On the Record: Alch Inqui is OP

[droid327]

Do not let any devs say they were not forewarned, that they didnt know how OP this was before it was released. No excuses to need to nerf this later because I'm telling you this is RED ALERT NERF right now...

Inqui + Alch does crazy insane damage, putting current Inqui to shame. It takes everything that was broken about current Inqui and dials it up to 18.

Here's the gist of what I was testing (despite Lama being a slideshow and I FREAKING HATE REINCARNATION MECHANICS!!!!)

20 Alch, Int>Con>21 Dex. 41 VC (capstone), 35 Inqui (T5s), 4 Apoth (temp HP). Ranged DPS feats, etc. etc.

I was only able to get <400 Poison spellpower on Lama with Dojo gear, testing at L24. Presumably at cap you'd be hitting far higher values. I ran in Green for the extra temp HP but you could see if Purple was a better option for the extra 5 BAB and Dodge.

Even so, I was doing several hundred Poison damage per hit, on top of Inqui Ratcatcher DPS. I had immune-breaking Poison damage, all the Alch buffs including unique +4 Alch INT, full suite of status cures and Heal admixture (which procs temp HP, as does Cocoon), unlimited Sprint and Haste boosts, and utility like Melt Lock. The only things I was really lacking was KTA and the Inqui capstone.

Basically I had all the best parts of /13 Clr, 20 Sorc for EK plus Poison AOEs and Savant-like SLA, /6 Rogue for evasion and locks and INT to dmg, /1 Warlock for Feigned Health, and still getting almost all the Inqui toolkit too.

What to do? I dont even know...the whole class concept itself is kinda screwy because its supposed to be too many things all at once.

I think scrap the Poison imbue entirely. I know that sounds extreme, but I think that's just the one thing that goes too far. Make VC into kind of a Poison Savant/Darts tree. They're going to do enough physical damage just with all the buffs to Darts, you dont need the Poison imbue on top of that. I think just being a Poison casting, Dart throwing tree with all the myriad heals and goodies in the Alch spellbook makes it a complete concept already, and has some different options both as a pure, and mixed with stuff like Wiz PM/EK, but doesnt lend itself nearly as much to crazy synergy with Inqui as a 20 Alch VC.

Other posters are seeing pretty insane results with Darts too, so again that seems to suggest that the Poison imbue itself is what's really throwing things out of whack.

----------------------------

Small side notes:

The Poison Arrow attack in VC is not functioning as a Red spell like the tooltip says it should.

There are WAY TOO MANY BUTTONS if you're playing the class to its full potential. There are so many good spells at every level, it eats up so much real estate in your hotbar.

Can something be done about Admixture targeting? If you're going to have it, at least have it work well: if you dont have an Ally targeted, can it default to self-targeted rather than on your reticle? I cant imagine many practical situations where you'd want to throw a potion at an empty spot on the ground. Likewise, much like Harm used to work, its frustrating to have to manually self-target to heal in combat if you have an enemy targeted. The healing is already slower to hit than actual Cure spells, without needing the extra buttons too.

[palladin9479]

They ain't gonna nerf alchemist until next year when they off the next new class or universal tree, at a price if course.

[DRoark]

They ain't gonna nerf alchemist until next year when they off the next new class or universal tree, at a price if course.

They'll do the same thing to Alchemist they did to Ranged, kill an old feat, and ignore player feedback because they think "it's in a good place".

We'll see a billion Alchemists as people run them to get back Completionist and then they'll fade quickly.

Not as many as they want though, there's going to be a server dropoff again (a chunk of career ranged will probably bail), and some just won't buy it.

[Malusny]

Do not let any devs say they were not forewarned, that they didnt know how OP this was before it was released. No excuses to need to nerf this later because I'm telling you this is RED ALERT NERF right now...

Inqui + Alch does crazy insane damage, putting current Inqui to shame. It takes everything that was broken about current Inqui and dials it up to 18.

Here's the gist of what I was testing (despite Lama being a slideshow and I FREAKING HATE REINCARNATION MECHANICS!!!!)

20 Alch, Int>Con>21 Dex. 41 VC (capstone), 35 Inqui (T5s), 4 Apoth (temp HP). Ranged DPS feats, etc. etc.

I was only able to get <400 Poison spellpower on Lama with Dojo gear, testing at L24. Presumably at cap you'd be hitting far higher values. I ran in Green for the extra temp HP but you could see if Purple was a better option for the extra 5 BAB and Dodge.

Even so, I was doing several hundred Poison damage per hit, on top of Inqui Ratcatcher DPS. I had immune-breaking Poison damage, all the Alch buffs including unique +4 Alch INT, full suite of status cures and Heal admixture (which procs temp HP, as does Cocoon), unlimited Sprint and Haste boosts, and utility like Melt Lock. The only things I was really lacking was KTA and the Inqui capstone.

Basically I had all the best parts of /13 Clr, 20 Sorc for EK plus Poison AOEs and Savant-like SLA, /6 Rogue for evasion and locks and INT to dmg, /1 Warlock for Feigned Health, and still getting almost all the Inqui toolkit too.

What to do? I dont even know...the whole class concept itself is kinda screwy because its supposed to be too many things all at once.

I think scrap the Poison imbue entirely. I know that sounds extreme, but I think that's just the one thing that goes too far. Make VC into kind of a Poison Savant/Darts tree. They're going to do enough physical damage just with all the buffs to Darts, you dont need the Poison imbue on top of that. I think just being a Poison casting, Dart throwing tree with all the myriad heals and goodies in the Alch spellbook makes it a complete concept already, and has some different options both as a pure, and mixed with stuff like Wiz PM/EK, but doesnt lend itself nearly as much to crazy synergy with Inqui as a 20 Alch VC.

Other posters are seeing pretty insane results with Darts too, so again that seems to suggest that the Poison imbue itself is what's really throwing things out of whack.

----------------------------

Small side notes:

The Poison Arrow attack in VC is not functioning as a Red spell like the tooltip says it should.

There are WAY TOO MANY BUTTONS if you're playing the class to its full potential. There are so many good spells at every level, it eats up so much real estate in your hotbar.

Can something be done about Admixture targeting? If you're going to have it, at least have it work well: if you dont have an Ally targeted, can it default to self-targeted rather than on your reticle? I cant imagine many practical situations where you'd want to throw a potion at an empty spot on the ground. Likewise, much like Harm used to work, its frustrating to have to manually self-target to heal in combat if you have an enemy targeted. The healing is already slower to hit than actual Cure spells, without needing the extra buttons too.

I just wish they really tried to make it fair for everyone in the game... and I fear I may not live long enough to experience that. I am also surprised that people didn't reply to you admitting that. It is just like everyone wants to take advantage...

I really hope there will be some justice and fair balancing....

[janave]

I would understand if this is some contra-culture to the critical hit min-maxing we have been doing to keep up with mob hp inflation, but the thing is, rarely works out- because these damage dice rolls are just another extra layer on top of the usual package. There are many builds which cannot employ such extra damage as well as high attack rate, these will have very little way to make up for the DPS gap.

AA's elemental damage was already kind of an overkill for heroic levels, but it is offset with Bow's inherently bad rate of fire, now we can stack these on DXB and Shurikens ( and pretty much Darts and Throwing knives getting the passive and active multishot) with top tier rof .


It is a tough job, many of these effects should not start scaling before 18-20, but then again that limits MC options, and they somehow have to keep up with the class design at 29-30 which is an entirely different dimension compared to enhancement opening levels.



Anyhow, ... looking forward doing quad base damage by level 15 with slightly less insane rate of fire .

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west,
And my spirit is crying for leaving.
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees,
And the voices of those who stand looking

nerfs kill games, kill them dead, I told them, but they don't listen.
Like every other before, like all the rest,
they make the same mistakes,
and history will repeat itself, on and on.

Some new build will break the game and they'll do more
nerfs, a never-ending cycle that ends with the remaining people leaving.
And its a fake stairway - pixels aren't real - what exactly are they
balancing a stairway to heaven, or hell, against?

it makes me wonder, ...

[HungarianRhapsody]

Inqui + Alch does crazy insane damage, putting current Inqui to shame. It takes everything that was broken about current Inqui and dials it up to 18.

Damage per hit can be quite high and still not be OP if the number of attacks per second isn't so high.

How much actual DPS did you do? How many seconds did it take you to knock down the boss kobold? Did you test this against any other enemies or are you just announcing that Alchemist damage is "too high" without actual numbers?

What was the actual DPS that you were seeing with Alchemist?

[droid327]

Damage per hit can be quite high and still not be OP if the number of attacks per second isn't so high.

How much actual DPS did you do? How many seconds did it take you to knock down the boss kobold? Did you test this against any other enemies or are you just announcing that Alchemist damage is "too high" without actual numbers?

What was the actual DPS that you were seeing with Alchemist?

Its qualitative, admittedly, but I was able to mow through mobs in several quests on EE like they were on HH. Quests that I run regularly on Live with my Inqui build, so I have a good feel for the pace of the quest, and it was palpably stronger. A big enough difference that I think a qualitative (and a holistic, actual-use scenario, not a more abstracted DPS test) metric is still valid.

The attacks per second with Inqui is still really high, even with the 50% DS nerf. That's not really an issue. And this wasnt a burst-damage or crit-fishing outlier, this was an entire quest playthrough.

[HungarianRhapsody]

Its qualitative, admittedly, but I was able to mow through mobs in several quests on EE like they were on HH. Quests that I run regularly on Live with my Inqui build, so I have a good feel for the pace of the quest, and it was palpably stronger. A big enough difference that I think a qualitative (and a holistic, actual-use scenario, not a more abstracted DPS test) metric is still valid.

The attacks per second with Inqui is still really high, even with the 50% DS nerf. That's not really an issue. And this wasnt a burst-damage or crit-fishing outlier, this was an entire quest playthrough.

Lots of builds are strong currently. I think that if we're going to ask for nerfs we're going to need more ammunition (if you'll pardon the pun) than "This feels too strong".

I don't think that DPS tests will be the ultimate test of how strong a build is, but if a dozen people can do the kobold in 20 seconds and one person can do the kobold in 7 seconds, that's a lot more of a difference than a dozen people doing the kobold in 20 seconds and one person doing the kobold in 18 seconds with one spectacular attempt bringing the time all the way down to 17.5 seconds.

ESPECIALLY when your specific complaint is that the damage is too high.

[SerPounce]

This is exactly what people were saying when inq came out and rough lama builds were getting compared to finely tuned gxbow fusilade builds on live. If a handful of people screwing around on lamania for a few days are making alchemist builds that equal the current top meta then the builds people will be using a month after it goes live will be crushing everything.

[HungarianRhapsody]

This is exactly what people were saying when inq came out and rough lama builds were getting compared to finely tuned gxbow fusilade builds on live. If a handful of people screwing around on lamania for a few days are making alchemist builds that equal the current top meta then the builds people will be using a month after it goes live will be crushing everything.

Before the change to Multitude of Missiles, I would have agreed. That one change alone made a huge difference.

For offensive casting, they're ridiculous in early-mid Heroic levels, but almost everything is ridiculous in early-mid Heroic levels, so does that even matter?

That poison damage is nice, but it doesn't scale as well as a lot of other damages do in Epics.

The attack speed for thrown weapons is terrible and thoroughly bugged (tested and retested this).

The CC looks good until you notice the cooldowns. And the fact that their best CC doesn't work on Reapers.

I can see really good players making some crazy powerful Alchemists once they learn all of the ins and outs of the class, but it's not going to be like Inquisitive, because 1) you have to be an Alchemist to be an Alchemist and 2) the class is a lot more difficult to use and get the benefits out of than Inquisitive since Inquisitive works just fine with "run backwards and hold down the attack button". Alchemist is going to play like Monk. You're using a dozen different buttons to do all sorts of crazy things OR you're throwing a bunch of daggers/darts/shuriken.

We'll see a billion Alchemists as people run them to get back Completionist and then they'll fade quickly. It's possible that people will run Alchemist for their Racials, but I'd be kind of surprised if that happens.

[HungarianRhapsody]

This is exactly what people were saying when inq came out and rough lama builds were getting compared to finely tuned gxbow fusilade builds on live. If a handful of people screwing around on lamania for a few days are making alchemist builds that equal the current top meta then the builds people will be using a month after it goes live will be crushing everything.

Side note: When Inquisitive came out, the people posting that it was OP had actual numbers and evidence to back up their claims.

[SerPounce]

Side note: When Inquisitive came out, the people posting that it was OP had actual numbers and evidence to back up their claims.

Most of the people with numbers and evidence were saying that INQ was NOT OP, but rather that it was roughly similar or slightly behind gxbow. And it's not that the numbers were wrong, they just weren't based on fully optimized builds and didn't sufficiently take into account the massive utility and flexibility that could be built in with that DPS. Alchemist isn't going to be as flexible as a universal tree, but there's certainly a lot going on there.

I'm not necessarily saying that alchemist is going to be OP, I just find it cold comfort that after a few hours of tinkering no one has complete obliterated the current top DPS yet.