With today’s patch, we saw Battle Wizard have its career skill cooldown changed from 90 seconds to 40 seconds. Given Battle Wizards place in the game right now, any positive changes are of course welcome, but we’re now in a weird design place where at level 25, Battle Wizard and Pyromancer’s ults just become better than Unchained’s. Currently, there is not much real choice for the 25 talents in those tiers – vent on skill is just in a different league than the other talents. This means that both of their ults perform the primary function of Unchained’s ult (vent all of your heat) on less than half the cooldown, while also providing either a teleport or the more Burning Head.
The most obvious solution to me seems to be to remove those vent-on-skill talents and replace them with something new. As of now, being able to fully vent on a 40 second cooldown undermines the other venting mechanics of each, removing distinction from the individual careers… Either way, it’s a bit odd that both of the other careers fulfill the Unchained skill’s primary function on literally under half the cooldown, with superior auxiliary benefits as well.
This has been my thought pretty much all the time I’ve seen complaining about “OP Pyro”. As others have said, the most OP thing about Pyromancer (and Sienna in general) is that she can quite easily trivialise Overheating. That she can completely remove it on one of the shorter-cooldown Career skills, is a significant factor (though not the only one).
I wouldn’t go as far as to remove the Talent completely, but rather let it remove, say, half the current heat, with another short buff to compensate. They are still level 25 Talents, so they should be quite powerful. I think that way they could still be used for their original purpose (heat management and possibly saving oneself from exploding), while not trivialising heat quite as badly, and still feeling powerful.
This is still only one of the non-choice Talents that exist at the moment, and I fully expect for them to change in the future.
Yeah BW and Pyro manage heat so much easier, and also don’t put themselves as risk of dying using ranged weapons. Its either Unchained should no longer blow up from full heat, and not just that, replace explosion with some buff&debuff, like for example 20% AS + 6 UnstStr stacks for 15 seconds, but cannot use ranged and take 50% more damage(BloodMagic doesnt work), so she cannot ignore heat, but is not punished so much for using ranged , or… idk, make heat management a bit harder for other 2 careers. Because having your ‘real’ hp as ammo is not very viable, considering that both BW and Pyro manage their “ammunition” better, and have hp as actual hp.
you are looking at individual abilities without considering the whole picture.
the unchained takes 50% damage shunted to overcharge AND can remove overcharge by blocking strikes. no other class can do that, and have to rely on manual vent or thru ability clearing. if you want to compare straight up shooting and clearing heat, sure, the other classes might excel over the unchained. but i feel you guys are judging a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree here.
the issue that it is risky playing melee is another argument concerning player skill.
The point isn’t that I think BW is overpowered now, it’s that the Sienna careers are being homogenized by giving them all the same venting mechanics. With a full vent on a 40 second cooldown, a BW heat sink on their staff can pretty much entirely ignore Tranquility, defeating the underlying identity of the career in comparison to its alternatives.
Unchained’s ult has a clear main function to me - to vent. By giving the ability to fully vent on cast to the other careers on under half the cooldown, the uniqueness of that functionality is totally undermined. It’s just awkward design when a talent enables one class’s career skill to be perfectly superior to another. Instead of seeing an interesting mechanical difference between Pyromancer and BW in their venting mechanics, both of them can now just vent by using heat sink and hitting their ults every 40 second and ignoring the rest of their kit.
Can we at least reduce the cooldown on Unchained’s ult a little bit? 3 minutes seems a bit long compared to all other abilities and considering how little damage it does. I feel like 2 minutes base is a little more reasonable.
Alternatively, if 2 minutes -30% with talent is too much, still make it 2 minutes base, and replace the CDR talent with a damage reduction buff or something else.
So it seems, I misspoke, apologies. It may have been me looking at the base CD a while ago, and it still feels a bit long to me, but yes, it does seem to be 2 minutes.
In that case, the CD likely doesn’t need to be reduced by much if at all, maaaaybe 90 seconds from 120, but otherwise yes, I agree with you @flipl that they seem to be homogenized a bit. Venting as an active (base) doesn’t seem all that great when the other careers can just grab a level 25 talent to do the same thing on a shorter cooldown.