Battle Wizards Passive: Suggestions and Discussions for a rework

I have been dabbling with Sienna’s Battle Wizard carreer the last couple days and I really do think it’s the only carreer in the game that really isn’t too viable, especially considering Sienna’s twoother carreer choices which are probably among the top tier carreers in the game. To me, her main problems are a lack of true syngergy among her talents, an underwhelming skill that really doesn’t fit Sienna’s overall playstyle (and has a surprisingly long cooldown for what it brings to the table) but to me the most obvious is her passive. It simply doesn’t work out.

The two conditions that have to be met for it to trigger add up to each other and block the niche the other would open. Not casting spells in itself is an astonishing and almost baffling design choice considering both Sienna being a ranged character overall as well as the lore connected to her. Sienna, a literal pyromaniac whose whole existence revolved around setting things on fire, gets “tranquility” when she doesn’t cast spells and sets things on fire. It is both very counter-intuitive and -productive in my oppinion.
But I get the idea: you stop casting spells to get your cooldown faster. Okay, that makes sense, let’s mix things up and give Sienna an incentive to melee.

Except it doesn’t, because you also cannot receive damage. While it is certainly possible to fight even on Legend without ever receiving damage for quite some time, the game treats things so many things as “getting damaged” that are simply not that it is, again, both counter-productive and -intuitive. Getting shoved by a mauler for 0 damage? That’s a reset. You artfully dodge the packmaster’s grab for 0 damage? That’s a reset. Slayer Bardin landing next to you for 0 damage? That’s a reset. Merc Kruber HEALING you temp health with his skill? That’s a reset. Ranger Bardin using his skill? That’s a reset. And this already ignores “real” damage you can’t avoid, like the occasional stray bullet from FF or a rattling that fires through obstructions. But I digress.

Also, for a carreer that makes her whole shtick about getting that overcharge down to allow for more casting, she really cannot do anything with it, as it is either her passive or overcharge venting - because again, say it with me folks, if you vent for 1 tick of damage, your passive resets. Essentially what you do is: stand around and wait. That’s a fun character concept, right? Casting spells and then standing around waiting. Or you could, like, do it like any other of her carreers and use your temp health to get rid of that pesky overcharge (temp health actually being something BW could potentially SWIM in with her lvl 5 talent).

It does seem to work, but at least for me, overcharge venting damage sometimes resets my passive and sometimes it doesn’t. Will do more testing to find out why that is so (something to do with hosting and not hosting?).

Now, to me it is kinda obvious the “don’t cast spells” thing was added later, as it is the only rational way to explain her talent that increases her charge speed while the passive is active, being that you get ONE spell and your passive resets.

This topic is meant to discuss how to improve the situation, because I see ALOT of potential in battle wizard. Her skill could indeed make her a very pure ranged character that can teleport away from danger and keep dishing out those ranged dps while her team keeps the hordes away from her.

To start things of, my suggestion would be to remove the “don’t cast spells” condition from her passive, reducing it to “not receiving damage”. But to me, that simply doesn’t do it because you’d still have to worry about clearing overcharge by venting and when that does damage, well, it kinda defeats the purpose. My suggestion would be that as long as the passive affects Sienna, give her the overcharge clearance she has now, additional ranged charge speed (on top of what she can get via talents) and attack speed.

Discuss and suggest!

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You can vent and take vent damage AFAIK and your passive will still be active. Imo the cooldown time should be dropped out around 2-3s before tranquility kicks in and it will be fine.

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Thank you for your input. If that’s really the case, than it isn’t working for me, or not as it should (bug?). I just tested it out again and sometimes, the venting resets my passive and sometimes it doesnt. I have to admit that I had not tried it for the past games since the last times I tried it DID reset my passive.

The ‘don’t cast spell’ condition is needed in order to be balanced I fear. Without it, you technically could always have that 40% ranged charge speed… which would be insane on things like Flamestorm staff and Conflag for example.
WHAT I COULD SEE HOWEVER is to make it so that casting spells while your ability is already on cooldown doesn’t restart the cooldown. That could work pretty well alongside my other propositions (that follow.)

For I do understand that you get punished for one tapping targets with lmb (especially with Conflag since it is actually really good at killing single targets, like specials), but it could be part of what this career identity is… one BIG charged attack.

What I would do is remove the ‘damage condition’ that reset your passive. I would do so since I don’t think it is needed at all to make it fair and balanced. Not to mention that it is too often out of the player control, mainly when it comes to avoiding FF damage… and I see this (getting punished even more for your teammates mistakes) as a bad design. Not to mention how unreliable it is due to the fact that it’s linked to ‘damage taken’… which is sadly not the most intuitive/well implemented part of this game (no hard feelings FS).

With that removal of the damage condition, I would also reduce the base cooldown to 4-5 sec (I honestly need to test it myself to be sure how long it really should be tbh).

Also, I think that BH passive is the best comparison in the game for BW’s passive. I’m not saying that they are identical, but they both are passives that increase your ranged dps every so often. Point being that BH passive is amazing (if not too good) and BW is pretty bad.

BH gets a slightly longer base cooldown, but can automatically regain it by getting a mele kill… no negative conditions here.
BW gets a slightly lower base cooldown, but has 1 negative condition to make it weaker…

IIRC the difference is 2 sec between the 2 (haven’t played BH all that much)… needless to say that it doesn’t justify BW’s negative effect and BH’s positive effect. Though I don’t want the ‘mele kill refresh your passive’ implemented on BW at all… it wouldn’t fit the career imo.

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Battle-wizard is fine, imo. You can be an insane block tank with 100% cost reduction between talents and gear along with hoard clear potential from conflag or flamethrower.

You can also bring the beamstaff to serve as a murder-tool and still be impossibly tanky, using your teleport for clutch revives and snipes.

  • casting spells should NOT turn off tranquility
  • only getting hit (mobs or FF) should turn it off
  • CD stays the same

Now with these changes her -charge talents make more sense now. coz atm it’s utterly useless for a battle mage who has a -charge build specialization.

+her other talents need some love.

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I’d like to see that, too.

Ridicolous as, also Pyro, has her “tranquillity” with one grim.

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This, combined with her increased crit chance and Heat Sink just makes Pyromancer so much more viable to play as purely ranged char. I barely ever have to look out for my overcharge levels since I get so many crits, my staves just won’t reach the limit.

Flamestorm staff? Just fire away, if you get one crit on a horde your overcharge is gone.
Bolt staff? Snipe a few people with the secondary which pierces them, one crit, overcharge gone.
Fireball staff? A bit harder but it still gets the job done.
Conflag? Is bad anyways, why use it?
Beam? Use primary when on high overcharge since it barely generates heat, just hold LMB and aim on some dudes. You won’t kill them but your overcharge will dissipate quickly so you can start shotgun blasting them once more.

I see no incentive to play Bright Wizard over Pyromancer or even Unchained. Which is a damn shame.

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And Pyro makes useless also other careers, like huntsman or WS… Fatshark should buff weak ones or nerf strong ones.

Precisely. Pyromancer pretty much has tranquility with one grim without any of the restrictions. The grim talent would have been better on BW to begin with, not that I’d wanted to take it away from pyro now. Pyro has better talent synergy, better synergy between passive and weapons and an (arguably) better skill. BW passive should, when it comes to reducing overcharge, give both other carreers a run for their money. IMHO, BW should be all about “getting rolling” when you manage to keep your distance, dishing out your ranged dps.

Maybe the whole “passive overcharge venting” could be traded for something else. Maybe it could reduce overcharge generated by a flat 35-50% and talents should be about buffs as long as the passive is active (attack speed, additional overcharge reduction, faster spell charge, additional ranged damage, better burn damage, better stagger and knockdown, anything goes).

I’ve played BW lately and I kinda think her designed role by Fatshark was “Small group killer”, like you’re the main treat to these small pack of mobs that you meet every 20m (The passive is supposed to cool you off while you keep moving in the map, and the charge speed benefit for Fireball, Conflag or Flamethrower, which can destroy small pack).

Now the fact is that 10sec is way too long, you’ll never move accross only 1 group every 10 seconds.
I did think of some solution (separated, not all at the time) :
-Lower the cooldown, easy one
-Make tranquility work differently. Upon activation, it clears up a huge chunk of overcharge in 0.5 second. Then there is not venting speed, just the increase cast speed. Because right now even if you were able to wait 10 second, you still need to wait it to vent a bit.
-Huge changes here, could feel too weird. Tranquility cooldown decrease to like 5 sec, and when it activate it clear ALL overcharge, BUT Battle Wizard now has -50% max overcharge. It makes her a bursting machine, not suited for horde, but can destroy small group or patrols (if we assume conflag and fireball get a bit of love from fatshark)

While we’re at Sienna abilities, I think all of her “F” button should remove overcharge (cause it makes Unchained meh when you reach level 25, as everyone pick the Clear overcharge anyway) and so give her funnier talents :3 .

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That is a good observation. Maybe her passive could reflect that with talents, like larger AoE and damage over time while passive is active or something like that.

Yup.
Overall I think that’s the problem right now with balance. Fatshark started to create career with defined role, and then proceed to make them somewhat versatile. And obviously only the most versatile are considered “meta” and other are rejected by stupid players. Same goes with the weapon, the beam staff is played because of hit capacity to do everything (stagger, sniping, AoE, headshot, etc…)

They need to take back what career were build toward, and focus them on this. They wanted to add more teamwork, career just NEED to be single purposed

i think the bw talents are mostly fine and only need minor tweaks if tranquility gets a change.
the op is absolutely right tranquility needs a change to make it actually do something.
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.
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.

Battle Wizard is not supposed to be a pure ranged class unlike pyro. If you look at BW talents you’ll see they strongly suggest that this class is actually a spellsword. Even the name battle wizard suggests this.

As for magic, it looks like BW is supposed to specialize in charging staves (fireball , conflag and flamestorm) and pyro is suppsoed to use mostly fast hitting staves (crit synergy works best with fast weapons)

Which doesn’t excuse the fact that tranquility breaking on cast is absolutely ridiculous.

Absolutely. Let’s not ruin that and instead fix BW and adjust overcharge damage on Unchained on legendary. When supposedly tanky char explodes if gets a few unluky hits ( or 1-2 hits after casting some spells) while still having tons of HP left then something is really wrong. At the very least Unchained active skill MUST cancel exploding.

PS They could make these changes to tranquility

Tranquility would have 3 effects:

  • permanent 25% charge reduction
  • venting X% heat per melee strike.
  • something something
    +Of course, some talents need to be revamped.
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Thank you for your insight on this!

It seems as if that was the “consensus” right now: Either get rid of “resets on damage” or (which seems to be “prefered” atm) get rid of the spellcasting restriction.

Now of course, as Semela has suggested, BW is kind of a spellsword-ish character or could at least be seen as such (something that could definitely be worth a look, something that could be expanded upon). No matter if we got rid of one restriction or the other, we’d definitely “push” the carreer in either a more melee or more ranged focused direction, so I’d still like to discuss new ideas how to make her passive fit with either playstyle.

So so summarize, what we’ve gathered so far (which nobody claims speak for the whole “community” or to even represent any kind of majority, just for the record) is fas follows:

  • Battle Wizard’s passive feels too restrictive regarding the conditions that have to be met for it to trigger
  • Battle Wizard, in analogy to other heroes’ carreers like WHC, Merc, IB and HM, seems to be the “crowd controlling support character” whose strengths don’t lie either in ranged nor melee, but in controlling hordes and to some extent, elites and specials. As such, her passive (and in extension of that: her talents) should allow her to fill in that role either by through melee or spells. With Sienna being overall a ranged-focused character, spell-casting should either way the focus of this character. The same way as Unchained seems to be “more geared towards melee”, BW at least seems to be intended the other way round.
  • Talents like “Rechannel” seem to suggest that at one point, Tranquility indeed seems only to have been broken by taking damage. The idea that modifying her character’s playstyle primarily via her Tranquility ability seems to be something that could make the character stand out both from other heroes’ comparable carreers as well as Pyromancer and Unchained.
  • Ideas are that no matter what direction to take, her talents should modify things like AoE of her staffs, modifying damage over time, knockdown/stagger, attack speed or spell-charge speed. Any or all of these seem could be buffed by her passive or made more accentuated through talents.
  • Her active seems to be geared to allow to jump in and out of combat. It would be good if it could synergize with her passive (using the skill while her passive affects her could give additional benefits, resetting it. Lvl 25 talents could further modify this. E.g.: If skill is used while tranquility is active, cooldown is reduced by additional 5%, flames linger longer and deal more DoT, removes all overcharge and heals temp health or allows her to deal more melee damage for a short period of time)

I think that you misinterpret the ‘Battle Wizard’ title. A Battle Wizard is a wizard that is used by the Empire during battles. It doesn’t imply engaging in mele combat at all, just that you use your magical talents in the fields of battles.

Actually, most battle wizards are heavily range focused since it’s where they are the most useful. They are there to destroy chunks of the enemy forces with deadly spells or to (de)buffs the troops present on the battle fields.

Those wizards only engage in mele combat as a last resort (like any ranged fighter), since they aren’t trained for mele combat.

Worth mentioning is that most Bright Wizards are Battle Wizards, since it’s where they shine the most. They have little civic value and great damage potential on the battle field.

So Battle Wizards ought to be specialized in huge AOE range damage… and that seems to be what FS is going for… aka. a range specialist that does huge aoe damage while avoiding mele combat.

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I was just summarizing. If it was up to me, like I said, she would be all about devestating AoE damage (which, again, KINDA seems like what they were going for). But your input is very much apperciated, as it does give more of an incentive to tweak her more into the direction that fits more with the lore.

Hush… don’t trigger some melee fans who wish to nerf ranged classses in this game to bring back V1 melee circle jerk paradise. /s