Some Thoughts on the New Archetypes

[dogsoldier]

Stormsinger:
This one appears to be a hit, adding spells to the very limited regular bard spell book, has nice Tier 5s, but a hard choice has to be made because Spellsinger T5s and capstone offer a lot of nice things too, sustain, more crowd control, heal spell. It loses some buffs and if you go full nuke, you lose even more. It is not going to out nuke a sorc, but it does not have to, it just has to be competitive with sorc.

Dark Apostate:
This seems to be missing damage, and also missing Death Auras. It doesn't have to be able to nuke as well as a Pale Master, but again, it needs to be competitive with it. And negative healing without an aura on a divine, why not just use all of the heals that you have instead? This seems pretty easy to fix, add some damage, and add a couple of death auras.

Sacred Fist:
It is clear that most people that are running Sacred Fist are trying to work in ways to use Daggers, Quarterstaffs, Short Swords, Longswords, well, just about anything but Handwraps. Sacred Fist really needs to have a Deity Choice on creation. It could be a cut down Monk themed list, say: Quarterstaffs, or Handwraps, or Shortswords, or Kamas, or Shuriken. The base of the class is really fun to play, and you can get a lot of cool stuff for 23 AP spent. It needs to have things in the tree that do not fight with the Ki Spells in the spell book. You do not have enough Ki to utilize both spellbook and enhancements, so it needs something to combo along with the spells. It is still feat starved, even with the reduction in requirements for Whirlwild Attack. It needs more useful things in the Tier 5s. Put Spring attack as a non-Ki-Ability in Tier 4, put Whirlwind attack in T5 as a non-Ki-ability in T5. Add a CHA trance somewhere in the T1-2 Range. Give it more healing amplification, something similar to KoTC. Give it base monk stances, not full feat progression, you would have to multiclass with fighter to pickup full stances, but give it a starting point of the base stances. This would open up the option to utilize items that boost MRR cap for Monk, and give it a better opportunity to more fully utilize the Grandmaster of Flowers Destiny, where there is another +15 MRR cap boost.

Edit: Also, regular caster bards took a major hit with the Sonic Blast nerf. A lot of S.Posters shouted down the concerns as a low level only thing. I would just like to remind people that there is a Master of Music feat for bard which is really not worth taking anymore given the other hard choices you have to make there, also a couple of features of Fatesinger specifically boosting sonic blast are now much less useful, BoGW is the obvious one at 24 now to give you a spell with a little better targeting than what you have in your book and with SLAs. There really are not that many sonic spell choices in the game right now anyway, but hey, what if regular bard got the Cold spell choices that Stormsinger gets as SLAs. They are just regular spells, so not as powerful, but along with the Primal Mantle Sky Strikes, this could make for a nice rotation for more easily getting Sky Mantle procs, and give regular caster bards some much needed extra spells in heroics.

[misterski]

Stormsinger:
This one appears to be a hit, adding spells to the very limited regular bard spell book, has nice Tier 5s, but a hard choice has to be made because Spellsinger T5s and capstone offer a lot of nice things too, sustain, more crowd control, heal spell. It loses some buffs and if you go full nuke, you lose even more. It is not going to out nuke a sorc, but it does not have to, it just has to be competitive with sorc.

Dark Apostate:
This seems to be missing damage, and also missing Death Auras. It doesn't have to be able to nuke as well as a Pale Master, but again, it needs to be competitive with it. And negative healing without an aura on a divine, why not just use all of the heals that you have instead? This seems pretty easy to fix, add some damage, and add a couple of death auras.

Sacred Fist:
It is clear that most people that are running Sacred Fist are trying to work in ways to use Daggers, Quarterstaffs, Short Swords, Longswords, well, just about anything but Handwraps. Sacred Fist really needs to have a Deity Choice on creation. It could be a cut down Monk themed list, say: Quarterstaffs, or Handwraps, or Shortswords, or Kamas, or Shuriken. The base of the class is really fun to play, and you can get a lot of cool stuff for 23 AP spent. It needs to have things in the tree that do not fight with the Ki Spells in the spell book. You do not have enough Ki to utilize both spellbook and enhancements, so it needs something to combo along with the spells. It is still feat starved, even with the reduction in requirements for Whirlwild Attack. It needs more useful things in the Tier 5s. Put Spring attack as a non-Ki-Ability in Tier 4, put Whirlwind attack in T5 as a non-Ki-ability in T5. Add a CHA trance somewhere in the T1-2 Range. Give it more healing amplification, something similar to KoTC. Give it base monk stances, not full feat progression, you would have to multiclass with fighter to pickup full stances, but give it a starting point of the base stances. This would open up the option to utilize items that boost MRR cap for Monk, and give it a better opportunity to more fully utilize the Grandmaster of Flowers Destiny, where there is another +15 MRR cap boost.

Edit: Also, regular caster bards took a major hit with the Sonic Blast nerf. A lot of S.Posters shouted down the concerns as a low level only thing. I would just like to remind people that there is a Master of Music feat for bard which is really not worth taking anymore given the other hard choices you have to make there, also a couple of features of Fatesinger specifically boosting sonic blast are now much less useful, BoGW is the obvious one at 24 now to give you a spell with a little better targeting than what you have in your book and with SLAs. There really are not that many sonic spell choices in the game right now anyway, but hey, what if regular bard got the Cold spell choices that Stormsinger gets as SLAs. They are just regular spells, so not as powerful, but along with the Primal Mantle Sky Strikes, this could make for a nice rotation for more easily getting Sky Mantle procs, and give regular caster bards some much needed extra spells in heroics.

In Preview 1 Sacred Fists did have a deity choice at level 1 like the other divine classes. Lynnabel changed it to autogrant Path of Light in Preview 2. Deity choice was removed for some reason and I don't think they'll back out of that.

Sacred Fist already has Avenging Whirlwind at T5 which shares a cool down with Whirlwind Attack. The only differences between the two is the ki cost and vulnerability stacks applied with each hit and no feat prerequisites for Avenging Whirlwind. So that's 3 feat slots freed up already although most will probably take dodge and mobility anyways.

[dogsoldier]

In Preview 1 Sacred Fists did have a deity choice at level 1 like the other divine classes. Lynnabel changed it to autogrant Path of Light in Preview 2. Deity choice was removed for some reason and I don't think they'll back out of that.

Sacred Fist already has Avenging Whirlwind at T5 which shares a cool down with Whirlwind Attack. The only differences between the two is the ki cost and vulnerability stacks applied with each hit and no feat prerequisites for Avenging Whirlwind. So that's 3 feat slots freed up already although most will probably take dodge and mobility anyways.

Avenging Whirlwind is a noob trap, fyi, it takes Ki to activate, so you are burning Ki that would be better spent with the spellbook stuff like Incinerating Wave.

[dogsoldier]

There is a use case for Ki abilities in Sacred Fist, but it would be on a multiclass setup, say you are 12/6/2/ Monk/Sacred Fist/Fighter, but in that scenario, you definitely would not go T5 Sacred Fist, so a Ki ability does not belong there. You could make use of something in the T1-3 Range. You are not going to even go T4 Sacred Fist unless you have 11 levels of it to gain the Ki Spell Incinerating Wave, and and that point you would want to be 12 levels of Sacred Fist for the level 12 core, but still nothing in the T5s that is useful outside of the far left choice, and only if you are using handwraps, or have a divine class that gives an alternate deity.

[dogsoldier]

I also view dodge and mobility as mostly useless. For most armor sets, you are going to be running into the dodge cap anyway, so will not get much use out of dodge, unless you use one of the special level 8/15 armors that have higher max dex bonus for light armor users and also happen to totally ignore Ravenloft and Sharn sets, or if you are in cloth armor without a lot of reaper points. Mobility by itself is useful insofar as it raises the dodge cap, but then it is also available on items, and even as a level 6 augment.

[DRoark]

They really weren't implemented well at all. Anyone doing a Fist-a-din is probably better off skipping wraps entirely and just using other trees, or as I have seen, multi-anything
else. Just the fact they aren't a new tree IN the class, even prevents you from doing Class-Iconic-Archetype, so instead you get stuck doing the class over again. Yeah... blarg.

[thegreatcthulhu]

They really weren't implemented well at all. Anyone doing a Fist-a-din is probably better off skipping wraps entirely and just using other trees, or as I have seen, multi-anything
else. Just the fact they aren't a new tree IN the class, even prevents you from doing Class-Iconic-Archetype, so instead you get stuck doing the class over again. Yeah... blarg.

Agreed. It didn't make sense to me to have to go out of their way to refactor so much for what could have just been new enhancement trees for their respective classes.

I would have loved to have seen Paladins get something else to work with besides the awful (IMO) Vanguard tree or having to multi-class and get messed out of their capstones.

Edit: Well, as another forum poster pointed out, I guess it makes more sense why they are not just enhancement trees when you consider the other things that are going on with archetypes..

"



2) Class specific enhancement trees are physically incapable of interacting with some elements of character customization, such as changing your feats, or giving you a system (like ki) and make it scale off a different stat, or change prerequisites, or any of many other things.

This makes Class specific enhancement trees a poor vector for consistently providing players with additional character customization.

And then of course there's Lynnabel's post which I completely missed since I wasn't paying any attention to the forums earlier last month. I wish this had gotten referenced more, since this was pretty informative, IMO anyways:


https://forums.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/533554-U56-Preview-1-Archetype-Overview?p=6532222&viewfull=1#post6532222

[Kebtid]

Dark apostate: Clerics best choice for dc casters, ignore the onhit proc and all that garbage.
Sacred fist:Best raid pushing healer build base, great replacement for 17 souls 3 palie builds, ignore the on hit and playing as dps aspect, it is not viable, it is terrible and you are a burden and would be better off playing a real monk instead
Stormsinger:Fun, good for r1 gear farming, we are not clear yet how it performs in endgame, im closest in guild to have a fully geared dps specced stormsinger, so far it looks .. decent, nothing extraordinary, best use will be as a bot for providing the proc song

I like the past lifes tho,ngl (minus apostate, it actually makes me take more neg damage from enemies as it is like reverse healing amp, cant beat coding in ddo, reported it already)

[Ereshkigal]

Dark apostate: Clerics best choice for dc casters, ignore the onhit proc and all that garbage.
Sacred fist:Best raid pushing healer build base, great replacement for 17 souls 3 palie builds, ignore the on hit and playing as dps aspect, it is not viable, it is terrible and you are a burden and would be better off playing a real monk instead
Stormsinger:Fun, good for r1 gear farming, we are not clear yet how it performs in endgame, im closest in guild to have a fully geared dps specced stormsinger, so far it looks .. decent, nothing extraordinary, best use will be as a bot for providing the proc song

I like the past lifes tho,ngl (minus apostate, it actually makes me take more neg damage from enemies as it is like reverse healing amp, cant beat coding in ddo, reported it already)

The Past Life feats are different? Are these listed anywhere? I didn't catch them in patch notes, nor on ddowiki when i was looking at changes.

Do you know what the PL are for all 3?

[Kebtid]

The Past Life feats are different? Are these listed anywhere? I didn't catch them in patch notes, nor on ddowiki when i was looking at changes.

Do you know what the PL are for all 3?

Sacred fist was 5 amp 5 pos spp
Apostate iirc was 5 neg amp, forgot if it gave spellpower as well ( I would remote log to check from work but game is not live now)
Stormsinger wa 5 elec/cold spp.

I got all beside the third stormsinger as i plan to play it in endgame for a bit (do a rotation of r10 quests once fully max geared to have a opinion of the class and how it performs at top level, leveling its super strong but i think most people realize that)