Dervish Weapon Spells

Dervishes are way too dependant on enchantments, and thus vulnerable to enchantment stripping. No other class depends on enchantments as much. Monks can do well without enchantments, and Elementalists have a large enough energy pool to compensate for a loss of attunement.

I suggest that some of the Dervish enchantments are changed to weapon spells, and that Mysticism is affected by weapon spells as well.

I would still dislike the fact that dervishes would need to repeatedly stop attacking to apply the buff to themselves. But maybe you are thinking about a dervish which doesn't attack but spam buffs (like orders)?

You're gonna get some whiners with the standard 'no we4pon sp3lls are only for rits!111' or the fact that it could cause a lot of problems in PvP. Certainly it would be a good idea for the spells that alter the dervishes damage types. Frankly anything to stop dervish being so mediocre.

Personally, I think it is just fine.

Dervish can hit hard for a mass amount of damage in AoE with just one swing of a Scythe. Tell me another melee class that can do that with their chosen weapon.

But there is always a drawback. You have to use enchantments. So in order to have your mass AoE heavy hitting damage, you need to apply a few enchantments first. Oh well. Every class has a good and bad side. This is the Dervishes.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

What, exactly, is wrong with Dervishes relying on enchantments to do their job? That's part of what the Dervish class is about.

This is a horrible idea.

To begin with, enchantments being stripped is the least of the dervish's problems. Bigger problems include but are not limited to:

-Other professions using the dervish's weapon and skills better than it does, rendering the profession completely redundant in PvE
-Terrible energy management on a highly energy-dependent profession
-Lackluster primary attribute that has no synergy with the only thing the profession is somewhat good at (the scythe)
-An intended playstyle (enchantment juggling) that is both conceptually flawed and laughably ineffective in both PvE and PvP

Not only would your suggestion make enchantment juggling completely impossible, but (far more importantly) would destroy what effectiveness the class does possess, as the dervish requires not one, but multiple enchantments on it to be effective. It's only possible to have one weapon spell on oneself at a time. So turning those enchantments into weapon spells would be a horrible thing to do to the poor dervish.

Oh, and before you bring it up, the inability to have multiple weapon spells is a fundamental weakness to compensate for it's lack of strippability, so you can't (or shouldn't) change that.

/notsigned

Agreed, dervishes wouldn't be dervishes without enchantments and

this. Basically.

/not signed

Part of the reason I haven't deleted my PvE dervish is because I'm hoping for some sort of miracle to occur. That and she looks cool.

That said, I think dervishes are supposed to be versatile, yet they keep falling back to the same thing over and over. Dervishes are way too energy dependent the way they are now, and enchantment juggling just isn't efficient in the long run when you compare them to other professions in terms of dps. I propose they have slightly faster-casting enchantments, but have the attributes for the more powerful ones switched to mysticism, so as to prevent too much cross-profession abuse. Mysticism should be reworked to function more appropriately with scythes, as well as with -dervish- enchantments.

I agree with faster casting enchants. I'm not going to stop in the middle of a fight to cast a 2 second spell. make all 1/4 or 3/4.

Reaper with no name summed it up nicely.

I don't think rangers or mesmers would like that.

Make the enchantments worth their casting time instead.

I would remove half of the dervish enchantments and replace them with a 'prayer' type skill. A prayer would basically work like a stance (with no casting time and unable to interrupt, maximum one 'prayer' skill active at a time, stacking with the stance). They would cost energy to cast and have a cooldown, and they couldn't be worn off by any enemy skill (but the dervish player might be able to remove existing prayer by casting a new prayer, or simply waiting for it to lose it's duration). Their effects would vary, ranging from +X Y-type of damage with your next Z scythe attacks, damage/hex/condition spread in aoe, IAS/IMS, increased armour rating against certain/all attack types, partial or absolute immunity to enemy hexes, interrupts and conditions, increased block chance and so on.

Basically a prayer would be a situation skill which can't be spammed without severe energy problems (and you need a lot of energy in order to be able to use scythe attacks AND cast enchantments, affecting the effectiveness of your Dervish at any given moment!), and should be used ONLY & WHEN it's needed for an 'extra' push, like bring a particular target down with next scythe attack when you need it, survive a potentially mortal blow, get away from the danger or apply increased pressure at the cost of being exhausted when the prayer ends (effectively reducing your effectiveness later, for the sake of being more powerful now, when you need it).

To put it simple, few prayers would either give a small (but significant enough) boost for the Dervish for a short while without side effects (e.g. short IMS prayer, which could be combined with IAS stance), while the other ones would give a moderate short-term boost, at the cost of penalty/side effect later (some would give a negative 'prayer' effect very much like condition, non-stacking but unable to remove, lasting for X seconds ... others might decrease our energy/health regeneration, give us negative conditions or impact cooldown of our skills).

If implemented right, a 'prayer' skill type would make Dervish opponents harder to predict, more mobile on the field of battle - and most importantly of all - more versatile, giving them more room in end-game pve/pvp than now.

Then they're going to have to buff the hell out of interrupts, conditions, hexes, and anything else.

I would prefer to increase the duration of enchantments (or making mysticism do so, for example, for every rank in mysticism your dervish enchantments last 2% longer, to avoid secondary prof abuse), so you could cast all your enchantments before joining a fight, being reasonably sure that they will last long enough not to force you to stop fighting to refresh them. If the fight is really long, then, you would stop that one time to recast them, but i don't think this would be a big problem. Furthermore, a short recharge would be needed, to counter ench stripping.

Another solution would be increasing the effect of dervish enchantments to counter the downside of being forced to stop fighting to cast them, but there would be the need to link these strong enchantments to mysticism in some way, to prevent secondary abuse. (This means also tying AoHM to mysticism).

Then make that change pve only. If they can change all binding rituals to make them 3/4 cast time then they can do this.

I rather like this idea more than my own in the sense that it's more realistic in its approach. Some enchantments should have a more practical use upon casting imo though, considering some of them are just horrible.

Mysticism: now reduces the aftercast of dervish enchantments by 5% per rank.

Part of the original point OF dervishes were that if an enchantment was stripped, they actually benefit in some way.

Making them worth it would be nice, but the bigger overall problem was covered by reaper.

That could work, but you'd have to increase the recharge and lowering the duration of the enchants, to prevent other classes from maintain dervish enchantments at a meaningful levels. But if you increase the recharge, you'd become vulnerably to enchant strips as you mentioned.

I like this better, all you have to do is balance the damage output. If a warrior is putting out 80 damage for each attack skill it uses, all you have to do is to make each enchantment you're casting add +80 damage to your next attack skill. They gotta work off of or get a bonus from mysticism in some way or another, like faster recharge and energy management.

True, i've actually suggested to tie the ench duration to mysticism to avoid secondary abuse (as you see between parenthesys). It could also be nice to do both things together. You can tie both ench duration and a basic damage buff to mysticism (working on numbers to avoid making it too powerful), so to give dervishes something that other class can't have through secondary switching.

A basic counter (thinking about PvP) would be ench stripping, so when you have a dervish as opponent, you would have to take care about keeping him without ench, but he would keep reapplying them easily, so the dervish would still be doing some big damage, but with basically a low attack speed. The problem now would be that dervishes would have the same counters that other frontliners have (blind, hexes, ..), but with one more counter, which is ench stripping, so it would be nice to give dervishes some innate way to deal with hexes/conditions, something like "when you are under enchantment, conditions expire x% faster for each ench you have, and hexes expire y% faster for each ench you have". So you would have the downside of dealing with ench stripping (lowering your attack speed because you have to keep casting), and the buff of having the ability of dealing better with hexes/conditions, while warriors would have a great attack speed and DPS, while having to bother often with hex/cond. Sounds fair to me, of course using the right x% and y% numbers.

I understand what you are talking about. If you want to pvp with a devish you are prone to strips and shatters etc....I do think that dervishes need a little more protection against strips. What the protections could be i don't know.
Personally, making weaapon spells like a rit is the wrong answer. I think if anything the enchants should be guarded. For example, "enchant can not be removed for 5 seconds after casting" rather than a weapon spell.
Dervishes are broken at the moment except in pve. I hope they get fixed soon because they are real fun to play. They are just exposed easily by necros and mesmers.

Maybe you can have an enchant that causes your conditions and hexes to expire x% faster for y amount of time for it's duration and removes your hexes, conditions and heals you if someone else ends it prematurely. That way the more someone strips your enchantments the more beneficial it is for you. That way you're getting free hex/condition removals, heals and energy for someone wasting their energy and time trying to remove your enchantments, it would probably make it very annoying for the person trying to strip you. That makes me think of possible abuse of RoF and Life Sheath if mysticism was actually powerful enough to refund all your energy.