Make PB Big Bang an Elemental Magic Attack

Currently, PB's BB move when it faces left is a physical attack. I am suggesting that it be changed to an elemental magic attack so as to bolster DK survivability and alleviate the burden of zerking via their passive Elemental Resistance skill (40% damage reduction). The element type that it should be changed to is not particularly important, though I suppose it might as well be ice or lightning to throw a bone to the IL AMs with their Partial Resistance.

BB does roughly 18.5k damage, or about 15.7k damage with Achilles (15% damage reduction), meaning it's rather difficult to reach the sweet spot where one can survive a BB without potting back up while zerking. If BB were an elemental magic attack, a DK would take only about 9.5k damage. This would enable DKs to almost fully swap to ginseng roots as they would recover 12k and remain within the zerking threshold while still being able to tank a BB. The end result is that DKs now have an easier time zerking and are unlikely to die to anything apart from PB touch damage and not potting back up when taking mini bean damage.

This change is not meant as a penicillin that will solve all the ails that plague DKs in PB but just as an easy to implement change that conveniently has no other consequences except in relation to DK survivability, and I would hope that the DK class would receive further changes should this change go through (e.g. scalable zerking). While this change is unlikely to have an impact on the theoretical ceiling of DK dpm in PB body under optimal conditions, it will have a real impact on dpm in runs that look like the one below.



If DKs can readily tank BB while zerking, then their survivability and zerk uptime is no longer contingent on visibility of the bean and knowing which way it is facing at all times and may make them less unwelcomed on more optimized runs. It will also improve the situation for people newer to PB who may be asked not to zerk at all for their first few runs given how critical their survivability is to their party.

Pros:

• easy to implement
• scope of change limited to DKs only, i.e. no unintended consequences or ripple effect

Cons:

• arguably trivializes the zerking mechanic by largely removing the risk factor in PB

 

That's true, I didn't consider that. Hopefully the upcoming defense revamp will alleviate that disparity so as to make this point moot.

The only way to address that would be reducing PB touch damage by at least 30%, which seemed a much more radical change than what I was proposing. Most sensible DKs will also just pot up and not risk zerking when the bean is well obscured and it's also not practical to always pot up to between 15.8 and 16.5k hp so I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with the characterization of this change being just "making something that can already be done easier". That being said, significantly reducing PB touch damage is a change I could get behind and I'm not sure anyone would take issue with it either. I think both of these changes in conjunction could be a good thing. Straight up lowering damage of attacks for all classes might be a bit of a slippery slope though, for better or worse.