Make voltan passive, heck, just remove completly the penality.
Their is no reason to have this penality in the 1st place.
Even the new moonbow/Tohrn staff/bardin flamethrower don’t slow down the char at all…
Each time I made a Pyro build I’m like “oh let’s try this to change”, go to a game, use few spell to get crit => BOOM unplayble… You get so slow that not even fun…
You can’t even say “hey, I’m just gonna stay at range then and use only my staff like BW can” because you’ve 0 good tool for that !
This and the buggy skull are what that prevent me to play pyro more.
Forget “buffing”, Pyro needs a rework. A complete, thorough rework.
Literally the only non-careerskill-talent I’d consider interesting on the whole career is Deathly Dissipation, which only starts mattering on a difficulty you need to pay for. Almost everything else is just a different way of getting carpal tunnel syndrome faster or doing more damage. I enjoy Battle Wizard and Unchained but to me there’s nothing interesting about Pyro, at all. The high crit chance enables some crazy stuff in Chaos Wastes, but the real issue is and always will be the base game.
I consider “crits” as a main career identity a pointless, unsatisfying design. In theory it would simply make almost any weapon work through sheer dps increase, but Unchained does the same in melee and Battle Wizard’s burn/charge talents do the same for ranged, only way more transformative and more consistent. And they bring other things to the table.
Even if Pyro was the most OP career in the game through sheer number buffs, I doubt I would play her.
I can’t tell you what this rework would look like, because it’d require starting from scratch. But it’d need to be a bigger change than whatever they’re planning for Huntsman.
One issue that I’ve noticed is that newer classes show more cohesion when it comes to combining talents for a certain build while older classes are for most cases glaringly disjointed. Reworks to certain classes and in general a lot of the game mechanics are definitely warranted.
What should the identity of Pyromancer be? Currently it seems to be the pseudo randomness of power increases or decreases based on talents and the overcharge mechanic. Battlemage and Unchained are more about damage over time, crowd control or sheer raw power in comparison while also having innate ways to deal with overcharge - Pyromancer out of the 3 probably has to vent the most depending on talent choice (temp health on ult or exhaust on ult).
If the emphasis on Critical Hit Chance is to revolve around this class perhaps Critical Hit Damage should also be something that scales based on Overcharge which would give this class slightly more oomf even though Critical Hit Damage is a bit of a joke in how it works - unless that has changed.
Perhaps critical hits can emphasize the actual power of the class while manually venting and taking damage can yield it’s own benefit in some way so that the player is encouraged to build of overcharge and also make use of venting while relying on melee for temp health - perhaps another passive that yields some additional temp health in some way. Searing Focus (which should have more % ranged power when you have Outcast Engineer giving an aura of 10%) is the only passive so adding another that revolves around venting could be an interesting idea.
I also think the ult in it’s current form could either use a 2nd charge perhaps like Sister of the Thorn running on it’s own cooldown though maybe impacted by critical hits in some way. That or it’s pierce and damage should be increased a lot more - feel like Waywatcher’s ult is better in comparison.
Yeh, a rework would be in order. But I believe the idea of a slight talent shuffle and rebalance stems from the expectation that a rework takes a lot of time, and testing, and that it might be easier to just make the class feel a little more homogenous and comfortable, and maybe just a smidge stronger - it doesn’t need to be a lot better, some other classes need to be brought down. It could still be reworked in later months.
I like a lot of her talents, in isolation. They just don’t match that well.
The crit chance on overheat, and the option of attack speed in addition to that, aren’t bad, per se, but they don’t influence gameplay in a meaningful way.
There’s extra bonuses for being on high heat, there’s bonuses for being on high health (so less room for venting), there’s the nice flow of ride the fire wind.
But none of them quite fit together; And while that’s fine on other classes, where you have clear build avenues that somewhat contradict each other, but each have a sort of identity, pyro doesn’t get that.
It is just really hard to play around the concepts - the “being on high overheat” is a simple gimmick that doesn’t grant anywhere close to the engagement Unchained’s heat mechanics offer, or the incentive for strong blasts followed by cooling down that every single one of BW’s level 10 talents and her passive grant and reinforce. It’s just “shoot until you have to vent, then vent a little, repeat”.
I believe Pyro could do with less crit chance, and more crit bonuses, like swift slaying or hunter, to incentivise a reactive playstyle. And, if she’s supposed to be the intuitive, single-target focussed option, some sort of precision bonus.
Still, small changes are all we’re likely to get in the foreseeable future unless FS has already started on a rework.
Honestly this is pretty true. Before Volcanic Force was added I figured FS would develop BW around burns and Pyro more around direct damage, what with Lingering Flames etc on Battle Wizard. In fact when I first heard about Volcanic Force I thought it was being added to Pyromancer.
When I saw it got added to BW I was confused, BW instantly went from offering better burn damage to offering better direct damage on staves too. That became the moment Pyro’s iconic bolt staff became better on BW and Pyro doesn’t have much really - 1h sword works well on her thanks to the finesse multiplier, meanwhile most staves work better on BW since she can choose to buff their DoT or direct damage depending on what they excel at.
That and as I stated before, Pyro’s talents are total jumbled mess. The critical mass talents aren’t even in one tier. BW has these neat, themed tiers and currently is better in most ways - she can buff direct dmg, burns, has good dmg reduction, even has good THP with flame sword/dagger stagger, and her ult is actually functional (Burning Skull works great against unarmoured elites but if armoured ones show up it sputters out after it hits a SV, that’s it).
And as you said, if you want melee you can go Unchained over Pyro and get sheer damage as opposed to critical boosted melee.
I don’t mind the venting aspect to Pyro, it’s part of her identity, but thanks to Volcanic Force on BW there’s no incentive to take Pyro beyond some Heat Sink interactions. Pyro won’t ever be the single target option unless she has some sort of consistent boost that outperforms Volcanic Force for single target damage.
She needs a new gimmick. Staff cleave is the one area that hasn’t been touched upon by a Sienna career. Single target would require Pyro being able to beat the consistent 50% increase from Volcanic Force.
Simply making The Volans Doctrine an inbuilt talent, would be enough to balance her if you ask me. The class is designed around having a high overheat, so it fits the theme as well.
“divination by means of fire or flames” - definition of pyromancy
It’s amusing that pyromancer has no affinity for fire or divination.
One thought I had was to move lingering flames from BW to PYRO to be another perk, and fix it so the largest DOT overwrites smaller DOTs (one stack, but the biggest).
I’d disagree. Dagger is a very strong weapon as is. I don’t use it cause it requires too much micro and extra presses IMHO, but it’s a very solid weapon if you know how to use it right.
That’s a double-edged argument. I’d say that whoever can kill the special faster should do so - leaving kills for pyro cause she’d get free casts - that’s either the next level of communication and teamplay or a recipe for a wipe.
Um… doesn’t pyro get close to 50% with all the buffs?