I suppose I'll start with an introduction regarding me and the contents of this post.

Hello! Im Altarator, a Witch player since the release of Black Desert. I dont lifeskill whatsoever and almost exclusively grind monsters.

As you can see I have substantial amount of playtime on my class and have also killed a decent amount of monsters. Knowing this you can maybe imagine how excited I was to see the class reboot of Witch and Wizard, but after having seen the contents of the reboot, the disappointment is immense.

So, this post will be about the problems Witch has in PvE and how to fix them without just introducing band-aid fixes, pushing real fixes further into the future. I will compare my proposed, necessary changes to Witch with top tier PvE classes. PA has stated multiple times that they don't like the idea of nerfing and we can all agree they haven't gone back on this yet. So comparing to the best seems reasonable because balance is only achievable when everything is on the same level(duh!) and nerfing isn't an option, so up we go!

OK, here we go. First I want to talk about the state Witch is in, in terms of PvE-capability for Awakening.

For a spot to be efficiently grinded the monsters need to die as fast as possible with as few spells as possible, because the gaps between spells are considerable compared to other classes. So the first point is "low DPS caused by gaps between spells

(damage gaps shown by "Attack Decisions")

The next premise for a Witch to be able to efficiently grind a spot is how much DR (damage reduction) the monsters have. That is because part of our damage comes from flows. These are casted by the pets. But why is that a problem? The way pet damage is calculated is different from *normal* spells.

Normal spell = "sheet ap" + "bracket ap" 

Pet spell        = "sheet ap" + 100ap

(patch notes of pet changes)

Pets also don't get influenced by PvE damage, special attack damage from elixirs and crystals.

^Bigandshiny tested it, he didn't explicitly test addons but he assumes that those also don't influence summons.

So why did I say that the DR of mobs is important? well thats because of how AP and DR work. 

If you want to know more about that ->APDR analysis

So we can say that the damage of pet flows is insignificant at most up to date endgame spots. Just to be clear here: If u have 305k with a PEN: Blackstar your pets are missing over 200 effective AP (i know an oddly specific example).

We also have to be very careful about how hard the mobs hit, Witch does not have a single spell in her kit with HP per hit, so to get HP back u have to stop your damage and use a stationary and unprotected heal.

Now we know on what spot we can actually grind, great! Next up is what to do when we are grinding.

Witch has a very important spell called "Magic Lighthouse"

When used it aggros monsters which are then forced to attack the orb for some time. It guarantees Back-Attacks and allows us to position well. The positioning is especially important because certain spells have sweet-and sour spots. When u cast Fissure Wave or Yoke of Ordeal and the mobs are directly in front of you, those two spells almost deal no damage. When a spot has a lot of melee mobs the spell isn't up for every pull due to its 20 sec cooldown which slows down the grind by a considerable margin.

This problem is a bit deeper and can be fixed through a couple different methods but we will get to "how to fix the class" later.

tl;dr: dps is not consistent and quite low

         pet flows don't deal dmg

         low sustain

         certain spells have bad hitboxes

Global Lab Witch reboot

As I said at the beginning, I am incredibly disappointed by the current state of the reboot, it doesn't even attempt to touch on the problems the class has.

Okay, what did we get? Three of the five pet flows got moved into the main spell, damage overall is unchanged. Why only 3/5? I think PA had too little time and just needed the space in the skill tree for the new three spells. Besides that they only touched fissure by swapping floating, knockback and air attack for knockdown and down attack. It is also said in the notes that Fissure Wave now casts faster but that's not the case and this isn't listed in "known issues".

left - live server, right - global lab

the *test* was done with equal conditions: 5 cast speed, no lvl 61 or 63 passive casting speed trait

I really dont wanna talk much about the new skills because they look super early development, so I'll keep it short.

The damage looks good with 1137%*10 and 50% crit. I don't like the "Y" pose and I really dislike the forced repositioning on a damage spell.

It looks amazing. Because it has a windup time and you can cast other stuff while it winds up, I'm pretty sure it's a pet spell so it doesn't deal any damage.

It's too slow and the protection ends way too early while being stuck in animation and its not really useful in PvE because you would need to turn your camera 180 degrees twice which is quite uncomfortable. Besides that, walking is faster anyway when you put your weapons away because of the sheer length of the animation.

tl;dr: nothing really changed

         new spells unfinished and clunky

Now we get to the important part: How to fix Witch´s PvE?

Move every pet flow into the main spell, then add a completely new flow which transitions very quickly into the next spell. For example the Y pose spell can be “press F after Thunderstorm”, of course without the movement and silly looking jump. The new earth spell can become the new yoke flow but please don't make it pet damage. You get my point, I guess.

Remove the cast time of fireball and residual lightning. The damage is rather low, its unprotected and just feels clunky.

Add HP per hit and crit chance on a couple spells in the Awakening skill tree.

Double the range of awakened magical evasion or let me surf on a Fissure Wave-like skill to make in combat repositioning easier. That will kind of fix the melee problem. 

But PLEASE fix the hitboxes aswell.

Make the pets useful, either by giving them actual damage or giving them utility. For example remove the damage from the pet flow completely, buff the damage of the main spell slightly to compensate and move some selfbuffs or debuffs to the pet. The summon and command spells can just get deleted.

Add AP buffs, DP debuffs and crit chance buffs in general.

Give Speed Spell 100% buff uptime

Remove Sage´s Light and Lightning Arrow and let Witch and Wizard choose between all Rabam skills.

I love your well thought out response, but the problem is people with actual voices in the game and who represent the class have their heads stuck up PA's butt are going to say this is considered "misinformation". I wish that PA had the type of data research team to see how many succession to awakenings there are, and maybe send out an official poll with serious issues of the class, maybe even a survey (think of the one pokemon unite made when their game first launched, it was actually a really well thought out plan to get player feedback) and then they could see what the general public of the playerbase thought.

I hate that this game is balanced around Node Wars. There's so much more to this game than a weekly guild vs guild fight.

Agreed I could care less about some guild fights

Since i havent added my sh*ty opinion here it comes.

With some suggestions for new skills and some older still left out ones.

Disclaimer all of this is for awak Witch.

Why is resurrection not gone/reworked/improved or atleast fixed to be of actual use ? 

New teleport : 

- Make it full i frame 

- Not as clunky

- Lower the CD maybe about 10 secs ? 

- And as an extra, maybe cover a little more distance ? 

- make it cancel out of all awa casts

-OLD teleport and flow teleport :

I guess having those split isnt a thing for us. 

But maybe remove the cd of the 2cnd tp to add a little more mobility by having it always up with the usual tp cd.

(Thx SchwarzZ loved the idea)

- make it cancel out of all awa casts

Baptism : 

- Speed it up

- Make it full SA 

- Maybe remove the colision

Residual lightning + new lightning rabam( lightningspear?):

- speed both up by alot 

- remove slow effects 

Manashield : 

- pls remove the damn mana cost upon taking dmg. It makes this skill not worth using.

Pets : 

-  Are the active summons actually supposed to be only used as bodyblocks 90% of the time ? 

Active Q-Block ... crevice idk what its called :

- Make the active resistance buff a little weaker maybe like 10% instead of 20%

- Make the duration of it last longer (stole this from some post in the past ty very good idea).

Magical evasion :

- atleast make it cover some more distance

- id love it to actually have i frame but i believe its unlikely

Lightning blast:

-remove the flow from magical evasion and detonative flow

Equilibrium Break :

I got 3 ideas for this weird ass spel

(Am i the only one that thinks it is pretty much worthless ?)

1: keep it as it is BUT make it fully ranged.

2 : speed it up, keep the fg and increase debuff

3: make it sa and cover a larger aoe.

And to come to one of the things i would like to see but is prolly the most unlikely.

Can we have overall a little more dmg through class multipliers ? I am sick of not beeing able to kill half of the classes even with a fully ass combo if thy are over 360 dp at 309 ap. Also while a 290 ap ninja/hash/guardia/nova/sage/warri/valk hell even mae easily combos me at 390 dp ?!?!?! 

Id be happy if atleast some of those suggestions would make it live.

Anyway still wishing gl to all the adventurers that havent rolled away from Witch YET.

Thx for reading

Because the devs wrote in the global lab patch notes that the damage and effects of the skills will remain the same I have a strong suspicion that moving pet flows to the main skill won`t change the damage calculations for them.

i like the idea of making it ranged. My initial thought for Equilibrium Break was to just remove the stiffen, so the damage comes out instantly

Give it the Earth Arrow treatment by combining both hits when cast after magical evasion or detonative flow
 

I guess i give u an upvote but i am convinced PA cant do better.