I’ve seen this comment often before. On what basis is it calculated (just for my understanding)? Mainly damage or also the increase in cleave (and stagger). Also does current Enhanced Power have the addition of the 20/40 Stagger 1/2 bonus?
Because damage-wise Mainstay should win if you need more than one-hit to kill something.
Pushattack spam Mace & Shield Footknight uses Mainstay. Super niche, but it’s still a use, at least.
Right, but at the end of the day, you’re nerfing stagger talents, which is fine. Now just reference a couple comments back. Your suggestion gives a larger damage advantage to ranged staves than just making enhanced power 10%.
Also, I think we can all agree assassin needs a nerf.
EP is 1.075/1.29/1.5. Enhanced power is also 7.5% more cleave which is enough for some weps to hit cleave BPs. Also, a disproportionate amount of enemies hit are at stagger level 0 unless you’re spamming push stabs (e.g. t spear). And then ranged BP’s as an added bonus.
I will agree on that one for sure. For the rest we can simply disagree. I don’t see that Finesse would be so much behind Smiter so I don’t really consider a nerf outside of the increased need for headshots. But yea, it is fine to have different opinions.
Thanks for that. That makes it obvious why Mainstay has such troubles currently. Then I have to reformulate what I wrote above. Enhanced Power would not stay the same, it would also lose the +20/+40 bonus for Stagger 1 & 2, respectively.
IMO 2H Hammer FK does too. Knocking a CW down with your Ult then killing him before he can even get up certainly feels worth taking mainstay to me.
Honestly FK in general can use it well since he has a good number of ways to put things immediately into stagger level 2.
I believe I tested this, Mainstay and EP can both reach the same breakpoints.
Mainstay can reach a 2 hit bodyshot breakpoint with strength pot without adding Chaos to the weapon unlike EP. It’s kinda neat but pretty niche and means giving up other qualities.
Just regular pushes puts enemies into stagger 2, some weapons do it better but even something like Rapier/Dual Daggers can put trash enemies into stagger 2.
Eh melee breakpoints are super overrated. There are a huge number of variables that change them that don’t generally get accounted for, mainstay is more damage in most situations, which means more likelihood of killing quicker. I’m basing this off feel mostly, but if EP isn’t needed for a stagger/cleave breakpoint mainstay feels noticeably better to me.
Does that apply to elites though? Always been curious if for instance you can push a SV straight into stagger level 2 with enough stagger power bonuses. FK has an Ult that puts elites into stagger level 2 to my knowledge, so that’s largely why I think mainstay is particularly good for him.
They are, just pointing out the difference between EP and Mainstay is tiny, Mainstay is redundant in 9 out of 10 cases.
Assuming you have enough stagger power, sure. e.g M&S is capable of staggering Stormvermin out of overheads with a push and immediately put them into stagger 2.
It’s a fair point and I certainly wouldn’t mind Mainstay being a little more impactful. I don’t think EP really needs a nerf though. Ideally I’d love to see Bulwark and Mainstay rolled together. If your whole team was doing +60% damage on enemies the FK/IB/whichever mainstay class put into stagger 2 that could be pretty impactful and play well with the role those stagger tanks are supposed to fill.
I’d merge Bulwark and Enhanced Power.
Bulwark plays off staggering and Enhanced Power can assist in that.
A duration and damage buff on Bulwark too.
EP might be picked for more than just ranged/niche stagger breakpoints or simply because x career doesn’t have Smiter or Assassin. It would actually be useful for FK, shields or consistent stagger and potentially better DPS for better push heavy weapons.
Yeah I can see that. So what in that case you’d just scrap mainstay?
I wouldn’t mind that change, though I do think the EP description is gonna get pretty convoluted and a bit incoherent. Would be a nice change mechanically though.
Could just delete the whole stagger tier and create something unique for each career. Personally never been huge fan how any of the talents work, not to mention assasin/smiter being such obvious choices.
Definitely good idea.
Is it really? Sounds like a huge amount of work when we’re still waiting on balance for a lot of the talents we already have. 2.0 changes ain’t going anywhere at this point, and FS clearly consider the stagger mechanic and talents pretty integral, so I’d say you’d be pushing the proverbial up hill to get anything done along those lines.
I think the idea is solid, its totally different debate if the game has enough life left for such a massive undertaking.
Heck personally I think its utopistic to expect it to happen but its still worth bringing up once in a while.
At any rate the simplest and probably easiest to implement solution is just to give every career each of the talent variants and nuke bulwark/mainstay from the game.
I think when we start to merge stuff like smiter/assasin (wtf) its going to create even more idiotic balance and other problems.
It’s not really that simple though. If given both smiter and assassin the vast majority of builds are gonna take assassin. Also you’ve just given Pyro Assassin as a byproduct which would certainly be a boost for her, though probably not the one she needs. Of course you could also nerf Assassin, which as pointed out further up is probably warranted anyway, and admittedly would fix most if not all the issues with your suggestion. Other than my quite liking mainstay/bulwark thematically for classes like FK and IB.
Hence why I suggested merging bulwark and mainstay so everyone has at least smiter or assassin, and the new combo talent ought to be stronger than either mainstay or Bulwark individually, and could be buffed further if needed. I actually think that solution would introduce the least potential balance issues.
Obvious answer is to nerf assasin as stated before but there has been enough discussion about it so i won’t bother starting other debate about it.
My personal biases aside, I think my problem with merging bulkwark/mainstay is that it would still rarely be used. Sure on paper it sounds awesome on some control weapons but in practice I think it will have the same issues as the 2 talents have individually currently.
Then again I really see no harm in it either so meh.
Yeah it might need more help to become passably competitive. My idea would be that any enemy you put into stagger 2 takes +60% damage from all allies (overwriting their own stagger bonuses, not adding with them), and then allies running EP could effectively get the best of both worlds if they capitalised on your stagger well. In theory it could let 1 good tank very significantly increase the damage output of a party not normally suited for melee. Most assuredly in practice though it would rarely work out this well.
I’m just loathe to abandon the talents because I like their identity, making them worthwhile admittedly might be more trouble than it’s worth though.
Just want to input that it doesn’t have to be that black and white. You can put EP / Smiter / Assassin on almost all classes, but you just put bulwark on classes where it makes sense. This would be HM (crit talent could be too strong and HM has shield), FK, GK, IB, Engi, RV (possibly), BW, UC, etc. Nerf assassin dmg bonus to 30%. Buff Bulwark so it applies to all sources of damage and the debuff lasts for 5 seconds instead of 2. That way you’re actually buffing your teams damage. Mainstay can just be removed. It really doesn’t make bulwark any better. Also, buff EP to 10% damage bonus and then it would be your option for horde-clearing weapons.