salsithier

Will the bruiser class ever become defined a class? Dps or Tank? Hybrid? We've voted and talked about it, but will dev's ever take what is suggested into effect? and will GU#52 solve the great debate of how the bruiser should be classified as? Or I'm just ranting to start up a controversy?

IMO, I just wanna DPS, tanking is fun but i dont mind leaving that to the plate tanks.

Flame ON !

Crabbok

No, GU52 has nothing to do with fighters or bruiser class definition.

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salsithier

Ahh I thought for some reason we were expecting this HUGE brawler revamp or something that would drop on GU 52. So is there a expected time for this to happen? I've heard rumors of revamp on test but not sure if it has ever been confirmed. If it has been, is it what people are expecting or just more confusion on where we are heading?

Novusod

The poll we voted on here is off the books and it does not seem like it is going anywhere anyway as most players picked hybrid and rest the split on pure DPS or Tanking role.

But that is not to say Nothing will ever happen. Brenlo is the new director running the show now and he has dropped hints of pushing changes to the game mechanics in general. Not sure how it will apply to Bruisers but keep your eyes open /feedback whenever you can about what you want out of the class.

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Vilelinea

Eh. Compared to bruisers at launch, I think we're doing pretty good as it is.

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Bruising since '04

salsithier

only took like 3 years to get here though

Crabbok

There is no plan to specificly change brawlers atm. There is another possible fighter revamp on the drawing board, of which we know nothing about. I plan to address many of our concerns at Fan Faire this year. I am always looking for feedback from other bruisers, to ensure that I do not only speak for myself when I address bruiser issues.

Hopefully there will be more good stuff to come as the next expansion draws closer.

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Novusod

Actually Bruisers were in much better shape at release then they are now. If you remember the dev Blackguard he played a bruiser and he put in a good word for us. Avoidance tanking actually worked back then even if it was a bit OP and our dps was up there with assassin. Also at release it wasn't all about the end game. Just getting to level 50 was not a trivial task it is now and the bruiser was pretty much the only class that could solo. The DoF expansion came out just 7 months after release so it didn't leave a lot of time to finish the grind and raid before the level cap was raised.

Also DoF was not a bad time to be a bruiser either. The Bruiser made it through the LU13 nerfs relatively intact because Blackguard would not allow his pet class to be nerfed. Also some DoF epics auto attacked with poison damage instead of crushing which made Bruisers the best tank while other tanks could only tank certain mobs. This was changed towards the end of DoF because of constant warrior whining. Looking back it was all down hill from there.

When KoS released avoidance tanking took a back seat to mitigation tanking . Brawler dps started to decline. Blackguard left halfway through KoS and then the nerfs just rolled in one after another. Hardly a LU would go by without another bruiser nerf. Players were tired of bruisers constantly farming PoA named so our solo'ing also took a hit. They took away our ability to cast shrug off on ourselves because someone complained. In EoF beta Bruiser was treated as the red headed step child of the game as they gave so called avoidance tanks NO uncontested avoidance and the Bruiser AA tree sucked balls. If you were a legacy Bruiser in late KoS and EoF you might have done OK but if you were a new up and coming bruiser you were screwed.

The bruiser was just left to rot after that in RoK and TSO. RoK was crap for bruisers unless you had your mythical and TSO saw all other tanks leap well past us. The bruiser needs some major improvements now to even remain a moderately raid viable class. Our best hope is that another dev like blackguard comes along and starts looking out for our class again because the current batch of devs clearly don't give a shit.

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Dhuin

Couple of questions - my perception thus far, having been a bruiser since December of last year and getting to 80/165AA/etc...

We're the best heroic instance tank, hands down. You can take two healers, a druid and a shaman, and have a bruiser tank in offensive without issue, and have group dps up where you'd have it with a single healer/plate tank/etc. BUT - you have the flexibility of having 2 healers in a group - far more stable than a group with only one. Our ability to stone-skin spell hits, lock encounters, lock single targets (even at my gimped 165aa) is pretty much second to none. I know when I was tanking WoE a month back or so, any time AE's would pop (we were learning the pulls at that time), it was a HUGE help for healers to not even have to worry about healing me as my stoneskin absorbed it.

On top of that, concerning Rock Skin - the CA everyone says is useless... I tend to run into a fight w/a named in offensive, pop Chi and knockout combo, parse ~5-6k dps on the thing for 20 secs, then pop Rock Skin. Give it 15 seconds to run when you have 75 avoid 60 mit (in offensive at this point), and then drop it, swap to mid or defensive stance, and by end of fight you're a fighter with a fight-wide parse of 3-4k. And this is w/T2 shard, 165aa, epic fabled, nothing fancy here.

Now, as for raids... are we really useless? Or do people just not realize what a bruiser brings to a raid? I've looked at the #'s - let's assume you're bringing a bruiser instead of an assassin. W/the gear levels I'm at in offensive and raid buffed, I'll pull 3-4k on a fight, 2.5-3.5 if it's really really extended and I tard-out on my CA rotation. Now, 5% CA improvement across the board for everyone in the raid, along with 5% accuracy on all melee and spell resistance...

I have to assume that makes up the difference in dmg between myself and an assassin - friend of mine is similarly geared to me and pushes 4-6k on his assassin w/fabled epic and T2 shard. 4-6k vs. 3-4k, you're looking at a 1-2k spread in dps loss raid-wide, throw in the 5% CA and accuracy...

And aren't you at least break even there?

Now, throw Shake Off into the mix on the MT....

Get to where you're mythed out and perhaps it's a different story, but a bruiser pushing 6k dps vs. an assassin at 11k, that 5k spread should be made up by the 5% up on all the other mythed heavy parsers... though I realize the dps curve is more improved by autoattack dmg at that point, you're still getting 5% on attacks, CA dmg... etc. etc. etc.

Am I off-base here? A lot of this is spreadsheet conjecture, so I'm sure Crab has some more hands-on parse analysis w/this stuff. So thoughts?

EDIT: thinking about it - there's almost 3 Tiers in the game that need to be balanced. T2 shard/fabled/pre VP, VP Set/Mythed/T4 TSO, and then Avatar+. I'm not even touching the Avatar+ realm with a 10 foot pole, as I haven't had enough exposure to those parses #'s to know anything about 'em.

Dhuin

You know, another thought I just had whilst taking a piss (yeah, working nights gives me a lot of time to think apparently)...

Scenario 1: "DPS" class instead of bruiser on raid.
MT goes down. Extra dps class... stabs mob and cries, hoping OT rescues it? But wait - OT is on other mobs. WIPE!

Scenario 2: Bruiser on raid
MT goes down (even w/shake-off... hah). OT is engaged. Bruiser pops 12 second 180AA ability, rescues mob immediately. @ 11 seconds, pops mythical. If healers don't get MT up in 20+ seconds, they FAIL at life.

So.... is it possible Bruisers are just hard to play, and most people don't realize what they can bring to both heroic and raid content?