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Comments
Ninja and gunner are on the easier stronger class side. You WILL see better performance from them because BHS tossed the whole "challenging class should give better performance" thing every other game has out of the window. THOUGH gunner's main dps move, Burst fire, is ping dependent too. Heard people macro it, though. Not sure if that works.
Before Ninja patch Slayer was the top end of the dps charts for a long time. Only Brawler was far ahead of Slayer with Gunner being barely ahead of Slayer. Every other class was pretty far behind on average compared to these three classes. Which is why if you look at balance changes Gunner received none when it came to damage and Slayer received minimal changes to their damage compared to the other buffs the classes got. Of course, due to these changes Slayer is no longer 2nd/3rd by a fair margin.
I would also like to point out it doesn't matter if a class on paper can do x damage (that's if your statement is even accurate), what ultimately matters is how it actually performances when put to practice. With things being used, Berserkers are not completely dominating Slayer or Archer in damage for NA. They're pretty close.
i.imgur.com/W31V0GC.png SSHM Pahogear: Noktenium + Food + the run itself was pretty average = could be better
Berzerker worries about crit chance of thunder strike, evasive smash and too many buffs to keep an eye on.
Namely, that Zerk feels so dependent on RNG that it hurts sometimes. Fail to crit three times in a row or something, and you can enjoy watching your overall DPS plummet compared to everyone around you who attacks twice a second. I love the way it feels to land a big thunder strike crit, but honestly it feels like a slot machine class and I can't enjoy it like I used to. The amount of times where I've used my quickcarve, every buff in my arsenal, had a mystic standing right next to me with her crit auras on, and still hit multiple consecutive white numbers despite having over +300 CF is just ridiculous. I'm not asking for 100% crit rate, but come the [filtered] on. The passive crit boost given to archers should have gone to zerks as well, since zerk dps consists of charging a couple of skills for a few seconds each and hoping they crit every time.
Then you have just, this massive jump in playing style from the leveling process to the endgame process. All classes go through this to an extent, but for zerk it's just terrible. You go from critting constantly with your avatar weapon and being able to block basically every boss mechanic, to never critting at all and blocking nothing meaningful. Places like ABHM, Manglemire, and WH are great examples of what this game needs more of -- dungeons that allow players with a block to use their block effectively. I get that most classes don't rely on dodging, but when you make your hardest dungeon nothing but iframeable one shots, you can't look around afterwards and wonder why no one's playing zerk anymore.
Even in capable hands, zerk survivability is shaky. Zerks have two iframes if you're not counting unbreakable will's animation (which really -- please. The cd on that is ridiculous.), and those two iframes share a cooldown for some absurd reason meaning unlike ninja which can roll twice in a row and then teleport behind the boss and then do thousand cuts effectively iframing four times in a row effortlessly, zerk can roll once. And then that same zerk can roll again in about 5-6 seconds at best. We also have a low HP pool, and our attacks drain from that tiny reservoir with each overcharge, so I hope you brought potions or priestbuffs with you to ghilie and IoD dailies. In this recent patch as well, developers decided for no reason to spit in our collective faces by making us take more damage from bosses for no reason, while allowing reapers -- reapers! -- to take less damage from bosses. The tradeoff for that relatively poor survivability is supposed to be big burst DPS. It's like the devs saying "hey, you're gonna have a hard time avoiding everything in this place and it's gonna hurt a lot, and you won't even have a party endurance debuff you can offer like archers or warriors, but what you do have to offer are your big critical hits." Instead, that crucial tradeoff isn't even assured because you're constantly at the mercy of RNG just like every other class, except every other class has extra things they bring to the table besides just their DPS, and every other class can attack swiftly and therefore rolls the crit dice twice, maybe even three times per second. Zerks have crit glyphs, but so does every other class. And god help you if you're still gearing and your crit factor is below 200, because then the drop in DPS is just massive. I've seen people quit zerk over this alone, when they realized how much they would have to minmax and push that crit factor slowly higher if they wanted a chance at better dps, since that was their only real option. There is no complex rotation to practice and improve with like warrior. There's just charging up and hoping you crit, and then feeling good if you do and bad if you don't.
Buffs to thunder strike are great, don't even get me wrong. I'm grateful for the "additional" roll as well, even if it shares a cooldown and doesn't really feel additional. But that doesn't erase the underlying issue with zerks: that you're EXTREMELY reliant on good gear and an expensive high crit build, and even then you can still have bad luck [filtered] all over you waaaay more often than it should for all the gold and time you've invested in the class. Like, I love the class but I've started getting really bitter and frustrated about it recently. How do you hit white with over 300 CF? Like, seriously? Then I look at gunners who don't even need 200 cf because their skills are made with extra crit just built in, or reapers who get a triple crit glyph on their skills even though they can attack multiple times in a second, etc. etc.
It's just so aggravating how the developers do all this baIls to the wall crazy OP bulIshit with other classes, but when they get to zerk suddenly they want to talk about balance. Like zerk tanking seemed centered around making a tank but not making it better or even comparable to lancers, so zerk tanks turned out HORRIBLY and now nobody plays it and nobody ever wants them for anything. No leash, no enrage, one awful shout, one of the worst endurance debuffs in the game, terrible dps output. But you know what? I get that. Lancers specialize in tanking; they should be superior. But then, sure enough, a month later they made brawler which outshined lancer in every way AND outshined DPS classes. So for brawler, being the best tank AND the best DPS class in the game was perfectly acceptable. But they couldn't even give zerk tanks a way to crowd up adds because when it came time to give zerks something, suddenly the devs decided to obsess over fairness. Or you look at this patch, buffs to TS in pve came along ... at the price of gutting it by 30 [filtered] percent in pvp! Meanwhile, reapers get buffs without even needing a tradeoff. Reapers were never in a bad place; they just, got buffs! For no reason! Just, here you go, have some buffs that drastically change your rotation and allow you to increase your dps by an insane amount! But oh, suddenly when they get to zerks, then the devs care about balance. Then it's all about tradeoffs and "oh if you excel in X area then you can't excel in Y" and "oh if you're good at this then X class will feel bad." Where are these devs when BHS is rolling out new classes or giving buffs to classes that don't even need them?
Ugh. This post made me sad. Now I see zerkers as the femani of classes. >.<
But there's nice stuff to-do. Off tank prima at df is nice. Dsl is pretty fine as well, and I carried twice already, once against a gunner and a reaper. You can even tank 2,3 stars dungeon at instance match. Some people are so on auto mode that they are pleased when they see you out of the box handling everything fine.
If you get a main class with hard gameplay and difficult to master, you have these uncommon experiences, your learning curve is huge, and that can help you be better at many classes. Then, when things improve like go zerk patch again, you are ready to rock. :awesome:
Some people didn't like the challenge. It's alright as well, but i do, and that's fine I guess. I'll just be different. That's all.
It's really not, I've seen some 20-30ms zerks that are damn good with there class when I was on AV (can't speak too much for TR) that would wreck shop against all but the absolute best archers and slayers.
Low ping is a godsend to zerks.
Anyway, I'm starting a fund for me to move to Chicago from Spain, please donate (jk lol).