@Bleak Please strongly consider these suggestions. On atlantic alone I play an Archer, Wrestle Parry Mage, a Mystic Parry Mage, a Deathstriker, a Bushido Tamer Dexxer, and a bushido parry holy fister; and whether my opponents want to admit it or not, I am a top tier player on every single one of those templates. No one enjoys variety more than me. Even when I played WoW for one summer when I was 16, I worked about 6 different characters to level 30 and only one character to like 45. I never even finished a character because I liked playing and learning about the different classes. I am about as impartial as it gets. I don't favor any one class. My only agenda is to balance the game, add variety, and to make the game fun and improve PvP for EVERYONE. I know game mechanics as well as anyone and playing so many different templates I know what will make this game loads of fun for everyone.
Here's what we need to do.
1. Reduce base damage on bows by about 10%. All of these complex reduced damage changes are pointless, because the base damage on bows already scales with a weapon's speed. Just reduce the base damage. What you are currently looking to implement will nerf Archers to uselessness. Trust me. Ask
@de LEET ed. He may have main'ed an Archer for the past couple of years, but he's a top tier player that understands mechanics and knows what he's talking about.
2. Reduce moving shot damage by 20%. Decreasing chance to hit means it will still hit overly-hard sometimes, and not at all other times. Let's just reduce the damage overall and reduce the RNG super hits.
3. Reduce parry chance by 5% across the board. (will result in ~15% less parried blows with 120 parrying w/ a shield).
4. Return mortals to the way they used to work, where the duration of each successful mortal hit after the first would be halved, but lower the overall duration time of mortals (from 8 to 6 seconds / 4 to 3 seconds on second mortal, etc), and increase the duration of time that mortal duration will be diminished. With damage nerfs, Archers will still need a way to kill people with parry.
5. Make cleansing winds remove mortal + heal, but heal at a reduced amount (the same way it works against poison).
6. Make Spirit-Speak heal for way more damage. This isn't 2003. The skill needs a MAJOR buff.
7. Increase waki slow duration from 2 to 3 seconds (used to be 4.5) and make it cleansable by apples
8. Eliminate tactics requirement ENTIRELY. This is completely necessary to give tank/archer mages the template versatility they need to be viable. Reducing it by 30 is
not enough.
9. Increase SDI cap to 20 (already doing that).
10. Do not implement a delay on supernovas. This is an utterly ridiculous idea that the community even voted against (not including the top tier pvp'ers that are banned from here that all think it's a bad idea). Supernovas are just fine as is, but if you're SUPER INTENT on nerfing them, because you think they're OP for the same reason the LS players who don't even use them do, then take chad's advice and nerf the damage to 10 direct damage, and give it a 10% increase for every 10 alchemy skill, making it do 20 damage at 100 skill.
11. Keep the SDI cap for focus spec at 30. With a lower parry chance, parry focus specs will get disrupted more; and with 20 sdi, mystic burst damage will equal that of a 30 sdi focus mage. 25 sdi will not be enough for focus mages to compete with mystics- everyone will stop playing focus mages (eventually). The issue is not parry focus mage damage, it's how hard they are to hit.
Just do the math. If we reduce their parry chance marginally, and reduce archer damage marginally, it will balance the playing field for EVERYONE.
*Updated*