Why can’t he be compared to shade or BH? All three of them are possible careers in the same game trying to accomplish the same missions against the same enemies, be it with different mechanics.
If compared to slayer, GK doesn’t have leap and has to be more conscious of his position, therefore I would say he has more reason to dodge and kite than slayer for this example.
Comparing careers based off of ledging bosses is imho flawed because I take it as an exploit, but even then BW and FK is more efficient at it, potentially so is RV.
I still see no cause for GK to not be requiring dodging or kiting, are you just basing this on ledging alone? You can’t just stagger the boss for the whole 1 minute duration.
What do you mean by double sword? The longsword? You can’t defend against ground slams the same way as with shields and both can be used by every other Kruber career. So what makes GK such an outlier amongst all his careers?
There is a point where taking damage just downs you, so sure you could stack damage reduction but that’s Specifically what IB and FK are for, and that’s their niche ; and adding all stats to everyone just removed niches and makes everyone too good at everything and removes what makes a career special.
The entire point of the game is to not get hit. That is literally all the learning curve is about. Anyone can headshot after playing for an hour, but consistently not getting surrounded, dodging and parrying/pushing is what you need to learn to get good at the game. The fact that there is no DR is no big deal, as the point of higher difficulties (and what makes them difficult) is that if you get hit, you lose. From there whether someone has DR or not doesn’t matter to me ; and the fact that IB for instance has damage mitigation makes him an interesting choice for players who do get hit, but I prefer to have a player who controls the enemies rather than someone who can take a hit without getting downed.
Shade is in a good spot as a high risk, high reward career. Positioning for backstabs isn’t always as trivial as, say, pressing F on waystalker and killing 3 elites and 2 specials that were behind you. and around a corner ; or deleting a horde wave on a 30 seconds cooldown.
I don’t use 2h hammer so can’t speak for that, but since using the bretsword I really can’t like the Xsword anymore. It’s great, sure, but the parry on charged attacks on bretsword is so valuable when dealing with elites in a horde that I just get careless on the Xsword.
Also, Push attack is a downwards strike, that chains into H3, which chains into l3, so by doing push → heavy → light → heavy → light… you get infinite downwards headshots for elites, one with defense that can be kept charged and one that is really fast to come out. This deletes anything faster than Xsword imo, with the advantage of having some defense at the cost of potential crits.
They do increase your chance of not being hit dramatically. Not getting hit > getting hit with damage reduction.
I like this.
I definitely don’t see GK as a boss killer. He has good boss control, but not a boss killer.
Double strike on ult ; the one that I think is the least valuable on the row.
Edit: Editing the whole post, because it was made during a commute. I feel like it’s best if I explain my thoughts and didn’t really have room to do that before.
The game is balanced across multiple careers, weapons, mechanics and possible situations, so I feel it’s fair to compare the career with others. Whenever a career is strong or weak depends also on the rest of them. The point of my comparison to those 3 careers (BH, Shade and Huntsman) in particular was to show, that GK doesn’t really trivialise bosses in terms of boss dmg. The slayer comparison also comes in my next point:
The ult gives about 3 seconds of stagger and aggro, the stagger duration is really not enough to last during the entire boss fight and it gives you aggro after the fact, therefore there is almost no way to end this fight without utilizing dodge, block or kiting. The absence of any movement abilities apart from the bonus movement speed (which is kinda negligible) makes GK think about position even more and therefore use dodging and kiting. Slayer in comparison has a leap that boosts his movement speed and potentially also ranged weapon, GK however is dependent on his two feet to keep him in attacking distance and also out of bosses attacks (therefore utilizing dodge and kiting).
As in throwing them off the map or just throwing them off a ledge and attacking him while he tries to continuously get back to you? Either way my following point stands.
Firstly, stagger is not unique to his kit. Secondly, here comes into play my last comparison to BW and FK. Both of these were used to showcase the fact that he doesn’t even necessarily rule in terms of Boss Stagger. BW is able to stagger the boss two times in a single ult use, while FK can stagger the boss on much shorter cooldown. RV can potentially do also better using his ult and bombs.
All I really argued for was firstly that in my humble opinion, Grail Knight is currently balanced. He has his advantages (Single target dmg with smiter and his passive, elite deletion) and disadvantages (mainly his lack of ranged and movement abilities, which comes into play in my second point).
Secondly I argued against your argument that he doesn’t require less dodge or kiting during a boss than most other careers, in fact he requires it more precisely because of his lack of movement abilities. The stagger is not unique to him, otherwise you could then argue 80% of careers are trivializing bosses also, which doesn’t make GK ridicilously strong as you put it.
But I do agree bosses could use a proper lookover to make them perhaps a little bit more threatening.
If the GK is balanced, all the melee powerhouses are completely out of whack. WHC is on par with GKs elite damage and smokes him in, monster damage, survivability, team buffs, access of range weapons, or the ability to actually get out of crap situations. Shade, Zealot and Slayer are also more than able to keep up with a GKs killing potential while having access to range weapons, insane mobility, defensive Talents and again, ranged weapons.
GK is a Shade without a bow, invisibility, access to the crit chance boosting mobile elgi arsenal, assassin, and got peppered with random team buffs that might or might not have any value for you and your team. Their EHP is nearly the same thanks to BloodDrinker, so GK being more tanky is just not the case.
GK being balanced compared to other careers, who also work in his niche, is just umgak.
This is absolutely too situational to even be considered.
On another matter, ledging a boss should be fixed kind of in the same way a player hangs from a ledge, or how bosses climb ledges : the boss should grab the ledge and come back up.
Yes, honestly I don’t think he could do without it, unless they make it default for all shields. Without any ranged weapons or movement abilities, this is pretty much needed.
Been running him in Cata to test this suggestion out.
He is not SSS tier, but he’s certainly not weak, certainly not in need of buffs.
He can both crowd control like an Ironbreaker and deal out damage like a Shade. Thats a pretty lethal combo, being able to switch between the two on the fly means that he is pretty damn unmatched in melee. (YES you can say “but this career can hit those breakpoints” or “This career is tankier!”, but the point is he can do both ends of the stick at once).
The only thing I truly fear when playing GK are blightstormers, as you rely entirely on teammates to snipe them out. You do rely on quick reactions to deal with disablers, but your giant glowing sword makes quick work of them.
I mean yeah thats kind of the TL;DR here, everyone seems to think I want GK buffed tho, which I dont get. Im simply pointing out that by comparison he is worse at almost everything. There is 0 reason to take him over Merc as well.
On legend and cata, picking grail while there is ironbreaker in group can be tricky due lackluster of ranged, grail is maybe good for dealing with complicated situations, but hey, main reason to get complicated siuation is when ranged cannot kill something so his power is also his weakness.
I dont think grail need buff, but players who play it shoud be aware when to use GK when not.
speaking of gk buff, he brings too many buff icons. with his quests and grim icon I can no longer see blessed shot on my bh. which is awkward. might wanna put his quest icon somewhere else
I play tons of Legend QM and I tend to notice the effects of different characters joining. One thing that happens when Grail Knight joins is I tend to run out of ammo slightly faster because now 1/4th the team is not participating in special killing. I’m usually fairly on the money, but if I don’t conserve, and even sometimes if I do, I find myself out of ammo before the next ammo pickup which has led to some wipes because I couldn’t kill the blightstormer, hookrat, or whatever.
On the flip side, the GK health regen is the best. I roll NB on a many chars and most of the time with the added health regen I’m at 100% health which is just really deluxe.
The real problem is when a slayer and grail knight joins. Those games usually go great until we wipe to something stupid that was allowed to live because no one shot it.
Basically, I think GK is fine teamwise as long as you have a dedicated special killer with ammo regen and a backup special killer to take up the slack.
Use on temp on kill, 2h Hammer, Stoicism and just hit trade with all of the elites on Cata and gg. Simple bodyshotter, rewarded for the effort it takes. I’m disappointed in GK’s lack of mechanical complexity. Just another Slayer, but this time has a shield instead of speed.
I disagree, he can get huge power/dmg bonuses and has interesting talents with potential.
What I rather find is the typical Kruber lack of synergy.
Kruber’s shield weapon combos are a joke compared to HM and IB because he has unreliable, if any stamina sustain, no stun duration reduction and weak weapons alongside the shield. This might be a different story for the Bretonnian S&S though, I have only played him for a few days since I returned, but so far GK with Bretonnian shield seems far more competitive in cata than his other classes with their shields. I need to do some more experimenting but it appears to be the combination of swing patterns and higher power values for more stagger.
On the offense side the GK only appears to synergize with the executioner, but is quite the beast with it. Not just because the weapon itself is a beast but also because the higher power values bring the already high damage, cleave and stagger for the exe over the top while his higher base runspeed and even the temp HP for taking a hit every 5 seconds compensate for the sword’s weaknesses.
On top of that, while the exe shines on certain offensive builds, it also made those builds struggle fast once pressured and against shields. With a potent (because of high power values) shield in your secondary you pretty much patch these both holes as well.
The single major weakness of the GK that sticks out to me is his lack of ways to deal with getting cornered by monks and berserkers. Unlike other shield classes, he has neither the stamina sustain nor the damage reduction to wait out their flurries, especially in the middle of a horde, which is pretty much all the time on cata.
But maybe most importantly, unlike all the other shield classes and all the other Kruber careers, he has no ulti to deal with them. No dash to safety and no CC, even with opportunist and his big power values he can’t interrupt zerkers during their rampage.
His ulti is an absolute clutch tool in such situations, but the problem is he can’t use it with several enemies right in his face (neck) without getting his face smashed in due to the complete lack of damage reduction.
Now I am not complaining about this weakness seeing how strong he is with the exe, it is called balance. What bothers me is that the exe is the only offensive weapon that actually makes him competitive. The Bretonnian longsword needs a buff/rework to synergize with him and to get rid of those insanely high block recovery times.
One thing I have to say after dabbling with him more:
Anyone saying bretsword or xsword on him are too strong or anything, do yourself a favour and play with 2h hammer. With the right setup, you just eat everything. Everything just dies and you are virtually untouchable.
so his power is also his weakness.