For clarity, the purpose of the change was to address the issue that Grav Round, on its own, was responsible for too much of your overall DPS. In other words, using totally made up numbers, if all you did was mindlessly spam Grav Round, you could still achieve something like 85% (again, totally made up) of your total damage dealing potential.
Not only was it bad, it wasn't fun (for the target or the caster). When things are bad, not fun, and yet they're still effective, they become high profile candidates for tweaking.
What we did was lower Grav Round's damage and increase Demo Round's damage. I don't know what the net result is off the top of my head, but we feel it's much, much closer to a "rebalance" than an outright "nerf."
And in case you're worried, if it turns out to be more of a nerf than a rebalance (which we don't want to be the case), then we'll fix it. But even then that'll probably be in ways that don't directly affect the damage dealt by Grav Round.
With all respect, even if you cut Grav Round damage by half, people would still spam it due to numerous buffs it provides.
That is correct. However, I'll repeat, the reduction in Grav Round damage was made to address how much damage Grav Round contributes to your total rotation - not to address how many times you press the Grav Round button. Players have run off with the idea that we're trying to eliminate Grav Round spamming, which is not the case. My goal has been to eliminate how effective Grav Round spamming is if it's all you do.
An effective Gunnery rotation still utilizes Grav Round as both a "build up" ability and a "resource dump" ability. That hasn't changed, nor was it my goal to change that. What has changed is that competitive DPS now comes from utilizing all of your key rotational abilities instead of leaning so very heavily on just Grav Round. I hope that's more clear now.
Nerfs for...more fun?
So they nerfed commandos to make them have a rotation that's more fun?
I've seen this kind of logic since EQ. I guess game developers will never learn.
Was there some outcry from the commando community to change their rotation?
Not only was it bad, it wasn't fun (for the target or the caster). When things are bad, not fun, and yet they're still effective, they become high profile candidates for tweaking.
What we did was lower Grav Round's damage and increase Demo Round's damage. I don't know what the net result is off the top of my head, but we feel it's much, much closer to a "rebalance" than an outright "nerf."
And in case you're worried, if it turns out to be more of a nerf than a rebalance (which we don't want to be the case), then we'll fix it. But even then that'll probably be in ways that don't directly affect the damage dealt by Grav Round.
An effective Gunnery rotation still utilizes Grav Round as both a "build up" ability and a "resource dump" ability. That hasn't changed, nor was it my goal to change that. What has changed is that competitive DPS now comes from utilizing all of your key rotational abilities instead of leaning so very heavily on just Grav Round. I hope that's more clear now.