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Tech Mage on the Map as well as some other things

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6/22/2019 20:54:50   
.Lord Ginger.
Member

Tech Mage has two main problems, or things that keep it not able to be competitive.

Assimilation: Assimilation drain is weak, and the energy drained isn’t enough to compensate.
Assimilation needs to drain more, having 186 at 85 strength is not enough drain, and it recovers half of it.

With the higher drain, assimilation also needs to receive more, 100% is probably necessary, seeing how down in the dumps tech mage has been.

At 45 strength, tech mage should be able to drain about 175 and receive all 175, and at higher strength, like 85, perhaps 225.

As a tech mage, there are two immediate issues in this meta.

Tech Mage doesn’t have any passive armors or blood lust, which means that it doesn’t have the extra sustainability that other classes do, this is why it has reroute, however, other classes (unlike in other phases) can now drain energy, and they can do it the whole battle. Tech mage, Tactical Merc, and CH were the only ones that could get back energy.
Unlike earlier, CH has a nasty Static Charge, Tactical has a very reliable atom smash, and BH, Merc, and BM can steal energy from a tech mage and get back their own.

With the other class changes, having reroute and a weak assimilation does not work, because other classes can take the energy that TM gets with reroute, and TM can barely take it back.
Reroute, should also get a buff, at least for TM to at least 40% so it can sustain more energy to do powerful moves.

A reason why strength tech mage used to thrive was because of assimilation, and that got nerfed. The second reason why strength TM was revived after some balance changes was the powerful malfunction making up for the lost assimilation (and battery backup). Since malfunction is back to being a bit weaker, and there is no battery backup, tech mage is stuck without a way to keep energy and do damage.

Plasma bolt should also maybe have the damage increased on top of this defense ignore. If we are to have strength builds, bolt needs to be better. Supercharge can stay where it is.
For dex tech mage builds, obviously changing malfunction didn’t help for dex builds unfortunately. But what I found out was that the dexterity skills scale way worse than the technology skills, which is pretty funny actually. Maybe that’s because tech skills are with focus and dex skills normally aren’t? Either way, these dexterity skills should be buffed. I also think that plasma rain should move back to being dexterity, since having a support skill as a tech mage isn’t really useful.

Even in earlier omega when support tech mage was a popular build, a sword was used and no plasma rain was needed (and it was dex back then)
And frankly, maybe malfunction is better as a support skill so we can have support, strength tech mages if that ever happens again. A quick kill build with an alright win percentage.

Manipulating energy draining skills is not a bad idea and should be looked into more often. Without good energy draining moves, classes are being pumped up over a few skills, which is frustrating. Tactical Poison, Bounty Smoke, Blood Mage plasma Cannon (even though BM isn't good right now)


Mercenary is well rounded because of a solid Static Smash; Cyber Hunter is as well because of a solid Static Charge, and on top of the plasma armor right now.

Cyber Hunter used to have an extremely nice tech build until the EMP drain was taken, which says another thing about energy moves crippling classes.

The reason why static grenade didn’t cripple BH was because of the insane smoke screen, which throws off balance to the other classes, like tech mage, who don’t have the means to deal with smoke + Azrael aux + blood hawk shenanigans.

Balancing the energy moves is the way to help balance between classes, honestly.

< Message edited by .Lord Ginger. -- 6/22/2019 21:05:52 >
AQW Epic  Post #: 1
6/23/2019 2:47:46   
Foulman
Member

What about a significant buff/change to Reroute? An absurdly high energy return value like 50% would effectively stop direct nuke attacks. Or we could add the old effects of the passive Static Charge onto Reroute instead of turning Assimilation into Merc Smash 2.0.
AQ DF AQW Epic  Post #: 2
6/23/2019 8:05:18   
.Lord Ginger.
Member

Passive Static Charge is what?
AQW Epic  Post #: 3
6/23/2019 10:26:03   
Foulman
Member

A percentage of all damage done is converted to energy
AQ DF AQW Epic  Post #: 4
6/23/2019 11:54:20   
.Lord Ginger.
Member

That's an interesting idea and sounds pretty neat, actually. I'd be up for this, it's like the energy version of blood lust, could be interesting. Would indirectly make skills cost less energy which is a good idea too, especially for a TM.
AQW Epic  Post #: 5
6/25/2019 18:08:13   
Armagedon2018
Member

Sounds good
AQW Epic  Post #: 6
6/25/2019 21:51:20   
NDB
Member

I'm pretty sure there was no such thing as a passive Static Charge, but it does sound cool. If anything, it'd be an even greater idea for BM though, a class that's arguably harder to fix than TM. Could consider changing their Bloodlust to give health and energy.

For Tech Mage, just buffing Reroute and Assimilation might be enough. I definitely agree that Assimilation needs to be more strength-oriented the way it was before. Strength TM was a very cool build back when it was good.
The strength scaling should be increased to the way it was before where it'd be about the same as it is now for builds without any strength but a lot better for actual strength builds. Possibly also increase the damage to 85% or 90% at least. Nerfing it from 85% to 80% but making it unblockable was sort of a stupid move, I think. What's the point of it being unblockable if it hardly does any damage anymore?

I'm not exactly sure Plasma Bolt needs that big of a buff. It's already the strongest caster skill in the game by a lot I think and it just got a 5% defense ignore increase. I think it is pretty accurate to say that caster TM died because of passives. It relied on tanking but TM doesn't have a shield and Reroute just isn't as effective as Battery for tanking builds (it's arguably more effective for aggressive builds since you don't have to skip a turn like when you use Battery). It's also kind of annoying for Reroute classes that Poison bypasses it. That's an integral part of poison's effect, so I'm not suggesting to change it but that's just another reason why Reroute isn't that good, especially for caster builds. Obviously, Deadly Aim does nothing for caster builds due to the requirement even though their strongest attack is gun. I almost feel like the requirement on Deadly Aim should be removed because of that. I still feel like TM's Supercharge could have a health gain buff instead of the new Rage Bonus thing. The Rage Bonus effect is pretty darn useless because it's way too hard to set up (you need to be at low Rage and the opponent needs to have a lot of Rage). In a lot of cases you are already really close to Rage by the time you use it. And even if you set it up well, the effect isn't immediately beneficial since you still have to life until your next turn to Rage if you have it. All in all, getting Rage one turn faster isn't exactly that helpful, at least for caster builds. I even think that giving a 15% health gain effect to Plasma Bolt instead of or on top of the defense ignore could be a good idea.

In a nutshell, giving Reroute classes more and better ways to regenerate health indirectly helps a lot with energy control since more health=more energy. This would be a point to keep in mind besides just buffing Reroute. There's a reason why the first time passives were in the game, TMs were constantly running high health heal builds. That's why a couple weeks ago I suggested making TMs heal have a 3 turn cooldown and/or buffing it. Obviously, the 3 turn cooldown is universal thing now.

Dex skills are worse than tech skill because tech skills keep getting buffs. They used to be kind of similar. About a year ago Bunker/Plasma and Bolt weren't anywhere near as good as they are now. It probably is a case of focus being more relevant than dex during a balance crisis. Whenever a class needs a buff, the first thing that more commonly comes to mind would be to help the focus build first in order to get the class back on track, then deal with other stuff. The dex skills did recently get a buff and they do cost less energy, but they still aren't too amazing and I guess, more importantly, caster builds are dead in general.

< Message edited by NDB -- 6/25/2019 22:11:19 >
Epic  Post #: 7
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