You can’t use your Fire Walk on any surface that is not ‘ground level’.
Neither for jumping from the object you are standing on to ground level nor for jumping in place to get your cooldown/stagger of.
I know this might be intentional, and for a good reason (exploits, etc.), but even when going on a surface u can easily walk on or use a simple jump to climb upon, u can’t use Fire Walk.
Would love to hear if there might be changes on the way for it.
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In first build(s) of the game, in early betas, firewalk could go over obstacles. ANY obstacles.
It was very easy to go out of bounds.
It was neutered since then.
Would like to see some changes too.
For starters, maybe make it actual teleport instead of charge?
Or just bite the bullet and make it a dash – which seems easier to me. It feels a little wonky to use right now as a teleport with neutered effects and it was too easy to abuse as a true teleport. I think they just need to give up on it.
Although the ult is pretty bad generally. Fire does no damage. Stagger is weak and cooldown is high relative to other ults – especially considering it doesn’t deal damage or provide a damage boost. Feels incredibly underwhelming compared to similar mobility/stagger ults like Footknight and Slayer.
I’m also not sure how it synergizes with the class overall (although the class’ talent tree generally feels jumbled and poorly planned). BW doesn’t really want to use the ult to engage since it puts you in close range – which is awkward with poor melee damage or a staff. So you really end up using it as an “oh sh*t” button or as a disengage – which is pretty lame compared to almost every other ult.
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It synergises as: meh, at least I have overcharge clear. Other 2 lvl 25 talents are laughable.
It’s ok for occasional help to melee, because there is some stagger. Or rather it’s an opener of sorts.
Agreed. We need group buff/utility on this class.
Pretty much engager-or-disengager of mediocre+ efficiency.
To be said, i think BW is pretty balanced. And is one of my favourite careers.
That ult, however, it’s just underdelivering. Either give it teleport that can get you out of gas cloud, or proper firetrail that burns.
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BW needs a total overhaul as is. The fire walk is literally only good for stunning hordes/bosses, nothing more. The talents? Don’t make me laugh. Tranq is only good when you’re just getting started with the game, further on it’s either a free full conflag or block cost reduction, which is hardly exciting. The other talents are much like the remaining 14 talent trees, i.e. uninspired, boring and generally verging on useless. The increased charge speed is hardly useful and totally worthless on Beam.
Tear it all down and put something else in its place, because this’ll be underwhelming even once you ‘iron it out’. I say that as someone who only plays Sienna as BW and therefore technically ‘main’ BW. (I refuse to F L Y F R E E L I T T L E O N E, and Unchained may as well not exist until they actually do something with careers affecting character voice lines).
But slimdolphin will never do any of that, so at least make the fire not cosmetic for a start.
Well, technically the fire does do damage - to enemies standing in it. Iirc, it may even be enough to kill a Fanatic. The problem is it’s only when the enemy is standing in the flames, and the DoT doesn’t stick to them, so delivering any significant damage is near-impossible.
Not quite. Her kit is pretty powerful once you can figure it out, but figuring it out is hard, and Tranquility needs tweaks to be slightly stronger as a base, and to not encourage the “cast-wait-cast-wait” style it does now.
As for Fire Walk, I too find it hard to fit into the kit of the career and to figure out what it was originally meant for, and as such, another spell could’ve worked better. As BW is apparently supposed to be the controlled, paced caster who keeps to the backlines (or sticks her melee weapon up in defense) a wide AoE damage spell or a crowd control spell would feel more like her general kit. As it is now, though, it gets mostly used as an escape ability and to make a bit of space. And to vent, of course, but that is a problem of the Talents, not inherent to the ability.
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I play Battle Wizard quite a lot now, i work on the 100 wins hat and i am almost done.
In general Battle Wizard as a Class works. Depending on the Staff you use you can do a combination of horde clear, CC or just general ranged DPS. And the thing is you will be pretty good at stuff like that, but you should use a Staff with a AOE that you can charge to utilize the class. At least in my experience.
And now the fun part.
Tranquility, i have some issues with it. It feels like you get to little out of it. Better Overheat decay and the charge speed (or block cost reduction) thats all nice, but the cooldown is just so harsh.
On legend the onslaught can go on for so long, that cast-wait-cast-wait does not work, you have to fight.
And melee as Sienna… well you all know. It takes some time to kill most elite enemies and the longer it takes the higher the chance you get hit and reset Tranquility. When one of these onslaughts happens on legend you basically become a class without a passive.
Fire Walk, i agree with everything that was said here about it, but you are all wrong about one thing.
The stagger is awesome, that is the one saving grace Fire Walk has. One of your Teammates down and gets killed by some enemys? Teleport to him and stagger all enemys revive ally. A Foot Knight cant do it better.
Or a Chaos Spawn with just a little live left grabs one of the team. Teleport in his face stagger no live for him, you just saved the fight. The stagger is the one thing that works.
What kills the Battle Wizard is the comperasent with the Pyromancer. And a big part of it is not the Battle Wizards flaws, its the general imbalance of classes that can utilize critical hits good and classes that cant.
Well thats just my opinion.
I was exaggerating a bit. In general, it does so little damage in such a tight radius that it’s basically ineffective – which was your point too.
Even if FS buffed the damage, I’m not sure it would help – for the reasons you mentioned. It’s difficult to use since it’s area-based (with a relatively small aoe) – so I suspect it will just end up feeling like a worse version of Handmaiden’s ult.
Personally, I feel like they should just remove the fire effect altogether and go with something to make it a better initiator/disengage. Increased damage/atk speed or damage mitigation (like move speed or dodge) maybe.
Eh. I’ve played a large number of games with her now. She’s decent – and she shines with conflag. But she just feels wimpy/weak with most other staves and she still feels considerably weaker than pyro. Beam/fireball/bolt all perform better on Pyro due to the synergy with traits/crit. And the survivability is about the same since 100% BCR is REALLY situational – requiring 8 seconds with no casting or damage taken? And you give up her one damage increase talent that synergizes with Tranquility to get it…
Personally, I think the reason the class feels a little meh is because almost none of her talents synergize with Tranquility and its effect is weak. We have a single talent that boosts damage when Tranquility is on (charge speed)? No effects encouraging you to move to melee when it’s off – which is what it ‘seems’ like FS was trying to do. There was a lot they could have done here to make it feel better. Bumps to atk speed/melee damage when it’s off, other types of increases to ranged when it’s on (like flat damage on 1-2 casts or more atk speed over a duration (allowing stacking)). Hell, they could have added a talent reducing Tranquility’s cooldown. As it is, they took a pretty cool mechanic and didn’t really do anything with it.
I’d love to see talents that create more of a rapid ‘bounce’ build between melee and ranged – since pyro leans ranged and unchained leans melee. It seems like that was sort of what they were thinking when they designed BW. Although, the available “builds” on her feel so random that I feel a little hesitant drawing that conclusion.
I think they could encourage switching more rapidly/often by adding talents that give boosts to melee damage when Tranquility is off and boosts to ranged when its on. I’d personally like to see them completely revise both the second and third talents tiers to make that happen.
Right now you have one pick in tier 2 with world aflame (short radius and situational at best). Other two aren’t useful in group play. And tier three either has you choosing between 100% BCR (also extremely situational since it requires melee and no damage for 8 seconds?) and charge speed (which is never up in prolonged fights). I’m not going to mention increased decay rate on Tranquility (because it’s stupid).
Tier 1 is also pretty bad. You get more temp health, a stam shield, or charge speed. Stamina as a choice is almost always terrible for group legend play since you can just run parry. Temp health seems unnecessary. And charge speed is the only damage choice – so it gets more weight by default. Because, honestly, in normal group play, you lean toward just stacking damage since you can usually avoid most/all damage.
All told, I count like like 6/15 or 7/15 useful talents in normal group legend play.
Really the only area she shines. And mostly with conflag since flamestorm is terrible in normal group legend play. Still not sure why they didn’t add a single target attack to the light on flamestorm…
Agreed. It has nothing that synergizes as well with the other staves.
Although, I notice you can fire two fully-charged bolts or fireballs with Tranquility on and still get the effect of Rechannel. You just have to keep holding right click. That ‘seems’ like a bug to me. But it almost makes it worth it to switch to melee for 8 seconds… ‘Almost’ being the key word there.
Was curious so I went on the modded realm to test. Fanatics die in ~5 seconds just standing in the fire. Slaves in less. That’s with AI off for testing. With zero enemy movement, it’s not bad.
With AI on, it’s a lucky case if it does anything. Enemies get staggered out of the way or are just outside the effect. Once enemies are out of the flames it stops doing any damage at all.
It could be passable if it applied a dot effect that continued irrespective of the flames (like HM dash). If it continues to rely on the ground effect and enemies being in the flames, I think it needs a buff to the width. Enemies shouldn’t be knocked out of range immediately. Making it last longer but act as a miniature flame bomb (redirecting pathing) is a potentially interesting idea.
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It would have to be a pretty big column for it to hit mobs and allow them to stay in the fire long enough to take damage. Especially with the way that AI pathing avoids flames…
That or up the damage even more. 5 seconds doesn’t sound like very long, but with the way AI avoids the flames, most mobs only stay inside for 1 second or so. Assuming you can even position it properly.
I think I’d still rather see them just remove the flames and do something else. Hell, have it modify Tranquility or bring it off cooldown or something.
I think this is true. I mean, Pyro isn’t really that great talent-wise, it is usually not much of a choice, but her talents synergize with each other and complement her damage dealing ability both with her staffs and her active ability, which is highly damaging and versatile. BW gets nifty charge-speed buffs, but absolutely no way of increasing how many spells she can put out.
Pyro’s passive gives her a bonus all the time and again, it synergizes well with options that reduce overcharge generated (since less overcharge, especially the overcharge reduction that increases with overcharge) since it allows you to put out more spells on high overcharge. More spells on high overcharge mean more crits, means more damage, more cooldown reduction on active ability and potentially more crit procs for weapon traits. It all just fits together like a glove. One reason Pyro is so strong is that it is all connected and you get the fealing the more you cast, the more you get rolling.
BW has just one thing: increased charge speed with more overcharge. But since her overcharge is so high, she cannot utilize it to really good effect with many weapons. She gets some increase in burst damage, but her sustain is just plain bad. Her talent choices don’t synergize well with each other and just complement individual aspects of the setup (kinda like RV), and her overall choices are very questionable. Her passive ability is very, very weak.
Firewalk kinda fits the picture. I get the idea of battlefield mobility and does work very well with that, but when compared to Pyro, BW has two distinct disadvantages: No highly damaging active ability, no good crits. This is something she has to compete with. I mean, the only thing firewalk has over burning head is repositioning. Burning head can also give you the space you need and it also staggers larger opponents while dealing heavy damage, and without the need to expose yourself to danger by being next to them.
Firewalk just has the stagger and some absolutely negligible firetrail.
If anything, Firewalk should deal MASSIVE damage to targets hit when you teleport into them, and I mean massive. It should absolutely devestate any mob it hits and deal very heavy DOT to anything it hits. Level 25 should give the option to further increase the damage, cooldown reduction and overcharge clear, something like that.
Agreed on Pyro synergy for crits and overcharge reduction. I still don’t get the possible atk speed build with some of her talents – it feels more fitting on Unchained or BW to me.
Fuzzy and I were talking in Discord regarding changes to BW ult. We were thinking maybe triple the column width and make damage apply as a dot after first application (like Handmaiden)? But that feels like it might be broken in the other direction with a 24 sec cooldown - stacking CDR. I also think if it dealt a ton of damage at impact it would become basically be the same as Unchained’s ult (but with mobility)? That might not be great either. Hard to say.
I still just don’t like the fire effect. Even buffed substantially, I suspect it would end up acting like Handmaiden’s ult or feel like Unchained. It’s kinda ‘samey’ feeling. I’d personally rather they do something sort of unique and have it provide a short term buff or something (still similar to Slayer I guess).
Fatshark may be intended this melee/ranged Hybrid play for the BW. But you are right her talents don’t really reflect that. You have to choose between block cost reduction and charge speed. So basically a little better melee or better ranged, thats it. World Aflame can boost your melee and ranged dps a little bit but its just meh.
And Sienna in melee is just terrible, as i said earlier her melee weapons are just to bad. I get the balance reason behind that, her staffs are pretty good, so her melee has to pay the price for it. There has to be a balance, but maybe they overdid it there a bit. Thats why a melee hybrid Battle Wizard is a bad idea.
And that’s the reason Unchained feels so lackluster to me too, even with her dmg buff it feels to bad.
I actually think Unchained might be part of the explanation.
The weapons might be intentionally bad since any truly amazing melee weapon would be really hard to balance in the hands of Unchained. Could you imagine her with any decent weapon? Glaive or dual daggers or halberd for example?
You could possibly make melee feel better on BW without weapon buffs. For example, you could fix Tier 1 to be all damage talent tradeoffs (atk speed, crit, charge speed). Then add something like atk speed when Tranquility off in tier 2. Then maybe add +atk speed for 5 seconds when casting from Tranquility in Tier 3. Add in swift slaying on melee and 5% on charm, and switching to melee might not be terrible. You could be hitting +30-40% atk speed regularly and it would still feel different than Unchained. Just an example, mind you.
Thats true too, and you know what else it is? A design flaw. Here take a look at the great and powerful melee wizard, we only give her bad melee weapons because of balance reasons. That negates her purpose.
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Just putting in my two cents:
Firewalk is one of those ‘swiss army knife’ ults. It’s not going to kill anything outright, but it does allow the BW handmaiden-level mobility on top of being a reliable aoe stagger on a very short cooldown. I put it up there with some of the strongest in the game in terms of being consistently useful (Edit: when it matters). If nothing else, it’s leagues ahead of flaming ‘one stormvermin at legend’ head and living ‘only good as an emergency heat dump’ bomb.
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I’d put it the other way: it lacks identity. 
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Just replace it with a meteor strike, Reeeeeee nuke them from orbit.