A few reasonable suggestions to fix the Knight class

[Steele_S322]

I've been playing for over a year now... have read a lot on the boards, but haven't posted much. I'll never claim to be God's Gift to the Knight class by any stretch, but I do try hard to be a student of the game's mechanics and my friends know me as someone they can come to for technical & playstyle advice. I'd like to make a couple of suggestions that would "fix" many of the garishly broken Knight abilities, while retaining Knights' identity as defense/bleed focused, so no, this isn't about adding ridiculous healing or giving knights extra AOE attacks, a freeze ability, and WB insta-kill.

1) Enhanced Block: if this were tweaked to "+10% Block rating (note: NOT block chance!), 100% chance to restore 3% HP after block" (1/2 pts), and 5% HP after block (2/2 pts)... this would be a slight boon to lower level knights, and a small but serviceable boost to high level knights, helping carve out our defensive persona while not encroaching on the Mage's healing identity.

2) Reverse Damage: this ability is completely worthless by the time it's maxed out, because it simply doesn't scale with skyrocketing character HP from L50+. Since this is a defensive tree, reward Knights for concentrating on their defense! Keep the same Rage cost and perhaps increase the cooldown to 15-20sec, change the effect to: "Spikes erupt from your armor; for the next 3 attacks, your attacker takes 15% of your PDEF in damage" (1/3 pts), 25% (2/3 pts), 30% (3/3 pts). The highest Knights in the game have just over 30-33k PDEF, but for most of the rank & file it's in the mid-upper 20k range; this would give the typical defensive Knight a strategic ability that would deal 5-8k reverse dmg per attack for 3 attacks, revitalizing a currently unused ability. Scattershot and Purge effects would still neutralize this buff.

3) Whirlwind: in its current form, the dmg-to-rage cost ratio is horrific. We're not Archers, and we're not Mages, so the ability shouldn't get a huge boost, but it needs to at least be worth using... and that means it needs to either do a little more damage and/or have a lower rage cost. I would suggest lower the rage cost to 35-40 and give it a 5-10% bump in dmg output.

4) Puncture: this Talent's bleed effect (% chance on Whirlwind) needs to NOT be subject to opponent PDEF damage reduction; it currently seems to be. When coupled with the issues that Whirlwind has to begin with, this Talent loses its viability quickly.

5) Shadow Thrasher: the damage is reasonable for its Rage cost, but the flat-damage bleed QTE on this (similar to the situation with Reverse Damage) makes this ability lose its luster even before L40. This is supposed to be the Knight's rage-dump ability, in the same vein as Thunderer (slow) and Armor Pierce (PDEF reduction); instead of 5-stackable of flat 120dmg, change it to either 5-stackable of 1% opponent MAX HP or 5-stackable of 2% your PATK, duration 5 turns. Purification effects would still neutralize the debuff.

6) Intercept: once players are in their PvE set, this ability loses much of its sting; I'd propose increasing the ability's base Rage reduction by 10 (basically make the current QTE a permanent effect) and also change the QTE to a 3-stroke combo "opponent suffers -10 rage per action for the next three actions." Sylph form would still grant immunity to the Rage-reduction effects of Intercept, and the proposed debuff would be removable with Purification effects.

I know not everyone will agree with my ideas, and I also know there are plenty of trolls lurking around here, but I welcome constructive feedback and hope that the gods-that-be will see this and seriously consider (maybe even fast-track!) at least some of these proposed Knight improvements.

Respectfully,

Steele
L68 Knight, originally of S322
Asst. Guild Master of chaos

[Billy_McF]

3% hp regain on Block that procs 100% of the time, are you serious?

A high level knight can easily have 200k hp, that equates to a 6000 HP heal on every hit. So your troops hit for 1000, and the knight gains 6000, then you hit a knight for 7k and they only take 1k damage. So your attacks are doing a gross 0 damage.
Maybe you need to look at a high level knight and see how hard they are to kill for ANY class, before suggesting all these changes.

Knights are hard to play I agree, but when built correctly they are nearly impossible to beat at lv70+.

As for No2. You think the top knights only have 33k Pdef? Well don't know who your looking at, but on EU servers they are pushing 40k. And the average knight has around 32k Pdef. So you need to look again at your figures.

finally No6. Intercept is one of the best skills in the game, depending on how the knight uses it. Not only does it steal rage, it actually makes the opponent miss a turn, if they have already cast a skill before being hit with Intercetp. You also seem to think that every class gains rage like a knight. Archers in particular have problems gaining rage without the PvE set equipped, and even then they only gain 10 rage per action, and an additional 5 for a crit hit. Taking 10 rage for 3 turns would in essence make it a 3 turn basic attack only scenario.

[Anubi0s]

1) Enhanced Block: Its ok the way it is.

2) Reverse Damage: ok, this is **** after lvl 40. 1000 reflect is nothing. should be change to %. Like 5% of own HP*. (4% + 1% from QTE).

3) Whirlwind: yeah, the AoE dmg is too low, and since it has long CD, should be raise to 105% + 25% from QTE (now its up to 95% + 25% from QTE).

4) Puncture: only CD shortens matters. Its ok the way it is now.

5) Shadow Thrasher: The dmg is ok, but QTE is garbage, should be 1% of own hp*, stackable up to 5%

6) Intercept: its ok the way it is.

7) Agoran Shield: the QTE is garbage after lvl 40. Should be 5% more (for a total of 25% absorb dmg). (now its only +800).

*Cause WBs and other bosses has to much HP to be base on enemy HP.

[Doranos89]

Billy_McF, I'm not sure of what you are arguing about with the block thing...what the OP said was basicly keep it the way it is right now, but also give +10% for the block rating (that's the number for the block stats...). For the lvl 2 for Enhanced Block, we already get 4% hp back each time we block (and the OP proposed to make it 5% hp back instead of 4%). Though, I do agree with what you say about the Intercept skill; mages and archer don't get as much rage than we do as knight, so that -10 rage debuff would be just too much strong against mages and archers, like you said. What might been good (but I'm not sure, maybe someone else would view a flaw in it that I don't see yet) would be to actually give you something back, like +5 rage for x turn or something like that... but otherwise, Intercept should stay the way it is...