Testing the wolf

[elvesunited]

Couldn't figure out how wolf damage was being calculated so
I reset all my enhancments and turned them on one by one.

With no enhancements selected when I equip a normal scimitar I saw
1d6 + 8 damage ( the 8 was my strength )
turn to wolf form I saw
1d6 + 8 damage
Equipped a scimitar + 3 in human form and saw
1d6 + 11 damage
turned into wolf I saw
1d6 + 14 damage.
It's doubling my enhancment value on my weapon whien I'm in wolf form!

So after further testing equipping a scimitar +3 I got

1) My strength bonus : +8
2) double the +3 enhancement value: +6
3) +1 damage per nature warrior core : +4 ( I was worried when it wasn't in the description )
4) fight enhancment : +3
5) power attack: +10 ( even though holding one handed weapon with heavy shield )

Other notes:

Throat Strike:
Very odd to use. When I first tried it I thought the move has a long wind up it's useless. But then at the end of the wind-up it hit the enemy three times. Later I tried it in the middle of a mob and after the wind-up it hit every enemy in the mob 1 to 3 times like a multi-strike alpha strike. I didn't see any bleeding damage, but perhaps I need to test against a sturdier level of opponent.

Go for the Kill:
Glad to see the sp cost down some. Goes off fast enough though the margin between out of range and +30 melee power is a thin one.

Nature Warrior core 4:
Was originally going to be an increase to critical multiplier. Now it simply says it gives a competence bonus to attack bonus. But when I took the enhancement it only added the 1 point of damage I've been getting with every Nature Warrior core and nothing else. I can tell from testing that it is definitely not increasing the multiplier.

protector rage:
Making the rages 1 minute long is not enough to distract from their overall uselessness. Sustainable DPS is a big concern for melee types. Barbarians get around it by having more powerful rages at far greater durations.

fatal Harrier:
The most useless enhancment is now a rquirement for alpha strike forcing me to take it. And the duration of the stack has been lowered to 8 seconds for 20 compaounding its uselessness. And still it removes all the stacks at once, not one at a time. The only hope is that maybe now it stacks with item enhancements.

Ghost Pack:
with 14 levels of druid and 14 levels of wilderness lore at 5-8 damage per lore you'd think ghost pack would do more than 58 points of damage.

Alpha strike:
this enhancement has been nerfed hard.

Natural Fighting:
Glad to see no sign of "Fang of the Wolf" or "Claw of the bear" feats. Now +4 Melee power, +4 PRR, +1 tactics per feat. Now the rough part. No reflex or dodge for any who might actually want to play an evasion wolf. And the bear still can't turn of its glancing blows not that they do much good at a maximum 30% damage.

Spirit Refresh:
Still languishing under the ridicoulous less than 33% health requirement.

[edrein]

Ghost Pack:
with 14 levels of druid and 14 levels of wilderness lore at 5-8 damage per lore you'd think ghost pack would do more than 58 points of damage.

Natural Fighting:
Glad to see no sign of "Fang of the Wolf" or "Claw of the bear" feats. Now +4 Melee power, +4 PRR, +1 tactics per feat. Now the rough part. No reflex or dodge for any who might actually want to play an evasion wolf. And the bear still can't turn of its glancing blows not that they do much good at a maximum 30% damage.

The bear abilities also suffer from this. The melee power scaling and use of wilderness lore feats don't really seem to be adding up to useful abilities beyond heroics (and even then Big Brother's Tremor damage is awful in level 18.)

Wolves are definitely the biggest losers of the Natural Fighting changes. The nerf to bear glancing blow damage isn't even the glaring problem, currently if you activate the bears' defensive stance you prevent yourself from glancing blows at all. I didn't think to test this with the fighter's defender stance either. Defensive Fighting also toggles off glancing blows, however using a bear form innate attack spell breaks this stance entirely as if you cast a normal spell.

Bears need an actual weapon stance like Venomed Blades for glancing blows. The Glancing Blow damage could use being raised back up to 15% per feat. Wolves need their doublestrike again, as well as the proposed reflex and dodge.

[majikpaul]

when in Wolf form you can lose the +20 melee power from Vistani Single Dagger. To fix it you have to leave wolf form, unequip the dagger, re-equip the dagger, and then go back into wolf form

[Kaboom2112]

What kind of boss kobold times are people seeing on level 30 wolves?

[elvesunited]

duplicate post for some reason

[elvesunited]

Ghost wolf: continues to do 58 damage. Every time. unless i pump up my melee power with Go for the kill. Which brings it to 66. Every time. There is no randomness to it. It's like the base damage is 50. I've got 14 wilderness More Levels and 18 melee power.

Go for the kill: is doing area attack damage. With each enemy taking damage having a chance to be tripped. Note this ability doesn't work well while feather falling. You still charge but you don't hit anything.

alpha strike is doing +1 multiple on critical hits. I'm 98% sure of it.

Fatal Harrier: Confirmed that fatal Harrier does not stack with speed boots. which at 8 second duration or all stacks disappear makes this the most useless enhancement imaginable. Note Fatal Harrier also apparently provides +1 reflex save? I am seeing it go off against enemies that are far lower level than me with no level check.

Throat strike: no bleed effect from normal strikes in so far as I can tell. I tried to make an enemy vulnerable to sneak. to see of it can only happen for attacks that count as sneak attacks. But kept dying. So I summoned wolf companion. who kept him busy for a few seconds to grab aggro. I did see a bleed effect from a sneak attack as I could see his health edge down even though no one was attacking him but no numbers or anything to show what was actually happening.

Brother Wolf: I see a lot of wolves in the future putting their companions in passive mode and putting them in a corner. Because boy do they die fast but the effect range is pretty long. Also I didn't use my wolf companion much at all in the regular game but.... I can't target him with any healing spells. His only healing right now is wolf companion enhancement only. Is that normal?

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Overall:

DPS is impossible to gauge. The critical mulitplier increase is not happening on normal attacks. ( I really hope this is just bugged as wolves get x3 mult now ) And the damage bonus is getting increases from obviously bugged places.

Also special attacks aren't like the description says they should be with Throat strike and Ghost strike being the biggest offenders. Which makes figuring out their effectiveness near impossible.

[SerPounce]

Good tests. Unfortunate results, but good testing.

All the "scales with melee power" effects need to be changed to something like "scales with 500% melee power." Then they might barely (bearly?) be worth it in epics. Probably still lackluster in legendary, but it would be a start.


As I've mentioned before fatal harrier should be a smaller bonus (2-3%), but stack with enhancement. It should also last longer (30-60 seconds) and only decay at one stack at a time. How many kills per minute can you really expect a druid to do in a group? It's not a "dominate the kill count" type of class. And abilities should be effective in groups not just solo zerg.

I'd consider dropping the cooldown on alpha strike to 3 seconds (I'm not sure about the SP cost also. That would make for some more reasonable AoE potential on the wolf.


I'm hopping the lack of crit mulitipler increase from T4 wolf is a bug...

[adrian69]

duplicate post for some reason

262-308

[elvesunited]

Well checked out lamania druid update v2

the same
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1) Enhancement still appears to be doubling in animal form
2) Power attack still gives +10 to one handed weapon users. If you turn power attack on and off it gets weird.
3) Go for the kill and throat strike continue to be alpha strike style multiple target attacks.

updated
----------------------------
1) Can now see the bleeding effect from throat strike. It effects every target in the area throat strike multi-target hit including those I missed. The bleed damage appears to be extremely minimal. ( like 1-2 damage per tic )
2) ghost pack is now area effect cleave attack that strikes a wide column extending several meters in front of the wolf. Some enemies remain stuck in confuse effect just standing there helpless for seemingly unlimited time. ( as if dazed ) Confuses undead too though since this is a ghost attack, that might be WAI.
3) the critical multiplier core enhancement appears to work correctly now. ( tis good )
4) weapons take damage in wolf form. In fact they appear to take more damage. About 5 strikes on an ochre jelly dropped a 180 durability weapon to 89.
5) When I look at the character screen I don't see any of the advertised doublestrike from natural fighting. Nor do I see it while fighting.
6) Throat strike is listed as 3 attacks. But generally only against a single target. against multiple targets it hits 1-3 times.
7) I'm achieving a lot less tactical knockdown effects than before. I can feel the loss of DC from having druid levels removed as part of the formula.
8) spell point costs for enhancement attacks is off from description by a factor of 2. Alpha strike ( 3 levels ) costs 12 spell points. Go for the kill and ghost wolf pack both cost 30 spell points. ( I like both of these but they are not SLA fireballs and you burn sp fast )
9) go for the kill works even if the wolf has less than 10 spell points left. ghost pack does not, though it doesn't gray out either.

thoughts
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Better, but the weapon damage and power attack is still all over the map. Which makes DPS testing still impossible. I'm surprised that virtually all the nature warrior attacks are area effect alpha stike style attacks. Not complaining if that was the intent. the never-ending daze that the confuse effect can pull is an obvious bug.

[Tilomere]

Can you test En Pointe and Confront any Foe in animal form under new rules?