Problems with the Dervish?

I strongly discourage any changes to be made to skills that are commonly used in dervish builds. Rework should be done on obscure skills so that people can evaluate whether the 'buffed' skills are ideal to their current strategy. A good example to illustrate my point would be how changes were made to Shatterstone and Mirror of Ice to bring some damage to water ele builds without diminishing it's utility.


And we shall have caster professions spamming enchantments. Seriously no. If we were to have strong cast upon and ending effects for dervish, we might as well buff earth/fire elementalist PbAOE spells. Instead we should make the enchantments' PbAOE damage trigger when the dervish targets foe with melee attacks, just like how Chilling Victory's cold damage is being dealt out. This way dervish will have the clear advantage over other melee profession, which is they are still able to deal damage even though their physical attack is blocked/miss. This will also reduce out the magnitude of disadvantage dervish had when blinded compared to warriors or sins, since daze also had an adverse effect on dervish too. In addition by revamping the enchantments' complimentary damage (e.g. struck for XXX damage.) effects to be in effect by number of attacks and not duration, mysticism will be triggered more often as players will recast it on recharge and utilise it fully before self expiration to fuel energy for other skills.

An example to illustrate this would be:
Grenth's Fingers
15 Energy ¼ Activation time 15 Recharge time
Enchantment Spell. "All adjacent foes are crippled for 5..13 seconds. For 10 seconds, your next 1...3 melee attacks which target a crippled foe, that foe and all adjacent foes are struck for 15...51 cold damage."

Also I don't believe lowering energy cost of enchantments is a good idea since there is always a possibility of other professions abusing it. The energy cost obstacle can be overcome by having skills either interact with mysticism exclusively or boosting dervish's max energy temporarily since the dervish max energy is too paltry.

Eremite's Zeal
5 Energy ¼ Activation time 10 Recharge time
Enchantment Spell. "For 2 seconds, this enchantment does nothing. When this enchantment ends, you gain 2 energy for each adjacent foe (maximum 2...5 energy). (50% failure chance with Mysticism of 4 or below)."

Zealous Renewal
10 Energy¼ Activation time20 Recharge time
Enchantment Spell. "All adjacent foes are struck for 15...51 holy damage. For 3...15 seconds, you gain +10 maximum energy. When this enchantment ends, you gain 1 energy for each successful hits while under the effects of this enchantment."
Lowering energy costs is a requirement. Otherwise, the dervish will either not be able to afford them or Mysticism will have to be buffed to obscene levels (opening up potential for abuse). The trick is, to make their power come from being spammed. Since Dervishes would be for the most part recycling their energy and other classes wouldn't, only the dervish would be able to afford this. Also, it would be essential to split up the damage between not only the enchantments themselves but also the attacks that remove them. In fact, the attacks should do far more damage (and will have to in order for this style to ever hope to be useful for melee AoE, seeing as how melee damage is so overpowered compared to caster damage, and the major buffs that make it so only affect attacks, not spells).

Higher max energy != energy management. If it did elementalists wouldn't need all those energy management skills in Energy Storage.

Also, having the dervish do less damage than other melee characters yet be less affected by anti-melee would not help them much, seeing as how there isn't that much anti-melee in PvE (and in areas where it is, you don't bring as much melee to begin with). Furthermore, none of that would address the issue of other classes using the dervish's skills better than it does.

Since people seem intrigued by enchantment juggling, here's some preliminary stuff to illustrate what I'm talking about when I say that the buffs required are insane:

Grenth's Fingers
Dust Cloak
Staggering Force
5 energy, 1/4 activation, 3 recharge, damage is armor-ignoring

Needs to be 5 energy for mysticism to fuel spamming of them (if they can't be spammed, there is absolutely zero chance of competing with conventional melee AoE). Needs to be short recharge for same reason. Needs to be short casting to increase dps (despite that and being armor-ignoring, this part of the enchantment-stripping-attack paradigm is still a huge drag on dps).

Pious Assault
5 energy, 1/2 activation, +20...60 dmg, removes 1 dervish enchantment, instant recharge if removed

One thing I worry about is this 5 energy cost, which when spammed (again, a requirement to compete) will quickly burn through a derv's energy (since it won't be affected by mysticism). A zealous scythe would likely be necessary. In any case, ridiculously high +damage and short activation is needed just to compensate for the low dps of the enchantment before it.

Mysticism
1 energy per 2 ranks when dervish enchantment ends on you

At 10 mysticism, you'd be able to fuel 5 energy enchantments.

Sadly, if you do the math and throw in AoHM and Asuran Scan, you'll see that this will still not even match what a scythe sin can pump out, despite the obvious overpoweredness of it. Now, you would have blindness, weakness, and cripple spam, too, but I think I've gotten the message across of how insane these buffs would have to be just to even be "useful", let alone good enough to be part of the meta.