What moveset?
I’d never-ever put spear over exec (not in any situation).
Proper balancing is not about making weapons that are in good spot feel bad and render them half useless. Of course if there is something extremely good it needs to be toned down but that is not the case here.
They have bad history with balancing over the years and now instead of focusing on fixing the weapons that actually need fixing they also make these big changes to weapons that does not need tweaking at this point.
That is just a move in wrong direction.
Changes on Unchained Sienna is feels really good. She’s much durable now, I think.
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Can’t say I agree. She doesn’t feel much better at al.
The main problem is she wasn’t actually buffed, only some of her talents were.
You could still play without any of the buffed talents and then she remains exactly the same. I think she deserves some buffs that aren’t tied to any talent.
Unchained talents have buffed her to the point of being broken/exploitable without any mention of weapons.
Her Talent to transfer HP to Cooldown bar coupled with Bomb Balm makes her disgustingly resilient and powerful. Anything that can get you 40-50 shots off from a fireball Staff without being downed is completely stupid.
That is, admittedly only one talent that has broken her.
If you knew what you were doing she wasn’t(and still isn’t) a bad choice all. I’d like the old Fuel for the Fire back though.
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For horde clear? push+attack > light attack1 > heavy slash > push attack > repeat and interrupt at anytime to push attack. The light attack is quicker than the animation so you can move into the heavy slash fast. In practice you can use the light attack to poke elites and stagger them between slashes.
Especially on Merc, you can solo cata hordes with elites mixed in. The heavy slash even staggers CWs, so while you don’t do much damage to them you deal with them while continuing to clear the trash. The push attack also builds enough space to whip out a ranged weapon and gun down a special or two before getting back to the horde.
The combination of powerful offense, control, good defense, and mobility is why I think it tops the list. Exe will never be the best because its not mobile enough. Once you are overwhelmed its difficult to recover, where as the spear makes that easy.
For Merc try running +2 stamina +30% Block cost reduction on the spear itself and +2 stamina on your necklace, 30% stamina recovery on trinket for good measure. For spear stamina is a resource to use offensively and defensively, so you want as much as possible for offense and you also want to lose as little as possible while defending. Digging yourself out of a hole requires stamina, so manage it wisely.
For Huntsman or FK drop the block cost reduction for atk speed, that will offset the loss of Paced Strikes.
All that is ultimately why the spear is losing stamina and nothing else. Its push attack and total stamina is what makes it powerful. Reducing the stamina reduces its potential without needing to touch damage, cleave, or attack speed numbers.
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disagree with the dual dagger/sword dagger nerf on Kerillian as well, reason those two weapons are being picked more than others deal with Shades stealth damage boost, those two weapons have massive single target boss/monster damage with stealth, unless you rework the stealth bonuses on Shade, those are the ONLY 2 weapons any legend/cata Shade should be using, groups will kick (and rightfully so) a shade using other weapons unless they’re in the mood to carry a player, if you’re dead set on removing the crit bonus, maybe consider returning the stacking bleeds instead, might even out shade for damaging higher hp non armored enemies
For Handmaiden, can’t say I like any of her tier 6 (level 30) talents options with this rework, was previously using Blade dancer myself (applied bleed to enemies you dashed thru) as invisible seemed counter productive for attempting to front line, still does.
As for the Blade Dancer rework, instant revive on dash is redundant to a degree as one could do a guaranteed revive before by holding block starting the revive then hitting the action skill to dash away, also in general don’t care for skills/stats that revive players, prefer skills/stats that keep players alive so they don’t need to be revived.
Power From Pain rework: Extra cleave power after dash seems very dependent on weapon selection, I tried it when i was testing spear/shield, didn’t notice any additional cleaving when I did, will have to test it out some more. I suspect if you’re attempting to get people to pick more variety in this talent tier, one of the biggest changes you could do is make Handmaiden immune to damage and grabs for the duration of her dash, I suspect that getting hit or grabbed mid dash is what makes the invisible option so attractive to many players, 1 second immunity buff before talents would open up players to other options
Shadow Step rework, 1 second 10% damage increase too short of a duration of a boost to really want to give up other options, 10 second non stacking boost and I’d probably take it over Willow Stance (5% att speed 6 seconds per dodge, stacks 3 times) simply because Willow Stance can be tedious to stack and maintain at times
swift bow feels good with changes; spear, shield and spear, glaive, elven 2h sword liking the changes, need to play with Elven 1h axe some more, hording still felt difficult
All things considered enjoying this beta version, keep up the good work 
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An 8.5% attack speed reduction isn’t going to take a weapon from top tier to useless, come on. Particularly when it got more crits, making it easier to keep SS up anyway.
Such insane hyperbole doesn’t help the discussion at all.
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This is prolly what they thought when they made the change.
It’s not hyperbole at all.
- 8.5% is quite a bit.
- The attack speed of overhead attack was already very much on the edge in Cata and higher, so now when it got cut by additional 8.5% it’s pushing it over the edge rendering it garbage tier. It’s not like you make something 8.5% slower and it’s 8.5% worse. There is a cliff in this situation and if you push it over the cliff it’s over. Which as I can see is not obvious. If you can’t properly put your attack in between attack of the boss it’s useless. And it’s not just boss, it’s many other situations like when there is multiple Stormvermins fishing for you with their pikes, you start the attack and get stabbed and can’t even block, and you’re just fu*ked, there is not much to do, you can’t really dodge much and you can’t attack.
In some situations few % can make huge different. To make the point easy to understand, imagine you are doing 100 damage per hit and enemy has 100hp, you kill the enemy on one hit, then patch comes and there is a 1% nerf to the damage. Well there sure will be people saying “Dude calm down, it’s 1%, it’s irrelevant” , while not understanding that it’s basically 50% damage nerf in this situation since now you have to attack twice to kill the enemy.
tldr: Just go and try Executioner in Cata 3 and let me know how does it feel now and if you still want to use it and … find it fun to play.
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Yes, and this 8.5% nerf doesn’t make it impossible to land swings. It makes it a bit riskier, but that was clearly the point. A weapon that puts out as much damage as exec sword does should be risky, when you’re able to one hit any of those SV it absolutely should need to be hard to land the swings under pressure.
Attack speed and damage breakpoints aren’t really at all comparable. 1 swing to 2 swings is a huge increase. 1s to 1.08s is not (hypothetical numbers obviously). There’s no easily identifiable point at which attack speed creates a huge dip in efficiency. Particularly when it’s primarily used on merc anyway, who gets a bunch of other buffs to it (ignoring GK who can just bring another weapon for those high pressure situations). Is the weapon being slightly slower going to hurt merc who can already get like +40% attack speed? Is +31.5% just too weak?
It is a nerf, but considering it was also buffed, I think you’re being silly if you’re acting like it’s now trash tier. It’s still a perfectly fine weapon that’s doing all the same things it was before, just with more risk now. I’m not sure how cata 3 would make much of a difference either, as far as I know the only spawn behaviour that’s different in it is a single extra max special and one higher of each type?
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Flisler exemplified this in particular with the chaos spawn. And the point he makes is that it went from risky use to unusable in a lot of situations. Unusable because it’s now slightly too slow instead of requiring perfect timing.
I haven’t checked this for Cata 1 - 3 but generally speaking you have less reaction time on the higher difficulties. In other words, the difficulty matter for weapon speed if it’s, like exec sword, borderline too slow.
I havent really played with the exec for a long but what Flisker describes was my first thought when I read the patch notes about exec. What about you? Have you tried it out in any of the situations Flisker describes (dancing with chaos spawn, multiple stormvermin)?
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I’m not sure he did, he just said he personally can’t do it properly after the change. Without actual numbers that’s not really proof of anything, particularly if he was playing it on merc like basically everyone did anyway.
I’m happy to change my mind if he has exact numbers that prove it is impossible to dodge dance a spawn though.
Sure, I’ve played around with it a bit and I honestly didn’t feel the nerf particularly hard at all. Didn’t do any chaos spawn dancing to be fair. Merc still just spams attacks, GK still just swaps when he’s under a lot of pressure, huntsman still doesn’t use it and I haven’t played much FK.
You have less room for error on cata 3 sure, but I don’t think it’s relevant if you’re talking about fighting multiple SV. The way you do that on all cata difficulties is mostly the same. Odds are if you eat a stab when they’re spamming running attacks you’re dead regardless of what cata you’re on.
Considering you get more SS up time anyway, I think the reactions to this nerf are silly. It does nothing but making the weapon a little riskier and slightly lowers the max possible DPS vs single targets (though this is not a very useful metric).
I mostly just take issue with the ridiculous overstatement that it’s anything like a 100% increase in ttk, or that it’s “half useless” or “complete garbage”. If he said “I think it was nerfed slightly too hard” I wouldn’t bother commenting, I disagree but it’s just slightly differing opinions there.
Probably not but it will make it god awful to use for anyone else but merc. Personally don’t see how this balances anything if the weapon becomes god awful for rest of the careers and still maintains most of its power for the biggest abuser anyways.
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Biggest abuser would be GK with his single target/charge attack power/damage boosts. Mercenary is more the “Don’t care because I have an overpowered skill set anyway” guy.
And it isn’t like you couldn’t get up to +55 % attack speed on Foot Knight even without Swift Slaying. It is kinda silly to complain about ist reduced speed if we are getting flooded with attack speed buffs/talents/properties left and right.
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That’s highly debatable. Sure if you value executioner only for its charged attacks then yes i guess 25 % is more let’s say “idiot” proof than anything in the Mercenarys kit.
Also that last one i simply fine it to be extremely moot point. Sure when swift slaying procs or you happen to have some other talent steroid active it does not matter for one second if you have 8 % or 15 % less attack speed. But if you do not have those steroids on hand you will feel the 8 % less attack speed on situations like chaos spawn dancing, weaving attacks against multiple stormvermin etc.
Perhaps you don’t but i certainly do feel it and i still think there would be better alternative ways of nerfing executioner without making it feel like absolute ass when you don’t fully build around making an weapon work for you.
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Which is his main selling point. If the Executioner wouldn’t have that Charge 1 attack anymore or it would got nerfed THEN the weapon would be picked less. Because many people use it for its 1-hit breakpoints while still being good at crowd clearing. Because if you wanted a Sword which is excelling at crowd control you could just pick the Greatsword. Which is also a reason for the nerf, to make these differences more visible. Because up to now people always asked: Why should I use the Greatsword if the Executioner does everything as good or better?
As for the steroids: They are available nearly all the time. You get +10 % attack speed just by properties, nothing attached to it. As FK you get 15 % just for pushing. You get another 3-30 % for using your active skill which is up less than every 30 seconds. So this is a buff working at least 33 % of your run time if you want so. And this is without Swift Slaying.
On Mercenary it is slightly more difficult because all his speed buffs are harder conditioned. But with the increased cleave they can be triggered easily in hordes. Also, the charge 1 has 20! % crit, +10% crit by properties and 5 % as class bonus this means Swift Slaying each third hit. The Executioner’s crowd clearing potential does not suffer from the change in the BBB, neither on Mercenary nor on Foot Knight. If you say that his Charge 1 got slower. Then yes, it should be so considering the freaking huge amount of damage it does. And yes, a build should be tailored to the weapon. If you can use a weapon just for any build, it is a sign that the weapon is to good of an allrounder, does overperform and indeed needs a nerf because it apparently doesn’t have a weakness which wouldnt be taken into consideration.
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Disagree, it’s still fine on GK because he doesn’t have to deal with its biggest weaknesses at all, and like @Adelion said FK can get a fair amount more attack speed anyway. A weapon being toned down a bit but still keeping most of its strengths on the careers it’s best on seems good to me? Different careers being encouraged to use different loadouts is good.
I don’t see the whole “fighting multiple SV is a bit harder” thing as an issue at all either. Vulnerability under pressure is clearly intended to be the big weakness of the weapon. You still get SS up fairly regularly now anyway.
That’s an interesting point which touches upon player’s skill level and such.
Frankly for me it is almost impossible to do these things before nerf with the input lag and unresponsiveness of switching/cancelling and such like.
I’d just try to go for the head with light attacks, come to think of it being able to pull off a heavy attack between bosses strikes or a swarm of SVs should require teamplay not an OP weapon.
I agree with this.
But without that, she will be so weak again. Maybe tone it down then?