I think they may be overdoing it with the cooldown on [ability]Sleeping Gas[/ability] and [ability]Frog Kiss[/ability]. Chain stuns are terrible for the game (nothing on [ability]Screeching Gears[/ability], by the way?) but the 1 round cooldown on abilities that deal very low damage and must be spammed to become even decent fillers is a terrible change.
I think they should just add extra logic to CC effects so that they don't refresh themselves, or alternatively, spawn Resilience straight away, but without removing the present effects, just preventing application of new ones.
The only use-case where this would be a nerf (other than the target one) would be if you somehow chained
different CC abilities, such as a [ability]Geyser[/ability] going off, then using [ability]Clobber[/ability], but I don't think anyone does that so it has minimal impact.
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Still need to evaluate the impact of the Undead racial. It's not a bad course of action, but I'm concerned about it still benefitting slow and powerful Undeads, over providing some benefit to Speed.
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As for [ability]Cleave[/ability]... bad change, imo. In AoE situations, it does more damage than things like [ability]Tidal Wave[/ability] (Base power 7, x3 = 21)- but the problem isn't so much that it's spammable AoE, the problem is it has that same base power of
24 on single target (so a tad above the standard 20 for spammable damage skills) and is also far more powerful than AoE on 2 targets, all while being smart damage (that in turn favors a dumb user
)
I'd say the best course of action would be nerfing its base power to 18, and leaving it without cooldown. It'd become much weaker (despite what it may seem at first glance) and also be behind specialized AoE/single target moves. Essentially becoming a reasonable filler move, but not a go-to ability to kill everything.
On that same note, [ability]Dreadful Breath[/ability] also has a split-AoE effect with 21 Power, up to 26.25 during [ability]Cleansing Rain[/ability]. I don't know if that's fine due to being a
channeled effect, or if they are just addressing [ability]Cleave[/ability] to explicitly nerf [pet]Weebomination[/pet]... My personal opinion is that a [pet]Scourged Whelpling[/pet] spamming [ability]Dreadful Breath[/ability] is about as bad as a [pet]Weebomination[/pet] spamming [ability]Cleave[/ability], but whatever.
Overall, given that [pet]Weebomination[/pet] is the only [ability]Cleave[/ability] user, the cooldown would just constantly force it into lockdown (in an even worse way than [ability]Bone Serpent[/ability]). The suggested damage reduction would allow it to keep going, while also making [ability]Diseased Bite[/ability] an alternative for the filler slot.
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The underlying core issue is, if anything, AoE in general and split-AoE in particular, and I don't think cooldowns will help that much on either front. Rather much make all AoE attacks work like [ability]Arcane Explosion[/ability], i.e. abilities dealing their damage to the primary pet, and reduced damage to the backline (which is a cheap tactic anyway, they nerfed [ability]Pheromones[/ability] for a reason...). Generally speaking, the active pet should be the one dishing and taking the damage. Adding some damage reduction to backline pets (to shield them from AoE) would be a quick shortcut, but it'd kill DoTs in the process - so they need to address AoE directly.
