Voice of Kaez Timer (Hijacked: Terror of Kaezul)

Kakos

Dalayan Adventurer
With all the new awesome spells SK's have gotten I've now come to an issue that I don't have the spell slots to utilize them. A solution I think is if you could make the Voice of Kaz timer longer than (10min approx now I believe) it is and make it so that you don't have to wait 10 min approx for the recast. That way I'm not forced to keep that spell on my spell bar and can make room for one of the new spells.

As I see it now the list of essential spells to have are:

1) Deflux (Sublimate Soul is great, but because of the recast on it, deflux is still needed for when healers are out of mana or die). Would love to have room for both.

2) Wave of Enfeeblement (IMO, absolutely necessary to get initial attention on multiples so that they don't overrun the healers)

3) Veil of Dis/Marlow (new spell that I think is essential to have now)

4 and 5) Terror of Kaz/Marlow, need at least two terrors on spell bar, some people use more, but I find these two with AA assault of shadows is enough

6) Voice of Kaz (15% aggro... do I want to give that up to make room for one of the new spells, just too important to, changing timer so it's a standard buff would help)

7) Shout of Agony (This one I am considering dropping.. but wow does this come in handy when all hell breaks loose, so handy I think it's essential to have)

8) Feign death

So what is missing is either a choice of:

Sublimate Soul
Vortex of Death
Brazen Bull
Touch of the Succubus

Anyway, just wanted to get some feedback on this, would Dev's consider changing Voice so SK's can make room for one of the above on their spell bar? As far as I see the only reason for the short duration of the spell and the long recast is to force SK's to have it on their bar, I'd like to see that changed.

Thanks
 
In a raid, my spell line up consisted of:

Terror of Kaezul
Terror of Marlow > Pretty essential with timing of Assault of Shadows
Terror of Death
Voice of Kaezul
Vortex of Death - Can't skip out on our limited utility
Deflux - Goes without saying
Shout of Agony
Death Peace


There are a few situations where Shout or FD could be taken off, and a few more where tanks could get away without using Voice. I really do agree that the wait time/duration of Voice is a huge hit to it's usefulness, as you pretty much need it up 100% of the time, just in case your MT wants it, or you've got some situation that demands it.


But at the same time, it's a situation all spell-using classes face, and we shouldn't be any different. I do feel that a cut in the recast time is in order, possibly with a small cut in the duration. (ie 30 second recast, 6 minute duration)
 
It would be really nice if the initial load times were taken off of all spells like this and they just went by the last cast timer instead. If one refreshes it pops, but if the timer is still going, you still are unable to cast it, leading me to believe this might be possible. It would be nice not only for voice of kaezul, but for monster summons, shout, spirit of the cheetah, db, etc, etc, etc.
 
It would be really nice if the initial load times were taken off of all spells like this and they just went by the last cast timer instead. If one refreshes it pops, but if the timer is still going, you still are unable to cast it, leading me to believe this might be possible. It would be nice not only for voice of kaezul, but for monster summons, shout, spirit of the cheetah, db, etc, etc, etc.

totally agree with this, and was about to post same thing. this way u could load Voice when u wanna cast it, shout, etc.
 
I kind of see this as a positive problem, and of switching spells a lot as my needs change.
For raids I usually run with
Terror of kaezul
Terror of marlow
sublimate soul
shroud of nightmares
deflux
brazen bull
voice of kaezul
death peace

Thats, the usual setup, that I use when tagging and such, whenever I need to pull brazen bull is switched for another fd, when I need to ae wave of enfeeblement and shout of agony is switched in, sometimes shroud of nightmares is switched for touch of the succubus depending on group, one more terror switched in for some certain encounters and so on.

This is not on my toplist of changes Id love for the sk, but sure, It would help make room for more spells. A possible solution:

back in the days before soulbound spells there was a limit on how many targets a buff without timer could be on. If it would be possible to remove the recast time on voice, but make it so it can only be on one target at a time that would keep its utility, keep its limitations, while making it easier to mem it, buff, and demem it.
 
The new spell was partially balanced by the very decisions you are complaining about.
 
As was hinted in the other thread, we talked about alot of things concerning how the SK is played. This is something that was brought up while designing the Veil spells. We had a sorta solution, but we don't know if we're going to end up implementing it or not. But for the sake of discussion lets share it with you guys. Again this was just something we discussed in passing and is not something we are definitely putting in.

Working under the assumptions that:

  • Every SK has at least 2 terrors up to lock aggro
  • Sk's tend to spam them to assure they maintain it
  • In an ideal situation emergency deflux's etc are not mandatory

What happens now on an 18 second timer is:

Terror!(N/A), Cooldown (~2sec), Other Terror!(1sec), Cooldown (~2sec), Terror!(>= 1 sec depending on lag and gem refresh), Cooldown (~2sec), Other Terror!(1sec), Cooldown (~2sec), Terror!(>= 1 sec), Cooldown (~2sec), Other Terror!(1sec), Cooldown (~2sec), Terror!(>= 1 sec)

This gives you 18 seconds of spammage for 4230 hate. As any experienced shadowknight knows, however, this is a very idealized number. Odds of getting that last Terror in an 18 second time frame is very, very low. For discussions sake we're going to assume the realistic scenario of missing out on the last Terror, and work with the more reasonable 3555 value.

What we talked about was changing the Terror spell to have a lingering hate dot effect that blocks other terrors. Using Terror of Kaezul as an example, the changed spell would be something like.

  • 675 Initial Hate
  • 510 hate (the previous terror spell) every tick for 3 ticks
  • Negligible recast time
  • No other terror spell can be cast on the target until it finishes ticking

So that would work out to 2205 in 18 seconds, but with a single cast, and the ability to use the same terror spell on another target if you so desire. This is obviously less hate then the terror spamming, but ALSO leaves you around 3 ticks to make up the difference in hate with other spells if you so desire.

For those having trouble visualizing it, here is a idealized timeline. Top is spamming your top 2 terror spells. Bottom is just the single cast of the proposed terror. Red is universal cool down. Green is when a cast is available
Code:
0      3      6      9      12     15     18
[COLOR=Red]|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR]
[SIZE=1]675     1185     1860     2370     3045      3555    4230[/SIZE]
[COLOR=Red]|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|------|------|------|------|------|[/COLOR]
[SIZE=1]675      675      1185      1185    1695     1695     2205[/SIZE]
If you wanted to make up the difference, you now also have more time to cast other spells before you'd need to reapply. Deflux, sublimate soul, a spear perhaps.

If you were a shadowknight with no damage increment, no tomes, no casting speed increment, and no +aggro, spamming deflux when available, your hate would look something like this during the 18 seconds. You'd also have made up about 1k in hp you wouldn't have otherwise had.
Code:
[SIZE=1]675               [/SIZE][SIZE=1]1515               2355              3195[/SIZE]
[COLOR=Lime]|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime][COLOR=Blue]--|----[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]--|--[/COLOR][COLOR=Blue]----|--[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Blue]|------[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]|----[/COLOR]--|[/COLOR]
[SIZE=1]             1005            1845           2685[/SIZE]
The idea behind the change as we discussed it was to save a spell gem by allowing an SK to only need to have 1 terror up at a time, and make them a bit more offensive (and hopefully more fun), by giving them the ability to toss other spells in to an optimal hate rotation.

Again, this was a passing thought on our part, and doesn't directly address the concern in this thread, but is something worth talking about.
 
While the idea sounds great, would in practice our other spells really cause enough hate? Spears get resisted all the time (Cvet has 336 cha unbuffed and most SKs have less), dots often too. Lifetaps land most of the time, but again not on very magic resistant mobs (THIS IS NOT A PALADIN THREAD, DON'T START ABOUT THEM). Vortex and succubus aren't worth casting before they stop ticking I think, I personally prefer spending my mana for lifetaps.

I have no idea how much hate a simple nuke or debuff would cause, but if this is implemented and our "dps" spells remain as they are, SKs won't be the best single target aggro tanks anymore.

I am very happy with the recent changes, though. Soul shroud is awesome, I love sublimate soul and I have yet to find veil of Marlow.

For the record, on Cvetkaa my spell list ususally looks like:

terror of marlow
terror of kaezul
sublimate soul or terror of death (if it's multipulls)
deflux
vortex of death
touch of the succubus or reverse ds or veil of dis (depends on group)
shout of agony
fd

I don't remember the last time I used voice on myself or raid tank. I'm probably bad because of that, but I'm either duoing and aggro isn't an issue or in a group where buffslots are an issue anyway.

PS: Would assault of shadows (AA terror) remain unchanged?
 
When I used to play otcho regularly, I always found I could spam three terrors when my latency was good, and being limited to two was horribly crippling. When I could spam three I could spam three for a long amount of time and only get a small (maybe a quarter a second, if that) of the first terror being back up after casting the third and that was only on occasion. And after a good minute or two of that I could just spam deflux and never lose aggro. I'm curious how the math would figure in using three terrors instead of two?
 
[/code]The idea behind the change as we discussed it was to save a spell gem by allowing an SK to only need to have 1 terror up at a time, and make them a bit more offensive (and hopefully more fun), by giving them the ability to toss other spells in to an optimal hate rotation.

Again, this was a passing thought on our part, and doesn't directly address the concern in this thread, but is something worth talking about.

Anything that moves in this direction would be the most welcomed change ever for me personally, I hate my class in its current form and this is the biggest issue with how they currently work. There is nothing fun about swapping targets to spam the same three/four spells over and over and having no acknowledgment of your good play other then the mobs hopefully hitting you. There is nothing fun about being hindered to the point of being ineffective in content by lag. Theres even less fun when developers try to provide new things for my class(succubus/bull) but the way my aggro works dictates that I have to make an unbelievable sacrifice to use the new spell that they put in. The most enjoyment I got out being a shadowknight was hitting harmtouch/leechtouch at the end of a raid boss to deny cleric kills.



Also I cannot believe you actually mem and use voice of kaezul, I stopped doing that at tier 2 and never looked back. I got bitchy when someone told me to memorize it for gongoerth as that was the only point I ever felt we would actually benefit from it being cast.

I have no idea how much hate a simple nuke or debuff would cause, but if this is implemented and our "dps" spells remain as they are, SKs won't be the best single target aggro tanks anymore.

Big deal, you have all this hate that means absolutely nothing because it literally never matters to have so much hate. The best usage of shadowknights aggro is to have a warrior taunt it off of you, you could succeed without it anyway but just because we all want nwaij to nuke the golem at 100%.


ps: I would throw feign death under the bus if it meant I never had to memorize three terrors again.
 
Last edited:
What we talked about was changing the Terror spell to have a lingering hate dot effect that blocks other terrors. Using Terror of Kaezul as an example, the changed spell would be something like.

* 675 Initial Hate
* 510 hate (the previous terror spell) every tick for 3 ticks
* Negligible recast time
* No other terror spell can be cast on the target until it finishes ticking


So that would work out to 2205 in 18 seconds, but with a single cast, and the ability to use the same terror spell on another target if you so desire. This is obviously less hate then the terror spamming, but ALSO leaves you around 3 ticks to make up the difference in hate with other spells if you so desire.

The idea as such sounds interesting, and it might make the sk a more fun class to play. I do have some worries though:

1. At the moment, with only one hatespell cast on a mob, I tend to lose agro to a shaman slowing or someone doing stuff at an early point. Thus waiting an entire tick for the next 510 hate would hurt. This change would seriously affect sk agro at the start / first 10 seconds of a mobfight.

2. When losing agro on a mob, or when someone else gets agro first, I need to get that agro back.. then I spam terrors. not being able to spam them to that effect might mean I wouldnt be able to get agro back.. At the same time, if I have multiple targets, only casting one spell on a mob for a total of 675+510x3 hate might actually help in keeping agro on the other mobs though. Still, one terror might not be enough to take agro from whoever has it, and that would be a big issue.

If the initial value of the spell was raised to something like 1000 hate (obviously, it would need to be tested) that would most likely fix both of the situations, and in that scenario it would be a truly welcome change. Assuming I can still get enough agro quickly enough at start of a fight and get agro back on mobs lost, I like this idea.

edit: addition:

concern 3: Just realised, a current problem with aa hate and with the new lifetap from frugloks is that on reflecting mobs you lose a shitload of buffslots to your own offensive spells landing on you. If this change happened that would have to be somehow fixed, or the sk would have no means of building agro on a reflecting mob.
 
Last edited:
When I used to play otcho regularly, I always found I could spam three terrors when my latency was good, and being limited to two was horribly crippling. When I could spam three I could spam three for a long amount of time and only get a small (maybe a quarter a second, if that) of the first terror being back up after casting the third and that was only on occasion. And after a good minute or two of that I could just spam deflux and never lose aggro. I'm curious how the math would figure in using three terrors instead of two?

That's the entire reason I use 3 Terrors instead of any other spell. In most cases you can chain the three down the line, and by the time Terror of Death is finished, you can use Terror of Kaezul again. Or if you can't, you can throw in Assault of Shadows and enjoy an instant recast Terror after that.

That said, I think the changes proposed would be revolutionary, and make me enjoy playing my SK again. The biggest drawback to the class was the need to constantly spam a cycle of buttons with no real stop, and this would help alleviate that to great effect. My only concern would obviously be snap agro, which SKs already suck at. If the changes proposed were to go live, I would hope the Dev team would either greatly increase our taunt skill, or change the hate generated by Assault of Shadows to surpass that of Terror of Kaezul, and bypass the restrictions planned, while retaining the limits of the spell.
 
had another thought, if this goes through, would it be at all possible to make the changes to the aa hate as well? ie according to below suggestion:

Assault of shadows:
intital hate 1k
cast time: 1 second (instead of 1.5 as atm)
then 510 hate per tick for 3 ticks.
mana cost: 50 (mana cost of terror of kaezul currently 55, assault = free)

My reasoning for this:
One of the problems for the sk today is that spellgems refreshing depends on lag. This is a clientside problem (?) and cannot be fixed. It also means that a sk experiencing a lot of lag will have crappy agro on 1 mob and worse on multiples. after the suggested change to spells but not aa he would still have this problem for multiple mobs.
If the aa was changed as well, that would mean that lag would truly not affect sk agro, even on multiples, which would be kind of huge.

Biggest extra of this change would be that the sk would not need to mem a terror at all, and could fre all spellgems for other spells.

Biggest drawback would be suddenly not having any terror/hate except what can be built from melee when out of mana.

Personally I think it would be worth it, to lose my ability to build manafree agro, if it meant not having my agro affected by lag. It is a considerable price to pay losing manafree agro, but freeing up another spellgem would be a plus weighting that up some.
 
Last edited:
Reflect is actually detrimental to someone?!?! Halt the presses, this has to be changed!

in its current form, if a shadowknight casts sublimate soul to lifetap a mob, and the spell is reflected to land on the sk, it overwrites his own selfbuff ie soulshroud. This means if he uses it on said mob he loses a buffslot, hp/ac/lifetapproc/ds and doesnt get healed. Compare that to using a selfheal for tanking capability.

Currently if a sk uses a hatespell and its reflected it doesnt take up a buffslot, if it would he would lose another buff, or have to click something. That would be quite a big setback.
 
had another thought, if this goes through, would it be at all possible to make the changes to the aa hate as well? ie according to below suggestion:

Assault of shadows:
intital hate 1k
cast time: 1 second (instead of 1.5 as atm)
then 510 hate per tick for 3 ticks.
mana cost: 50 (mana cost of terror of kaezul currently 55)

My reasoning for this:
One of the problems for the sk today is that spellgems refreshing depends on lag. This is a clientside problem (?) and cannot be fixed. It also means that a sk experiencing a lot of lag will have crappy agro on 1 mob and worse on multiples. after the suggested change to spells but not aa he would still have this problem for multiple mobs.
If the aa was changed as well, that would mean that lag would truly not affect sk agro, even on multiples, which would be kind of huge.

Biggest extra of this change would be that the sk would not need to mem a terror at all, and could fre all spellgems for other spells.

Biggest drawback would be suddenly not having any terror/hate except what can be built from melee when out of mana.

Personally I think it would be worth it, to lose my ability to build manafree agro, if it meant not having my agro affected by lag. It is a considerable price to pay losing manafree agro, but freeing up another spellgem would be a plus weighting that up some.

If this went through, that AA would be changed greatly. We aren't going to reveal that one just yet, as it is dependent on this change, which we aren't sure is happening either. Suffice it to say it would be a nice change, though not quite as nice as what you propose.
 
hmm suppose an addition of the current use of aa for most sk's might be a good thought then:

Currently smart sk's use the aa for start of fight, because there is no refreshtime/downtime at all between aa hate and spell hate meaning
assault of shadows 350 , 1.5 seconds (cast to tag/get agro ie before timer starts really)
no downtime
terror of kaezul 675
= total of 1025 agro in (1.5)+1 second.. ie 1025 agro is gained on single target during first 1 second of combat.

this in comparison to
terror of kaezul 675, 1 sec cast (before timer starts)
2 second downtime
terror of marlow 510, 1 sec
= total of 1185 agro in (1)+3 seconds.

For the same reasons, sk's use aa when pulling, ie cast aa, then without waiting for spellslot cooldown they can instantly fd. if using spell hate for this instead and having bad luck with sudden lagspike that could mean a few seconds before being able to cast fd spell.

the above mostly meant for information to take into account when balancing changes. The changes hinted at does sound exciting though! :)
 
Last edited:
When I used to play otcho regularly, I always found I could spam three terrors when my latency was good, and being limited to two was horribly crippling. When I could spam three I could spam three for a long amount of time and only get a small (maybe a quarter a second, if that) of the first terror being back up after casting the third and that was only on occasion. And after a good minute or two of that I could just spam deflux and never lose aggro. I'm curious how the math would figure in using three terrors instead of two?

So 3 terrors is the spam standard? I suppose I just used two whenever I ran an SK and just let the first one refresh. Revised numbers would rotate between 675, 510, and 450 in a perfect cycle, versus the proposed numbers

Code:
0      3      6      9      12     15     18
[COLOR=Red]|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|[/COLOR]
[SIZE=1]675     1185     1635     2310     2820      3270    3945[/SIZE]
[COLOR=Red]|[/COLOR][COLOR=Red]----[/COLOR][COLOR=Lime]--|------|------|------|------|------|[/COLOR]
[SIZE=1]675      675      1185      1185    1695     1695      2205[/SIZE]

I suppose one would need to multiply the terror mana cost by around 2.5 to 3 or so. With a proportionally increased mana cost, there would be little reason not to allow spamming of the same terror. It would allow the same snap aggro when you need it, but would drain your mana pool pretty quick. And with any reasonable gear you'd be better off casting other spells as far as hate versus mana goes. Once again, this is just musing on my part for now.
 
Would the proposed terrors block -all- terrors from landing, or just from the particular SK? And would it work like current debuffs, in that a higher level version would stick and overwrite a low level version, or just not stick at all?
 
Back
Top Bottom