Profession Balance Specific Wishlist

[Ebag333]

This is a wishlist specifically for the upcoming Profession balance patches. More generic wishlist items can be found in the standard wishlist.

• Pets
  
  • Heal Pet
    Our heal pet is sadly out of date. Two suggestions came up:
    
    • A new 220 level healpet
    • Adding a percent heal to the SS line. (See here.)
  • Mezz Pet
    Our mezz pet is not particularly useful in Inf and higher mobs. Additionally, the mezz pet is completely useless in PvP. Some suggestions:
    
    • A new 220 level mezz pet.
    • Reduce or remove the break chance on the current mezz. This will not unbalance PvM terribly, while making the pet useful in PvP. Alternatively leave the break chance for the PvM side, and reduce/remove the break chance for the PvP side.
    • Add a line of nano changers that allow the mezz pet to have different functions. Some suggestions:
      Small AOE mezz (short duration, high break chance)
      Init debuff
      A true stun (applies for PvP only)
      AOE root/snare
      Single/AOE fear
  • Attack Pet
    Our attack pet is actually probably our most balanced pet at the moment. Here are some of the issues that came up recently:
    
    • 50% or less of our damage comes from our pet. Even non-DD setups will typically OD their pet, DD setups can OD Rihwen by 10% or more.
    • Rihwen has basically no defense. While this is an issue with all of our pets, Rihwen tends to tank the most, so mobs attacking him is much more an issue than with healpet or mezz pet. Since Rihwen has no defense, even with 60k HP mobs can cut through that rather quickly. Some of the new LoX DB mobs (just regular mobs, not bosses) can cut through Rihwen's HP pool in a matter of seconds.
    • Regarding the above, a taunt/detaunt pet buff nano (where either one can overwrite the other) would be very very very useful for helping to manage aggro.
    • Level gaps. There are some huge level gaps between pets, most noticeably between Caco and Biazu (minimum of 65 levels, for many people it's closer to 100). Adjusting the two IS urn pets to fill between Caco and Biazu would go a long way towards plugging that hole.
  • All Pets
    Some issues that effect all pets:
    
    • Zero resistance in PvP. Meaning their drain totems, a constant target for AOE's, and constantly debuffed in PvP. It's unusual to have the pet not be debuffed. Many debuffs we do not have a remover for (short of repulling the pet). Even something as simple as UBT reduces our pets (heal or attack) to about 50% effectiveness.
    • Cast time is too long for PvP. For PvM, a 30 second cast time isn't that big a problem, but for PvP it is. Considering that there are several very long debuffs that are unremovable, our only option is to terminate and repull the pet. A cast time that would give about 7 to 10 seconds with nano init full IP'd would be ideal.
    • Regarding the above, a taunt/detaunt pet buff nano (where either one can overwrite the other) would be very very very useful for helping to manage aggro.
    • Lack of pet updates. Pets get updated very very very rarely compared to player weapon/armor/nano updates.
• MP's (General)
  Balancing MP's face some unique challenges, because we are a unique profession. Okay, sure, everyone says that, but it's really true in our case!
  
  • Profession Focus
    Our offense lately has been focused mostly on weapons. Many people have been proclaiming a desire to see us move back towards pets and nanos as our primary form of offense (or "offensively oriented debuffs" as the case may be).
  • Defense
    Yeah, we got SS and SoZ (see below), but for non SoZ users our defense is just slightly on the weak side. We're not where we were pre-LE, but we do go squish awful quick too. Some suggestions:
    
    • More healing (improved perk healing, improved heal pets, etc)
    • More evades/AAD (*yawn* boring)
    • Damage to Nano (more the style of reflects than NT's "oh crap" version).
  • SS
    Yeah, it' so broken it needs it own bullet point. Lets face it, no one likes it. Other profs don't like it. Even we don't really like it, because using it disables a large part of our toolset. Some suggestions:
    
    • Tone down the benefits, and tone down the recharge. Even something as simply as reducing the spec blockers from 5 to 2 would probably justify a recharge drop from 30 to 15. If we could get the recharge down to 5 seconds or less, that would be ideal.
    • Add/Change to a lockout. Drop the recharge to something more ideal, and add a lockout to the nano to prevent it from being spammed. (This is not mutually exclusive from above).
  • SoZ
    Yeah, it' so broken it needs it own bullet point. SoZ is a classic example of an overpowered item. Because of SoZ MP's can now tank LotV (where as before we went squish in about 10 seconds). Additionally, SoZ creates a huge problem going forward because any additional defensive items that MP's get would cause SoZ to become exponentially more powerful. Some suggestion:
    
    • Tone SoZ down some. Leave the AAD/NR (or only reduce slightly), but cut the reflects in half. (15% reflects is more in line with the other 1HB shields anyway.)
    • As a compensation for removing a significant amount of defense, add some offense. A nano damage % modifier and a smallish +nanoskill boost would bring SoZ much more into line with the MP profession in general, and remove a lot of the "off balanced" nature of having a hugely defensive item.
• Perks
  MP's have a few perk issues that would be nice to be worked out.....
  
  • Channel Rage
    While the modifiers from CR are quite nice, the perk action is not. Many MP's don't even use the CR perk, due to being far too busy with other things to have time to trigger it. Ironically, the time we need it most (in PvP, so our pets land more hits) is the time when when are least able to use it. Simply extending the length of time that CR lasts from 30 seconds to several minutes would mean it would be far more likely to be used. Additionally there is a problem with CR, where you cannot use it on a lower level pet. If I pull a lower level pet (like say Caco, due to him being instacast), I cannot use CR on him. Having a single CR perk action that encompasses all the levels of pets (instead of 10) would allow this to be corrected.
  • Soothing Spirits
    Despite being considered a "must have" perk line, SS is one of our weakest lines. Even at the top level (SS 10, with Morti), you're looking at approximately a 100 HP/Sec difference between having SS 10 perked and not having it perked at all (this includes the heal perk action). Considering that the line itself gives almost no modifiers at all (150 HP, 250 nano), spending 10 perks for that small of an increase is not great. See above suggestion on adding a % heal to the line, that would effect the heal pet.
  • Blunt Mastery
    Pistol Mastery was recently opened up to 10 for MP's, BM should be as well.
  • Notum Source
    This line is basically useless. One of the perks I do not believe works at all, the other is not worth the perks required for it. It may be mildly useful for NT's, but I suspect that they would rather spend the 10 points elsewhere.
  • Theoretical Research
    Very nice perk actions, horrible modifiers. Not much incentive to train this line.
  • Ancient Knowledge
    Decent perk actions, but again, horrible modifiers. The perks would be worth it, but Ken Fi suffers from the same problem as Channel Rage, namely that when we could use it, we don't have time to trigger the perk action. Increasing the duration of the perk would help offset this a lot.
  • Ranger
    Pistol Mastery was recently opened up to 10 for MP's, Ranger should be as well.
  • The Unknown Factor
    The perk actions are almost impossible to land on anyone, and the modifiers are useless. No reason to train this one.
• LE Procs
  Procs can be simply summed up as there's no real reason to use any other proc other than the two evade procs (with the possible exception of the NSD proc). An increase to both our DD proc and our init debuff proc would give us viable alternatives. Adding in procs that gave bonuses to our pets would be another alternative (IE: proc that gives a 50m AOE snare/root reducers and short resist).

Reference Threads
Profession Review: Pets
Profession Review: Perks