Hi there. I’m a long time Sienna main and Pyro is my favorite career in the game. I was looking forward to the last balance patch and, after having played with it for a while and after hearing the devs say they’re going to do more balancing work, I thought I’d share my feedback on the state of Pyro and the new balance changes brought to her. Let’s first analyze the changes from that patch:
The good.
- New passive: the volans doctrine is now a default passive, which is great.
- New passive: 50% more overcharge. This change does give Pyro a lot more identity as the ranged focused Sienna career, which is exactly what they wanted.
- New talent: 12 seconds of unlimited destruction when using your ult. This talent alone gives us a reason to play bolt Pyro and actually makes the build worth it and not just Battle Wizard but worse. It’s probably overkill on other staffs though, so Bonded Flame remains a strong contender.
The ugly.
- New talent: 80% reduced venting damage, but it gets worse the more enemies are close to you. This talent punishes you for getting close to enemies. Problem is, the best ranged builds on Pyro benefit greatly from getting close to enemies. If you’re running fireball, you don’t want to be behind your team shooting the horde all the time (and you need to be waaaay behind to get the benefit of this talent), because then you’ll be constantly scorching Markus’ undeserving arse (and you’ll also probably get hit in the back). If you’re running Corus, Flamestorm or Beam, you literally have to get close. If you’re running Bolt, you don’t need this much venting.
As it is now, I barely see any uses for this talent. My suggestion for a small change: venting deals no damage, but you generate 50% more overcharge. This respects the idea of more venting, but it doesn’t punish you for getting close to enemies, and that extra overcharge would actually come in handy in clutch situations, where you need more crit chance but don’t have enough space to cast many spells.
The bad.
- The Burning Skull still sucks as it wasn’t changed at all. But now you can be disappointed by it every 50 seconds instead of every minute. I won’t beat around the bush here, this ult has been buffed in all balance mods made by the community, and it actually feels useful when playing with those.
Buff suggestions for Pyro’s ult (from well tested balance mods). Please Fatshark, this is the most important thing that Pyro needs.
- Give it at least 53% more power so it can actually consistently one shot specials on Cata (yes, you need 53% power to one shot gas rats and blightstormers without a headshot or a crit).
- Double the animation speed (so, halve the cast time) so you won’t get so easily hit while casting it.
- Give it a small explosion on impact so it doesn’t feel terrible to have your entire ult eaten by a single stormvermin.
Overall, the changes were good (but we reeeeally need that ult buff), but I don’t think they address the fundamental problem that Pyro has: there’s very little reason to pick most of her ranged focused talents. This is because:
- Pyro’s ranged talents are always about giving her more ranged power, or more casts. The problem is, that’s exactly the only thing Pyro doesn’t need more of (even more so after the 50% extra overcharge buff!). She can already melt everything at range without those boosts. The only exception to this is the new level 30 talent, which at least reduces charge time. This means most of her ranged talents are boring and don’t change the way you play at all.
- The alternatives to those ranged boosting talents, most of the time, increase your survivability, which is exactly what Pyro needs. Spirit casting gives you more crit chance, which equals more melee damage and stagger: exactly what you need to survive when you’re being pressured in melee range. One with the flame gives you attack speed, which, again, increases your survivability under pressure. Same for Soul Siphon and Bonded Flame. Thus, even on a ranged focused build, you’re still better off taking the talents that boost your melee, and staying away from talents that only boost your ranged, simply because the former give you a little bit of survivability, and you don’t need more ranged damage.
The solution to this is obvious: give her more survivability and change her ranged talents to be more interesting and actually build defining, just like every other ranged career has.
3 simple suggestions
- Give her THP on stagger instead of on kill (this, unsurprisingly, has also been done in balance mods). This change would make Bonded Flame no longer mandatory for most builds, letting us make thp with firesword like BW does. This would open up a world of possibilities as Firesword is a great defensive weapon (more so with Pyro’s crit chance), and make ranged focused talents more attractive since you have better survivability with it.
- Switch On the Precipice to: killing an enemy in melee increases charge time of the next spell by 50%. This talent would be build defining in the same way that similar talents are for Waystalker and Bounty Hunter. It’d be a really fun talent to have, and it isn’t just a damage boost.
- Switch Ride the Fire Wind to: fire DoT from critical hits ticks twice as fast. This would allow Pyro to make use of more DoT oriented builds (she’s a pyromancer for crying out loud!), as well as to make better use of firesword, increasing her ranged build variety.
3 things that would be nice to have (but don’t have as much priority).
- Martial Study: boring talent. Change it to: melee critical hits set enemies on fire. I know it’s not a ranged talent, but well, it’s called martial study. You could remove the “melee” restriction and give it a different name though.
- Soul Siphon: it’s not great. It’d be really nice if it were changed to give damage reduction on critical hits, as right now its uptime is pretty mediocre.
- THP on crit and Assassin would be fun on her.
TL;DR
- Buff her ult (done and tested on balance mods, and it feels great).
- Give her THP on Stagger (done and tested on balance mods, and it feels great).
- Make her ranged talents more interesting (I gave some of my own ideas, but really, the point is that she needs ranged talents that actually change the way you play, if she is to have a strong identity as a ranged career).