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Corruption Sorcerer/Seer Sage Set Bonus Discussion


EricMusco

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Hey everyone,

 

We wanted to take a moment to reach out to the community to collect ideas on set bonuses. We are looking for opinions on current and previous set bonuses as well as concepts for future. This thread will cover Corruption Sorcerers/Seer Sages.

 

Note: Our intent is to have set bonuses not increase HPS by more than 5%. Please keep this in mind when posting your suggestions.

 

Current Level 60 Set Bonuses (for reference)

  • 2-Piece: Activating a healing ability has a 15% chance to grant Force-Mystic's Critical Bonus which causes your next Dark Infusion or Deliverance to be a critical. This effect can only occur once every 30 seconds.
  • 4-Piece: Consuming Darkness or Vindicate restore an additional 10 Force.
  • 6-Piece: Reduces cooldown of Innervate or Healing Trance by 1.5 seconds.

Cheers, all!

The SWTOR Combat Team

 

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If you are willing to make the current 6 piece base line then you could make it so Innervate / Healing Trance has at least one guaranteed crit. So Force Surge is a bit less random without increasing overall HPS that much.

 

I agree with the above. That 1.5 second reduction is almost required to heal as a sorc. I'd like to see it as a level 65 passive, and the set bonuses actually feel like bonuses rather than must haves.

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Honestly, the only time I use benevolence is when I see its activation bonus on my buff bar. Other than that it's not really used by me. I'd suggest adding a set bonus to reduce its cooldown. Although the way this set bonus is now is fine with me.
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2-Piece: Each tick of Healing Trance reduces it's active cooldown by 0.4 seconds.

4-Piece: Consuming Darkness or Vindicate restore an additional 10 Force.

6-Piece: Using any skill while in combat will heal up to 8 allies in up to 45 meters radius for a small amount(let's say up to 10 times lower than overload. This heal, range and number of targets healed is proportional to your current Force(meaning missing a lot of force gives you an almost non-existent heal to only few allies in a small radius). I'm not sure exactly how this could be done and rebalanced but it for me it feels like it would fit the theme of a Force Healer well.

 

I'd imagine you could figure the numbers for precise balance.

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Is it possible to have different set bonuses for pvp and pve?

 

That resulted in situations where PVP set bonuses were considered so horrible that PVE set bonuses were considered better. For some classes, it was worth it to take the expertise hit, even before bolster, because the disparity was so great. For example, pre 3.0, the sorc heal PVP bonuses were terribad and taking the PVE set bonus for 1.5 CD reduction on innervate was common. Healer sorcs without access to PVE set bonuses sometimes mixed other specs' set bonuses in search of a better bonus; for example, either borrowing the set bonus meant for Lightning to reduce lockout on Static Barrier, or even taking the assassins' 3-charge Recklessness bonus.

 

That's the situation that I"m most familiar with, as my main PVP toon is a sorc healer (and almost always has been, except for the time between 1.3-1.6), but there were other classes that took PVP set bonuses into PVE raids because the PVP bonuses were better, as well.

 

Standardization makes it much easier to balance, though I sympathize that it makes gameplay a little more dull. I wouldn't be opposed to having 2 set bonus options per spec instead of only 1--only I'd rather have both options available on PVE and PVP gear so people don't feel forced to cross over and do content they don't want--and in many cases aren't wanted by the other players doing said undesired content-- just to get a "better" bonus.

Edited by AdrianDmitruk
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  • 4-Piece: Consuming Darkness or Vindicate restore an additional 10 Force.

 

Was this reverted back from the 5 force it was restoring in the final version of 3.3 PTS?

 

Don't get me wrong, I definitely am in favor of this change due to the addition of the weary effect in the last patch and the increased emphasis it would put on the 4-piece value (5 force is meager), but want to make sure it's not just a typo here.

 

 

On topic, if there is to be a new force ability that will utilize force bending/conveyance, then I would maybe like to see the 4 or 6 piece bonus moved to a new passive ability in the tree and have them replaced with a set bonus that either lowers the cd of resurgence/rejuvinate or maybe adds a second stack of force bending/conveyance on activation. This should help everything remain rotationally relevant in the face of potential ability bloat.

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I agree with the above. That 1.5 second reduction is almost required to heal as a sorc.

 

Yeah, the 1.5 second reduction shouldn't really be the 6 piece bonus, it should be the 2 or 4 piece bonus since it's the most important one.

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4pc set bonus resurgence no longer has a cd. or you could go with roaming mend can travel an additional 2 times making it 6 targets healed.

 

 

another idea:

 

2pc: 15% chance to cast a separate non force bend roaming mend after a direct heal ( wouldn't proc off resurgence hots or revivication)

 

4pc: resurgence has no cd

 

6pc: reduce innervate cd by 1.5 secs

 

if u made innervate cd baseline could replace 6 pc with additional charges on mend

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The set bonuses in TOR are garbage. There is literally no counter argument to that statement. World of Warcraft had more interesting set bonuses when the game's class balance consisted of "if you can heal, you ARE healing."

 

Set bonuses in TOR might as well not even exist for how useless they are. You guys (the Devs) want less than a 5% power boost? That's not a statistically significant change, and so it's worthless. Either change that mentality, or get rid of the massively disappointing set bonuses altogether. A set bonus should feel like a bonus. 2-set maybe not so much since it's so easy to get, but 4-set bonuses should feel good, and the 6-set bonuses had better be spine-crushingly powerful.

 

Especially since your terrible itemization system forces people to win THREE pieces of gear before they can equip ONE, or suffer from massive stat imbalances. DPS classes suffer the worst, whose set base stats often don't have enough accuracy to cap. Also, get rid of accuracy. It's not fun to be forced to have exactly enough to cap. Too much is literally wasted stat, and too little means you shouldn't even be in the raid because you're gimping yourself. Get rid of it. It's an antiquated, moronic, and un-fun mechanic that adds literally nothing - and especially nothing interesting - to gameplay. And it also punishes only DPS classes; tanks don't need to cap it, and healers have literally no use for it.

 

*ahem* Anyway.

 

If you want to look at what good set bonuses do, look at WoW; they've been making set bonuses be progressively cooler for a decade. I'm not saying copy WoW, that's stupid (and they'll beat you with experience anyway). I'm saying look at the kind of awesome set bonuses which exist in that game, and take some inspiration for bonuses here. Since I spent the last four years I played WoW as a Holy Priest, let's have a look at what the most current bonus for that class was when I stopped playing. (And I'm posting it here because the Sorc/Sage lvl 57 heal, Wandering/Roaming Mend, is identical to Prayer of Mending in WoW.)

 

Tier 17, 4-piece (Holy): When Prayer of Mending heals a target, you have a 20% chance to gain a stack of Serendipity.

 

Well, on the surface that doesn't seem especially interesting. But, what's Serendipity?

 

Serendipity (Holy Priest passive): When you heal with Binding Heal or Flash Heal, the cast time of your next Heal or Prayer of Healing spell is reduced by 20% and mana cost reduced by 20%. Stacks up to 2 times. Lasts 20 sec.

 

Well, that's a little more interesting. But, there's synergy with a third skill.

 

Divine Insight (Holy Priest talent/utility): Your Heal and Prayer of Healing have a 40% chance to make your next Prayer of Mending not trigger its cooldown and jump to each target instantly.

 

It may not be immediately obvious from reading the descriptions, but here's how these three abilities interact:

 

1. You cast Prayer of Mending during raid-wide damage. It bounces around, and the 4-set procs to give you stacks of Serendipity.

 

2. Serendipity causes your bread-and-butter spells, Heal (single target) or Prayer of Healing (aoe) to a) cast 20% faster and b) cost 20% less.

 

3. Divine Insight causes casting Heal/Prayer of Healing to sometimes make Prayer of Mending bounce immediately - that is, 40% of the time it'll instantly bounce and you'll get your Serendipity stacks right back to cycle between steps 2 and 3.

 

These three skills (one set bonus, one class passive, and one utility) combine to completely change the way not only of how a particular skill functions, but crucially, how it is used: Prayer of Mending - I mean Wandering Mend - goes from a proactive aoe heal (whose full potential is often squandered if the random target it bounces to doesn't take damage) to a reactive heal which sustains itself (and your mana pool) via the use of another oft-used skill.

 

Set bonuses in TOR should be like that. They should change the way a skill functions. They should change the hierarchy of the classes' priority systems. And no, guide writers, an 80 GCD, two minute long rotation is not a rotation! It's a priority system that has a periodicity of two minutes. Anyway. One autocrit on a single ability per minute for a SIX SET BONUS is mind-numbingly BORING! (My main is a Shadow.) Especially when half the classes already have passives that do that on a 15s or even 12s internal cooldown - literally 4-5 times as powerful and you don't even need to raid to get them!

 

It's definitely good that you guys realize your set bonuses need some serious improvement, but you're never going to improve them with the obnoxiously restrictive criteria you force upon yourselves.

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1. Something like putting up one of your dots lets people heal on hit from a mob (a small one maybe about 500-1000 depending on health pools at 65) or a % of the user health the 'heal on hit' can last either for a few seconds (so everyone can potentially hit it once or twice) or it can have a user/use cap like 'heals 10 times then dissipates' with an internal cool down of perhaps 20-30 seconds or so. - This makes for an interesting rotation change for healers once the set bonus is available but wouldn't be OP, and wouldn't increase raid dps by any significant amount because it's only worth refreshing once the ICD is up etc.

 

2. Using any ability (doesn't really matter which one) increases some stat (either base stat I.E. willpower or a tertiary like alacrity or surge) by 1-5% for a few seconds - put this on one of the lesser used heals or one with a longer cool down, also give it an internal cool down of at least 10 seconds but perhaps up to 30 seconds (my personal preference here would be alacrity but that's just me)

 

3. A raid utility one - Healing a person with X skill gives them 5% ish of a stat (whatever their highest tertiary stat is) for 5-10 seconds on a 30 second to 1 minute internal cool down. While this doesn't add to the sorc/sage at all it does bring a differing raid utility buff and 'could' be a game changer but not a big one - like using it right as people are popping cool downs could significantly increase dps and might give a higher skill cap to the class.

 

4. Using X skill reduces the cool down of Polarity Shift by 1-2 seconds each time you use it.

 

Just a few ideas.

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You don't use wandering mend correctly. You should never use it without conveyance to make that it moves instantly to the other 3 targets.

 

This has always confused me :/ If the burst healing isn't needed, then isn't this approach will likely screw up the effectiveness of either you and/or your co-healer?

 

I would think that if you're on a boss phase with a decent amount of periodic rage-wide damage _and_ you don't need to burst heal someone, then you're likely better off not using conveyance with mend. The questions I think about are "will all 4 mend heals take place before mend is off CD?" and "are we not in need of a burst heal". If the answers are both yes, then I don't use conveyance on mend. In this scenario, I believe that I gain no benefit from the instant moves because I don't need the burst heals immediately _and_ I'm in very little danger of the mend not healing all 4 possible targets. I feel like I do however risk over-healing raid members and possibly messing with my co-healers effectiveness. In this scenario -- if believe it's best to use it to proc something else (Healing Trance or the Deliverance/instant-cast Benevolence if the proc is available/off CD), as I'll have more control, better triage, better co-healer effectiveness, and better ehps.

 

Just my thought, but I've yet to hear an effective rebuttal against this perspective. Would be interested if someone with more experience than I could logically explain why you should "always" use conveyance with mend.

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You don't use wandering mend correctly. You should never use it without conveyance to make that it moves instantly to the other 3 targets.

 

I wasn't talking about wandering mend there. I was talking about the equivalent spell in WoW, which, because Priests have a bigger toolkit than Sorc/Sage, use it in that way (normally, without bonuses from a set).

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This has always confused me :/ If the burst healing isn't needed, then isn't this approach will likely screw up the effectiveness of either you and/or your co-healer?

 

I would think that if you're on a boss phase with a decent amount of periodic rage-wide damage _and_ you don't need to burst heal someone, then you're likely better off not using conveyance with mend. The questions I think about are "will all 4 mend heals take place before mend is off CD?" and "are we not in need of a burst heal". If the answers are both yes, then I don't use conveyance on mend. In this scenario, I believe that I gain no benefit from the instant moves because I don't need the burst heals immediately _and_ I'm in very little danger of the mend not healing all 4 possible targets. I feel like I do however risk over-healing raid members and possibly messing with my co-healers effectiveness. In this scenario -- if believe it's best to use it to proc something else (Healing Trance or the Deliverance/instant-cast Benevolence if the proc is available/off CD), as I'll have more control, better triage, better co-healer effectiveness, and better ehps.

 

Just my thought, but I've yet to hear an effective rebuttal against this perspective. Would be interested if someone with more experience than I could logically explain why you should "always" use conveyance with mend.

 

I probably don't have the most experience, but if I don't need burst healing, I don't use wandering mend at all. As you mentionned, you can mess with effectiveness using WM wrong so I only use it if a) my tank is about to die and need heavy healing or b) we're taking constant huge raid wide damage.

Keeping your tank up is your 1st priority as most of the bosses need tank swaps in this tier and if you take constant raid wide damage (Underlurker is a good example) you probably won't overheal.

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Since surge is a lower priority for our class, I'd like to see a change to the 2-set. Make that the Reduce CD on Innervate/Healing Trance by 1.5 (it was the old 2-set dunno why it isn't now). Remove the current 2-set and make the new 6-set a little more beneficial for our class in particular. You could potentially give all three healing classes something that's more specific and vital to their role as a healer rather than just a general "lol here's an auto crit". For sorcs/sages, the 6-set could be something like a 15% increase to Static Barrier/Force Armor.

 

Another idea for a new 6-Piece could be "Increases the crit chance of Innervate/Healing Trance by 10%. Or "Casting Innervate/Healing Trance has a 25% chance to make your next Revivification/Salvation activate instantly without consuming charges of Force Surge/Resplendence once every 24 seconds". Perhaps instead of the autocrit on Dark Infusion/Deliverance it could be "Causes your next Resurgence/Rejuvenate to grant two charges of Force Bending/Conveyance", or "Causes your next Force Bending/Conveyance to be twice as effective". Also you could tack onto the 2-Piece "Reduces the cooldown of Resurgence/Rejuvenate by 1 second". Not exactly sure if this would be viable to be worked in as a set bonus, but it would be nice if Revivification/Salvation could consume a charge of Recklessness/Force Potency.

 

Obviously the numbers are completely arbitrary, and you're just looking for ideas for set bonuses anyway. So to reiterate:

 

2-Piece: Reduces cooldown of Innervate or Healing Trance by 1.5 seconds and Resurgence or Rejuvenate by 1 second.

4-Piece: Consuming Darkness or Vindicate restore an additional 10 Force.

6-Piece: Increases the amount absorbed by your Static Barrier or Force Armor by X% (Where X would be a number of your choosing). OR: Increases the critical chance of Innervate or Healing Trance by X%. OR: Innervate or Healing Trance now has a X% chance to make your next Revivification or Salvation activate instance and without consuming charges of Force Surge or Resplendence once every X seconds. OR: Activating a healing ability has a X% chance to grant Force-Mystic's Critical Bonus which causes your next Resurgence or Rejuvenate to grant two charges of Force Bending or Conveyance. This effect can only occur once every X seconds.

 

(For S's and G's)

 

7-Piece: Your Static Barrier or Force Armor now state its exact amount on its tooltip. Also, your cleanse now prioritizes CC and stun effects.

 

But seriously, c'mon now guys. "A high amount" was cute at first, but now it's time to let us in on your definition of the word "high" because "high" is an incredibly subjective word. And I think we healers have gone long enough in PvP without a useful cleanse. Outside of the very rare occurrences when someone is CC'd/stunned and they miraculously don't have 3 rows of debuffs that usually take 1 gcd to reapply and are apart of the applier's rotation anyway, there's just no reason to even have the cleanse on the bar. You gave us the ability to cleanse hard stuns and then said "lol it's ok they won't be able to cleanse through the 8 new debuffs we're putting in the game anyway". Again, c'mon guys.

Edited by Dhurwin
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This has always confused me :/ If the burst healing isn't needed, then isn't this approach will likely screw up the effectiveness of either you and/or your co-healer?

 

No, the opposite is true. Since that without conveyance it will only activates on damage, it may heal a target when it's not needed anymore, seconds after you casted it (which is much more unlikely if it burst out with conveyance up).

 

After one/two jumps you can't track it anymore. Either you or your co-healer may have already healed the target it jumped to. Or activate by the time you are your co-healer are casting on the same target. Basically, without conveyance, its an heal that is out there healing who knows who. Note that it selects the next target at the moment it jumps, based on his HP but the HP of the target may not be that one at all by the time it activates when that target finally gets damage again.

 

The only time that it really makes sense to cast it without conveyance is as a preemptive heal that you cast (for example) in transition phases, before raid wide damage comes in, on top of force armor and/or salvation if at that moment the raid is toped out or close to it.

Edited by MarcoAnt
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No, the opposite is true. Since that without conveyance it will only activates on damage, it may heal a target when it's not needed anymore, seconds after you casted it (which is much more unlikely if it burst out with conveyance up).

 

After one/two jumps you can't track it anymore. Either you or your co-healer may have already healed the target it jumped to. Or activate by the time you are your co-healer are casting on the same target. Basically, without conveyance, its an heal that is out there healing who knows who. Note that it selects the next target at the moment it jumps, based on his HP but the HP of the target may not be that one at all by the time it activates when that target finally gets damage again.

 

The only time that it really makes sense to cast it without conveyance is as a preemptive heal that you cast (for example) in transition phases, before raid wide damage comes in, on top of force armor and/or salvation if at that moment the raid is toped out or close to it.

 

I think it makes some sense to cast without Conveyance if you're in a "whole raid taking unavoidable frequent ticks for the foreseeable future" phase. Think: burn phase on The Dread Masters. Monolith comes pretty close to this during the flower, and Revan does during both of the floor transitions. That's pretty situational though, and generally I think it's probably better to stick with the Conveyance proc for Wandering Mend whenever you can.

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