General Thorns Discussion

I would love to start a discussion on people's thoughts on the state of thorns in the game.

My experience with thorns:

Fire magic, shield, warden. I've never used a scorpionclaw set and I've yet to play a druid - would love input from people with those builds.

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Overall take-away:

Thorns is powerful, possibly too powerful, and seems to work outside of limitations set on a lot of other skills. It can be a lot of fun, but also takes a fair amount of up-keep and is only really useful in solo play or if you're holding aggro. It allows for quick grinding and is an enjoyable mechanic, but I suspect is more in development than other general combat mechanics (e.g. AoE)

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Things that I think might be broken:

By broken - I mean I expect it's a kind of unintended form of play and that we should not expect these to be permanent facets of the gameplay.

Mass mob farming:
A while back AoE got nerfed to prevent power farming and limited damage based on number of enemies. Thorns doesn't have a similar scaling, but (for the most part) only works on melee mobs so most places have a mix of melee/ranged. Adding orc rangers and mages to the razorclaw panther farm spot for instance gave a much needed nerf to thorns grinding these mobs. I would not be surprised if eventually we see some scaling, but I assume this is a much more technically difficult task and if we do see it will be low priority.

Warden:
Okay warden might not be broken, but I would expect a privacy field nerf at some point. I wrote about this in the update notes, but really what I think will be changed in warden is that I expect the main hand mod which allows privacy field to damage ranged attackers to be replaced at some point. Probably not soon as this is a new skill, but it allows warden to work around the only existing limitation to thorns power farming. I also don't conceptually get how a lightning field causes burning effects and wouldn't be surprised if that gets tweaked, but I think the ranged mod will have to go at some point. I love it and feel so powerful using it, but >1k total damage per hit from any mob that hits you with 100% uptime makes a well modded privacy field the only skill a warden needs.

Accuracy:
Thorns is not connected to accuracy/evasion. If thorns was minimal dps with some utility effects I think this would stay, but currently I can pop the "+x out of combat speed - 33% chance to hit +x% burst evasion" three times and still wander around Amaluk Valley cave watching things die on a partially modded fire/shield build - I assume warden would only be stronger. This might not change based on how thorns works conceptually - it's a reflect not a hit so why should my accuracy matter. It allows you to take up the Segewick curse on a healer and still have a viable dps build for solo grinding in some form.

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Things I love about a thorns build:

Dps while stunned or looting:
I love being able to still damage a mob while stunned. I love getting mobs to ~10% of their total hp and then beginning to loot the first downed mobs. Thorns just makes for an enjoyable grind. It doesn't hold up in dungeons/group content unless you're the tank so having a nice boost to dps while running around getting various objects is great. Thorns is also pretty widely available so if you're like me you have a combat build without it and a travel/grinding build that relies heavily on it.

A fun mechanic:
I was very happy to see the thorns improvements over the last year. Honestly I think it's a fun mechanic and I'm glad that it's a viable combat skill - because ranged mobs make you have to be alert, non warden builds can't fully rely on thorns + healing. I also feel like having a variable dmg dps slot based on how many times you're hit opens up the skill bar for some more utility. I can let go of a dps skill or two because I'm still doing damage when I'm not casting damage spells.

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Places I would like to see thorns go:

Increased Duration:
Having played warden with it's beautiful 30 second up time Molten Veins feels cumbersome all of a sudden. Having to cast it every 10 seconds means sometimes a combat encounter hasn't ended so what is more or less a passive dmg skill is now #2 on my skill bar so I don't miss when the CD pops. I assume part of the reason for this is that the way molten veins and fire shield (haven't tested others) were coded they persist even if the skill required to cast them leaves your skill bar. That means you could in theory cast both and then switch load outs before combat giving a boon to dps that was not intended. Going the armor patching thorns route with 100% up time means there's now essentially an extra skill on your skill bar so I don't expect to see too much of that.

Aura based thorns:
Similarly to the previous I would be interested in an aura based thorns. Something like echolocation where you cast it on and off, but again this sounds like heavy dev work to make sure the skill turns off if it's not on your skill bar. I totally get why we are where we are, but just putting my wish list out to the world in case it makes a difference to the road map ;) - I know another problem with an aura based thorns is, why cast at all? Why not just walk around looting if you have 100% up time with no need to focus. Someone could just stand in KT lower level and just eat away at a hallway without being at their keyboard. My next desire I think makes a work around for this.

Low natural damage with buffs based on # of recent casts:
I do think thorns can be a little OP at the moment and clearing a room before I can event consider casting something else seems a little off. I thought it might be cool to see mods where the damage increases not based on casting a specific spell, but for molten veins for instance "+x% dmg for 10 seconds whenever you cast a fire magic spell" might be interesting. This would turn thorns into the same boost to dps it is now, but require you to still use other spells.

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Overall though I'm very pleased with where thorns is - sometimes too pleased ;) Would love to hear other peoples thoughts and experiences. Especially you Dreva Fan-folk

Overall thorns is very useful for grinding. It's incredibly powerful at low levels and even at high levels it's pretty strong. However the thing is that I think that's really the only thing it's good at. Thorns is not useful for killing elites or tougher mobs because they have too much health and you can't afford to get hit as much. I do believe that thorns is incredibly efficient for cleaning trash, but the fact that it's only good for trash stops it from being broken in my opinion.

For the most part, I don't believe thorns is over powered for mass-farming, although it resembles the old AoE farming before the nerfs. The fact that you need to get hit by mobs stops it from being too stupid since you can't mass-pull things unless if you're tanky enough to deal with a mass of them. I've found that generally unless if you're using twink equipment or over leveled compared to what you're trying to thorns farm, you'll die if you pull too many.
It's not as much of a problem if you have built up equipment so your thorns kills the enemies incredibly fast and/or can survive longer, but then I would argue you could find similar results simply building a good AoE set and killing mobs in sets of 3-5. In this case thorns is still more time efficient for grinding, but not overpowered. Even then the areas where thorns grinding is significantly better than normal AoE farming are pretty limited.
Basically I see thorns as a trade off. Better potential for farming trash for faster EXP/Money, but limited in growth because it doesn't scale well into "Hard content". If you make a thorns build, you're making a commitment towards a farming build (Which is definitely useful for PG, but not the end-all-be-all),

I do think the Warden's ability to hit ranged enemies with thorns is a bit concerning, since it significantly increases the range of areas at where you can grind via thorns. I can't think of any locations at the moment where this would be blatantly overpowered for farming mobs compared to a typical thorns grinding spot, but it does make privacy field a bit TOO lazy of a grinding skill. I don't think it's that bad since there's Wardens should have some attacks they could use to deal with ranged mobs anyways, but Privacy Field lets players just auto-walk through a dungeon repeatedly and farm everything.

Thorns damage not being tied to your accuracy is completely fine honestly. It does make thorns farming work better in the Ranalon Den and Rahu sewers, but even if accuracy was an issue, it wouldn't be too hard to build in some into your build and make the thorns work perfectly fine again. Something to keep in mind that thorns actually has negative synergy with YOUR evasion though, because if you dodge an attack, your thorns won't proc off of it. This means that you can't build evasion for more survivability if you want max farming efficiency, and thorns builds want both.

Also just as a brief note, Scorpiclaw armor, while it sounds cool, is simply far too weak to be viable. Reflecting a % of your attacker's damage back is incredibly weak because enemies have far more health than we do. Not only that, but the damage you reflect is based on the damage you take AFTER mitigation. This generally means that even with a full scorpiclaw set at around level 70, you'll be reflecting double digit damage back to enemies who have thousands of effective HP. The only situation where this reflect could be useful would be in very specific PvP scenarios.

Overall I think thorns is useful, but not game-breaking or anything. Privacy field is definitely the best source of thorns, so its mods could use a bit of a nerf. Molten veins is very high damage but the 10 second duration keeps it in check at least. Fire and Acid shield potions are too useful for low level characters, but you're almost certainly not new if you're using them (And probably being fed) so it doesn't really matter. Other sources of thorns are totally fine in my opinion and don't need nerfing.

After having used it for a while in Rahu Sewers, in my opinion Privacy Field is overpowered. It cancels mobs powers such as evasion, stun, root, disable and so on. I can rush pretty much anywhere, all I need is to manage a hit with a combat refresh ability before mobs impale themselves on the field. it works underwater, on mobs behind you or hiding the dark. It works when you're having big lag spikes, or even get disconnected.

If I was to nerf it, I'd probably include some max damage it can deal before disappearing.

Noting that the Druid/Warden combo is getting nerfed I would like to nominate the fire shield/molten veins combo to get nerfed as well. People have addressed a lot of hate to this build for being overly powerful. In my opinion the shield thorns is pretty well balanced in terms of what you get for mods; I think the MV portion probably needs to get severely adjusted considering the complete option package.

But I wonder how everyone would feel about a very simple nerf : You can only have 1 'thorns' type skill active at a time from a combat class.

This would leave room for potions or things like shield wax to stack with a thorns ability and make sure the thorns meta dies before we have the AoE problem all over again.