The Awakening Witch community is so small, it cannot adequately reach the ears of Pearl Abyss. It’s not because the class cannot be popular. The class is an original classic of the game: it is merely deserted (considered weak, frustrating to play, clunky, ancient). If some kind souls ever feel like pushing the idea to help this good old class, here’s a few ideas to dig in.

The list begins by stating a problem from the class and attempts to provide a solution to each solution. The given solutions are generally simple and do not concern any % damage buff of any kind. I hope you will feel that those given changes are reasonable and would help modernize the class to a certain ‘current year standard’.

Cancelling Awakening skills.

Awakening Witch needs ways to cancel out of her abilities in the middle of the cast. Some skills require up to 2 seconds of casting before being able to commit to any new actions (other than dying).

Elementalization, Flow : Magical Evasion, Teleport should be usable to cancel the following skills: Yoke of Ordeal, Fissure Wave + Perfect Sign, Equilibrium Break, Thunderstorm, Lightning Blast.

More Staff Swap to Sphera Flexibility

Allow the Witch to cast Flow: Magical Evasion (Sphera magical evasion) while using staff to swap naturally to Spheras. There is never a reason for an Awakening Witch would wish to use the staff Magical Evasion over Flow : Magical Evasion.

Allow Elementalization to be used while using Staff to swap back to Spheras. It would work similarly to the S + C swap Teleport, acquiring the full lists of current cancels.

Mobility

On the matter of Teleport. Awakening should not have split teleport. However, giving them a access to shorter Ultimate: Teleport cooldown would allow them more flexibility in their movements. The cooldown of Ultimate: Teleport would need to be reduced by 3 seconds. As such, double teleport would be continuously available to them. It would provide them a significant disengage or continuous engage momentum when needed.

Ultimate: Teleport cooldown reduced to 7 seconds from 10 seconds (for Awakening).

Elementalization should be changed to be an invincibility frame during the whole casting animation, not just during movement.

How Much Should a Mage Rely on Basic Sprinting?

When an Awakening Witch’s teleport is on cooldown, Elementalization is on cooldown, her best mobility option is to press TAB to unsheathe her Spheras quickly and hold SHIFT + W to sprint away.

When a Mage in a fantasy game needs to use their legs to sprint, it’s really time for the Devs to get back to the drawing board. Let’s be serious.

It was thankfully improved with the Reboot via the Magical Evasion hopping, but, Sprinting is still much faster and better without slow debuffs or once a safe distance is established.

The Pet Blessing System.

The new system that was implemented during the reboot was to give the Witch a special bonus depending on the current pet summoned.

Tett for Voltaic Pulse and Thunderstorm.Gorr for Fissure Wave’s Perfect Sign and Equilibrium Break.

The given bonuses for Equilibrium Breaks in terms of Cast/Animation Speed should never have been part of this conditional system. Equilibrium Break is in a shameful state without Gorr Pet out due to its poor casting speed patterns and is generally obsolete given that Lightning Blast does the same work while being a much safer frontal with its camera turn.

Additionally, the Pet Blessing is also conditional on the pet staying alive. However, the pet’s life total seems to decrease drastically whenever node wars begin. The life pool total is very hard to guess. But currently, it seems to be at most 10-15k life. Being an Awakening Witch in nodewar or siege feels like playing Tamagochi with this constant need to reset the favored pet’s hp via resummons. If this life hp reset is not done, the pet will simply die during the next ball engage and the Witch will suddenly lose a huge portion of her damage.

Increase the Pet's HP pool drastically during nodewar and siege.

Finally, I don’t see the class being suddenly overpowered should the pet blessing system be completely removed.

This current system creates more problems within the class’s internal balance. Because some players favor Tett and some favor Gorr. If one skill performs poorly without Gorr pet out but is adequate while Gorr is out, how should balance be approached through that perspective? In a more concise point: Equilibrium break or Perfect Sign (Fissure Wave Flow) being quite useless without Gorr out and viable once Gorr is out.

Yoke of Ordeal?

I do not wish to talk about any other skills to put all the emphasis on this Yoke of Ordeal + Gorr Roll skill. Everybody knows about Witch’s Gorr Roll. This is the “signature” skill. This is the 2nd protected CC skill of Witch. This is our Tier 3 addon in Awakening.

Except… I don’t currently have a Addon slotted on the skill, and I certainly don’t use it at all anymore.

Nobody knows what happened to this skill after the Class Reboots, but this skill got from a “good situational ability” to a “Why did I do this skill?” ability. The damage is disappointing, casting this skill was suicidal even before the Twilight Kama Slash world, so imagine now.

Once this frontal guard skill is casted, you need to wait 2 seconds before being able to dash or teleport out of it. And in terms of damage distribution, about 15% of the skill damage is dealt within the first 2 seconds, followed by 85% of the rest in the last 2 more seconds.

Yoke of Ordeal needs new glory days.

Cut down the windup animation of Yoke of Ordeal by approximatively 0,8 seconds at the beginning of the cast to make it so that Knockback is attempted right after the cast is initiated.

Improve the quality of the crowd control effects. First tick of CC could remain Knockback, but the second tick of CC on the second wave of Yoke of Ordeal could be a Knockdown.

No need to buff the damage of the skill if the damage is dealt in a shorter damage window, if it can be cancelled at any point via dashes or TP, or if the attempts at CC are more convincing.

Pre-Absolute staff skills VS Absolute staff skills

I hate myself for pointing that one out given that it would make me quit the class should the bug be fixed. But it has been going on for quite a while already, and nobody has been complaining about it yet; therefore, it probably is balanced.

However, the Pre-Absolute skills (Such a Risidual Lightning rank IV) are currently dealing approximately 46% more damage in PvP than it’s “superior” rank, Absolute: Risidual Lightning. The damage difference varies around 30% to 46%.

This trend is true for Rank III Fireball Explosion, Rank III Meteor Shower, Rank III Lightning Storm.

This change was introduced almost one year ago in an attempt to buff the Pre-Absolute staff skills before reaching level 56 on Witch, Wizard (and Berserker). They nearly doubled the damage of the pre-absolute ranks, but seemingly never realized the lack of PvP damage reduction modifiers from them. This causes the Pre-Absolute ranking to be MUCH, MUCH stronger than the Absolute staff version of the skills.

So here’s the point. If after one year of this change, nobody cared to complain or found it odd. It probably means that the mistake needs to become official.

Just make it official: swap the damage on those Awakening Mainhand skills and make the Absolute’s damage similar to the current pre-absolute versions of the skill. Do not remove the %MP damage portion.

Keep rank III Meteor as is.

Bump. Alot of these changes apply to Awakening Wizard, but witch definitely needs the help more than wizard IMO.
And to those who might downvote; If you don't want to give the class any more mobility, damage, or utility, why not just make the class tanky so it can SORTA maintain the playstyle it wants to? Shield & Gauntlet classes get to while performing better, even Corsair is doing it better.
A simple but boring solution would be to give the class evasion scaling on awakening, but I find this to be dodging the problem, so that isn't how I would approach it.

At the end of the day even if you only give bandaid solutions to awa staffs, the inherent kit design will not work if gear, damage and mobility continue to scale and powercreep as they do now.

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I mean, I dont wanna say they arent reading the feedback and suggestions at all, but ... y'know. :D

So much feedback has been posted in this forum regarding wizard/witch pvp/pve but nothing wich really matter has not been implementated.

The only tweaks was about dmg numbers wich didn't change nothing when is clearly a.f. that the class need more mobility and faster animations.

They shoud get rid of the summon pet's.It's disgusting when a DK kill your summon in 2/3 sec and you lost the buff from him and also lose 1 second stuck in animation to summon him again and in the same time you lose 1k HP or maybe more by taking dmg while summoning.

Hi Despins.

Why don't you feel Awakening Witch / Wiz should have split teleport? This is my #1 desired change, and has been since the day Succession released. 

Love the idea of being able to swap from Staff to Awakening by using Magical Evasion. That'd be a huge QoL improvement.

The Summoning Blessings are definitely lackluster...I like the additional particle effects of the lightning skills when Tett is out but the damage doesn't seem noticeably different to me, so I always have Gorr out for the additional protection. I haven't done a NW in years so I can't remark on that part of your suggestions.

My other personal gripes are with how much better the Wizard Fireball Rabam and Lightning Spear Rabams are than ours, but I don't expect Pearl Abyss to do anything for us in this regard. It's drastic, though. Wizard's Lightning Spear is a CHUNKER of an ability. This last thing isn't a suggestion but I just wanted to say I'm really enjoying our new Magnus skill Earthen Eruption. :)

imho we have elementalization so they just have to make it full iframe and lower cd a bit.

Elementalization skill was dead on arrival. Sure they fixed it a little bit but still it is clunky af and the iframe hardly ticks.. specially in laggy siege pvp it is a skill that just gets you killed. One fix that they should add because of such laggy servers is that while we have only couple iframes and 1 good iframe/mobility it should start the iframe at start of the cast and that iframe should take priority in laggy situation where grab or some other cc might happen within same few milliseconds.

Very sorry for the super late response...

If "double teleport" is the suggestion to reduce the ultimate: teleport cooldown for awakening by 3 seconds to always have the double teleport ready, and "split teleport" is to have them usable independantly similarly to Succession Casters, I would indeed favor "Double Teleport" for Awakening Casters for a number of reasons.

1.While I am very sure Split Teleport would be excellent, I believe that the paths between specs need to be different. It would blurr the lines between both specs and it seems to merely be a game of imitation here. The spec shouldn't be a succession clone merely because it works well for Succession; is there no other way for a caster spec to have success with?

2. What is good for Succession is not necessarily good for Awakening. Split Teleport seems excellent for the Succession spec. Why? Succession is able to cancel almost all their skills via teleport and even their slower skills such as Lightning Storm High Voltage.

3. Succession is also a lot more about kiting with long ranged high dps and constant pressure.  4.Succession has protected, high value slows that are easily applied unlike Awakening. 5. Succession actually has a plathora of quick catches that will be chained with protected skills afterward.   

All to say, what is it you'll do as Awakening after a Split Teleport? Cast Detonative flow while the target is moving at normal speed? Try a Thunderstorm? Maybe you'll do a Sage's Thunder, but what for? You're still inferior to anything Succession will attempt.

4. The budget cost of this implementation could be too expansive for Awakening Casters.

This change is such a "holy grail" or the panacea for many players. However, outside players or even some devs perspective on the matter is that the moment Split Teleport is acquired for Awakening Casters, it means that they'll be just as good as Succession and everything will be fixed. There are many out there who thinks that Succession is merely Awakening Casters with mobility. As for the opposite, reducing the Ultimate: Teleport cooldown by 3 seconds for Awakening is a rather low budget proposition that would actually give Awakening a lot more for it.

Why is Double Teleport good?
1. Fewer jump of shames. Everyone does it, it's the Awakening trademark. You lie if you don't do it when you're oh so desperate for that little red teleport.
2. More chasing, more disengage. You're certainly aware that Awakening got a very strong Sheath and Unsheath animation via TAB. Having Double Teleport gives the class opportunities to keep on a chase in some specific instances where all you need is to hit this Paralysis. But, more importantly, if you engaged in large scale and managed to get that Teleport ready again, you'll be able to get farther from the danger. This is fundamentaly good food both small and large scale and we both know how important that 3 seconds cooldown difference is.

3. Double Teleport tricks. You can do a little bit more fancy shenanigans with double teleport especially if you'll do it without worrying. Awakening is more about confusing the opponent due to her Pet Stiffness command. 
4. It's not a dead end. We're probably all aware that Awakening Witch or Wizards are probably one of the least favored class by Pearl Abyss at this point. Is there a reason? Who knows. But what's clear to me on a personnal level is that if we gain Split Teleport, we're not receiving anything else. Maybe it's all we need? I'll leave you to the answer. I personally wouldn't want Split Teleport if it means that, even if it's quite the potent tool: I don't want to be a pale imitation of Succession.

Awakening Witch is garbage.
Cannot SA trade like the early times.
Cannot defend a grind spot for nothing.
Striker and Mystic counters her tremendously. like...TREMENDOUSLY.
Shes AOE based, but why play her when You got NUMEROUS other clases that can do that SAME thing and self PA at that.
BETTER mobility. And Better SA Traders.

She has nothing going for her but maybe just the Heals for OTHERS and PA for OTHERS and NOTHING for herself.
 Keep at the excuses as to why shes fine or op. You're delusional if you think shes in a "Fair" or Overpowered spot in anything PVP related.