Okay, so everyone knows Battle Wizard is in a terrible position right now and i’m sure that Fatshark’s metrics probably reflect that, saying something like 1-3% of people playing sienna actually play it after lv 7. So what can be done to help and make her more appealing?
1.) Alter tranquility. As it is, tranquility is supposed to reward refraining from casting and going into melee and helping to your team. In actuality, it promotes passive play and staying away from the melee because it resets every time you take damage, hobbling your teammates.
In my opinion, tranquility NEEDS to reward melee combat, not refraining from it. As an introductory class to one of the most unique characters in Vermintide, Battle Wizard should be the most flexible and adaptive to moving from one play style to another. The most straightforward way to fix this is to grant venting on melee kill, not on cooldown. It could be renamed into one of the most popular traits that people want returned from V1, Earthing Rune. Or, instead of a flat vent for 3-4 seconds after a kill, kills could reduce the cooldown on tranquility by about 25% if she absolutely needs to keep the tranquility passive cooldown. (of course this would affect her lv 15 talents but ill talk about those in the comments if anyone is interested.)
2.) Change Fire-walk
Fire walk is VERY underwhealming. The fire trail is small and narrow and doesnt do much, while the teleport just serves to get you closer to your enemies, which, with the current tranquility, you don’t want. The only redeeming talent is the venting on power activation, but again you are now close to your enemies and should transition to melee.
I can think of two solutions to the issue, which are buffing fire walk or replacing it entirely. The buff can be like allowing you to firewalk backwards, giving BWs a panic button that allows them to gain the space they need to cast if they activate their ability while pressing s (or whatever is bound to walking backwards), or giving you a bigger flame patch at the end and staggering opponents.
The other choice is to just remove flame-walk entirely. In their dev blog about Sienna, Fatshark said that her new found control allowed her to manipulate even more complex bright wizard spells, giving her “spectacular area of effect spells.” This new spell could be anything from a blanket of flame, to a miniature vortex spell (though sienna would probably never be able to cast a vortex spell). Anything that fits the criteria of “spectacular” is fair game.
I’ve been always using this skill in oposite direction - runing FROM enemies, take better position and cast spells. Or sometime charge to your fallen ally. This is not an offensive skill to be honest.
The downside of this skill is how it works. In this state it works strange sometime, not teleporting you at all, so you must spend your time on aiming it properly, and it is hard to teleport over some gaps.
I love BW, and will be happy for her improvments, but I still like her play style. Well, you need to “git gut” to not take damage for tranqulity recharge. It is not that hard. Still it will be fun to decrease tranqulity cooldown on melee kills (but not like Slatz’s BH imba crit trait).
I think her kit is a bit confused. She seems intended to be the balanced class (though I think in the original descriptions they described her as an AoE specialist? I guess the fire from the ult is meant to do that).
I feel like she should be built around team support. Tranquility is a neat idea, but should maybe just ramp up her venting over time, ignoring damage. Perhaps some abilities can spread a useful effect to nearby team mates.
Her current teleport is a bit clunky, buggy, and only situationally useful - and unlike many other situationally useful ults, it isn’t situational for a number of situations (like Merc Kruber ult or Handmaiden dash), but only . . . two maybe. Getting to downed allies (which she isn’t that suited for to begin with), and escaping tough spots (which is useful, but its clunkiness undermines this).
I think she needs a new ult - a team buff or support ult. Boost team mate damage for ten seconds, or make them all apply a fire DoT. If it worked like Merc Kruber/WHC’s ults and pushed back hordes, that’d be even better.
She is with her ability to cast spells much faster
I think she is as well. The problem is that Pyro is less balanced, more easy to use and more attractive since she has offensive skill with 20-30 sec cd.
I like the idea of team based skills, fire dots on allies, but I don’t think that devs will do that to BW in terms of gamedesign (and yeah I don’t want it personally). I do believe that we have a chance of new career with such talents if there will ever be new ones.
Honestly when I play it I find it much more powerful than Pyro.
Its Pyro that I get crushed with.
Yeah I know Burning Head is supposedly the be all end all… but with BW I can use Conflag and Fireball Staves and rack up a much higher kill score than with Pyro, and die a lot less on top of it.
Simply make it work like it used to on V1 where you would bounce between melee and ranged for overcharge reduction. Using Earthing on the fire sword then switching to beam staff for some shotgunning at close range was really fun gameplay.
Give it something extra? Fire dot damage increase? Fire attacks penetrate armour?
Tranquility is an ok idea, but making it sort of passive and simply ‘not using your staff’ to reduce overcharge feels a bit useless. Especially on higher difficulties where you’re going to be in fights a lot.
Her over all talents can be pretty balanced and basic, leaving her a bit boring.
The ultimate itself can be made use off, but feels quite useless when compared with Pyro and Unchained.
P.S Pyro’s ult cooldown time needs some looking at imo. Way too short. Look at this:
I should really learn to just make videos tbh
I’ve seen people suggest replace Firewalk by Fire Sword of Rhuin or Crown of Fire (if I’m not mistaken on the name)
Those are both offensive support spells, and I feel like it’s what she need.
First, she switch between melee and ranged (earthing rune would be fun, but seems to simple to make a passive around that, maybe complexify it 
) while casting fast AoE spell (Fireball staff is awesome in her hand), but she don’t have anything that support her melee.
Second, all character got a support career, by support I mean defensive way, so Mercenary, Witch Hunter Captain, Ranger Veteran, Handmaiden and… Well Battle Wizard should do this.
Thirdly, Fire walk seem to be here just because Sienna didn’t have a career that can dash/jump/move.
Here’s my idea for the new passive and active
Tranquility :
After 10 second not casting spells, vent your overcharge. While on cooldown, each melee kills increase the strength of the upcoming vent, stack up to five time.
This allow you to cast spells then finish you enemies off with the melee, to vent fast. You can even play around and cast spells on nothing to prevent Tranquility to proc before you actually kill some stuff.
Fire Sword of Rhuin :
During the next 7 second, you and your allies will burn foes on each strike
Passive talents :
-Reduce tranquility cooldown to 6 second
-You can have up to 10 stack now
-You gain increase spell charge speed and stamina while Tranquility is active
Active talents :
-Fire sword of Rhuin last 10 second
-You and your allies gain some armor penetration under the effect of this spell
-This spell also gives your allies stamina and gives you spell charge speed
It is sad that also Pyro has “her tranquillity” with one grim. Real tranquillity (BW) should be more versatile and more efficient… and imo, just a first ideas, should have less heat as a passive. In this way she would have less impact damage (less crits, less powerful active) but more dps (to cast spell for more time).
P.s her super is a good panic button… if you use it without aim, Sienna will remain into same place and she will stun some enemies.
The thing about “git gud” is she is the introduction to playing sienna, and in new player situations where they will be taking damage combat, they wont get tranquility until they dont need it outside of combat.
i think the bw talents are mostly fine and only need minor tweaks if tranquility gets a change.
right now playing a bw feels like having a class with no passiv at all, you get so little out of it.
if tranquility would change to some form of overheat management that is adding something to the class instead of the counterproductive and counterintuitive passive we have now, this class could be really fun with all the charge speed and other talents it already has.
pyro and unchaind have inbuild overheat management talents that really work(more or less). but the bw big passive that is all about overheat management is not really working as good as the talents of the other classes
and the change to tranquility… i think that it is a hard question what to do with it.
but my suggestion for the new tranquility is:
-faster overheat decay than normal
-and a higher boost to overheat decay on a timer like right now or on some mechanic like the bh passive
with a change like that the passiv can still trigger the talents in the tree, and it will actually do something for you.
i would really love a bw with a good overheat passive so i can run around with a confla staff and burn stuff with big and fast aoes
oooh, granting AP to your allies, I like it. And everyone gaining the ability of MORE DoTS is pretty spectacular.
I really dislike the charge speed or stamina/-block cost when tranquility is up because its a one time use thing, while if she had something that was for a short time after she got a melee kill she could get off 2 almost full charge spells before it ended and she got the choice to keep casting or go back into the melee to cool off. The lv 15 traits would reflect this in allowing you to choose how to use your tranquility after a kill, increasing venting rate, increasing casting speed, or some sort of buff to melee if the player wants to take a more melee focused style
The lv 15 talent does give that faster overheat decay and im a bit confused on the wording of that second part. Did you mean that if tranquility was active you would boost it by getting kills or did you mean it would activate soley based on kills. Because I feel like waiting for it to activate over time means you get it when you dont need it, inbetween fights.
Do you compliment your fireball/conflag with AP melee weapons like mace or dagger? because the whole point of pyro, like is said in the dev blog I linked, is that she gave up her restraint and training to operate more on instinct (though she isn’t as far gone as the unchained), meaning she loses access to the complex bright wizard spells (oh man no more fire walk, what a shame /s) and focuses on perfecting simple single target annihilation like with burning head.
If you use CC staves more often then you might get swamped if you are expecting BW’s faster casting speed, but pyro right now has so many built in venting talents that she can outcast BW any day of the week. Meanwhile if BW wants to keep up she has to engage in timid combat and then her venting ends the moment she casts a spell. Maybe changing the “more ranged damage” passive that they both have to make them more differentiated like BW gets “More damage from AoE spells” and Pyro gets “More damage from single target spells”
okay maybe my wordig is a bit fuzzy there^^
and yes level 15 bw gets increased effect of tranquility, but its a terrible talent charge speed is way better in my opinion.
i am not a fan of the timer for tranquility ether, but the devs think it is thats why i included it.
New players play on veteran and recruit and avoid damage for 8 seconds is pretty posible. Interval between horde waves must be longer, so tranquility works fine in this situations too.
Or when you play Unchained and Pyro (without grim) the overheat decreases on the very low rate, while BW need to rest of about 15 seconds to complitly cheal (you can let your elf or saltz kill some trash enemies in this period)
I agree that Pyro “grim tranqulity” is a little too much.
So - “NERF THIS” Pyro, so people will start think about BW
Playing BW regularly now and I am actually quite happy with her. BW is definitely sub par, but you can make it work right now, though it still feels a bit like wasted potential. Only thing I’d like to see: either reduce cooldown on passive or remove the “no spellcasting” restriction and I’d like to have a way to increase the AoE of spells.
BW and Pyro just need to be better defined as far a their goals.
It feels like BW was intended to be the “heat management” class, but Pyro does it better.