I’m not a Sienna main, so I’m probably not the person best suited for this, but I want to start a discussion on Sienna’s general status by saying this:
I think the Pyromancer class is the class with the worst defined identity/role in the game, and her current melee niche is ill-fitting her. Unchained should be the only class without overcharge slowdown, and the talent which gives her attack speed on high overcharge is doubtful at best.
A brief history of the class: when the game launched BW was designed around control (automatic venting inbetween casting, block cost, crowd control ultimate), pyromancer was the “dps caster”, with high overcharged increasing crit chance substantially, and the burning head ultimate. Unchained was focused on staying on high overcharged and going melee.
Way back then, Pyromancer could use the crit properties of the staves to great effect, being able to sustain a level of spam unmatched by her other careers. This, coupled with the increased damage of a crit, made her something akin to a “ranged unchained”: she could get close to max overcharge to dish out some very high burst damage, albeit at a greater risk of exploding than unchained herself.
Unless I’m mistaken, the attack speed talents (her current niche) came after the general nerf to range careers spams, to give her something back. This and the following changes, besides being ill-fitting, never gave her a clear role compared to other Siennas.
Back to the roots: Looking back at the presentation for the character Dev Blog - Sienna Fuegonasus — Warhammer: Vermintide 2 this was meant as the core of the career:
Only by channeling her wildness into tightly-focused castings can she hope to keep control of the power blazing within. As a Pyromancer, Sienna is a ferocious single-target annihilator, specialising in incinerating the hardiest of enemies at a brisk pace, one at the time.
This was arguably true back then, but as far as I know it’s been lost amidst the patches.
I believe the class should return to her roots as the monster deleter Sienna, the scarily focused DPS career akin to bounty hunter and huntsman (or even shade), where Battle Wizard is fitting as a jack of all trades with a lower damage ceiling.
BW is in a great place at the moment, thanks also to better THP talents, so my suggestion is to start by giving Pyromancers the passive for faster casting time BW could live without (or maybe restricting that to CC staves like conflagration for BW, and giving it to pyro for beam/bolt).
This would increase her dps against single targets and at the same time reduce BW’s a bit.
I’d also change her ulti somewhat: either increasing its damage substantially, or changing it altogether. Maybe some inspiration might be drawn from this part of her characterization: “she relies too much on instinct and too little on her lessons”. Sadly at the moment hers is the least instinctive of all her ultimates, requiring planning/aiming for the most part.
I’m not Fatshark though, so I don’t have their inventiveness: I do think her ultimate talents are good, but the ultimate itself is lacking. I think it shouldn’t work like waystalker’s ultimate, I think it should either work like BH’s, or offer some panic button, or it could even do something unique like disable and damage a single enemy, monsters included, something like a pillar of fire a la deepwood staf? but bigger, darlings!
Overall, I think part of the reason why Sienna’s so hard to balance is that every career gets access to all of the staves, making them quite versatile and making it very hard to predict all possible interactions. A solution to this could also be to limit some staves to some careers, but I can see how this might be controversial. I just thought I’d mention it.
Regardless, I think her identity is well illustrated in the blogpost above. I now bow my hat to Sharks and Sienna’s mains.
TL:DR: read the bold