My problem with zerker stats are that zerk character can still stay in the thick of combat throughout an entire fight. If you’re specs for glass cannon, that’s fine, you can do more damage, but you should need to be much more mindful of your health and need to get out of to recuperate and heal up. I would like to see dungeon fights go something like this:
1. Fight starts, everyone stacks, blows their neat DPS skills, zerker is doing much more damage than the other builds, then everyone realizes that the boss is not dead yet
2. Zerker builds are at mid to low health, they disengage, heal up, maybe plink from range until they heal or get mitigation cooldowns up again. Balanced and defensive statted players are doing fine, they keep attacking
3. Boss winds up for a big series of attacks/frenzies for a time/etc. Balanced builds realize their outclassed and disengages, zerker stays the hell away, but defensive players just keep on trucking.As a nice side effect, this would heavily reduce the outsized importance on stacking. How to implement this is a different question, a basic method would just be un avoidable damage, but there are better ways.
Do you even play any zerker builds? I solo a lot in zerker on my guardian. Usually have 15k HP. I don’t die that often strictly due to that I play aggressively and tactically.
I do as much damage as a guardian can do, sure, but in dungeons? It’s all about stamina management. I survive off 100% stamina regen on crit to stay mobile and knowing the fights, I.e when to move and where to move to.
On my power necro with his zerker gear, he has way more base HP vs guardian having way better trait able stamina regen, so it’s a different ballgame. My necro has to eat some things that my guardian can just ninja away from, and that means the necro s just plain dead more often.
I don’t bring necro into dungeons for both that and the fact that they just have so much nothing to offer a team apart from the same straight dps everyone can do anyway.
Your ideas would basically require at least a soft Trinity making tanky stats significantly more powerful that they currently are, as even someone in full Soldier isn’t going to want to just eat damage on dungeon bosses. They’ll be dead a few seconds later than a zerker that tries to do the same, not just trucking along.
Zerker isn’t the problem. Everything else being kinda pointless when it’s all about DPs and mobility is, if anything is at all.
Yet, I still find excellent, if occasional, use for my clerics, soldiers, Valkyrie and rampagers sets. It’s all circumstance, builds and what you do with them.
But zerker s my default, especially on guardian. I find it more enjoyable to test myself rolling around doing lots of everything in it.
I’m not proposing to do away with Zerker at all, more to bring up other sets to be useful in a different way. Notably, all of the builds I mentioned are still DPS builds, just using different ways to deal damage, with Zerker doing heavy burst damage, but needing to disengage to recuperate, while tankier classes do less damage in a single burst, but are doing damage more often.
It certainly wouldn’t require a trinity, there would be no need to have tankier classes, just that tankier classes would be able to do comparable damage in fights compared to zerker geared characters.
Part of the issue that makes tankier gear far less useful is that active mitigation is way overpowered. If any character can actively mitigate all damage, then zerker is no longer a “glass cannon” gear type, it has no downside; and being harder to use isn’t a downside worth mentioning.
As a side point, I would argue that even full knights is middle of the road between DPS and Tankiness; something like Cleric’s, Sentinel’s Magi’s, etc. should be buffed to the level of being able to absorb more than they do now, wither by healing through it with healing power or just weathering through it with Toughness/Vitality.
There has been progress to better fights though, the new LS instance bosses are much more interesting to fight and allow for a much more balanced distribution of stats while still completing quickly. Similarly, all of the Fractal boss fractals are really fun fights, although the damage scaling at high levels gets restrictive again. Some of these are a little too gimmicky, to the point where personal stats stop mattering at all, but all in all, more interesting.