Herald of Xotli

[Morfiend]

Since I seem to be fagging up a bunch of threads about the issues with HoX, I figured I would post there here instead, so people could see what I was bitching about.

High priority bugs:
Combos that have multiple hits (Hell strikes/Fire Lance/etc) on the casted "finishing move", will deal damage per hit, yet if the last hit(s) are interrupted (either by yourself or others), the damage that was already done (and SHOWN) is refunded on the target and they are healed back up. This can even effect targets you killed with previous hits (essentially bringing them back to life) and midway thru a target having a fatality performed on them. This also affects other classes, not just HoX. We would really like to hear Funcom's input on this issue, as it impacts most of our combos. **More info on this below.

Female characters have a slower swing time on certain directional attacks. Certain combos also appear to be effected by the animations as well (i.e. faster in demon form)

Thundering Flames does not silence like it should.

Roots of Hell is not working properly. It does not give you the same knockback resistance as full plate.

Reports of bonus fire damage from gear/feats is not adding to our spells/melee (Occuring after patch: 6/26/08)


Medium priority bugs:
Flame Tongue randomly does not add a new (or additional) buff, even when HFB does hit and damage the target(s). (The short duration on the buff makes this even worse.)

Horrible Visage of Xotli feat line drains player's stamina, not the target's.

Hellfire Feast has been reported to not return the proper amount of mana.

Hellstep can get screwy when trying to charge targets, similiar to the soldier charge problems.

When you have a combo already active, sometimes you can continue to perform the rest of the combo after using Hellstep, and sometimes you can't. Is one way or the other bugged?

Spells seem to get "jammed" sometimes, if you cancel them right as they're finished being casted. Locking out other spells until you recast that first spell again. Ex: casting HFB, interrupting it right at the end, then trying to cast another spell and it won't work until you cast HFB again to "clear" it.

Fiery Enervation states on the tooltip it inflicts fire damage, but it doesn't. Is the tooltip misleading or is it supposed to deal fire damage along with the debuff?

Wrath of Xotli not adding as much as it is supposed to? (For me, it doesn't appear that the tooltip is updated at all, but unconfirmed if the actual damage works.)

Undying Glory of Xotli buff is removed when zoning.

Undying Glory of Xotli is not giving shield of the risen, when it was reported that it used to (or randomly does?)


Low priority bugs:
Hair disappears/changes and weapon sometimes "floats" after demon form fades. (Workaround: Swapping your helm/sword off and on will temporarily fix it.)

Flame Cleave does not have a graphical effect as the tooltip would make it out to have. (Concerns on the damage are reported below.)

Desecration doesn't appear to update the tooltip with the proper cooldown, yet the effect itself appears to work.

Reports of a graphical fire ring remaining around the player after dying in demon form and res'ing back up. Purely cosmetic, but can be fixed by relogging.

Possible Discrepancies or Unconfirmed reports:
After recent patches, it seems like combos are sometimes doing no damage (completely missing), reporting no dodges/parries, and the target is in fact right in front of you on your client. Nothing displays in the combat log either, as if you were swinging in the air. (We need some screenshots or testing done on this, reports seem to vary.)

Pillar of Infernal Flame fails to damage nearby enemies when the target dies before it goes off. Sometimes it randomly does not hit any enemies, regardless of the target being alive. (Reported to be fixed, but I still see it failing, possibly due to the other miss issue)

Demon form (or possibly buffs?) wearing off will cancel a combo being setup. (needs more testing)

Crimson Shield may not work properly? Reports of the tooltip value not equalling the actual value it absorbs per hit.

Iron Shield may not work properly? (reports of it working fine for some people)

Reports of buff cooldowns randomly being set to an hour or more. It is unknown how this occurs. It can be fixed by re-zoning.

Purge is not working as specified?

Some combos don't seem to scale damage as well as other combos (possible bug maybe with them?)

Generic Bugs: (effects every class):
There is a bug that affects all melee classes, where you hit the combo and it immediately keeps cancelling it. It does not occur often, but it can lock your character from doing any/most combos until you either relog, or try to "clear" it by finding a combo that isn't broken. (anyone have additional feedback on this?)

Sometimes the character goes bald while hidden (low priority)

Now, they recently added this to the game:

Spells that were incorrectly receiving bonuses from increased magical damage will no longer scale with increased magical damage. This adjustment will only affect such spells that were not meant to have scaling with the increased magical damage bonus. This resolves issues with enhancement spells like "Pact with Set" where the health loss was too high for the trade off for the bonus to damage.

But when they did this, they reduced our coefficient to 0%. So the HoX community is up in arms about it, and we finally got a dev to respond.

As we have reviewed the Dark Templar abilities, we will do the same for the Herald of Xotli as well. They will be reviewed on Monday.

Like the other secondary minor effects for Dark Templars, the proper values for the various proc effects will be much lower than the unintended 100% value from before. This is just a small warning as to not expect it to return to the level it was prior to the bugfix.

I will make an additional post after the evaluation of all the fire-based damage sources is complete to let you know in advance of our intended changes.

This is pretty fucked up, as the HoX is very very fragile, and from talking with a few maxed level HoX it was running about even. If they reduce our damage very much it is going to make life very very rough, not to mention the buffing of mobs level 70+.

Now, I dont want to doom and gloom, but even I noticed that my damage was down a bit last night, and I dont have the gear to stack +fire damage like maxed level characters do. I guess we will see what happens monday.

[cevik]

How much +damage gear do you really have at the moment?

[photek]

How much +damage gear do you really have at the moment?

Lots of the +damage stuff is from feats, making many feats useless currently.

[Miasma]

I don't see many HoX around at all (although since I'm on a PvE server I can't really identify classes too well), seems very unpopular due to all their problems.  All of the mages kind of suck for the most part really, except for the necro PvP gimmick build I guess.

[photek]

Herald of Xotli is awesome. It is an insanely strong class in the hands of a skilled player. I took out a Tempest + two Bear Shamans at level 37, ToS was 47, BS#1 was 45 other was 41. Instagibbed the ToS, outplayed the two others. Sick damage, but squishy like hell. I can see the massive potential at high level. Same goes for Demonologist. Necromancer is... either on or off.

[Morfiend]

How much +damage gear do you really have at the moment?

At level 52 I currently have around +35 to 50, off the top of my head. But like photek said, we get a lot from feats and or short duration buffs or spells. This change is going to make a lot of those from semi useful to completely useless.

As it stood before this, +fire damage was pretty much the only stat that was useful to us, besides + HP stuff.

[cevik]

As it stood before this, +fire damage was pretty much the only stat that was useful to us, besides + HP stuff.

There are almost no spells in WoW that used the entire +damage number (anything less than a 2.5 second cast when I quit the game), yet it was still the most important item for a damage caster.

I think it sucks that there is a bug that is causing none of the +damage to work at the moment, but they've said they were going to fix it and I think that the "zomg it's going to be terrible, I won't get the full effect of +damage" cries are a little premature until we see how things work after the fix.

[Slayerik]

HoX has such huge burst DPS and a stun that they can completely rape most anyone one on one. Give them some healing love from a partner and its pretty evil.

Even with that, i dont mind fighting against them, any real PVPers that see one will melt his ass before he becomes too much of a problem....well, hopefully.

[Morfiend]

HoX has such huge burst DPS and a stun that they can completely rape most anyone one on one. Give them some healing love from a partner and its pretty evil.

Even with that, i dont mind fighting against them, any real PVPers that see one will melt his ass before he becomes too much of a problem....well, hopefully.

Yeah, the problem is that HoX is so fragile. They have less defense than any of the other mages. If they reduce their damage by even a little it could really make the class pretty weak.

I'm not panicking yet, but it would be very easy for them to go to far.

[Nerf]

The HoXs I've fought up until 60 have had the dps to melt my PoM 2 or 3 times over if they are smart enough to not get knocked get down and eaten.

[Morfiend]

From Jayde:

As promised, we have performed a full review of all magical damage sources triggered by the Herald of Xotli class. As it is intended for bonus magical damage (specifically fire damage) to be an effective way to increase the damage output of the class, we have implemented and adjusted the magical damage coefficients on all fire-based magical effects.

The main sources of scaling from +magical damage will be from Hellfire Breath (as before) and Burn to Death, as they are primary damage-dealing effects. Additionally, moderate to minor coefficients have been added or increased on all secondary fire damage hits and damage-over-time components.

While the balanced values will not be equivalent to the erroneous 100% coefficients being applied to some spells prior to last patch, there were many spells which were not scaling previously that will after the update. Given that we have adjusted all spells to have a bonus equivalent to their base power, the contribution from +magical damage should be much more consistent across all spells.

Combos which deal damage only through the combo attack, such as Pillar of Infernal Flame, will not be affected by this change as they scale with melee-based damage adjustments.

The future update will also include fixes to some additional issues we discovered in the process. When patched, the update notes should include the following changes:

Herald of Xotli
-Desecrating Essence should now scale more consistently across all levels. Additionally, the variance between minimum and maximum damage has been decreased to be more consistent.
-Burn to Death now receives a substantial portion of the Herald's bonus magical damage on its damage over time effect.
-Burn to Death now applies a separate debuff for all Herald of Xotli players.
-Spreading Flames will now always tick 5 times, instead of occasionally only ticking 4 times.
-Inferno, Tongue of Xotli, and Phoenix Cloak's gain from bonus magical damage has been increased.
-The area of effect damage from Inferno has been renamed to Inferno instead of Lash Field.
-Phoenix Cloak and Burning Skull have had their base damage slightly increased.
-The following abilities now properly scale with the Herald's bonus magical damage:
Avatar of Xotli
Bonds of Anguish
Burning Hex
Burning Skull
Burning Words (Word of Command)
Chains of Anguish
Desecrating Essence
Fiery Weapons
Flame Cleave
Hatred of the Living
Hellstep
Improved Burning Skull
Knowledge of the Underworld
Searing Curse
Searing Hatred
Spitfire