The Hidden Forest

"A number of Items in Tier 7 and Tier 8 have had their skill mod values redesigned."

Were all of these 'nerfs' in a sense? Noticed both the mods on my zerkers items were reduced by about 2-4%

Id imagine its not going to take an absurdly massive impact on my dps and such, hopefully. However how come things were reduced?

Vampire Bane Earring down to 18% now. Might finally switch it out now. used to be an amazing dodge mod item. sad to see it go as it was nice for tanks, melee, and casters. dont see any reason to equip it over other options now but maybe thats a good thing. I guess what im saying is maybe these nerfs are not the whole picture and there is more in store. (hopefully like more items not more nerfs hehe )

Regards,
Sticky

I'd lean towards what sticky posted, it's probably adjustment in prep for new items. Like dsk tier 3... I hope that uses the plane of blood zone files.

The "nerfs" were not intended to be seen as "nerfs". Were some values lowered significantly? Yes, but lately the dev team has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to even out the itemization curve to streamline designing new items/content and the skill mods were one of the major things that we noticed needed to be addressed.

Right now the game plan for skill mods that we have layed out is as follows:
Pre-raid content:11%
Tier 1: 12%
Tier 2: 13%
Tier 3: 14%
Tier 4: 15%
Tier 5: 16%
Tier 6: 17%
Tier 7: 18%
Tier 8: 19%

So far only tier 7 and 8 have really been adjusted but the rest of the adjustments will be coming soon.

Are there still going to be the few exceptions? Heck yes, but the idea behind the changes was to even out and make sense of some of the randomness in the items available in game.

As always, the team appreciates all the feedback and understand the concerns/complaints.

I noticed the berserker shoulders from nadox were dropped from a +48% frenzy mod to a +19% mod. Was it intended to be dropped by 30% or was that overdone on accident?

It was intended. The shoulders are a T8 drop and were lowered to match the other T8 drops at 19%. The same thing happened to the zerker shoulders from T7, they were lowered from 45% to 18% to match their tiers skill mod value.

That was one of the major things that we found while reviewing the items. We had class specific zerker items with incredibly high % skill mods and other class items with normal (19%) skill mods. Thus the reason we made the changes

Semi related, but how are berserkers holding up with all the changes recently? Rogues/Monks got a lot of recent love, and I *think* zerkers took a hit off the changes that were made at this time but I had never parsed before the blur of axes changes. This seems like another decent hit (though I do understand where you are coming from as it makes sense, not complaining) to their dps.

Not very good, and neither are wizards. The previous top two DPS classes wouldn't hold a candle to evenly geared / donor'd rogue's in the long run. I always assumed the berserker mod was so much higher than the rogue shoulders because rogue's backstab is so much more powerful than frenzy. Unfortunately though wizards/berserkers even with all the important donor gear are dropping lower and lower compared to other classes (particularly rogues and monks).

Wizards in particular though. My wizards parse roughly 40% of what they did a few months ago.

Will totally agree with what Warlgor said. In preparation for the donor bp's monk, rogue, and even BL got new special attacks. Zerkers? had frenzy reduced to max of 3 swings. I understand that this was how it was supposed to be, but there was no compensation elsewhere. Zerkers are clearly not in Rogue class anymore, and I wouldn't be shocked if monks out dps'ed us now.
Wizards are in even worse shape. Don't even really use my donor wiz now. Thought about getting the donor robe to compensate, but eight casts every three minutes is peanuts compared to new mage and necro pets and the full minute of insane dps on the melee bp's.
Wow, I sound like a whiner! Oh well, facts is facts

It's alright, I don't mind sounding like a whiner In my opinion balancing is one thing but making the two classes (wizard/berserker) that dominated parses for years drop down to third and fourth place (way behind rogues and monks) seems more like punishment. I'd need a third hand to count all the wizard nerfs over the past few months.

edit:

lpdfan wrote:eight casts every three minutes is peanuts compared to new mage and necro pets and the full minute of insane dps on the melee bp's.

It is peanuts. The wizard donor BP is like an 8 cast pre-nerf gladi.