Not to mention blinding all of your teammates.
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How can people defend this and say it’s not a problem really makes want to stop visiting these forums.
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If it isn’t stronger than other normal builds on Pyro, builds that actually work and scale with skill, then how is it a problem?
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Terribly inefficient and needlessly dangerous build. Fireballstaff on Pyro clear hordes faster, safer and probably alot better for your wrist 
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@Guziol I have yet to see anyone even attempt to answer that question and I’d love to see the justification as to how “worse than virtually every other option” is somehow “a problem” or “overpowered.”
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This is a problem. The fact that this build is so hillariously bad makes it a huge problem, when you get a pyro like this in a legend run. Still, nerfing already bad build seems illogical, so i guess we just wait untill people realise that using the beamstaff as you’re supposed to(shotgun the horde, beam specials) is actually a better way to play her.
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Not sure why you’d need a macro tbh. Just have your sensitivity at a moderately fast speed so you’re not sniping.
I dunno. Being able to spam it while getting 1-2 second ult cooldowns on hordes is just silly. You can just spam vent your Crit Temp HP, which can also be gained from first ticks. Bare in mind I’m not carrying a Grim in the video, so I don’t have the increased vent speed.
I don’t get what you mean regarding the other 3 careers, are you saying they are more powerful?
Which means I’m not sure I understand why CommanderJ and Avar liked it, they both believe that the Huntsman needs a serious buff.
The macro would just be to maximize effectiveness against a single target, but you’re right, after trying it out I don’t think it’s necessary anymore.
Looking at it in game, I think this interaction is 100% a bug. Hit a target dummy body with the solid beam, it hits for ~100 and ramps up to ~700 over time. It ticks every second or so with each 700 tick counting as 1 hit for purposes of cooldown reduction. Swing the beam on and off the target for rapid 100 ticks, each counting as 1 hit for the purposes of cooldown reduction, so it ends up recharging your ult significantly faster as you get more hits. Resourceful sharpshooter just compounds the problem with crit windows, a single crit can mean a refreshed ult. Not sure if the swinging does more or less damage overall as far as the beam itself, especially since it doesn’t apply a burn unless max stacks, but it certainly charges the ult bar faster.
These 100 hits are all ‘first tick’ hits, so I don’t understand why the patch 1.0.6 beam change isn’t applying to this. This has to be unintended behavior.
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You’ll only do it that fast when you have condensed mass of weak targets in front of you, or you get blessed by RNG.
There have been times where immediately after launching a Flaming Skull, I followed up with practically nothing and got a cluster of crits in a fraction of a second, immediately refreshing the flaming skull.
I think people have attempted to adress this.
My understanding is.
- Stagger is a valuable effect. beam staff on horde does that.
- Ult does a ton of damage. this build allows ult spam
- Team play which most of us do, requires we defend the mage somewhat, this is boring with this build.
- I’m not sure exactly how the beam ticks work, however if each touch counts as a tick then tick speed may be increased by waving the beam back and forth over targets. (?) Creating faster damage output too?
I see a lot of assertions that this build does less damage, but I’m not seeing the math to back these statements up, I’d be interested to see it, right now it seems like people are talking about gut feel, no math involved.
However my concerns extend beyond this.
The people defending the build are also saying it does not scale well, and allows lesser skilled players into legend, where the defenders of the weak build proceed to abandon the mage using it to their own devices, (almost as if they have a contempt for the player and build?) So even if your’re correct and the build is not over powered and the first tick proc is not a bug, (?) its creating ill will towards the less able/skilled players who are using the build and from them to the players abandoning them.
Holding the beam on a single target yields maybe 2 ticks of damage per second. Not that fast for being a “beam”, and not ideal when trying to get crits as rapidly as possible.
But the moment the beam hits a target it’s not already firing on, you immediately deal damage, so sweeping a crowd will yield 15 instances of damage, 15 chances to crit, in the same time you would do 3 ticks of damage by holding the beam on one enemy.
It’s not a bug, it’s just a beam staff technique for great crowd damage/CC, and it utilizes Resourceful Sharpshooter better than anything else.
This is the worst kind of argument. It’s always the burden of those who make the initial claim to provide proof. In this case the initial claim is that something is BROKEN and OP. Thus if anyone were to supply impossible math, it would be those who make the initial claim.
And it really would be impossible math. Show me anyone on this planet that could produce a mathematical formula to prove that one ranged weapon in this game is better than another one. Taking into account damage, variable enemy density, cleave, different kinds of enemies, different kinds of effeciency of running through the map, and come up with a formula. It can’t be done. You’re essentially asking for impossible evidence, and not even from those who are making a claim.
I’m not sure if this was intentional on your part or simply ignorance, but is never the burden of the status quo to provide evidence, it is the burden of those who challenge it. If you were to claim there existed a second smaller moon behind the moon we already know about, it wouldn’t be on anyone else to prove you wrong. The burden of proof would be all yours.
Following from this, the initial claim of this being broken, OP, a bug, is also a “gut feeling”. You have several veterans in this thread telling you that the damage of this build is not partcicularly good. I can tell you that Kitten is not the first person on the planet to discover CDR builds with beamstaff. I have tried it ages ago, and it is not efficient at all. Not compared to other builds and staffs, and arguably not even compared to how you use a beam staff “normally”.
By this argument, we have to remove Ironbreaker from the game, as it is by far the easiest, most forgiving career in the game. He even has access to ranged weapons that allow total noobs to turn this super-tank into a very good ranged DPS. I could argue that they turn IB into a ranged DPS because they’re not good enough to use a squishy real ranged class, and no one could provide “math” to prove me wrong.
As for the latter parts, about creating ill will… A number of people are annoyed by any number of builds that they personally find annoying, too easy, not optimal or just for any number of reasons. While I have no great desire to play with a beam cdr sienna, that doesn’t mean it should be removed from the game. You can’t start limiting player choice and build options just because some people find it to be annoying/not effecient enough/cheese.
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Stagger is valuable up to a point, but doing stagger with basically no damage is only very situationally valuable. For hordes in particular, killing it as fast as possible is far more valuable than continually staggering it. Some stagger & spread to a horde can be beneficial, but just providing stagger slows down the horde killing and is not efficient at all. Also, all other staffs provide stagger AND do damage at the same time.
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Ult does decent damage, but not “a ton”. If you’re relying solely on your ult for damage, your output is going to be far, far lower than with other staffs and builds. Hint: when I run fireball staff, taking the purple potion for more ults is NOT the potion you want to do maximum boss damage. The fireball staff on its own with a speed pot for instance, will far outdamage the ult.
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Lots of things are boring. Having any kind of Kruber that decided to bring a shield is incredibly boring and annoying. Defending the mage is a choice. Perhaps show the mage that she has brought a terrible build?
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The beam staff ramps up damage over time. First touch is 1 damage. (shown as 100 on dummies). Normal tickrate I believe is approx 0.4 seconds. Even if the tickrate was increased by moving it over a bunch of targets, I think it’s very safe to say that doing 1 damage is not exactly going to increase your damage output.
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This. If the video were to provide proof for anything, it would be that the build is not very effective. I mean, the very first horde, I am 100% certain that anyone with a good fireball staff setup would have cleared it in less than half the time. Or heck, using the beamstaff shotgun. The only real thing of concern is temp-hp generation on beamstaff, but that’s not a matter of cdr. Considering the insane amounts of temp-hp I get with fireball or conflag staff when clearing hordes, I wouldn’t see that as a problem, either. Sure, there are some places where you can cheese your temp hp and you could, in theory, refill them on a boss this way. Or, you know, you could do something useful and actually do damage to the boss.
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Brah… this is such a BS pic. Anyone with half a brain can look at it and wonder why you didn’t do better with your “OP glitched class”.
Let’s break this down, you’re playing the 2nd best ranged class in the game, in my opinion, WS #1. And you’re competing against 3 of the worst range classes in the game in my opinion. The only one there that could put up much resistance to the Pyro is the IB with drake pistols. And, will you look at that, he actually got the most ranged kills?
One thing I do not understand in this picture, is how you got 658 total kills with only 152 ranged and 2 melee? Every other class in the game outkilled you, but somehow you have the most total kills? lol wut?
Also, 18k damage? Not bad, I normally average about 15-17k on my WS, but I do that playing against other ranged classes. Not Rofl-stomping melee classes by killing everything with a beam before it even gets close to the party.
At the end of the day, even if this picture is real. It’s not impressive. But I honestly think you edited the scores. It doesn’t make any sense and for some reason, the IB with half as many total kills as you doesn’t even have 40% of your damage. Not to mention the boss damage doesn’t add up either. If this was a legend game that boss would still be alive, unless you glitched him off a cliff or something. Every boss damage score I’ve seen on Legend adds up to about 2.5-3k damage.
Either something is up, or the score cards are completely broken and don’t record anything properly. I know from comparing score cards on discord that all 4 people in a party can have completely different score cards. I had one game were I was top ranged, damage delt, boss and ranged kills. But on my friends card, I only had top boss damage.
Most of them are neither melee or ranged kills, i. e. kills from those weapons directly. That means that those kills came from either bombs or Career skills, and I doubt that there were enough bombs for those numbers, especially without a Ranger in the party. ~500 kills on Burning Head alone, more than thrice the kills done with actual weapons. Quite well done, I’d say.
Frankly, that’s likely why Kitten feels this build is too strong. If the vast majority of your kills come from the skill that’s supposed to be used for priority targets or occasional horde shooting (and that at best kills a couple of rats at a time), things feel strange.
I won’t say this build in particular is overpowered (no personal experience on it, or on Pyro in general that much), but I also feel that Pyro’s increased crit rate synchronizes with Beam staff a bit too well still.
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Most kills come from the ult, because to make this work at all you’re basically not doing damage with the staff. It’s slow, and it’s not effecient at all.
As for beam working too well with crit rate, I would say that’s the entire point of a low damage high attack rate weapon.
As for the temp HP on crit thing, this and flame wave are the only examples in the entire game of temp HP on crit actually working, so I’d argue that’s not exactly OP either.
I don’t play beam anymore, and the few times I do (just to remind myself why I never use it anymore mostly) I certainly don’t use this build. It’s really not very good. I’ve tried it, and it’s just slow AF in actually getting things done.
I’m not arguing here to defend some OP build I use as a crutch, I’m arguing against removing build options from the game. It’s not even a good build option.
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interresting that some consider this a weak build, yet i get the most kills / dmg on my team using this build most of the time and i dont even tryhard. I often use beam to protect the flanks and back instead of shooting my mates in the back.
But on hordes its best to aim for the horde, it will allow you to spam your ult killing stuff really fast.
Maybe its time to remove that statistic from the game since you guys seem to get really worked up on the stats or need them to boost self esteem =)
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The picture is complete BS. It’s obviously from a long map like Skittergate, and he’s playing with 3 of the worst ranged careers. Also, it raises a lot of suspicion that his teammates were helping his damage by letting him slowly kill everything. He has posted this pic/video in multiple Sienna threads to advertise his twitch channel. It’s sad.
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