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Artifact Dirks and the Death of Percentage Affliction Scaling
One of the larger challenges when balancing Imperian over the years has been scaling affliction rates against healing. We have had hours of discussion in various beta tests and classlead channels looking at the impact of healing rates on offenses and great successes as a result.
This has lead to several noteworthy combat advancements, like the decoupling of weapon speed on affliction rates and has impacted the attack speeds of Outrider, Shaman, Berserker, and Hunter. There are math formulas behind ideal curing rates, and actual numbers that can be fixed on how fast someone has to afflict to get ahead of them.
But the one place that we fell short of complete balance was Assassin, because the artifact dirk scales player affliction speed in a way that can still be purchased for credits. The Assassin beta was first, so changing the artifact was not yet in the cards, meaning the Assassin balance efforts were somewhat clunky. We instead balanced Dstab speed against Spatium speed, disadvantaging the higher level dirks not by cost or effect but by their ability to combo with the better secondaries. This 'worked' to diminish the value of the artifact at the high end, but it never truly fixed the problem of buy in.
With our current outlook on balance, and the general fact that there is only one active player using the class to begin with, I think we can finally take the step to rebalance the dirk into something that makes Assassin work without a mandatory additional credit investment. I would like to argue for the following changes:
1. Decouble the Dirk from dstab speed, setting Dstab speed to roughly between the L1 and L2 speed before any bonuses.
2. Change the dirk to scale Trioxin damage by a percent, increasing significantly when relapsing. My base numbers are 5.0/7.5/10 and 10/15/20 respectively. This stops it from being yet another scaling artifact on top of Trioxin's already very potent scaling with Dexterity, but lets it dramatically increase the damage of the Assassin closer.
3. Reduce the cost to match that of the spear, or 250/600/1200 rather than 300/700/1500. This is not necessary, but it could be argued that the new role puts it closer in utility to a spear than a longsword.
I want to do this in a way that doesn't cause Trioxin to be too dramatic in teamfights without preconditions, because I do not want Trioxin's base damage to be scaled back to account for it.
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream.. or a fever
Like a daydream.. or a fever
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Comments
This is exactly why the dirk was my first big artifact. People said they sucked, but the ability to push affliction rate well past what people could hope to cure was amazing. It still is. Some small efforts have been made to temper it - when illusions were still a thing and changed to allow two sets of illusions per dstab, they weren't tweaked to let fast statpack plus a level 3 dirk get in two illusions, so that slowed me down a tiny bit.
But as long as the dirk exists, the renegade and saboteur professions will be in an awkward situation where they're either balanced so the dirk isn't disgusting, and suck without it, or they're ok without it but the dirk renders them unstoppable.
Diadem still has uses for Assassin even without it being a requirement to hit the real aps.
Linking the arti damage to relapsing is interesting and seems fitting.
Anecdotal note about the issue the buyin presents: Leathon recently switched from Assassin to Defiler despite interest in the class almost entirely because the buyin was off-putting compared to working with another class.
Unrelated Assassigade artifact notes: There is also room for artifacts that don't offer up a straight aps boost but help with playability. The whip is garbage because garrote is garbage. It'd be better off deleted or swapped to something flay/scourge related. I mentioned a faster swift attach arti elsewhere, which would help with flexibility without adding raw aps. Crap like that.
Like a daydream.. or a fever