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Some thoughts about Slaying
First off, I pretty much only play priest. So this is the perspective I'm writing this from.
So, I was recently thinking about the slaying crystal and how it changed the playstyle of the party involved.
There is no argument that slaying doesn't give you the biggest damage boost a crystal could, but I utterly hate how it punishes healers.
Both healers have aoe heals that they suddenly cannot use or have to place extremely cautiously, have to take care with their lock-ons to not not get whomever is slaying, can only hope their target doesn't get a random crit if they do heal them, should they somehow fall to very low HP without dying, assuming they even brother at all. This is made worse by the awakening patch with priests unable to use divine charge (and effectively cutting them from slaying runs entirely).
Meanwhile whoever is slaying has to get below 50% HP, pray their healer doesn't do their job and live with the fact that most attacks will just one-shot them.
So, in short, what does slaying do:
- put a strain on the healer and how they do their job
- force the dps to near perfect at dodging
So, if these were to stay with slaying being changed, how would it work?
I came up with three ideas:
1. Take increased damage
This is fairly simple. What does being restricted to low HP mean? Any damage you take is much more meaningful.
What has the same effect? Taking more damage. Double damage has the same effect in the end because your effective HP stays the same.
Say you have 160k HP and the attack deals 60k. You're slaying and this is theory, so you're at 80k HP. You're now at 20k. next attack is 30k. You're dead.
Now we have you at full but with x2 damage taken. You're now at 40k, next attack is 60k so you're just as dead.
However, you'll always below 50%, so in reality this doesn't quite add up. Still, we'll keep this in mind and continue.
2. Reverse effect
Slaying only activates at 50% HP and below.
What if it only activated at 100%? Or maybe 95+% since HP costs are a thing. Suddenly the interaction with healers becomes reversed: Instead of actively avoiding you, keeping you at full HP is now a primary concern, as any scratch you take is a loss of damage and any dot becomes devastating.
This also directly leads to...
3. Reduced healing
From all sourced including pots. The idea here is that -all things combined- even a relatively weak attack would deal moderate damage and any healers' heal over time skills are suddenly not the answer. This then raises the question of whether they want to use their bigger heals on you, probably still overheal you by a lot and risk having a cooldown when needed, but getting your slaying to activate quickly, or play it save and wait for actual danger bigger than a dps loss.
let's combine these:
+X crit power while at 95% HP or above
+80% damage taken
- 50% healing received
In my opinion, this would keep the inherent risk of slaying, perhaps shift the danger from death to a more significant threat of downtime a bit, while eliminating the awkward need to get hit before a fight and the need for your healer to not to what they're supposed to. Numbers up to actual testing, of course.
So, I was recently thinking about the slaying crystal and how it changed the playstyle of the party involved.
There is no argument that slaying doesn't give you the biggest damage boost a crystal could, but I utterly hate how it punishes healers.
Both healers have aoe heals that they suddenly cannot use or have to place extremely cautiously, have to take care with their lock-ons to not not get whomever is slaying, can only hope their target doesn't get a random crit if they do heal them, should they somehow fall to very low HP without dying, assuming they even brother at all. This is made worse by the awakening patch with priests unable to use divine charge (and effectively cutting them from slaying runs entirely).
Meanwhile whoever is slaying has to get below 50% HP, pray their healer doesn't do their job and live with the fact that most attacks will just one-shot them.
So, in short, what does slaying do:
- put a strain on the healer and how they do their job
- force the dps to near perfect at dodging
So, if these were to stay with slaying being changed, how would it work?
I came up with three ideas:
1. Take increased damage
This is fairly simple. What does being restricted to low HP mean? Any damage you take is much more meaningful.
What has the same effect? Taking more damage. Double damage has the same effect in the end because your effective HP stays the same.
Say you have 160k HP and the attack deals 60k. You're slaying and this is theory, so you're at 80k HP. You're now at 20k. next attack is 30k. You're dead.
Now we have you at full but with x2 damage taken. You're now at 40k, next attack is 60k so you're just as dead.
However, you'll always below 50%, so in reality this doesn't quite add up. Still, we'll keep this in mind and continue.
2. Reverse effect
Slaying only activates at 50% HP and below.
What if it only activated at 100%? Or maybe 95+% since HP costs are a thing. Suddenly the interaction with healers becomes reversed: Instead of actively avoiding you, keeping you at full HP is now a primary concern, as any scratch you take is a loss of damage and any dot becomes devastating.
This also directly leads to...
3. Reduced healing
From all sourced including pots. The idea here is that -all things combined- even a relatively weak attack would deal moderate damage and any healers' heal over time skills are suddenly not the answer. This then raises the question of whether they want to use their bigger heals on you, probably still overheal you by a lot and risk having a cooldown when needed, but getting your slaying to activate quickly, or play it save and wait for actual danger bigger than a dps loss.
let's combine these:
+X crit power while at 95% HP or above
+80% damage taken
- 50% healing received
In my opinion, this would keep the inherent risk of slaying, perhaps shift the danger from death to a more significant threat of downtime a bit, while eliminating the awkward need to get hit before a fight and the need for your healer to not to what they're supposed to. Numbers up to actual testing, of course.
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Comments
If you take double damage, yes it technically gives you the slaying effect sure, but there's a key difference between taking double damage and being at half HP. If you're at half HP, you can still get to full HP. If you take double damage, you're capped at half HP. In other words, the former is 50,000 / 100,000HP but the latter is 50,000 / 50,000 HP.
This can be insanely detrimental in a situation where a player or the healer knows someone is going to take damage. Current slaying rules would let the healer get them to full HP and tank the hit. Your version would mean they die 100% of the time.
What's the purpose of reduced healing? That has no relation to how slaying currently works, and it makes no sense. The purpose of slaying is that in hard content, any attack should 1-shot you. The only thing reduced healing would do is make it more annoying to heal self-damage classes like Warrior or Zerker.
Speaking of, this would just be a huge pain in the as for healers overall if you have self-damaging classes in the party. Every single time a Zerker casts thunderstrike or cyclone you would have to heal them so they don't lose slaying. Can you imagine how many cyclones and thunderstrikes a Zerker casts in a single fight? No healer would want to run slaying with a Zerker ever again.
Same goes for Warrior with Combative strike, or to a lesser degree Archer.
The biggest point though, is that this runs contradictory to several slaying mechanics already in the game. Namely it would be a huge nerf to both Zerker and Slayer. Zerker and Slayer both get huge boosts in damage on their skills the lower their HP, Zerker with Vampiric Blow and Lethal Strike, Slayer with Fury Strike.
Although it's used far less, Warrior also gains a damage boost on Rising Fury with low HP too.
If slaying only works at 95%+ HP, then it becomes completely contradictory to these classes pre-existing slaying mechanics. You could argue they could simply remove the slaying mechanics on those skills and raise their overall power levels, but that would be an entire mess to balance properly.
Disregarding the balancing and technical aspects of your suggestion though, there's another social problem with the idea too. As it currently stands slaying is something both you and your parties healer have to opt into, if your healer doesn't agree or refuses, you can't do anything, they can just heal you to full HP and that's it.
Your suggestion though, would mean many players, especially try-hards or arrogant DPS players, would run slaying in ALL content and just expect the healer to keep them topped off or res them if they die. What can the healer do about it? They can't force the player to change crystal, and as long as they're wearing it they take double damage and receive half healing, it would be a nightmare for an average healer.
Of course you could just let them die, but so what? That just makes the dungeon longer and doesn't solve the issue.
Now you may say, but this is for pro's, normal players shouldn't use it in normal dungeons. But why not? In typical content, you're not supposed to take damage, you just do. But you are supposed to be max HP, so if you're supposed to be max HP who would use a pounding crystal when a slaying crystal is much better if the dungeon run is going properly?
Sure you might not follow that logic, but a lot of people probably would do exactly that with that exact reasoning.
Also, it would be nice to have a glyph or anything to remove self heal on priest from holy burst.
p.s. another idea is to have glyphs on heals to not let heals crit xD
> Correct me if i am wrong but divine charge heals? I am asking because it never healed me.
>
> Also, it would be nice to have a glyph or anything to remove self heal on priest from holy burst.
>
>
> p.s. another idea is to have glyphs on heals to not let heals crit xD
Heals party members for a crap ton, doesn’t heal the caster.
Finally enough, EU has a Slaying pot...reduces your HP to Slaying threshold and reduces healing received...
Just another thing we'll ever have ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can you link it? Or can you tell the name of it? This is amazing.
Maybe if we ask EME nicely enough then we might be able to get it as well.
You can find info on what it does at the bottom of this page: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZCFBXhuJw3xwH6wvLXQSOSCDf5LUUa1ekwwQtzwNFjI/edit#gid=1864283997
It's from the EU anniversary event.
I had this same idea a while back, and this would be the best solution tbh
However the only issue with forcing half HP is you can't top up for an incoming damage mechanic, an example would be the upcoming HM dungeon on the last boss he forces the party to take heavy damage and the easiest way to deal with this is to top everyone off and since it's a slaying party don't heal afterwards. Another example is slaying RMHM for Lachelith, the pushback and souls both deal a significant amount of damage that a slaying party counters by being healed right before the hit which then puts them back to slaying value, if you're forced to be at 50% and never any higher you won't be able to deal with certain mechanics.
Well some classes may be able to do it, like zerks, but over all.... rip slaying