Thoughts on Sacrifice?

I think 5% is fine. I could see it being useful when you're just above your comfort zone in terms of health, and you want to hit that spot or somewhere close to it. Sacrifice is a good use for that.

Personally I think Dragon Blood and Aura of the Beholder should be our main way to keep our health slowly rising. Like Dragon Blood should sap 0.5-0.9% of our health every 4 seconds, Aura should heal about 1% every 4 seconds. Or some increment of that. maybe 4.7% and 5% respectively, but make it so that we use Sacrifice to knock ourselves down to the health we want, and Aura would bring us back quickly if not for Dragon Blood trying to keep us in the sweet spot for as long as possible.

 

I was going to make a similar thread about Sacrifice and how bad it is after what happened here yesterday.

https://youtu.be/sa-nh19K0Kg

20k to 3k to 1hp to ded, all within a split second, un-reactable and feelsbad.



Head dips down so Sacrifice misses and when it comes back up, i hit it for 114k (20k to 3k HP) and die.



Sacrifice is luck based because it doesnt matter what style of swing connects, how the damage is buffed from potions (I was on Gelt), nor does it take into account critical hits from Sharp Eyes.

Easy fix would add more invincibliy/intangibility after Sacrifice connects, this gives the player a chance to react to the damage they took (since it is basically a random amount) and can potion or hold that HP without the fear of dying.

Currently you can die from Sacrifice + 1/1 or Sacrifice into frame 1 damage (like what happened in the clip above). Both are bad ways to die and remove all skill elements from the most skill-based Warrior class in the game.

NOTE: My skill level on Sacrifice is 3

 

However, the real problem is the current implementation of the non-AFK gameplay from the most recent patch.

Even if you attack with 5 of anything, you cannot use Dragon Roar. This forces DK players to use sacrifice in dangerous situations when they could have just-as easily used a potion, then used Dragon Roar to lower their HP by the fixed amount. This is much safer and more reliable.

But now we are unable to apply this technique.

 

I do agree with the fact that Sacrifice is extremely inconsistent when it comes to HP managing. The 5 hits thing is affecting more regular players than afk ones imo. I used to roar and heal back at some bosses, but now gotta reposition as well (which is quite annoying taking into account beholder healing and stance NOT working 90% of the time). I commented this before in the previous drk discussion. Roar is nice when you need to lose 9k hp straight up, but would be nice to have a way to cut off 2-3k hp consistently.

 

They re-worked Guardian in the most recent patch to be way more non-griefing, I don't see why not Sacrifice as well.

 

I suggested it in the mega dk feedback thread.

Sacrifice with a cool down that gives iframe and reduce hp that’s consistent. Maybe it could drop it to 1 HP and deal damage that scales off of the HP lost. This make dks even more technically interesting. The CD can be adjusted to accordingly. I suggested 20 seconds at max level in the thread.

 

however, the no. of drks at pb is still more than the no. of heroes+pallies.
hmm, why do heroes and pallies mains not "suggest more stuff"?

 

It would indeed be clutch where it protects you from being stunned/sed/death which would be OP if it had no CD. The damage from it could be comparable to Panic? No CD would also turn dragon roar into a mobbing/card hunting skill only.

 

tossing iframe is like giving drks a shifter

 

Idk man, right now sacrifice is unreliable because of its range, the variability in hp lost, and also because you can literally get hit the next frame and have no time to react. With roar, you have a safety net.

 

true sacrifice: berserk damage+100% but will die 5 minutes later.

 

...

It seems more interesting to give sacrifice a clutch functionality (which also improves zerk uptime) rather than give it what roar already does.

 

Everything I'm going to say here is with the caveat that I've only very recently hit 4th job on a DrK and I have basically no bossing experience on them. Pretty much the only bossing I've done is bigfoot hunting. I do have an on-paper understanding of how they play at the more commonly run bosses, but no actual experience of it.

To me, it seems reasonable that both Dragon Roar and Sacrifice are skills to get your HP down to maximise your zerk. Dragon Roar takes a lot of HP and is good to get you down quickly. Sacrifice takes a relatively small amount of HP and is useful to fine-tune to the exact amount of HP you want. It would therefore make sense for Sacrifice to not be RNG based at all. If it always consumed a fixed % of your maximum HP, that would mean it's entirely in the player's control. This would mean you can actually calculate an ideal roar and sac combo to get to an exact amount of HP from full HP (especially if the % scales with skill level still. You could even SP reset to get sac to a different level for different content if you're willing to be that sweaty). Before the changes to zerk, there wasn't much issue with sac being a little RNG based because
1) You could more reliably damage down with just roar. Two casts would bring you to 40% HP, which put you in zerk range
2) The exact HP number matters less because you only needed to be below 50% HP and don't get any further damage bonus for hanging around right on the edge of the HP you need to survive. Doing a random amount of damage to yourself didn't matter so much since you wanted to be in an HP range rather than as close to a specific number as possible.

I'd be against the idea of giving Sacrifice iframes or anything like that. iframes or post-hit invincibility would be highly exploitable, I think. If the HP loss in entirely in the player's control, too, the need for this kind of disappears. If you lower your health too much and die as a result, that's on you.

With regards to how the skills were intended to be used (someone mentioned something about Neckson's intent, but even if they hadn't, I can see pushback from it not being how the skill works originally): I think it's very hard to say exactly what Neckson intended with Sacrifice. I would presume that 3rd job skills were designed and probably even published before 4th job skills were even considered. Either way, Zerk doesn't work how it was originally designed, so Neckson's vision kind of goes out the window anyway. Rather than talking about intent, I think it's best to stick to talking about how things actually work and are used in Legends.