Madness is still useless for PvP and so is lacerate.

 

Though looks like tanking will be in a decent spot.

Well I'm sad to see the Self-Heals go away However, I am happy to see that I can actually be a tank when running Ops rather than being a Pinto. YAY for more Armor!!

Madness needs maul back in the rotation. I'm not particularly sure why it was removed to begin with - back when I used my SIN as a main, I was able to keep up with mara's etc, but in no way was it over powered in a PVE environment. As it stands now, the madness sin is exactly like the sorc madness minus the use of your saber...which is boring.

 

Deception. Increased damage to VS sounds nice...Why do we still have to take Low slash to move up the tree? This is virtually useless in a PVE environment - and even now when its used to proc maul, it's a huge waste of force. There needs to be a better design for this, make slow slash a standard ability unlocked at lvl 40 or something.

 

Charged mastery needs to increase crit chance or something, the deception spec relies so heavily on crit...or increase armor pen to more then 9 percent. I dunno.

 

Nerve wracking i think needs to be redesigned. Spike can't be used out of stealth by deception (which makes sense for pvp). Perhaps make certain abilities function differently in a PVP environment and PVE?

Tanking is finally going to be in a good spot. I am curious about the proc damage of dark charge. Will it be there or go away?

 

While voltaic slash and thrash buff is long overdue, maul buff is completely out of place. Dec already has one of the top burst. Buffing maul further is completely out of place. Also how much is a slight buff. With my experience that can range from 3-20%. A 20% buff to voltaic slash and thrash is more than welcome, any buffs to maul are unneeded.

Deception needed a hell of a lot more than that to become actually viable... still nothing to address their terrible force issues.

A buff to maul's damage really isn't needed. In fact, it's a scary thing for PvP that can easily leave sins feeling over powered. At least for deception assassin's. For madness assassins, it's really not an issue. Perhaps even a good idea as well as a reduced force cost.

 

IMO, for deception, a DoT or better resource management would have been preferable. Both would definitely help with sustain.

 

Voltaic slash doing more damage seems reasonable.

 

The changes to darkness look good. Hopefully they make sin tanks viable again.

Edited October 17, 2013 by Dedrayge

So let's just add more damage to Maul to make the class ridiculous in PvP and not fix its force energy problem? okay.

Dark Maul has become even more OP.

I feel the only change needed for Maul was for its proc placement to be back on the first tier like it always should have been, or at least the second tier perhaps where the damage increase for that move already is at.

 

I would like to know what "slight" means as well.

I feel like this change for dps will not grant me place in ops.

Like many others have said in this thread, Madness really needs to be addressed, namely it's lack of burst, long up time and force cost issues.

What if we did this for madness:

 

Deathmark has been modified. In addition to a 20% damage increase, deathmarks now increase the next 15 dots to tick 75% faster (or all at once?).

 

This would pull together the rotation and make deathfield a stronger ability similar to cull?

So let's just add more damage to Maul to make the class ridiculous in PvP and not fix its force energy problem? okay.

 

See the problem is force management for decept in PVP is already in a good place, but its bad in PVE. To fix this issues they will have to do some serious reworking of the spec.

 

And yes the buff to maul damage is just plain stupid. my level 51 sin regularly hit above 10k mauls already. You can kill people in 4 GCD just by yourself if maul, discharge, shock, and assassinate crit. My operative cant even come close to doing that., or even doing similar burst reliably due to relying on nerfed crit rating/ and collateral strike hitting.

 

Edit:

*note* sin was a main back in the day, recently decided to level him to 55 because i saw the writing on the wall. They are not going to give operative dps any good buffs. Buff deception more to be stronger than what it already is makes it to where there is no choice on which stealth class you need to be playing to be competitive in PVP.

Edited October 17, 2013 by FoE_Khorne

See the problem is force management for decept in PVP is already in a good place, but its bad in PVE. To fix this issues they will have to do some serious reworking of the spec.

 

And yes the buff to maul damage is just plain stupid. my level 51 sin regularly hit above 10k mauls already. You can kill people in 4 GCD just by yourself if maul, discharge, shock, and assassinate crit. My operative cant even come close to doing that., or even doing similar burst reliably due to relying on nerfed crit rating/ and collateral strike hitting.

 

Edit:

*note* sin was a main back in the day, recently decided to level him to 55 because i saw the writing on the wall. They are not going to give operative dps any good buffs. Buff deception more to be stronger than what it already is makes it to where there is no choice on which stealth class you need to be playing to be competitive in PVP.

 

Was there ever was an option among stealth classes? It was always sin for dps (at least in the last 2 years). And the buff to maul is silly. If they improved the proc chance, to make it more reliable, but damage..

Was there ever was an option among stealth classes? It was always sin for dps (at least in the last 2 years). And the buff to maul is silly. If they improved the proc chance, to make it more reliable, but damage..

 

Yeah... with the right people concealment was still somewhat useful, not on par with decept by any means. But it was at least close enough to where the added enjoyment I gained from playing the class I love outweighed it.... I dont think that will be the case any more.

I'm excited for the DMG Reduction buff. This will push us up to and past 40% which is about where we were originally.

The loss of self heals in DC is a pain but who knows, perhaps we won't miss it too much.

 

If overcharge saber is changed to be a heal across the board for Sins/Shadows I hope that there will be an increase for tank tree to make it more usefull than madness/deception

If overcharge saber is changed to be a heal across the board for Sins/Shadows I hope that there will be an increase for tank tree to make it more usefull than madness/deception

 

Overcharge saber already heals all stances by 15%. They changed it in darkness to now give you 25% DR

I feel like this change for dps will not grant me place in ops.

 

Really? I do at least 3 ops per week with my Deception Assassin and although it doesnt hit as hard dps wise as a marauder or sniper, i have no problem keeping up and have never been asked to leave an op over it... Is deception and madness on the lower end of endgame dps? Yes. Is it so bad you cant even do ops, no way.

Edited October 17, 2013 by AlexThomasG

Thanks Eric for the heads-up on the changes , its a step in the right direction for Deception Assassins and i can honestly say , that i will give tanking a try after 2.5 , since i am confident that i won't be 1 shotted by NiM bosses anymore.

The dps increases , are nice and all for Deception , but i feel that it may the wrong way of going about increasing consistency. I said this in many of my posts , but maybe for a future patch you could ask the combat team to maybe take a look at improving sin DPS by tweaking Shock and Discharge ? ( i am really hoping that the old 2x VS = %dmg increase to Shock , will come back ?! and maybe a small increase to Discharge base dmg ).

As a last note , could you please ask the combat team , when they feel they can take a look at the crit rating increase across the board ?! If i remember correctly , i read something about the class team looking into this issue in the Sorcerer questions. For a class like the assassin ( also operative in concealment spec. ) , which is very dependent on crit rating and since we don't have any auto-crit abilities , i feel that that was the biggest hit to our sustainability.

I'm just baffled, to be honest. None of the changes that have been listed really affect class balance in any way save for the Sin Darkness changes which make them light years ahead of every other tank. Rage is still OP and will just require a bit more skill when using UDR, Ops can still put out insane throughput while moving but still are near laughable as DPS in PvP, Snipers didn't get any of the promised nerfs, Juggs get to force someone to eat a whole ravage....if they can get Rampage to proc, and BH get nothing. Let me rephrase that: PTs got buffed in 2.4 and mercs got to feel little bit of that light shine on them via the shared tree. So as a consequence of that, they get squat in the "class balance patch"? What about the other two trees. This is just MORE proof as to why I'm only here until Wildstar comes out.

Hey everyone,

 

Below are the planned Sith Assassin changes for Game Update 2.5. Please use this thread to give feedback for these changes. You can read the full class changes blog here!

 

Sith Assassin

 

General

• Dark Charge no longer heals the Assassin, but now increases armor rating by 130% (up from 115%) and deals additional threat when it damages an enemy target.
  
• Slightly increased the damage dealt by Maul.
  
• Slightly increased the damage dealt by Lacerate.
  

Darkness

• 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness no longer cause the Assassin to be healed when Force Lightning deals damage. Instead, it grants Dark Protection, which increases damage reduction by 1%. Dark Protection stacks up to 4 times and lasts 18 seconds.
  
• Swelling Shadows has been redesigned: It now increases the armor rating Dark Charge grants by an additional 20/40%.
  

Deception

• 
  
• Slightly increased the damage dealt by Voltaic Slash.
  

 

what?

 

and you call that, balancing?

 

that doesn't help our *sustain*

 

play with talents, too easy increase here and there..what the hell. use your brain.

 

I don't have problems with my dps, but this "hype", a 2.5 focused on balanceing patch..and is that's all you got it from us?

 

meh..

Maybe by slightly increase the damage of Lacerate they will buff it to be as strong as Warrior's sweeping slash? Crits for 3-4k?

Overcharge saber already heals all stances by 15%. They changed it in darkness to now give you 25% DR

 

Hmm. Honestly haven't been out of Darkness since 2.0 didn't realize it already healed everyone. Thought it was still via the talent.

Deception Assassin burst is already on the brink of being overpowered in PvP, how is it that the development team considers buffing that already very potent aspect of the class even further? Especially since I've never ever heard a sin complain about how their burst was too low.

DPS Assassins already overshadow DPS Operatives in PvP who fill a similar role. This will only widen the gap.