Summary of the Bureaucrat doc.

[Sterva]

Here's a summary of the new bureaucrat changes as they match up against our wishlist. Sometimes it's difficult to see that the devs pay any attention to what we ask for, so I thought it might be nice to organize the upcoming updates according to what we have asked them for in the past.

Bureaucrat changes, the highlights:

: : : Crowd control : : :

We asked for:

root sand snares to improve in SL, and more effective crowd control in pvp.

The devs have responded with:

Improving all of our CC to work in SL and be more effective in pvp.

Crowd control of the future will be faster paced and land more reliably. The effects will be much shorter, but CC nanos will have quick cast times and lower checks across the board. Cooldowns will replace long nano recharge timers to allow us to use as many of our varying nano tools as possible.

: : : Defense : : :

We asked for:

bureaucrat only items or buffs that improve our defenses, and some kind of supplementary defense to our strictly evade based defenses.

The devs have responded with:

An exciting new feature! That I'm not sure I can talk about yet. >.> I'll ask to make sure, since it's not in the docs yet.

: : : Weaponry : : :

We asked for:

an alternative weapon line. Not everyone likes pistols! (Pistol haters, you are all wrong—just know that).

The devs have responded with:

expanding our nuke toolset with a much wider range of nukes, including alpha nukes, finisher nukes, steadier damage nukes, and nukes with debuffs. These additions will make it much more viable to go a more nano-focused route for any crat who doesn't want to depend heavily on pistols to get the job done.

: : : Pets : : :

We asked for:

better offensive buffs for pets, including de-motivational speeches being assigned to our pets and a wider range of buffing options.

The devs have responded with:

completely revamping pets to modernize them, and hopefully future proof them a bit so that they don't fall so out-of-date in the future.

Also, a new tl5 version of carlo!

: : : Offensive speeches : : :

We asked that for:

our offensive auras would extend to our pets.

The devs have responded with:

changing our offensive speeches dramatically! We will no longer use pulsating aoe auras for our offensive speeches, instead, these speeches have become 100% pet procs that we can cast on our pets, which we can change up depending on how we want to debuff our opponents. Pets will then debuff on every hit.

-----------------

In addition to our wishlist, the devs have improved a few other items.

: : : Defense speeches : : :

defense speeches will now be split into different bonuses so that you can mix and match which bonuses you wish to receive instead of only having the choice of iHM or NR.

: : : Init debuffs : : :

half nerf, half love, the total amount that we can debuff for will be lowered a bit (not too much!), however, our init debuffs will be collapsed into two lines, and the total execution time will be dramatically faster.

: : : Pet debuff removal : : :

we will be able to wipe debuffs on pets when pets are out of combat. Yay!

: : : Moving around defenses and AR : : :

Some of our AR and def has been shifted around, but we haven't actually lost any net AR or def in buffs. I think we actually gained a little AR.

: : : Charms : : :

We can now recast *long* charms without releasing *short* charms! (thanks for catching the typo).

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That's all I can share for now. There are perhaps a few other interesting things in store for us, but there aren't enough details worked out yet for me to share anything of substance.

[edit]

And here's a link to a relevant post by Kintaii in the balance forums.

[Kintaii]

: : : Defense : : :

We asked for:

bureaucrat only items or buffs that improve our defenses, and some kind of supplementary defense to our strictly evade based defenses.

The devs have responded with:

An exciting new feature! That I'm not sure I can talk about yet. >.> I'll ask to make sure, since it's not in the docs yet.

Not quite yet. Soon! (™)

[ragerayden]

I need some clarifications.

Did they change our AOE deroot/desnare into a team version ? It will make wars & tara a huge problem.

Where is my aoe stun proc triggering when hit ?

What will happen if our pets are rooted, snared & especially calmed ? Their won't be any offensive aura at all ?

All in all it looks great, however I'm still waiting for that exciting new feature to defend ourselves.

[Sterva]

I need some clarifications.

Did they change our AOE deroot/desnare into a team version ? It will make wars & tara a huge problem.

Where is my aoe stun proc triggering when hit ?

What will happen if our pets are rooted, snared & especially calmed ? Their won't be any offensive aura at all ?

All in all it looks great, however I'm still waiting for that exciting new feature to defend ourselves.

(1) There are deroot/desnare self, other, and team, just like we always have had. The numbers on them have been changed a bit, and cooldowns added.

(2) no aoe stun procs. we did get an improvement to living embalmment in the form of a nuke though.

(3) moving offensive speeches to pets should do two things. First, it makes pets more important, and second, it should actually dramatically increase how often a single target is getting debuffed. I'm not sure this can really even be considered a nerf compared to having an AOE debuff, since it had such a ridiculously tiny range that it usually only hit whoever you were standing right on top of anyway.

[Hvyshadows]

Crowd control of the future will be faster paced and land more reliably. The effects will be much shorter, but CC nanos will have quick cast times and lower checks across the board. Cooldowns will replace long nano recharge timers to allow us to use as many of our varying nano tools as possible.

It's nice that all of our CC tools now appear that they will work effectively in SL, but as to the "lower checks across the board", didn't they in fact raise the checks across the board? For instance:

Greater Restrict Movement:
Psychological modifications 52% Level 180%
Time and space 48% Nano resist 45%

Engrossing Elocution:
Psychological modifications 52% Nano resist 100%
Time and space 48% Level 0%

Every root and snare that I can see is just either 100% or 90% NR.

Also, I'm not sure I understand the offensive and defensive buffing auras. Do they cancel each other out? So you can run one, but not the other forcing you to choose either off or def? Kind of interesting.

Losing some of the init debuffs doesn't worry me since they were ridiculously OP anyway in PvM.

All in all it looks like a crat is going to be a very "busy" prof going forward.

[flaminbull]

Also, I'm not sure I understand the offensive and defensive buffing auras. Do they cancel each other out? So you can run one, but not the other forcing you to choose either off or def? Kind of interesting.

You can merge for example the def part of IHM with crit aura. Or you can do Offense aura + NR aura.. It's more about mix matching what you prefer - You can still use off/deff at once .

[SSK]

(1) There are deroot/desnare self, other, and team, just like we always have had. The numbers on them have been changed a bit, and cooldowns added.

We had AoE deroot, in document we have team deroot, so in future we'll deroot 6 people instead of blob of 100 (like so many still play anyway)

[Sterva]

It's nice that all of our CC tools now appear that they will work effectively in SL, but as to the "lower checks across the board", didn't they in fact raise the checks across the board?

I said across the board, because there were only two bizarre nanos that has super low checks. Most of our level appropriate CC nanos had higher checks than 90%, and most (all?) of them are now set at a 90% NR check. Additionally, most of the CC nanos give us 110% attack skills vs. 90% NR, which should help out in regularly landing things even more.

I have emphasized to the devs that some people will be upset with losing a root with a 48% NR check, if it turns out that the new CC is actually less reliable in the future, and I think that the general plan is that once everything is more situated with the other profs, if some numbers need to be tweaked here and there, the devs are open to it.

But the devs support the idea that CC should be fast paced, active, and that in exchange for it being short lasting and not spamable, it should also be reliable.

We had AoE deroot, in document we have team deroot, so in future we'll deroot 6 people instead of blob of 100 (like so many still play anyway)

Ah, you are right. This is a detail that escaped me—I think it's good, though. No CC will have long durations after the rebalance, so limiting deroots to teams over whole raids seems like a necessary step to keeping their effectiveness.

[Gridpain]

: : : Init debuffs : : :

half nerf, half love, the total amount that we can debuff for will be lowered a bit (not too much!), however, our init debuffs will be collapsed into two lines, and the total execution time will be dramatically faster.

Malaise and ?

: : : Moving around defenses and AR : : :[/B]

Some of our AR and def has been shifted around, but we haven't actually lost any net AR or def in buffs. I think we actually gained a little AR.

gained AR for pistol user I think ?

: : : Charms : : :

We can now recast short charms without releasing long charms!

I think it's the otehr way around. And it's nice ! (even if team whipe due to double recharming was fun )

[crattey]

Looks ace.

Questions, though;

do the pet procs work only on robots? Seems a bit odd, since the last thing we want for our bot is a taunt proc in PvM? Same goes for pet heals.. I was really hoping charms would no longer be excluded from the greater part of our pet toolset.

Also, I think the 'break on attack' chance is tad high. 25% is virtually instant for a dual-wielding crat with two pets.

The revised TTB looks nice. Though perhaps the duration/recharge could be tweaked a bit? 20 seconds every 3 minutes really isn't much.

Will we able to see which of debuffs from the new Tapes landed on our target? If so, this would certainly have it's uses.

[Phargus]

As I understand it there's now only a 40% chance the remaining red tapes will debuff initiatives on cast?

Edit: And since malaise is now only in the init debuff line anything that's immune to ubt will be immune to that as well?

[Sterva]

Looks ace.

Questions, though;

do the pet procs work only on robots? Seems a bit odd, since the last thing we want for our bot is a taunt proc in PvM? Same goes for pet heals.. I was really hoping charms would no longer be excluded from the greater part of our pet toolset.

Also, I think the 'break on attack' chance is tad high. 25% is virtually instant for a dual-wielding crat with two pets.

The revised TTB looks nice. Though perhaps the duration/recharge could be tweaked a bit? 20 seconds every 3 minutes really isn't much.

Will we able to see which of debuffs from the new Tapes landed on our target? If so, this would certainly have it's uses.

I believe that the pet procs will work on both robots and carlo, although I'm not particularly good at reading those sorts of details on nanos. :x Perhaps someone else can answer this with more confidence?

I agree that 25% is a bit high, I've mentioned this to the devs and as I've said before, there should be room for adjusting some numbers later once more changes are set in place and we can actually do some ingame testing. I can't promise that this will change, of course, but these things should be subject to testing and possibly revision later if it turns out that they aren't working quite right.

If the new tapes don't show up in the ncu, then I'll request that they do.

[crattey]

Oh, and also, quoting myself;

Fapperdefapfapfap. The changes look really great. So many annoyances are being removed, and a lot of really nice tweaks. Pet debuff removal and the changes to auras/speeches are hugworthy.


Sterva summed up most in the prof forums, so I'll just stick to something I'm curious about myself;

The nukes are a wet dream. I'm already working out a nano-based setup that will drop all this friggin' pistol/AS gear. Question for the devs though:

will we be getting a type of weaponry that has good synergy with nano-focused setups? The nukes still have relatively high NR checks, and we will need to focus heavily on nanoskills to make them truly effective.
This excludes using a standard dual pistol setup effectively in PvP. Most of our pistol AR can't be combined with a nanoskill setup. Not to mention the fact an effective nuking setup will require some focus on nanopool, nanodelta, %nanodamage and %nanocost. Most of which simply can't be combined with pistols.


If some type of dreadloch/engi pistol/cyberdeck'ish thingymajiggle gets tossed our way, we'd get a really nice diversion between weaponry/nano focused crats.

Basically, suppose if I went for a Shuffle/CP/CiB/Doctorate setup, in full scouts, all symbs, nano/def HUD, maxed nanoskills/nanopool, focus on -% cost and %nano damage. Pistols would be utterly useless in PvP, and it wouldn't even be possible to equip/use AS/burst pistols anyway. Any chance of getting some new toys for daddy? I mean, it'd be rather silly to waste IP if all you can do is equip dread pistols and tickle someone with the evades of an engi.

[flaminbull]

New toys for daddy?

In PvM, pistols would remain effective, but focusing on nanoskills pretty much means you won't have the IP for a PvP pistols setup. Not to mention most of the gear choices mean you'll pick one over the other. You could equip dreadloch pistols in a nano setup, but really, what for? Without perks and without proper AR, and just flingshot, it's a bit of a silly choice.

It would be cool to have some kind of utility pistols - with a 100% pistol/25% psych check ( amep lookalike ), with nanoskill,hp,maybe aad? bonuses, not oh so high dmg - but rather some useful proc ( lesser remod proc? -250 or sth ).

Cheers.

[Sterva]

This is just speculation on my part, I'm not hinting at anything official, but I've thought for a long time now that it will be to many crat's advantage to drop AS in the future. By doing so, you quickly gain either a lot more defense, or nano skills, or extra AR. I think that many crats will also drop pistols with the super high multi ranged requirements to save on IP.

Which is good. With nukes you can still be a pistol crat and do well without AS, or you can go into a more nano focused pistol setup, or you can abandon pistols altogether for something different. Options are great, and I look forward to seeing all of the new and interesting setups that people put together.

[Gridpain]

I think someone forgot to separate duration of calms for PvM and PvP

and... am I reading the cool downs right for LMN aznd jLMN ?? if so, it's a bumping of LMN and a huge nerf for jLMN

[crattey]

I knew I'd be dropping AS at the first mention of the nerf to it and the fact our nukes would be overhauled. IF were done well, and it sems it has, it would offer huge benefits to drop AS, burst and dual-wield.

Well, the remod is starting to have an appeal again, since we'll want something that hits a lot to get the %nano damage LE proc to go off. It's just that it's still in no way, shape or form something that says 'crat'. Tradeskills aren't exactly something I would opt for to have our AR and equip requirements based off of.

A psychology based item would have so much more synergy with our buffs, IP template and perklines. Could be something as simple as the engi pistols; think a Dreadloch pistol with added psychology AR and nano-ish mods. Perhaps even a slightly more effective nuke, similar to doctor's Blaze DoT to go with it

[Gridpain]

btw, I wonder why all the crats that havent raise psychology at all havent whined yet ...

[ragerayden]

AOE deroot/desnare nerf makes no sense unless they change AOE roots/snares into team roots/snares. It will only make wars & tara even more of a zerg fest.

BTW what with all those break on attask & random debuff ?

[Sterva]

AOE deroot/desnare nerf makes no sense unless they change AOE roots/snares into team roots/snares. It will only make wars & tara even more of a zerg fest.

BTW what with all those break on attask & random debuff ?

Well, think of the way it used to work. If you rooted or snared a zerg of players, they were stuck that way until they unrooted or unsnared themselves, or someone else did. Waiting out the crowd control wasn't even considered an option, really.

But with 10-20 second durations on roots/snares? It's more understandable that someone might have to actually wait out the root or snare instead of getting buffed out of it.

On the other hand, if AOE deroot/desnares were left as they are, how much of an effect, if any, would short CC with cooldowns have? They'd be much less useful.

Having deroots/desnares go to teams instead of AOEing also makes crats placement more valuable to teams in pvp, which again, is a good thing.