For the most part the patch has been great, the balance changes and droprate increases were fine but my concerns are about the cleave & stagger changes. So the big change from beta to live was to decrease legend stagger and cleave values to champion values. This was done so the experience going up the last difficulties would be similar and that you woulnd’t have to relearn what you can and cannot stagger / cleave through. I definitely agree with the reason but not the method and here’s why:
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Increasing all cleave by 1.5 (for example in beta your glaive would cleave 4 chaos zombies and on live it cleaves 6 because the mass of most enemies was reduced by 1/3) and stagger by, a lot, makes hordes even easier than they were before. In beta most weapons couldn’t handle hordes alone without kiting or good dodging / a lot of mechanical knowledge, on live, however, most weapons cleave and stagger so much that killing hordes is trivial. Basicly even single target weapons cleave skaven and, with some power, chaos hordes (daggers / dual axes) and medium cleave weapons (1h mace / falchion / glaive) have way too much control, making them able to handle hordes alone without too much effort.
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Im was an elf main mostly because of the weapon balance for her was exceptional. In beta, spear, daggers and glaive were all toe to toe in terms of balance and even SnD was ok. On live, glaive can destroy even chaos hordes better than any other weapon, (needed some extra mobility in beta to be safe and daggers / spear could contest its clear speed) which should be its weakness since its the best at dealing with elites. Also having less stagger in beta made glaive way more dangerous to play which also made it do less dps because you couldn’t be as reckless. So going to champion values makes glaive way superior to any other choice, basicly the halberd of elf.
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I generally hate making the hardest difficulty of a game easier, so I would much have prefered changing champion cleave / stagger values to the same as legend values or atleast meet at the middle. I know that the weapon balance will be tweaked according to these mass values but the change made the game drasticly easier which has decreased my enjoyment of legend a lot. Also the fact that the change made strictly melee combat, which is the bread and butter of this game, easier, is a horrible thing because the only end game we have is learning dodging, attack timings and game mechanics for melee combat. I know that mods will make the game more difficult than imaginable but if the base game is too easy, its hard to keep interest. Lastly I don’t think the hardest difficulty has to be something that every1 can play. If legend is too hard, the player can go back to champion and practice more.
On a sidenote, the change made saltz and bardin melee balance way worse aswell, 1h mace and falchion are even more dominant than b4. In beta there was even a point to using flail because most weapons didn’t stagger a lot, so something that staggered pretty much everything with charged was really really nice. The small weapons need to have way less cleave and less stagger than currently because if they can control hordes alone, there is no point in bringing a slow weapon. Also, I would really love to see armored enemies be more resistant to stagger so stuff like falchion light attack wouldn’t stagger SVs…