My take on some of the U45 Balance changes
So here is my take on the U45 balance changes currently on the Lammania forums, will not be touching Alchemist because that's something that I'll need to play around a lot with to get a good understanding of.
THF changes, Glacing blows & Strike through
Overall I really like how they're reworking glancing blows to be more powerful for dpsing small packs with strikethough letting you do full damage and doublestrike on 1 or 2 extra enemies, seemingly stealing the code from Dance of Death,will also make THF actually function in reaper because right now glancing blows do so little damage that after reaper reductions they can end up doing close to zero. Though there are some concerns that this actually decreases the AOE clear of THF on larger packs with 4 or more enemies. Personally I'd like to see some changes to cleaves to let them doublestrike and crit so that they become the cooldown locked big AOE for 4+ mobs while strike though is enough for 1-3 mob packs.
DoD changes seem totally unnecessary, moving it to the strikethrough system is fine but reducing the number of targets it can hit AND giving it a worse cooldown to uptime ratio at the same time is dumb, especially when you still get NOTHING if the first attack whiffs do to lag, I'd be willing to accept the reduced number of targets if it had the same cooldown/uptime and also was changed so it didn't need an attack to hit to get the buff (either removing the attack portion and making it a trance, or just make the buff independent from if the attack hits or not).
Ranged changes
Inquisitive doubleshot and lawdice nerf was well deserved and honestly I'm kinda impressed that they had some restraint and didn't totally murder the tree. While I don't particularly like the minor nerf to Gxbows via rapid reload as rogue mechanic is my favorite build if it's as small of a nerf as some devs had said (about 5% reduced fire rate) then I'm not going to get bothered by it, kinda sucks for repeaters to get dunked on too but oh well. IPS nerf kinda sucks though because now if you want optimal dps you'll need to toggle it over to archer's focus whenever you're only hitting one target because of that 20% damage loss, IPS is still going to be mandatory for pack clearing though. It's also going to make playing tall races as ranged even more painful as your IPS shots miss 50% of the time against short enemies and now you're eating a 20% dps hit even on the one enemy you hit, Halfling only ranged build meta incoming. Also RIP bow users, getting a tiny buff in deepwood stalker does not cancel out the 20% hit they're taking in IPS, and bow builds are even more reliant on IPS thank crossbow builds. New throwing support may be OP with alchemist but IDK.
Ship buffs
Honestly these should have gone a long time ago, they unbalance the first 6 or 7 levels of play making you nearly immune to most spells unless you're running R3+, they also invalidate resistances on gear for basically the entire 1-20 leveling process, only a handful of mid-high epic and legendary items have more than 30 or 40 resist on them anyways. Still I think they'd get a lot less pushback if they removed them together with a proper airship revamp, possibly reintroducing the resist buffs in a way that scaled with level to be less overwhelmingly OP in heroics and less useless at cap.
Still I don't like how much of the changes were framed as a balance decision for HC league, that was definitely a misstep as it alienates players who can't (premium&f2p) play HC or just don't like HC.
