v32 spell tuning & mastery synergies

[Kizo 41]

Preliminary observations:

The inconsistent range of targeted spells is somewhat awkward. It's probably best to streamline ranged focused spells on a mastery basis rather than have some be 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 or even 60. While I understand the appeal of ultra long or more middle-ranged caster abilities, the differences in different ability ranges within the same mastery can disrupt the natural flow of combat. From an outside perspective, this allows for the use of different spells depending on situation, but in practice it winds up being a bit fumbly and awkward as there aren't enough abilities for those extra long range fights even should you have 3 masteries, as your rotation is ultimately ruled by the minimum and median range of all of your abilities.

For instance, medical has abilities at 15 (heal), 45 (dmg), 40 (dmg) and 20 (heal) yard ranges. In a vacuum, that suggests a specific sort of positioning meta for healers in relation to their dps because you'll want them in range of your heals while simultaneously having the enemy in the range of your occasional contributing dmg and CC. However, that positioning meta exists in standard wow and other arena games where such ranged distances don't exist (all ranged is simply the same range), so it would be easier to just streamline all the abilities to 30 or 40 yards. The best way I can express that positioning meta is through an admittedly shitty paint graph:

In this sort of 3v3 arena situation, the healers are unable to damage eachother. If I had to put a number on the exact yard distance between the pillars in the Tol'viron Arena (the arena this graph is inspired from), I'd say there's about 70 or 80 yards between the pillars opposite to eachother, and about 50 yards to the pillar on the right hand side.

In this instance, the healers are already set up to heal their melee (who typically stand right at the edges of their range, at 40 yards) and have enough range to put pressure on enemy melee or ranged. Nevertheless, they still have to play carefully, because if the enemy melee withdraws and starts traveling towards the pillar so that the healer can save them, healer #2 can be caught out and killed. Snazzy.

In SS, however, there are some funky factors to all of this. For one, a lot of ranged aren't really ranged, but rather some close quarters caster who in this graph's situation actually can't kill their fellow ranged at all, because their spells don't have the sufficient range to allow for any sort proper positioning gameplay. The reason that this is annoying is because those ranged, such as genjutsu, have none of the advantages that ranged masteries like fire do in terms of distance, and exactly all of the disadvantages: when they're struck, their casts are slowed, and there's nothing to do about it.

Which, to illustrate what chakra jump is like, here's a frame of reference of how far it goes.: https://gyazo.com/f94fd4c9ba0b079b77f70c212b1a9b6f. Chakra jump is actually so long that it completely ranges genjutsu and other mid-ranged casters in 1 click. And if you range them, they have to recast. If you jump back and start hitting them, their cast times of 4 seconds are increased by 0.5s for the first and second hits (this is called pushback interrupt, also affects Chakra Recharge because it's a channeled ability).

Hopefully, you can now see what I mean when I say that mid range (10-25y ish) casting is awkward.

More specific observations:

- Lightning seems overnerfed when measured up to other masteries. A 15-20% buff might bring them back into range with others.

- Earth shield is really overpowered. It probably needs less stacks on it.

- In light of how short Kenjutsu's cooldowns are, the chakra cost of their abilities should probably be lowered by about 20%. It's very, very easy for them to run out of chakra.

- The range of healing is something I've brought to staffs attention already because of the recent Kama attempts, but I'd like to iterate that something around 30y is probably more sensible. From a PVP perspective, 30y is about the range of a chakra jump, so PVP healing is a bit complex (and by that I mean, annoying asf) in an open world setting where people are crazily repositioning, but that's fine: people should have to be careful of where they stand in relation to their healers. 30y in PVE is also big enough for healers to have a bit of wiggle room in larger boss areas like Vaga, MM, Kama and Raido while not being so completely braindead that all you need to do is stare at healbot nameplate and click names.

- Medical Chakra Protection, while interesting in concept, is actually a lure for wasting assloads of chakra. Sure, damage not taken is damage that you don't have to heal, but damage not taken does still need to be within 20 or 30% of straight up healing, or people will avoid shields like the plague. Currently, if you use Chakra Protection on a Raido Lightning strike, which does 3.5k damage on average, you stand to lose 5200 chakra from the shielding, as well as an added 252 chakra base cost for the spell. That's at least 50% of your chakra spent on counteracting 30% of the average chunin's baseline health pool, if my understanding of the spell based on the tooltip is correct. We heal about 1400 instant + 2600 HoT for a cost of 800 chakra. Relatively speaking, Chakra Prot accounts for 50% of my chakra, and 1 Mystic Palm accounts for 7% of it. I can do around 27k healing using Mystic Palm for the same cost as I can use Chakra Protection for. Suffice to say: nobody casts Chakra Protection anymore. We've already learned our lesson.

- It would be nice to get some kind of tank stance or aura that increases aggro generated. It doesn't need to reduce damage taken or anything like that, just increase aggro. The current tank meta of just switching things around limits fun mechanics to juggle, like bosses putting debuff stacks on tanks that need to be managed. Adding some sort of tank support that goes beyond reducing damage taken would open up more PVE diversity.

- If you add a group training dummy where we can wail on it for a few minutes (no rewards ofc) so that we can see how masteries align with eachother. It'll make it easier to compare damage throughput side by side. This won't be perfectly accurate, of course: while submitting feedback we'll still have to keep the design philosophy of the mastery in mind along with the things that aren't represented in recount like the amount of CC they have, but it will help a lot.

Edited January 9, 2022 by Kizo