[Trexmaster]

Bellowing Stag, as it stands, is so powerful you can have it as your only means of offense and still remain in the top tier of builds with the tankiness to back it up.

Right now it can exceed 100+ unresistable (bar dark resist) damage, which also subtracts from maximum health. As it stands it's a tank buster that scales off a tank stat and is equally if not more effective against non-tanks. If you happen to not resist dark, you'll lose roughly 20% of your health a turn to it, and damage racing Bellowing Stag tanks is often futile since their offensive stat is RES, leaving them plenty of points to spare to bulk up, not to mention freedom with their equipment.

For a skill that scales solely on Dark ATK with a minor bonus from rank + rage, it can afford to be toned down. Bellowing Stag is a better version of Retaliate right now, being not only more Rage efficient, but it deals its damage in an AoE to boot instead of a single target.

A simple suggestion to bring it into line: make Bellowing Stag go vs Mag DR from RES, at the very least.

[MakeshiftWalrus]

Being one of the people with a character wholly based around this, I can only approve of the suggestion. Bellowing Stag is far, far too strong and effective at what it does.

[Autumn]

I agree fully with the OP of this post, the fact that it doesn't go through RES really makes this skill oppressive, as you are fully allowed to build full tank due to the nature of it's scaling, you need 25% dark resistance or you almost always will get overwhelmed.

[Nanovelich]

Definitely agreeing with this one. Plenty of people running this also make use of Winged Serpent's ridiculous mobility to ensure that not only are you never getting out of Cursed Wounds' repeatedly stacking and refreshing duration (which could just as easily be accomplished with Charge honestly,) but they'll get to hit you twice each round as well, making them sacrifice virtually nothing to be extremely tanky, shut down any form of healing you have indefinitely, and still manage to beat you in the dps race thanks to their damage being unresistable.

[Kameron8]

I also agree with the OP. You can already buff this skill with elemental badges, and still double tap through resists so long as you're within 1 range to Jump Cancel. This is another case of a purely defensive scaling skill that has too much throughput.

[Rendar]

I've seen the sort of shit this does. The fact that it's elemental augmentable means that it has a lot of different variations, and none of them are really cool.

More AoE range, fire tiles of "fuck you", crit, it's just kind of ridiculous, and I'll be happy to see it toned down to not absolutely ass blast someone. (Especially considering I thought of a build that can do 700+ bellowing stag damage at 200 RE per turn with DK)

[Neus]

I could see it being changed to no longer being unresist damage. The main reason that was the case was because of pre-GR when RES was a flat reduction and damage was a little lower, so it took more time to build up RE.

[Trexmaster]

That'd be perfect, in regards to swapping it to be no longer unresistable damage.

[Snake]

So, about this. I kind of feel like even if RES blocks some of the damage, a Matador can keep spamming the skill indefinitely for easy Cursed Wounds stacking, which seems to be the secondary problem of this skill being double tapped all the time.

I 'think' making Bellowing Stag consume more Rage Energy (like 25% of your Rage Energy, from 15%), need a minimum of 100 Rage Energy (from 1 Rage Energy), and a 2 round cooldown on top of it (if not just the cooldown so it can't be double-tapped and used frequently), will definitely fix this.

Telling people to 'just build Dark Resistance and RES' won't be a fair excuse anymore, if 80 DEF/80 RES Priest tanks are just going to be spamming this back and forth while healing themselves for a heck ton.

[Chaos]

So, about this. I kind of feel like even if RES blocks some of the damage, a Matador can keep spamming the skill indefinitely for easy Cursed Wounds stacking, which seems to be the secondary problem of this skill being double tapped all the time.

I 'think' making Bellowing Stag consume more Rage Energy (like 25% of your Rage Energy, from 15%), need a minimum of 100 Rage Energy (from 1 Rage Energy), and a 2 round cooldown on top of it (if not just the cooldown so it can't be double-tapped so easily and constantly), will definitely fix this.

Telling people to 'just build Dark Resistance and RES' won't be a fair excuse anymore, if 80 DEF/80 RES tanks are just going to be spamming this back and forth.

Let's see if Dark Resist/RES isn't enough before we start absolutely throttling the skill with a thousand restrictions.