Quote Originally Posted by HTeam View Post
I haven't played in a couple years, but I'd be surprised if a good portion of this problem isn't the animist class.

In my opinion, it was always a broken class which could deal damage from a safe location. Something which fit Mythic's own definition of an exploit prior to the introduction of the animist.

Stackable mushrooms that do 8-15% damage to a character. Then stack animists. Even if the mushrooms are getting killed, they can be replaced fast enough in number large enough to kill an character in seconds. There was also the problem that (when I left the game) mushrooms finished their cast even if a player left line of sight. So you could peek around a corner and jump back but if there were 20 mushrooms there, you were dead. The whole time the animist is some place unreachable.

There was also the matter of end game content being trivialized by the animist class.
Nah, that's long ago been nerfed into oblivion. In fact, the major neutering of the animist class happened well before Catacombs, even.

To wit:
  • Nerfed number of shrooms per animist.
  • Nerfed number of total shrooms/pets per 100-yard radius.
  • Nerfed shroom health by 85% so that one wizard AoE (or hell, even a THANE aoe) could kill them all.
  • Nerfed to-hit on shrooms.
  • Nerfed shroom aggro so that aggregate aggro went to the animist instead of the shrooms. (This effectively killed animists soloing encounters where the mobs would last long enough to kill the animist, e.g.: dragons.)
  • Nerfed shroom LoS so they became nigh useless on keep walls and around doors.
  • Nerfed creeping spec CC turrets to be heavily affected by diminishing returns, basically killing the spec.
  • Nerfed turret damage for off-spec shrooms, basically killing using creeping DD shroom stacks as damage while PBAOE'ing with your verdant tank shroom or bombing with arb.
  • Nerfed verdant's main shroom PBAOE to-hit, damage and the survivability of the main shroom due to nerfs to verdant's "buff" shrooms.

Basically, the only viable animists left after all the blunt-stroke nerfs to a mechanic that was obviously not well thought-out, were arboreals. And those suffered severe issues with their "bombs" having stupid fucking problems like not being able to path into a keep or (LOL) not being able to catch sprinting players or someone running by you at an oblique angle using speed 5+.

It just got so damn silly that you ended up with a class that had roughly 85% of its original capability completely gutted, despite the fact that you could ALWAYS just AoE mezz a gang of shrooms and then forget about them as your entire raid just walked blithely by the sleeping, full-duration-mezzed pets.

I mean, I see why they did it, but the roller-coaster ride from "Hey, what's this new class all about?" through "Wow, this class is FUN!" to "OMG, my class...what have they done to meeeee??!?!" was depressing to live through as an animist.

These bludgeon-style nerfs to the last interesting class I played was what finally made me quit DAoC for good.