches, so that alone is enough to destroy a medium armor guy. Spec into unstoppable instead of crush and you'll have unstoppable smashes and uninterruptable chokes, at least against stuns/knockbacks, if they actually hit interrupt, think that interrupts it. So yeah, a lot more than 14000 damage.

Not sure what your point was at the end there about not caring about stuns and vanguards flame burst/etc. You said you were going to calculate damage done against medium armor war hero, not vanguards. In terms of vanguards specifically though, pretty easy to shut down. I mean, with lolsmash, pretty much everything is easy to shut down. it's a lot better to play the class/rotation and see what happens instead of calculating theoretical damage. If there's a healer constantly healing the sage you're smashing, it's going to be hard to even kill the sage. And for vanguards in particular, I've been smashing them for around 5000 in mostly tank gear, if they're tank spec'd, closer to 4000.

In conclusion, smash is overpowered and it really is ruining pvp, because even if you have some great rotations on whatever class/spec are fully ewh geared and a vet player, some newbie f2p player who just hit 50 is going to run up to you and smash you for probably at least 4k in recruit gear, repeatedly.

The only way to fix this is probably to just redesign the trees completely, so that they no longer suck for pve/pvp without lolsmash.