Carnage is obviously underpowered for a purely DPS class and for the level of difficulty as mastering the spec, it should definitely be pulling higher #s. Here are just some of my thoughts on how to give Carnage a bit of love to make it more viable. These buffs will mainly apply to PVE (because I really don't PVP on my Mara) so I can't speak to PVP buffs. I might be way off in all of these but I'm just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

 

1. Carnage relies almost exclusively on white damage. Maybe add a bleed or internal damage effect either from a tactical or set bonus. For example, Carnage has no good exclusive set bonus. Here's an idea:

-2: +2% Mastery

-4: Devastating Blast/Gore/VT has a 50% chance to cause internal damage for (x) seconds.

-6: Devastating Blast/Gore/VT has a 100% chance to cause internal damage for (x) seconds.

 

2. Give Berserk a higher alacrity boost so bursts are faster.

 

3. Increase the crit multipliers of... well... everything, but especially Massacre and DB. I say crit multipliers and not overall damage because you still have to time your crits (especially DB) and you're still subject to RNG.

 

4. Do something, anything, to make Ravage useful again.

 

5. Give the spec a baseline higher alacrity boost. Ataru Form is about hitting hard and fast, thus using Ataru should reflect its intended purpose. This means an alacrity boost is appropriate.

 

6. As some other people have suggested in other threads, make the cooldowns for the burst abilities shorter. When 10 out of 15 of the abilities in your rotation are filler (Massacre), you have too much filler and not enough burst on a burst spec.

 

I may be way off on all of this and if anyone has any better suggestions, I'm open to them. This post is just to get some wheels turning in we the players who pay for this game and maybe get the attention of Bioware on some tangible solutions.

Edited June 9, 2020 by KnightGreg

It does not have to be that complicated. What turned AP PT from a complete nobody into a dominant burst machine? Firefall + one auto-crit. All carnage needs is for one of it's 20-30k white damage hits to be a 60k yellow damage hit and it becomes a monster. Edited June 12, 2020 by StrikePrice

I agree with the notion that it's underpowered, but making the spec deal periodic/elemental/internal damage is not the answer; that this is getting suggested is indicative of the bigger picture of how horrible class balancing was overall this expansion.

 

Simply put, every single burst class that relies on weapon attacks just a little too much is trash compared to anything else right now, unless they have one of the myriad of tacticals that gives their abilities an internal/elemental dot. For example if you're playing Deception/Infiltration on a Sin/Shadow, most people use Awakened Flame and just spam their Lightning Ball/PKB as much as possible because the dot uptime is better than playing the spec the way it's been for years. Anni/Watchman players just take the tactical that lets them never have to reapply their bleed/burn dot from rupture/cauterize, and it goes on and on and on. Frankly I'm sick of it; if I wanted to deal internal damage I'd just go play Annihilation.

 

Sure EAware has probably done some tweaks since I last looked at guides for preferred classes and tacticals, but overall the issue remains: Weapon damage needs a raw buff, and all internal/elemental damage needs to go back to where it should have always been and ignore most defenses but not be as strong as a saber slash or other defense-dependent strike, period. I don't know why this is so hard for whoever is in charge of deciding the values of attack damage lately.

Edited June 12, 2020 by MagicTerror