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I was using the mace this evening and it was pretty damn good.
Will have to try out the 1h sword now.
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Can even get 2h Sword to work as Merc, but you would definitely need a Handgun for Elites. The only thing I haven’t tested again is his Shield weapons. The move sets didn’t appeal to me.
This build as Foot Knight is pretty fun:
Talents:
2,3,1,2,1
Items:
Longsword - Crit/Chaos (Resourceful Combatant)
Handgun - Chaos/Armoured (Scrounger)
Charm - Attack Speed/Chaos (Decanter)
Neck - Stam/Health (Healers Touch)
Trinket - Crit/Curse Resist (Shrapnel)
Haven’t got chance to play with a decent elite killer yet, but you can go pretty ham around the elites and build some ulti. Being able to use it more makes up for the lack of stagger from your weapon, and keeps you as a support tank. You’ll get decent damage, but nothing incredible.
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That’s fine I’d have liked to see video. And appreciate the time you took to even get the screen shot.
(I learn quite bit about my own play style flaws by watching better players and it actually adds quite a bit of extra info about the point you’re making.) I’ll take it on faith that this is legitimate and not photo shopped, (internet and all this is just dumb on my part, anyone got a bridge to sell me?) You’ve at least backed up that you can play considerably better than me, which means that I’ll take your balance suggestions far more seriously, I can’t produce the numbers you have in PUG or even friends games, unless perhaps I’m using Sienna. Though I’ve not really optimised any of my builds.
1.0.8.2 has come out which removes the point in any further “boss nerf” discussion, I see that you think 1.0.8.2 is heavy handed and “Kruber is boring(?) now”, do you normally main as Kruber? I’m still yet to play Huntsman, I hope to get some time tonight. I’m not finding the Merc boring but I admit that Kruber is unlikely to become my first choice.
I’m still not clear on what you thought Krubers weaknesses were (or are) in relation to the other characters.
Slow bow weapon switching?
Charged range attack had some scatter?
I don’t want to see an unplayable Kruber, last think I want is to see players forced to migrate.
I do agree with you score cards are not the best example of a characters usefulness, if Bardin takes the most damage, and doesn’t do much damage, it’s irrelevant to the impact Bardin had on the game, how much did Bardin’s tanking help the team, how many hits did he stop getting to the mage is of much more interest to me… This might of course be because I rely on my team to get though the level, I can’t carry them, I need good team work to finish Legend which (I believe) is what this game is supposed to be about . I’m all for any FatShark edits that forces team work, and forces an array of hero selection.
For me this discussion boiled down to a couple of points:
- Do the Huntsman’s weaknesses balance out the strengths?
- Do the Huntsman’s strengths make him fun to play with in a team?
- And finally… one not really appropriate to this thread but obviously highly affected by it - what is the point of the Ogre type enemies.
Speaking as someone who recently watched Ratsnitt and Deathrattler get their butt’s handed to them by a shade in about 2 attacks, no I did not enjoy that, nor did I get a feeling that the shade played well and feel the need to congratulate them on a kill well played.
For me this game has some overly brutal moments on legend, I can’t consistently beat it, (in the teams I play in,) and that’s what makes the victories sweeter, I think the bosses should be brutal each and every time, when a player can kill the boss in 5-10 seconds, without needing support from the team at all then I’m left wondering what the point of the boss was.
Thanks again for taking the time to generate those screenshots and respond, I appreciate the effort you went to.
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I went back and re read the first post, the whole thing is coached with “IMO” or as I understand that group of letters as “In My Opinion”. You can say Kitten is wrong, but saying Kitten is lying over an opinion?
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The player in question is a very good player, one who even mostly plays WS and Shade. Unless for some mysterious reason Huntsman just clicked very much better with his/her playstyle than anything other in this game, it is basically impossible that this player didn’t get comparable and better numbers (sans Boss damage) on Waystalker.
For anyone with many, many hours in this game on alot of different careers, it was quite transparent that using scorecards as evidence was poor form at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
Good players are good, and can surpass what a Huntsman can do on other classes. The only thing that was out of whack was his boss damage.
First post notwithstanding, this same player went on to great lengths to make incredibly dubious claims, saying for instance that Huntsman horde clearing with a bow was the best hordeclear in the game. This is just not true, and I don’t see how anyone could say it with a straight face.
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I played Footknight quite a lot in the beginning, migrated towards Pyro, then played Huntsman for a while, now I mainly play Waystalker and Pyro. I played Huntsman quite a bit during 1.08 beta, but not very much during 1.08 live.
Even with his boss damage, he is clunky to use compared to other characters.
As for Kruber being boring, he is one of the least picked characters overall.
Footknight is the worst tank in the game, easily surpassed by Ironbreaker, Zealot and probably Unchained and Handmaiden too. His damage reduction is pitiful compared to Zealot and the ignore-damage talent of Ironbreaker. As with all Kruber careers, his ranged options are very, very limited - and for melee you also really only have one choice if you don’t want to gimp yourself.
Merc is a melee class that lacks what all other melee classes have. He has no damage reduction, he has no extra dodge. Further, his +speed and +power only ever activate against hordes (need to cleave 3 enemies), so against the enemies that matter - elites, specials, bosses, you would have been better off taking any other class, even Footknight because then at least you’d have a little bit damage reduction. He has a 3 minute underwhelming ult, so playing Merc feels like playing without an ult.
Huntsman has a very clunky bow that makes you stop when firing, gives you a one second window to fire before you go into a zoom that destroys accuracy, and has a delay on weaponswap just to make you take extra damage. He has no waystalker regen, no extra dodge, and is the squishiest career in the game. Like the other Krubers, he is limited to very few viable melee choices - none of them as fun as the quick, dodge-weaving weapons of other characters.
If you take the handgun, you lose ranged hordeclear, and this squishiest character in the game is forced into even more melee.
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I know it’s a big thread and I don’t expect people to read the whole thing but the jist is that what started as a potentially innocuous exaggeration on a few aspects of the character in the original post quickly devolved into OP decrying the whole character as overpowered, citing scorecards that aren’t any better that what every skilled veteran player is achieving on every class they play. I didn’t jump in until what went from a warranted call for an ult adjustment became a heavily biased cry for a general nerfbat, which we’re now seeing the effects of. Instead of anyone but the most skilled players being able to pick Kruber up and maybe perform with him, he’s worse off than ever and, worst of all, he’s just downright boring and has been stripped of his identity as a “hunter” of heavy enemies relative to similar but better and more “fun” classes.
The reason the “evidence” cited and cries for nerf are disingenuous is because anyone with enough hours and skill to chart-top with anything knows that a high score on a character in PUG isn’t a sign that character is OP. Further, anyone injecting themselves into balance feedback shouldn’t be crying for nerf if they don’t honestly know what every class is capable of. In this case, I’m sure the OP is well aware that HS’ general performance in the posted scorecards was no better than what other classes do with less difficulty every single time.
Long story short: the ult’s boss damage needed tweaking. Basically everyone agreed on that. OP took it a step further and totally misrepresented the class in its entirety, so now we’ve got an already unpopular Kruber made weaker than he’s ever been. Instead of a healthy, diverse meta, we’re back to seeing certain careers way less often than is normal and these less popular careers underperforming in general.
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Balancing the Fatshark way.
Ignore everything and pick up occasional neckbeard campaigns against a certain playstyle/char as viable feedback.
Just scream nerf loud and often enough.
The two most outperformed ranged careers just got a bit weaker.
Cant risk having other ranged setups than Pyro, WS, BH in the gameplay.
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He is not that bad after this patch guys.
I did some legend maps last night…still can x1 shot CW when using active.
Pretty much killed a chaos spawn with my active using decanter and a conc pot.
Spawn was dead in 10 to 15 seconds.
IMHO he is just a lot more dependant on loadout.
You have to spec him for boss killing and stack crit chance.
So ya kinda gotta pick now…x1 shot specials, x1 shot armor(not CW ofc), or boss damage.
That was my experience at least.
He sure can’t. Maybe if you happen to crit headshot or have stacked lots of powervs chaos. He can no longer reliably deal with CW, and that’s the whole point. If you have to get a lucky crit to do it, it is no longer reliable in the slightest.
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I dunno. I had no issues killing them using my active last night.
X1 headshot and they dead.
Crit chance/power vs monster and chaos build, 20% power increase talent when using active.
Did it at least x10 times last night.
Seems to me ya just gave to spec him out for what you want to do.
Dont really see a problem with that.
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Ah, I see, yeah the 20% power talent helps of course, if you want to use your ult no more than 4-5 times per match.
You realize Slayer deletes a CW just as fast? Shade has her ult up way faster, and even has weapons quick enough that she can run CDR instead of swift slaying on them?
There’s is absolutely no reason to pick HS over WS, pyro or BH now. He’s utterly meaningless.
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Okay. So slayer kills them just as fast…whats the problem with that?
We can kill CW at the same rate BUT Hunts is a boss killer and can kill specials. An area that slayer is not quite as good at. Seems okay to me.
I pick him because I think he is fun. He is also good to have on the team if spec’d and played well.
I would rather play hunts over WS.
He could prob use a bit of a cool down reduction.
IMHO thats all he really needs right now.
Oh yeah, and please, PLEASE get rid of crouch animation when using active!
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Thing is, most people didn’t find him fun even with his broken boss damage. Needing the perfect spec roll, a specific talent combo, and flawless play to still underperform more than ever just means he’s back to being an extremely niche pick. Other classes don’t need to be 90+% perfect spec/roll to be effective on anyone but the 99th percentile of players.
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Thanks for summarizing. I didn’t want to read through 500 replies. =)
I can agree with your last paragraph (post #512).
It was pretty funny when I played with my friend. Oh look damn a spawn watch out! Oh he is dead? wtf.
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Thanks for taking the time to explain your points to me . I still have questions, but this thread seems to have reached it’s EOL point, new patch is out and the arguments appear to have been made, so perhaps its pointless to continue… however.
Of my friends, we find Kruber strong selection, (I’ve been asking around) we usually have a Soldier, dwarf, elf, wizard, Saltz swaps out with the others…
I 've now played Longbow Huntsman (on champion) from level 20 to 22, (in PUG’s) I can’t use this as a guage to legend, I can say that I had a lot of fun and will likely use Huntsman to finish my last 8 levels on him before trying out the Foot Knight, and I was quite surprised to find I’d killed 45 elites to the WayStalkers ~25 at the end of one of the missions.
I’m going to have to play him on legend, I know.
I have a tendency to use charged shot on every shot which I think is a mistake, I found the recharging arrows on a horde to be (talents and weapon traits) powerful, and while I never felt I was able to completely delete waves I certainly only let stragglers though.
I’m not sure where his weaknesses are, bow weapon swapping felt a little slow to me, (but there were occasions where I felt I did not have the weapon swap completed where I still got the block,) and in most of those situations it was because I was using the bow until very late due to how effective it felt, with the elf I’m much more reluctant to have my ranged weapons out at that point.
Chaos Warriors are an interesting point, There needs to be an enemy that’s fairly impervious to ranged attacks, I’m not sure what other enemy would fit the bill. Maulers seemed to be able to suck up a lot of damage, but then I’m not carrying any chaos damage items, so…
Again thanks for the discussion, I’m still not decided, I need far more experience with Kruber.
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Thanks for your feedback they just killed the class. GJ.
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I still find the HS very powerful. One shotting Stormvermin with bodyshots is not to be sniffed at.
The halberd is still awesome. I was even playing with the 2H sword and found it very useable.
I even found the boss damage comparable to WS Elf’s. It seems balanced to me.
The stupid bow-zoom-for-accuracy-drop is the only thing that really needs to go.
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