Best Of

Just speaking to everything you mentioned about shield spamming - pretty much no longer a thing. Hammer got some hefty buffs that make shield spamming nearly obsolete.

I was taking the Hammer change into account. There's very little reason to use Hew by itself now is my point, unless you price it, which you really only get one real free Repay out of it anyway before you're sacrificing momentum. You're better off just using Hammer, which is silly. Shadowprices are repaid by themselves at a rate of ~20 seconds, with Repay refreshing on whether or not it's a "free" one every 10. So basically, every nine or ten rounds of combat is another Price being returned. Every three or four rounds of combat is Repay not eating eq, but just eating your health.

Sciomancer manages to actually maintain its momentum by locking down an opponent, but an opponent can now lock them out of a substantial part of their offense and, by extension, their own defense in the pursuit of their own standard offense if they're a venom-based class (read: a not-so-small amount of Aetolia). Someone repeatedly using Weariness and Paresis over and over on a Sciomancer is absolutely going to destroy them and a Sciomancer can do jack all about it.

Edit: In essence, it's too easy for an opponent to ever be in a situation where they're confronted with Sciomancer's forked offense of pushing for a Voidtrapped or a state where the opponent can be Consumed. The latter already has very difficult requirements out of the two and shielding on the first Erupt when you see it is already enough to counter that route. The standard response to a Sciomancer if they actually manage to Shaderot you up to Level 3 now is just going to be shield spam until it's manageable. Sciomancer's abilities by themselves are not threatening until Shaderot is given the chance to build up. It's only once an opponent allows Shaderot to build up or, actively cures Shaderot and thus ignores Voidtrapped affs, does Sciomancer actually reach a state where they can fork their kill condition. It was already difficult for them to achieve Consume kills if an opponent was smart about prioritizing Voidtrapped affs. Even with the Hammer change, a few rounds of shield spam is all someone needs to recover against a Sciomancer and then leave.

For clarification, still not speaking on the overall present state of balance surrounding Sciomancers and only to the hammer tat, I think hammer tat has sort of become that for just about any class that doesn't utizlie a razestrike of some sort. Shamans now, for example, should never use leafstorm for the purpose of breaking a shield, even if you boost it. Hammer tat is superior in balance, and for successive shielding. Maybe a different conversation should be had about the power of hammer tat now vs class abilities that are presumably designed to break shields being outperformed by the tat.

I'm also not understanding what you mean by "a few rounds of shield spam" when hammer deals with it frighteningly well. Getting down to .5 seconds to break your shield is really nothing to scoff at. 3 rounds of shielding vs a hammer is the shielder offbal for 12s and you're offbal from shield a total of 3s. Admittedly I don't know Sciomancer intimately, but even for a slow class like Shamans its a lot of time to put work in.

Thanks for the answer on venom classes. I disagree with the conclusion in regards to Sciomancer viability, but I can see where you're coming from. Focusability does not totally sink a weariness-heavy venom offense, because it can be supported by other things (i.e. impatience). That seems fair and fun to me, though. Maybe. Maybe locking out Shadowprice entirely is the wrong lever for Keroc to have pulled here and Repay/timed recovery should have been locked out, or something else related to Shadowprice.

Last thing I'll contribute, really: What this comes down to is the principal of class resources. Nearly every class has a primary resource that, without it, you cannot push a meaningful offensive against your opponent. For Sciomancer, this is shadowdebt. The class is balanced (precariously or not enough depending on who is asked) around the timer of regeneration and how often you can repay without consume eq/bal. Now, that balance is tilted in that your opponent can lock a Sciomancer out of its resource.

Balance the afflictions of Scio. Tweak around what they can give, what order they can give them, take away or push the hard physical punishers further down its tree - but I'd prefer not to set a precedent that it is okay to lock a class out of its primary resource through afflictions, and that natural regeneration (there simply using) said resource has its own penalty.

I think you're digging in a little too deep on a kind of immaterial point here. All classes are different. Lots of classes have class resources, which are generated and used in wildly different ways, and that makes Aetolia a lot of fun. As far as Shadowprice is Sciomancer's class resource (one of them, gravity stacks seems like another), it does not have to operate by the same rules as other classes. As you've pointed out, the whole class is balanced based on its performance, including how it uses its class resources to good effect. If a class is overperforming (which, as Keroc noted, Sciomancer allegedly was), changes to a class resource, including a hard counter, seems fair to me. It's just a question of whether that counter is a challenge or a death sentence for the class. I don't know which it is in this case, but I don't think any Unwritten Rule of Classes has been broken just by adding a hard counter.