Rollback for the EDK Nerf

[Bunnysmack]

I'm not saying that Epic Dragon Knight didn't need a nerf, because it very much did, but the severity with this nerf has come with some severe drawbacks. For one, while EDK was strong, things like the Blackguard/Warlock Pit Fiend General and Bhaalor were almost as powerful...but those lasted for ages and the EDK only stays around for 5-6 minutes at most. It's an endgame Epic Feat, that lasts only a brief amount of time, and requires tacking three spell foci levels in one of the two summoning spell schools in order to get the maximum use out of it.

Now...it is painfully weak. The offense is still there (which, honestly, could have stood a bit of a nerfing), but it can't survive at all well in either PvE or PvP. At its current defensive stats, an EDK can be killed in one round by a Weapon Master, or similarly high damage DPS character (players have already reported this occurring). As the most powerful summon available to someone who invested 5 feats to call a dragon (two of which are epic feats), that is a rather severe issue; especially considering that the dragon is of such short duration that it can't feasibly be warded in advance of almost any engagement. Now, if it lasted a far, FAR, longer duration, and some of the other super summons were similarly reduced in powers, I could see this being more balanced (even if the damage was nerfed a bit more).

In PvE it is similarly a disappointment. I understand the concern that before its DR made it almost impossible for a lot of content to kill it but now? Just today, I watched it struggle to survive just the beginning mobs in Burning Shores. I shudder to think of relying much on it in an actually high difficulty area. My summon monster IX ended up tanking more effectively than my EDK.

Suggestion: Roll back the defensive nerfs to EDK and impose a small damage nerf to make up for it. It's still swinging an obscene amount of critical hit around, but is made of tissue paper. I think a more reasonable reduction in EDK defensive stats would be (comparing to it's pre-nerf values): -80 to -100 HP, Reduce DR to 10/+5 (making it less trivial to bypass DR altogether in PvP, but still possible to accomplish), and reduce DI to 20% or 25%.

These values still make it far, FAR, more vulnerable than it's pre-nerf incarnation, but make it so it is actually liable to survive long enough to be worth being such a high-investment, low-duration, ability.

[Irongron]

This is a decent, detailed suggestion, but unless some of the development team push for this to be rethought I'm not going to open it up again for further development or rollback.

Rejected.