Design Notes
December 19, 2015
Updates to Blademaster Assassin and Shaman
BladeMaster Assassin Changes
Iaijutsu: Lowered cooldown from 8 seconds to 6 seconds.
Death's Dance: Increased Dodge from 20% to 30%.
Simple Solution: Lowered cooldown from 10 seconds to 8 seconds.
Slicing Winds effect duration lowered from 4 seconds to 3 seconds
Umbral Shuriken: Lowered mana costs from 32 to 30
Lowered initial DoT by 25% (this helps balance out the lower cooldown cost)
Lowered Decay, Cannot Heal! effect duration from 6 seconds to 5 seconds.
Evolved Shaman and Shaman Class Changes
Elemental Embrace: 100% chance to hit
Elemental Grasp: 100% chance to hit
Hydrophobia: added 6 second Heal over Time and damage doubled
Ancestor: damage doubled
Why Did You Change the Class Skills?
Good question, faceless-internet-person! We experienced several issues during the release of the Blademaster Assassin Class during our Black Friday shop (where certain skill values released with higher-than-intended values). When those issues were corrected, we got a lot of feedback from fans of the class saying it was not as fun to use.
When we update classes, that's never our intention - we never want to make something less fun to play, or make things worse in order to make something else better. So there was only one real solution - re-fix Blademaster Assassin in a way that kept its balance but brought its power level back up in line with what the class owners wanted. Finding a middle ground can be pretty tricky, but Sync, Arklen, and our other class designers and testers found a way to make it happen:
Buff Blademaster Assassin AND make sure there were classes that couple compare to it. That is why theEvolved Shaman and Shaman Classes got some pretty sweet buffs this week, too!
As Pisces, AQW Class Designer explained on our forum:
After working with BladeMaster Assassin a little bit, the class balance testers pretty much decided that BMA was way too strong and could majorly end up throwing off PvP balance. I'm not saying PvP is balanced yet by any means, but when no class can consistently beat another then something is amiss. Because we didn't want to nerf BMA any more (since player happiness matters more than anything), we had to come up with a creative solution.
Our solution was to buff Shaman and Evolved Shaman so they could consistently beat BMA. Shaman had the damage on its first and second skills just about doubled, and we also added a Heal over Time to the second skill alongside the slight necromancer-esque heal.
After playing with the new Shaman, the damage seemed on par with our newest classes so players should hopefully have a reason to go ahead and rank up Arcangrove. The buff that really caused Shaman (and Evolved Shaman, too) to act as counters to BladeMaster Assassin is the accuracy increase to the last skill, now Elemental Grasp/Elemental Embrace never miss. So Shaman and Evolved Shaman can reliably negate all dodge and crit chance it has for a full minute.
More Class Feedback
Our plan is to continue updating older classes to bring them more in line with the current power-level in AQWorlds. If you'd like to take part in the class discussion and share your thoughts/ideas, head over to the AQW General discussion thread to join in!