I’m not asking if the career is “viable” or not because every career is viable enough for someone good enough to solo Cata with said career.
I’m talking about how they play out according to their design goal.
In the entire rework the biggest change is Volan’s Doctrine being made innate. The increase in overcharge bar looked really cool but I didn’t see myself using ranged more than as a BW with Tranquility. I tried playing with Dissipating Rictus a bit but eventually I found myself returning to Bonded Flame for the extra THP…but regardless of talent Burning Head remained a sucky unreliable career skill.
And I’m probably not the only one who found it bizarre that FS thought BW was the hybrid while Pyromancer was the ranged focus character. It felt like they judged it entirely on their respective activatable career skills without taking talents into consideration.
I think the Pyro rework absolutely hit the mark.
" * Battle Wizard aims at bringing a balanced playstyle. Moving between casting spells and melee while venting overcharge through the passive."
“* Pyromancer leans more into the ranged side of Sienna, unleashing a lot more spells through improved overcharge capacity and spells scaling with that overcharge, but having a harder time getting rid of accumulated overcharge mid-fight.”
“* Unchained leans into the melee side of Sienna, choosing between risk and reward with high overcharge gains with the tools to completely dump overcharge when needed.” ~ Fatshark
I think the ranged vs melee distinction between Pyro & Battle Wizard actually does a disservice to contrasting the two, the real contrast lies in the risk vs reward.
Battle Wizard is consistent & offers easy but effective crowd control, horde management, AOE damage, and Overcharge management.
Pyro is essentially a riskier, harder, but potentially more rewarding Battle Wizard, where offense becomes your defense. She can do everything BW does but with higher damage #'s(especially single target damage) in both melee & range. Pros:
Higher damage potential(Becomes intermediate-dedicated boss killer depending on talents)
Flexible damage potential(Damage threat vs all enemy types: Crits)
All melee/ranged loadouts are intuitive on her.(Ranged & Melee attack speed + Crits)
Potentially limitless ranged casting or potentially measurable melee dps to Unchained.
Cons:
No panic button AND squishy.
Both offensive & defensive talents are more conditional.(Harder conditions to hit)
Overcharge management is the most difficult/conditional of Sienna’s 3 careers.(Harder conditions to hit, managing between crit amp vs casting resource)
This is my setup I run on cata twitch+ which allows you to do everything(bossing, special killing, vaporizing patrols, and fleet flaming in melee). Dissipating Rictus is borderline game breaking with any staff, Deathly Dissipation completely removes overcharge management and this scales with difficulty + density. Fleetflame makes melee very safe vs all density compositions. Martial study can be replaced with Ride the Fire Wind. If you go this you absolutely will be ranging more than BW it just depends on your talent setup.
I think it hits the mark, though, one does need the talent for low-cost venting to maximize it. But while using it in a normal crit setup she´ll be rolling out fiery projectiles&/blasts all over the place in a visually unmistakable fashion to good effect.
Even if Battlewizard is still better at using beamstaff thanks to higher fire damage if i am not mistaken, but that´s one staff out of the whole lot. And most BW´s do not use Beam at any rate.
As for Unchained…well Unchained does lag behind Battlewiz in terms of output there is no denying it. But to be fair, there is no melee class in the game that competes with firewalking into dense hordes with potent effect against chaff&armor alike.
Even so, UC still does carry the heavy powerhouse melee niche well with fire-flail and the new scythe i think. All that extra power does make those swings feel like they got Oomph.
On melee builds, Parry, Movement Speed on Crits and THP Career Skill can help with this. Once you get used to it, you can survive some absolutely ridiculous situations. E.g. I’ve timed and blocked entire Chaos Patrols that are behind me.
You’ll also likely have melee Power for Staggers from Hunter.
They are pretty much the same.
Shoot shoot shoot, build THP, vent, shoot shoot shoot.
Only difference between them:
BW has a useful ult
Pyro is more capable against single targets while BW is more capable against tons of enemies
Pyro will kill 2 CW faster then BW. But BW will kill 10 CW faster then Pyro
More enemies+figts longer=more DOT damage
My choise:
Good team - Pyro
Bad team - BW
Pyro after reworks is better. Thats what i wanted in the first place.
