@STAFF_Letitia, @STAFF_Yuri, @STAFF_Yuri, @STAFF_Ethan
Please go tell the developers of the game that they just trashed a whole Class with the latest Ktest-update.
For the reason why, I have to write a wall of text because there are just so many reasons, but all in all it’s because of 3 simple reasons:
- the Class has nearly no synergy with any other Classes in the Cleric tree
- the Class has no synergy with its own skills, every debuff based on Gematria/Notarikon overwrites the others and Merkabah doesn’t benefit from them either
- The Class performance is bad because most skills have ultra-high CD times, low duration and/or a hitlimit and the Class itself has less damage in 3 Circles than every other Class in the Cleric tree except Pardoner despite being a Rank 7 Class.
Now let’s get into detail:
1st point:
As we know, Kabbalist can do nearly nothing:
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we have Ein Sof to increase the healing capacity and max HP, as well as recover SP via an attribute. The skill is only permanent from level 11 onwards with the CD reduction of Statue of Laima or from level 13 onwards without Laima and still has only 1 instance, so in a party it does ± nothing else than boosting a characters HP or recovering his SP every 60 seconds.
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we have Gematria/Notarikon to induce a unique number debuff on the enemies. With the recent rebalancing, their skillevel was reduced to 1 as well as their CD time while adding 10 targets as the standard amount and increasing its area of effect.
However, what exactly is the benefit of this change?
The debuff does nothing on its own and all Kabbalist skills that do anything based on these debuffs have 30 seconds(Gebura), 35 seconds(Reduce Level, Double Chance) or 73 seconds(Clone) CD time. That must be some kind of mockery against the players who play Kabbalist, otherwise there is no explanation why one would improve the base debuff but doesn’t do anything for the follow-up skills,because spamming Gematria/Notarikon has the same effect as Magicarps “Splash”: nothing happens. -
we have Revenged Sevenfold that has the base problem of being reliant on both the enemy damage and luck to cast it right before getting hit by a strong skill simply because it only reflects 1 attack every 40 seconds; the skill is basically useless for PVE unless you’re made of paper mache,especially since Kabbalists Ein Sof can multiply his max HP, and the scaling simply doesn’t justify investing points into it for non-PVP builds, except for left-overs.
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we have Reduce Level, a skill that is one of the most useless skills in the game;
previous the the balance patches of this april, you were able to at least cut away a chunk of damage from bosses, but now that even boss monsters hit like frog jumping against your leg, it’s just total garbage, especially since it doesn’t stack with Geburah or Double Chance. -
we have Clone, which is even worse than Oracles Clairvoyance+Resetting combo for farming.
Not only has it a high CD time, it also has the problem of low duration, so the cloned monsters will disappear very fast. However, Kabbalist doesn’t have the capabilities to kill the monsters because he simply lacks useful damage skills, so even with well-transcended gears, unless your build features Sadhu C3, Monk C2 or Bokor C3, chances are slim that you can actually utilize the skill.
It also doesn’t work on special mobs like Crystal Mines mission Mirtislampa,Skulls or Scaps (or however the spiders are called) where the skill could have an actual use… -
we have Double Chance, which is pretty good in theory, were it not for the high CD time, small AoE, short lasting time of 15 seconds and bias against multihit skills, which are the majority of Cleric tree skills, because it only multiplies one single hit of these by the number calculated instead of the total hits. The worst feature is that it is always triggered by any kind of attacks, be it autoattacks of companions, summons or other players, wasting the effect away and making it useless in combination with Classes like Bokor/Paladin or in parties.
Why does Zealots Fanatism/Fanaticism apply to all hits of a multihit skill but Double Chance doesn’t? Both skills are supposed to be ranked as Rank 8 skills[if we consider that there won’t be a real Rank 9 anymore, all skills of Rank 7 Classes appearing at Circle 2 (i.e. with the Rank 8 update) are supposedly also Rank 8 skills, because they were introduced at Rank 8], aren’t they?
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we have Geburah, which is a well-designed skill in theory(if I understood the skills effect right), but with the fatal flaw of again a hitlimit and a long CD time, which makes it again useless in combination with no CD Gematria/Notarikon. The hitlimit has the same problem as Double Chance, it triggers on autoattacks of e.g. zombies or party members.
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last but not least we have Merkabah, one of the worst if not the worst designed damage skill of the whole Cleric tree; not only has it a high CD time and a low damage capability (level 5 has a capability of 2175% every 35 seconds, which is less damage than level 5 Zaibas if we calculate the damage per second [Zaibas’ 73,8 vs Merkabahs 62,1]), it also has an interruptible casttime, which most Cleric skills don’t have.
All these skills don’t really benefit any Cleric Class, simply because they are too niche to be of use.
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Ein Sof basically is only useful for a Paladin C3 that takes damage for others within the Barrier with its devotion attribute; other than this, it’s a cheap Heal boost and/or SP potion, but if you’re using Chapparition cards and thus SP potions, it’s not even a good substitution for pots.
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Double Chance has nearly no synergy because most Cleric skills are multihit skills and thus have a low average hit damage; possible synergy exists only with Oracles Twist of Fate, Inquisitors God Smash and Sadhus Astral Body Explosion. For a skill that mainly only boost other trees damage, it is way too much of an investment and barely useful to the actual player. It also doesn’t work with Merkabah since the effect is triggered by the 100% matk damage on touch when the monster gets near a chariot.
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Gematria/Notarikon have no effect on other Cleric Class skills.
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Clone is also pretty useless for other Classes, the only purpose I could think of is multiplying a single monster to have a higher conversion-chance with Paladins Turn Undead. For farming the skill is just too restricted with reliance on a high number and the high CD time.
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Reduce Level has no synergy with any Class at all, there is no benefit from lowering a monsters level.
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Merkabah,.even with its C2 attributes maxed, has little to no real synergy with most skills, unless they have a really high hitcount (Zaibas,Cure,Carnivory);
The magic defence boost is too weak to be viable, a level 1 Barrier scroll has 100% uptime and basically the same effect.
The stone status ailment debuff against cursed enemies is way too short to be of any use,too, even in combination with Bokor or Featherfoot. -
Revenged Sevenfold basically only synergizes with Sadhus Out of Body state where your defence drops to 0 and/or with Bokors zombies that allow you to have more than 1 reflect.
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Gebura is not even worth a single skillpoint. It adds +100% damage at level 5 for debuff number amount of hits. Putting some points into DEX or buying a Quicken scroll has more impact than this skill. This is the ultimate trolling effort against this Class.
2:
As I’ve already mentioned most problems under 1. , I’ll put a quick summary here.
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Double Chance doesn’t synergize with Kabbalists only damage skill, because its aura will trigger the effect, leading to a ridiculous amount of damage multiplied. Even if one manges to multiply the damage of one chariot explosion, it will be a maximum of [335% x (1 + attribute level/200)] x (number of Gematria/Notarikon-debuff x Double Chance skillevel/10),
which is a minimum damage of 1005%(no attribute, number 3 debuff or lower with new attribute, level 10 Double Chance) and a maximum of 5197% (level 100 attribute, level 6 Merkabah, level 11 Double Chance, number 9 debuff); Bokor e.g. can deal the same damage with 6 overheats of Effigy level 5 (level 100 attribute) [i.e. within 10 seconds]. -
Ein Sof synergizes with no other Kabbalist skill, no skill requires you to sacrifice HP or scales with your HP.
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Double Chance, Gebura and Reduce Level overwrite each others debuff effects.
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Gematria&Notarikon have low CD times and large AoEs, although all skills based on their effects don’t have these features, making them useless most of the times when the debuffs are on CD.
They also have no effect on the other Kabbalist skills like Ein Sof or Revenged Sevenfold.
Well, lets start with the CD times.
Except for Oracle, the other unfathomable Cleric Class, Kabbalist has the highest CD times on most of his skills. With the exception of Gematria and Notarikon, which are useless on their own, there is not a single Kabbalist skill with less than 30 seconds CD. 30 seconds is only the lowest limit because the new skill Gebura has 30 seconds CD, otherwise the lowest limit would be 35 seconds.
The majority of Kabbalists 9 skills suffers from this high CD time, a total of 3 skills.
The other 3 skills have 40 seconds, 60 seconds and 73 seconds CD time respectively.
However, this isn’t due to their effects. If we exclude Ein Sof/Merkabah [with slow movement speed attribute active] for being useful, the other skills are basically just short-lived buffs with neglectible effects.
Looking at other Cleric Classes, they have a lot of high damage and/or high utility skills with less limitated benefit with a way lower average CD time. And if a Class has one or two skills with high CD times, the Class usually also features one or two skills with low CD times, especially damage skills. I don’t see a reason why a skill with such low damage numbers, as the single damage skill of the Class, should have such a high CD time (remember, the CD time was 45 seconds not long ago,which was even worse).
Next is the damage. We’ve seen the numbers up there already, so there is just a single statement to make: abyssmal.
@STAFF_Letitia, @STAFF_Yuri, @STAFF_Yuri, @STAFF_Ethan
IMC made two official statements what they planned to achieve with Class Rebalancing and Skill Rebalancing, but Kabbalist was never even object to one of them.
They neither tried to give it enough damage to be as viable as its counterpart Plague Doctor, nor did they consider their own skill rebalance guidelines to apply to Kabbalist skills.
If we give the kid a name, those two posts were the biggest lies ever told by the developers.
We at the dev team feel the need to reduce this ‘class disparity’.
We have implemented five class patches so far. These are the goals we have been aiming to achieve with them:
Each class should have its own characteristics and roles.Adjustments should be carefully planned to avoid one class dominating its rank or being left out, and to achieve a fairly equal distribution of classes in each rank.Rather than letting one class become too good to the point of self-reliance, we should devise a plan to encourage different types of classes to work together and develop new play strategies.
Point 1 is obviously a lie, Kabbalist has no role in the game, at least unless being bad at everything is a role. Maybe they should rename the Class into Harlequin or Scaramouche?
Point 2 is also an obvious lie.
At no point in the history of the game was Kabbalist equal to Plague Doctor or any other Rank 7 Classes.
In fact, it was always even worse than several lower-ranked Classes. And although the Kabbalist is heavily relying on other Classes to reduce his CD times and to produce damage, Plague Doctor never was forced to rely on any other Class, it was 100% self-suffcient and just became more OP with the introduction of Hungry Velnia Monkey cards, which boost his DPS by up to 30% with 60% uptime.
Point 3 is the greatest lie, Kabbalist isn’t self-sufficient and still bad, even in combination with other Classes, because of the many restrictions his buffs and debuffs have. Basically this means adding Kabbalist to your build destroys the character.
Meanwhile, Plague Doctor is too good to pass, he’s immortal, debuff-immune and deals tons of damage, which is everything the game needs.
With Rank 9, he even got a Pain Barrier skill to make him knockback-immune,
to cover the last weak point he still had, which created a complete antithesis to points 1, 2 and 3.
Now about the skill balancing
According to this list, Merkabah has the Rank advantage (Rank 7 skill), the time advantage (longer attack duration, longer CD time), the casting advantage (long casting time, immovable while casting, casting interruptible) and the other advantage (increases with more difficult skill casting conditions, increases when target can flee from multihits), so the skills modifier should be pretty high,right?.
Yet it is still inferior to even Zaibas, the new Divine Stigma, Effigy, Smite, Conviction, Incineration,etc which don’t cover most of these points. Effigy level 5 can even deal the same damage as Merkabah level 5 in 5 seconds!
How can this be if this list is not a blatant lie told to our faces?
If they would’ve lived up to their own guidelines, Kabbalist wouldn’t be so bad, especially in the damage department, as he would’ve featured equal damage capabilities to Plague Doctor.
That’s why I have to say this: Kabbalist is dead and you are the ones who’ve murdered him.
The one who studied the revelations of the goddesses the most and invested everything he had into perfectioning the divine power that was granted to him by said goddesses was brutally backstabbed by them by giving him seemingly “holy” chariots that break on contact by default, with only his hard work,silver and a few wooden pannels to restructure the mainframe making them useful, and explode with nearly no damage dealt.
His studies of the eternal energy made him near-immortal, but his calculation and reinterpretation of the divine properties/energy was harshly jammed by the goddesses by making most of his skills time-limited or hit-limited, with weak effects limited to only numbers between 0 and 9,
because in TOS the goddesses propagate it’s incovenient to use larger numbers(or because the mental capacity was forcefully altered to only use numerals instead of real numbers?).
Last but not least they gave every good thing they saved by withholding it from the Kabbalist to the Plague Doctor and sent him to exterminate the demons in the Kabbalists stead, because the Kabbalist was too pure/naive to protest his injust treatment.
Even Ijobs trials were a joke compared to this journey of harshness and injustice.
Getting beaten in this game gets you nowhere. The whole game becomes more and more of a DPS race against timers (ET, challenge mode instance) where Classes without damage can’t participate. By not giving equal damage, you’re openly discriminating against certain Classes/builds and robbing them of the ability to participate in the new content you develope.
Kabbalist is one of them.
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