Just get rid of berserker and lump packmaster in with infantry (all the other damn specials without armour are classified as infantry)
Leaves us with a much more sensible system of infantry (all things unarmoured), armoured and race - hell they could even get rid of every single category for just power increase for all I care. I never understood this system, it seems to make it harder to balance, needlessly complex for builds and it also makes you glaringly vulnerable to RNG. Only reason I can see why there is power vs instead of just straight power is to force players to reroll sheet and keep grinding. That only lasts so long or until people have access to reds.
The current reroll system is a classic “Skinner box” gone wrong - until you get Reds and the odds are good enough that this kind of operant conditioning has a positive effect on the player experience, but for anyone who has tried to min max gear while having orange stuff, already hate this skinner box like the plague by that point.
Berserkers are extremely tanky against specific ranged weapons. It would make packmasters obnoxious to fight unless they reduced the health a lot. I think it’s fine as it is.
Well, it’s not like any of Saltz’s careers are exceptionally good against bosses anyway, so a buff to pistols’ monster dmg would not hurt. I mean, even as IB I routinely out-dmg Zealot, BH or WHC Saltz thanks to constant Drakefire pistol spam - and I can deliver this barrage of fire (with additional 25% dmg thanks to barrage trait) without risking damage by going up close.
The boss combat is genserally flawed horribly. F.e. against chaos spawn you are not even trying to target head becauee it’s pointless, in general it’s all about spamming attacks or dodging and holding aggro with occasional 180-degrees turn and attack thrown here and there to mess up people with 2h weapons who won’t even have enough time time for blocking, thanks to non-cancelable attacks (BTW does blocking slams at least reduce dmg?) or are out of dodge count (pick has 1 with 85% dodge range I think :p).
Currently there is little incentive to go melee vs boss. To make matters worse, no matter what you do, you’ll get outdamaged by any lelf class anyway, because elven bows and melee weapons mostly melt bosses and allow for a lot of highly effective dodging. With spear on handmaiden with swift slaying one can solo take down a goddamn troll faster than the any other classes maybe with sole exception of huntsman Kruber, and let’s not even mention Shade…
Blocking does reduce damage.
I agree that anything below .95 dodge modifier is screwing yourself over very often, but I believe the pick has .95 as the 2 handed swords have, but shields and the greathammer has .85.
Even though the new dodge window has somewhat addressed that issue, it addressed that in the wrong way, and nothing was done to monster behaviour, nor does it help dodging monster “ground-pounds”.
Hagbane and Fireball staves are generally the best ranged monster killers in the game, but as soon as they are armoured (Fire Roger), Manbow and Repeater Pistol takes their spot. A strength potion changes this dynamic however and allows fireball and hagbane to destroy even armour.
Little tired of listening to all the elf hate/envy - it really clouds the validity of arguments. All 3 careers are squishy, so what else is she supposed to do? Deal the same damage as a zealot with triple the EHP or an Ironbreaker?
I think Kerillian needs more specialisation, making waystalker more support centric, and nerfing her ammo capacity as an example. Handmaiden dash stealth not breaking on attacking is another thing that should be adressed. Shade is too strong vs monsters, but where else is she supposed to shine? BH can one shot CW every 10 seconds, so that’s not even that powerful on her in comparison (being able to one shot cw with such little effort at all is returded to me.)
All the Axes can compete and out-damage the elf weapons, just as an example - halberd does good work as well.
Spear is a little overtuned atm, and it’s old damage values on light attacks, would have been just fine, but it did need better tools to deal with chaos warriors. That being said I think the majority of weapons available right now is overtuned in some aspect, particularly stagger wise.
Those are all broken aspects that should be addressed. She’s not the only one to get 50 THP on ULT, and it’s arguably equally broken on all those careers. I already touched on the other 2 subjects.
You think we should nerf all her weapons because her careers have broken aspects to them? We’d end up with shitty weapons for most characters that way. Once again I think we’re skipping over the root of the problems and just targeting the symptoms.
are we talking of the lats patch or a new one that got here today/ yesterday? Caus the shots have a greater distance before fall off in the 1.3 and greater dmg and other nice features.
If it is an update that went live not long ago then i haven’t seen it yet.
Played Handmaiden and she’s squishy only damage-reduction wise. But her survivability is pretty much off the charts. When I played her, me rezing whole team was a norm. Why? Because dash, dodge and killing speed + range keep damage away way better than DR and even fully tank IB won’t survive when properly surrounded. Lelf? Just dashes and runs invisivle for 3s. Yes, Shade has to have her strongpoints, but removing CWs 0-skill way is pretty good. She doesn’t have to outdamage whole team vs bosses to prove her worth. Being “damn good” in such situations would be enough.
The problem with elf weapons is that they are simply better. Glaive has this 60-damage heavy combo, so with 2 you down CW without any need to aim for head, all this while having 3 dodge count ( the same as 1h axe) and great range and cleave.
Oh and glaive staggers CW with light attacks
But my point is a bit different - Kruber, Saltz and Bardin have hard time vs Monsters with MAYBE the exception of huntsman. At the same time any of Kerilian’s classes have access to weapons that melt bosses, with Shade also having a special attack that multiplies her damage output several times.
Some builds of Sienna are also good vs bots. But melee-wise Kerilian is on whole other level.
This makes fighting bosses as f.e. WHC tedious and boring. You do your best, land headshots, drink str pot, start up ult, fire 30 pistol shots in 30s and at the end of the day you’ll get outdamaged by Kerilian anyway.
BTW how is BH supposed to 1-shot CW every 10 seconds? Tested for it and it simply doesn’t work (I’m a lot of damage from 1-shotting). What’s the trick?
Ah and all headshots? Or do body shots work too?
If it works like that, well, what can I say, it’s not a good design.
Just like buffing Kerilian weapons’ damage vs monsters to astronomic value for some unknown reason. When I first played this game, I thought the slayer is the anti-monster guy. But then noticed that with axes range and boss fight mechanics, you’re not really the guy to do the job, especially vs spawns.
What I’m saying is - boss fights are anticlimatic, with some classes doing all the damage EASILY outperforming the rest. I don’t think making 1 char a dedicated monster slayer is a good idea. For some reason any character can be specced to be good vs armor, vs CW, even vs hordes, but only lelf can truely shine vs spawns.
lol wut? Huntsman can delete Spawns pretty easily as well. And I have zero issue on Salty as well… Zealot gets 30% damage buff now as temp HP doesn’t drop stacks. Not only can you build him to 1 shot horde mobs with the raiper, but it can 1 shot SV as well. But yea, elf with hagbane can easily delete any bosses. Especially if you put monster and chaos on the bow. And nearly all my elf builds have armour and chaos on the charm as well. So that’s 30% more damage vs bosses.
Fireball is also on par with hagbane dps output vs spawns. I don’t think the hagbane is a problem on anything but ws though, besides it having stagger in such a large aoe. Nerf the stagger or nerf the aoe range and nerf ws ammo generation/capacity.
Slayer is deals exceptional damage vs Monsters and hos tankIness easily makes up for the lack of range in my experience.
Elf does have a lot of mobility and versatility and those 2 things combined is very strong in the game. You can beat her though. Whc with 2 handed sword or 1h axe will out dps the elf when equally skillled players use these characters. That’s just an example. The spear however is too strong in comparison I will agree with that.
Like @SmokerT69 says there are options out there for the other classes. Repeater pistol deals amazing damage against all monster’s including armour. Fireball for sienna. Manbow or repeater handgun for kruber, hagbane for elf, drake fire weapons for dwarf and dual axes for slayer
Now they are not equally good. Hagbane and fireball is extremely strong vs unarmoured, pretty weak vs armour and useless against super armour.
Repeater pistol is great vs armour and super armour but pales in comparison to hagbane/fireball against unarmoured.
Etc
As I’ve mentioned before, Huntsman is a honorable exception.
He’s a “mostly ranged” class though. When it comes to melee, it’s Elf or nothing. Zealot is damn good at horde clearing, but is mediocre/bad vs bosses, I mean, he most likely will survive without huge HP loss. But he won’t really be killing it that much faster than other classes, even vs ranged classes going melee due to unknown reasons (or due to known reasons - like Ranger with grudgeraker, because grudgeraker is absolutely trash vs bosses) - yes, the difference in power due to stacks will show, but more than 3 stacks due to grim are not guaranteed during boss fights, because, well, most people don’t lose HP deliberately to get more power (MOST)
Slayer has to get close. Which is often not possible or not viable. And even if he’s in range, f.e. against spawn one fas to get well out of range of dual axes to avoid tentacle grab or 180 degree slams, so it lowers the output significantly.
As Handmaiden you can just keep hacking away. If anything starts going south, you dash and have 3s of relatively safe boss beatdown time or you start spamming arrows (and ALL of the bows work good, Hagbane is just better) from the distance when someone else is holding aggro. I was really trying to replicate my Handmaiden’s damage numbers with Slayer vs bosses but I soon realised, I’m better serving my team by removing the horde while they are taking the big guy down.
Ok, we may agree on some things (spear vs monster damage is simply weird), but back to basics:
You were against adding more monster damage to pistols. At the moment they are EXTREMELY ineffective against monster armor.
With this change, Saltz no longer will be able to shoot at machinegun rate at the ammo crate, actually he’ll be shooting quite slowly. What’s the point of NOT giving him proper monster damage, if the main reason pistol monster damage HAD TO suck is gone? Post patch he not only won’t be able to deal reasonable dmg with a single shot, he will be dealing horribly low damage per second too. So at least we should allow Saltz to make these 12 shots COUNT.
EDIT: and just checked, dual axes damage vs monsters is v. good indeed.
The problem is, they can be fully utilised only against trolls and stormfiends, because fast enemies with attack chains are more effectively killed by ranged fire, and Slayer has none.
And I shouldn’t dwell into “I don’t like how Kerilian works territory”. My only issue is, melee boss combat is olften not really that fun and while beating down trolls can be a nice experience, against chaos spawn I’m dodge-dancing all day long with my funny short axes almost hitting him at all, while Kerilian doesn’t have such issues - she has a tool for every boss. And Shade makes bosses trivial. As a result, I often don’t really feel competitive with “typical melee classes” in boss combat, which is bad because hordes, patrols etc. are usually team effort (even bad AP weapons can help to cut down maulers and open-up shieldvermin for a good smack to the head), while boss fights are either “hold aggro” or spam attacks, and for really many characters that “spam attacks” part does not feel rewarding.
If bosses had more weakspots, targeting certain areas brough certain effects (and didn’t die to Shade in 20s), then maybe everyone would have his share of fun.
I find it extremely effective, even when you have aggro. You have good dodges so depending on the boss you can move in and dodge out after delivering a nice 1-2 heavy combo or just a quick safe push attack. Spear, when you’ve gotten good enough with it. allows you to dps just barely out of reach of monster attacks, but it’s a very high risk high reward sort of thing, and you get HEAVILY punished should you take a hit, that’s not the case for the slayer.
The mobility and versatility of elf’s weapons should balance out her no DR but then her weapons are extremely strong. Like spear is a finesse weapon (high crit/headshot multiplier) but also has light attacks that are stronger than most other weapons with high attack speed (and absurd monster damage.) Glaive is the best AP weapon and it doesn’t have any mobility draw back that other two handed weapons have, not as strong on monsters though. These two outshine any other melee weapon in almost every way so that doesn’t sound balanced to me. I know this thread was about BoP, and the reload would need to be compensated with some sort of buff because what was great about it before was they were always ready to quickly deal with a threat and having to spend so much time reloading would make saltzpyre’s other weapons just better at that point.
I know I’m going ultra-off-topic, but has glaive always staggered CWs with light attack (if only for short time), or is it something new?
Because it seems quite clearly that glaive light attack right now has more stagger than great axe’s light, and well, it’s kind of weird since great axe has this single strong attack swing pattern and delivers more damage, while glaive’s light is mostly a horde-clearer.
