Let me preface by describing what I’m talking about, weapons that have a constant stream of damage like the flamestorm staff and beam staff can currently take advantage of a quirk with the resourceful sharpshooter trait (reduce ult cooldown by 2% for every crit) that allows them to gain ult charge ridiculously fast. Every time you crit with the stream of one of these weapons, the crit lasts for around half a second, in which time every tick of damage you do will add towards the 2% ultimate cooldown reduction, this essentially means every crit leads almost instant ult cooldowns if you take into account enemy piercing.
This video demonstrates what it can do in action, you do not need a macro to use this but this is the theoretical limit how fast you can get your ult up if you only have a single target, it gets up even faster with multiple targets.
Even though I can’t find a single post about this, it has become fairly popular knowledge among the community now and has made it’s way into public lobbies. I will say that playing with pyromancers who use this build is probably the biggest chore I’ve ever had to put up with in this game. There’s a burning head going off every 10 seconds if they have enemies to target, elites just disappear, hordes stand still in their spawn being eternally stunlocked by beam staff and executed by burning heads, it’s just boring and I don’t feel like I’m playing a game with others, rather just sitting behind someone using a cheese build to jog through an entire level. This build takes no skill to use, all the fantastic elements of melee combat cease to exist if there is someone holding down LMB for half the match to farm up their ultimate. If you can’t tell I’m salty, I want ranged meta to not be prevalent, when beam staff was nerfed and people started using something other than beam pyromancer, the game was the best time I’ve had so far, but now it’s back to Protect the Sienna, except now with the added bonus of taking advantage of a build that is arguably even stronger than Heat Sink.
But these are just my two cents, I would like to hear the thoughts of others, from those who use it and from those who have had experience with others using it.
Sure, you could nerf the Pyro crit build, or ranged combat in general, but you’d only be making Legend that much harder. Even with an OP pyro in your party, wiping can still happen brutally fast at any time. I’d rather have pyro killing the majority of mobs before they ever get in range in every Legend run, just because of how unforgiving Legend can be, and how many times you’re expected to run Legend to get even a single veteran item.
Something to consider about this build is the risk of constantly casting. The beam staff forces a zoomed perspective and heavily reduces your movement speed when casting, making the pyro extremely vulnerable.
I don’t think it’s OP because you can’t rely on it in every situation. If you’re surrounded and getting pummeled, attempting to cast your staff or flame skull will get you killed.
Edit: I just feel like, in an ideal reality, you’re right, it should be toned down a bit, but I feel like with Legend having the potential to cheap-shot a party and cause a wipe any time RNG pleases, I’d take all the help I can get. If you’re going to undercut ranged combat, Legend needs undercut proportionally.
The problem is Pyromancer’s high crit chance, really. Anything that depends on crits can be abused through that. The best change would in my opinion be if the crit chance (or at least part of it) was replaced with equivalent damage bonus instead. Similar thing is a big part of why Bounty Hunter is as good as he is.
maybe not a good place to post…but someone please tell me how crit rate works. Doesn’t the game register actual headshots (include melee/ranged weapons) as crits? or depending on ur crit rate, you also get crits from bodyshots?
i have got 100% crit from all headhsots from bow off of Kerllian. what does that mean? I assume graphic cue for crit is when your crosshair registers as orange hit.
^^ a sitting duck
so yeah i know that bug or whatever but i will never use it bc i go for 4% remove overheat.
*kill the horde instead of play with it just to get ult ready.
i hate pyro who only hold LMB. and like always they get @ss rap3d. just use shotgun blast.
400 hours of playing, hundreds of pyros, many with ult’ cooldown on crits. Most of the games, I’m first being almost fully melee. Never felt hurted by pyros. Never met macros? Met. Never met good pyros? Met. These macro-users and such aren’t so numerous, but hey! who cares about people who just playing the game with the class they like and don’t worry about all of this. Let’s nerf everything because the few people did what other few people don’t like.
couldnt disagree more , i would say the answer to your issues is the champion difficulty.
I used to play almost exclusivley champion but with the op ranged meta and the broken power scaling its become utterly tedious , Legend is the only refuge of people that enjoy having to actual try and be a team left.
But i do agree the win/loss of legend is far too RNG based its very rare to feel like you dserved a loss its usually more like your left thinking well 2 chaos patrols 3 hordes and that quad disable spawn all while fighting a chaos spawn , in that dark corridor . yeah we werent going to win that one! An extreme example but i think we all know what i mean.
I think they have already spent far too long balancing around broken classes that they are in very real danger of making them essential as it is. playing legend without a boss cheeser is just asking for a loss because the length of time it takes for non broken characters to kill it means the director is usually going to wipe you with increasing lethal spawns during the fight.
as to the op’s point id agree its broken but seems like a pretty simple fix , either limit the hits per second the beam staff can do which will make it feel pretty horrible i would imagine , or simply put a cooldown on the proc
Alright, to avoid any confusion, everything I’m about to say is for Legend difficulty only.
The “ranged meta” doesn’t exist. If you’re playing a game of “protect the Sienna”, then you’re creating a benefit for the ranged characters in your particular match, and thus you’re creating the imaginary ranged meta.
Like others have said, a Beam Sienna that just holds down LMB the entire time is a sitting duck with a very narrow field of view. Do you feel like the Sienna you’re currently playing with is cheesing/macroing/trying to play EZ-mode? Don’t create safe spaces for the Sienna then. Don’t guard her, rush forward to melee hordes and elites and force the Sienna to move as well.
I have of course seen some cooldown reduction Siennas in my time, but I have yet to see one who matches the output I get when using other staffs and more skill-dependent builds. Just don’t stand around and let that Sienna stagger the horde and take forever to kill it. FF on beam staff is so low, there’s no reaosn not to just jump into the horde that Beam Sienna is beaming.
As for the cooldown reduction flamewave staff, the solution is even easier. It’s such a terrible, short range staff, you should have no problem pushing ahead and punishing that player for trying to cheese with such a terrible, terrible staff/build. Again, don’t play on the terms of the cheese-player, play on your terms.
That said, I don’t believe I have come across a macro-sienna yet. That could potentially be broken. Balancing around some very, very few macro users can be very difficult however.
Keeping in mind that Beam staff without this particular build is hardly the best staff Sienna can bring to a match, you’d have to be very careful about how to balance an already balanced staff.
I would suggest that doing anything at all to Pyro’s critrate would be a huge mistake. She relies on it far more than others, and you would have to rebalance all her staffs and possibly even rebalance traits if you start messing with her critrate. Keep in mind she has staffs that don’t have 2-3 critchances per second, and this would affect them badly.
I believe they already added a minimum time for critprocs to activate on the beamstaff to avoid this particular kind of cheese, but it seems it’s not working properly/isn’t long enough.
If you balance this with, say, not allowing crits/critprocs for the first 1-2 second of the beam hitting a target, you would probably have to counter it with higher damage for the staff, as the damage is already not that great after it was tuned. Particularly because you have to hold beam on target for a certain time before the sniper shot will do any real damage.
To sum up, I have not seen CDR Pyros that actually perform better than more skillbased builds, but this macro thing might be broken, but you’d have to be very careful about how to balance around a few macro users.
The most effective Sienna’s I see are with other staffs. Beam isn’t bad, but does essentially one thing: charge your active faster. Damage output only adds up because you hit everything with it. Beam staff is in a good place, don’t get me wrong, but even with macro use, it isn’t the “i win” button. The thing that is most annoying is that it causes hordes to hyper-stack.
