Fencer Archive

I wanted to know how you guys felt about this -- fencers and non-fencers. It's been talked about a lot, but I haven't really seen much discussion as far as specific improvements go, so I thought I'd stimulate discussion by offering my ideas.

We all know that as it stands now, our bleeds are pathetic. The base damage of bleeds are caluclated as about 33% of the max damage of your weapon, ticking once every 19 seconds, three times. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize how horrible that is -- it can pretty much be regened out of before it's done ticking, which is insane given that this is supposed to be our primary source of damage.

This is, in my opinion, still the greatest issue facing fencers. I think most would agree.

As I see it, the problem is that no one wants to make bleeds so powerful that they're "required" again, such as in the DoT wars pre-cu. I agree that this needs to be avoided.

However, PvP is much different than PvE, and none of us want our primary role to be lost when we go out PvEing with our friends. 500 damage goes a long way in a duel, but doesn't dent that Krayt.

So how do we make our Bleeds balanced in PvP, yet powerful enough that we can fulfill our role in PvE? The simpliest, best solution I can think of is to base the damage of the ticks off the Health of the bleeding PC/NPC, instead of the max damage of your weapon. Here's how it could work:

Let's say that, instead of 33% (about 1/3rd) of the max damage of the weapon, the bleed from Advanced Bleed attack would do damage equal to 1/5th (20%) of the total health upon the attack, spread out over 30 seconds worth of ticks. These numbers could be changed for balance. To make it simple, let's say that a bleed ticks at once per second. To give an idea of how much damage something like this would do...

• A player with 3,000 health would suffer 600 total damage from the bleed (3000 x .2 = 600) in 30 seconds, adding approximately 20 dps to the fencer (ticking 20 damage/second).


• A Krayt Dragon with 50,000 health would suffer 10,000 total damage from the bleed (50,000 x .2 = 10,000) in 30 seconds, adding approximately 333 dps to the fencer (ticking 333 damage/second).


• Again, the numbers could be adjusted for balance.

Additionally, it would be important to note that the effectiveness of bleeds calculated this way would go down as the target's health went down, so a bleed wouldn't actually kill. The next time bleed was applied to the above two targets...

• The player would now have 2400 health, and the new bleed would cause 480 damage (2400 x .2 = 480) in 30 seconds, adding approximately 16 dps to the fencer (ticking 16 damage/second).


• The Krayt Dragon would not have 40,000 health, and the new bleed would cause 8,000 damage (40,000 x 0.2 = 8000) in 30 seconds, adding approximately 267 dps to the fencer (ticking 267 damage/second).


• Again, I just made up these numbers right here. They could all be changed; if anyone has better ratios that would be more balanced post 'em.

I would argue that this way would satisfy the first two problems I stated in the beginning -- not turning PvP into DoT wars again, and not providing so little damage relative to PvE mobs that we do nothing -- and would still satisfy our role, all round. It would add significant, but diminishing, dps in PvP; and we'd be invaluable in PvE for cutting down the health on high-end mobs. And because the damage of the dot is proportional to the current health of whatever your fighting, it would be easy to predict how much damage relative to their health you would incur, so they would be easy (at least in theory) to balance.

Again, the numbers are kind of messy and might be able to use adjusting, and there's questions, too, and some details that would need to be worked out (what about CMs? What effect would armor have on the bleed?) but the basic idea is remains: base bleeds off health instead of the weapon. I think that's the only way to balance it all around, and remain faithful to the CU documents.

What do you guys think?