I have (well.. had rather since I'm no longer subscribed) an 80 Herald on Cimmeria with around 3kish PvP kills and I had known my class well enough to be able to kill most classes 1v1 (even polearm guardians if I gotten the jump), so I think I can judge this armor fairly...

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/926/hoxpvpgearlvl80mu6.jpg

Does anybody else notice what's wrong? I mean.. it's not like most of our damage is physical, right? Oh wait, that's right, it IS!

Pillar of infernal flame, fire lance and  hell strikes (although not so much a PvP combo) are all physical damage dependent combos with fire lance being the most fire(melee) dependent one, so why the hell would they modify the smaller portion of our damage?

Another curiosity is the + mana regen, as if that had ever been an issue given that we already have a surfeit of it..

... Yet ANOTHER curiosity is the casting concentration: Heralds don't even need more than 1 point in it, unless they plan on changing it, although during active combat Heralds usually only cast HFB and the 1.5 second Avatar of Xotli/DE and Phoenix Cloak.

I guess the best thing about the herald's PvP armor is that it's at least not a dress.

Lol, FC at it s finest.

i honestly think they dont know what they are doing.

What's up with the plus Holy, Ice, Dark damage?  That is damage right?  HoX only uses slashing and fire damage.  Well, this its the reason why some level 70 characters are stil running around in their lvl 40 dungeon armor.

Wild guess: Those are immunities, not damage. I reckon PvP-specific immunities, since they read slightly different than the other immunities,  and are quite high.

While I'd prefer more physical damage on it (yes, I play a level 80 HoX too), we've all seen what happens when you give players a mound of +melee damage - Funcom apparently wants to reduce that, particularly in PvP, and I can't say I disagree. Spells don't benefit from +damage half as effectively as melee attacks, so they're free to put lots of +magical damage on it without throwing things off-balance.
Mana regen is odd - I never have mana issues - but at least there's stamina regen too. And we can convert mana to stamina, anyway.

The extra casting concentration on those pieces is what I find to be the strangest stat thrown in the mix. Looking past the fact that we hardly cast anything longer than the demon form transformation spell in PvP either way, the entire skill is still going to be useless until they actually fix casting concentration so that you need more than 1 point for the full benefit.

I'm surprised they didn't give you a bonus to daggers :) (considering the destiny quest reward).

Misunderstood.

Originally posted by Enigma

i honestly think they dont know what they are doing.

I don't know if they ever played the HoX class past Tortage.

Originally posted by //\\//\\oo

I have (well.. had rather since I'm no longer subscribed) an 80 Herald on Cimmeria with around 3kish PvP kills and I had known my class well enough to be able to kill most classes 1v1 (even polearm guardians if I gotten the jump), so I think I can judge this armor fairly...

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/926/hoxpvpgearlvl80mu6.jpg

Does anybody else notice what's wrong? I mean.. it's not like most of our damage is physical, right? Oh wait, that's right, it IS!

Pillar of infernal flame, fire lance and  hell strikes (although not so much a PvP combo) are all physical damage dependent combos with fire lance being the most fire(melee) dependent one, so why the hell would they modify the smaller portion of our damage?

Another curiosity is the + mana regen, as if that had ever been an issue given that we already have a surfeit of it..

... Yet ANOTHER curiosity is the casting concentration: Heralds don't even need more than 1 point in it, unless they plan on changing it, although during active combat Heralds usually only cast HFB and the 1.5 second Avatar of Xotli/DE and Phoenix Cloak.

I guess the best thing about the herald's PvP armor is that it's at least not a dress.

 

Heya,

I'm still at DragonCon in Atlanta this week until Tuesday but I wanted to toss a quick update on this topic because it is something that I saw mentioned recently from the other HoX players.

The stats are not totally finalized and after speaking with the class designers they did mention that these have already been reported to be reviewed with the bonuses and values. I couldn't squeeze any other more "final stats" out of the guys yet but they said they will be reviewing over it in more detail.

I hope this helps a little bit in at least knowing we did receive the same feedback and that we are going over it with the developers to ensure they do look into it. Feel free to toss any additional input on the subject at that.

Originally posted by FC-Famine

Heya,

I'm still at DragonCon in Atlanta this week until Tuesday but I wanted to toss a quick update on this topic because it is something that I saw mentioned recently from the other HoX players.

The stats are not totally finalized and after speaking with the class designers they did mention that these have already been reported to be reviewed with the bonuses and values. I couldn't squeeze any other more "final stats" out of the guys yet but they said they will be reviewing over it in more detail.

I hope this helps a little bit in at least knowing we did receive the same feedback and that we are going over it with the developers to ensure they do look into it. Feel free to toss any additional input on the subject at that.

 

  Thank you for the response. Another interesting item is the defense stat: Defense right now has absolutely no applications in PvP, unless they are implementing it as a separate PvP stat in the future. Are they just including it on the armor to make it more well-rounded for solo and PvE use, or is it going to become a part of PvP?

You will see, they will have all the armor/stats smoothed out after they are put in beta. then when this game gets out of beta and launches it will all work out. have a little faith in Funcom ppl, geeeez.

Originally posted by //\\//\\oo

Originally posted by Lichthammer

Wild guess: Those are immunities, not damage. I reckon PvP-specific immunities, since they read slightly different than the other immunities,  and are quite high.

  Damage modifiers are immunities? I can't remember the term damage modifier ever meaning mitigation, since exultation and other talents/spells that increase damage modifiers directly increase damage by a %. Damage absorption is what you're probably thinking of, since phoenix cloak affects it and that decreases % damage taken.

 

 In case it was unclear, I was responding to the post above mine (didn't quote it since it was just above), which mentions the stats like "+2.7% Fire/Cold/Holy/Unholy" on some of the gear pieces. I assume those are immunities - PvP immunities specifically since they do not read like the normal immunities.

+Damage modifiers remain of course just +damage modifiers. I don't anyone's disputed that.

Originally posted by FC-Famine

 The stats are not totally finalized and after speaking with the class designers they did mention that these have already been reported to be reviewed with the bonuses and values. I couldn't squeeze any other more "final stats" out of the guys yet but they said they will be reviewing over it in more detail.

Translation:  You are all paying to play a beta suckers!  ;)

Originally posted by //\\//\\oo

I have (well.. had rather since I'm no longer subscribed) an 80 Herald on Cimmeria with around 3kish PvP kills and I had known my class well enough to be able to kill most classes 1v1 (even polearm guardians if I gotten the jump), so I think I can judge this armor fairly...

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/926/hoxpvpgearlvl80mu6.jpg

Does anybody else notice what's wrong? I mean.. it's not like most of our damage is physical, right? Oh wait, that's right, it IS!

Pillar of infernal flame, fire lance and  hell strikes (although not so much a PvP combo) are all physical damage dependent combos with fire lance being the most fire(melee) dependent one, so why the hell would they modify the smaller portion of our damage?

Another curiosity is the + mana regen, as if that had ever been an issue given that we already have a surfeit of it..

... Yet ANOTHER curiosity is the casting concentration: Heralds don't even need more than 1 point in it, unless they plan on changing it, although during active combat Heralds usually only cast HFB and the 1.5 second Avatar of Xotli/DE and Phoenix Cloak.

I guess the best thing about the herald's PvP armor is that it's at least not a dress.

 

arent there other ways to play than just the way you specced your character?
 

i thought each character had multple ways to spec?

but i assume you're the best source this forum has got...

so have it your way!

Originally posted by bluberryhaze

arent there other ways to play than just the way you specced your character?
 

i thought each character had multple ways to spec?

but i assume you're the best source this forum has got...

so have it your way!

 

 

  The thing is that the Herald of Xotli is more melee than caster: They only have one direct damage spell called Hellfire Breath  (two if specced, but if you spec for the damage spell then you gimp yourself entirely in PvP against necros, ToS and other fear using casters) that deals around 600-1000 damage every 5 seconds with an AoE effect. Now compare the magic portion to the melee portion when white hits will still do around 200-300 every 1.42 seconds + the combo portion; in an interval of 10 seconds this amounts to around 250*4+3000=4000 damage vs. the 1600 damage you'd expect from the spell damage alone.

There is, however, one combo called burn to death which is affected by magic damage as most of it's damage comes from the magic DoT tacked onto the end of it, but the combo has limited applications and requires nearly all of your CC to pull off during meaningful PvP combat.

As for the multiple spec part, the problem is that a lot of the end-tree abilities are completely broken, or simply not worth it. In the Herald's case there are really only two viable PvP specs: One that involves an anti-root/snare that is on a 45 second cooldown and the other being the most popular spec that involves the one end-tree ability that kicks ass: Avatar of Xotli. Since Avatar of Xotli is required to beat most classes and gives the Herald his conditional one-shotting ability (Avatar of Xotli is basically a 1000 damage heal through max health gain with absolutely ridiculous + damage modifiers and a nice little 300 damage aoe tick and +25% fire damage absorb) with firelance (the 3 minute cooldown combo), choosing latter spec makes a lot more sense than the former.

Since Avatar of Xotli also functions as another stun and gives the herald 75% fear immunity, purge has too many tradeoffs and wasted points to make it half as useful.

For most classes in AoC, there are really only two viable specs due to the amount of trivialized/broken talents in the talent trees that seem to be afterthoughts. I can't say WoW was much better with every class, but there were a couple of classes that had more viable specs (i.e. the rogue with mutilate, ShS, combat..)

//\\//\\oo please do tell us if the stats as they are make into production when they release the pvp update.

lol that is so funny, the stats are not finalized yet

Thats like saying. Yeah so we screwed up, we did not get it right, or even close to right the first time. But thats what patches are for. So we can redo our work.

Because everyone knows it is more efficient to do the same thing 9 times wrong, then get it right on the 10th try, rather than do it right from the start.

So the item dev gets told "Look you idiot you made PvP armor and gave it DEF. Don't you know that DEF does not work in PvP.  The stupid suckers are all crying in the forums.

What? What? I based all my stats and calcuations off factoring in DEF. Why doesn't DEF work? 

Because with everyone having the same DEF it makes things balanced!

Balacned? Oh no! What I have I done to the poor defensive tanks!!!

Originally posted by Pipwicky

lol that is so funny, the stats are not finalized yet

Thats like saying. Yeah so we screwed up, we did not get it right, or even close to right the first time. But thats what patches are for. So we can redo our work.

Because everyone knows it is more efficient to do the same thing 9 times wrong, then get it right on the 10th try, rather than do it right from the start.

 

So the item dev gets told "Look you idiot you made PvP armor and gave it DEF. Don't you know that DEF does not work in PvP.  The stupid suckers are all crying in the forums.

What? What? I based all my stats and calcuations off factoring in DEF. Why doesn't DEF work? 

Because with everyone having the same DEF it makes things balanced!

Balacned? Oh no! What I have I done to the poor defensive tanks!!!

In terms of balance and amounts, class gear stats are a matter of trial-and-error that invariably requires "live" testing to get right.

Class gear with entirely wrong sets of stats for that class is sheer, unadaulterated incompetence.

honestly, i don't remember the last time i looked at any stat other than natural stamina regen. very few noncrafted pieces have much damage on em....and thats all i've ever used for pvp...now i don't know what the hell i'm gonna do O_o

Originally posted by Pipwicky

lol that is so funny, the stats are not finalized yet

Thats like saying. Yeah so we screwed up, we did not get it right, or even close to right the first time. But thats what patches are for. So we can redo our work.

Testserver = Win

Thanks for the comments Moo. I did speak with the developer some more and will follow up later tomorrow as I just finally rolled back into town. These of course have been reported by others but as above, just wanted to let you know that we did receive similar feedback.