Love the balance pass. Thank you, devs and Aqshy. Wanted to offer some tweaks from my own experience and from reading player feedback. Mostly in the direction of restraint.
Summary:
Removed Grail Knight, Bounty Hunter, and Dual Daggers nerfs
Simplified changes to Warrior Priest, giving players control over when they proc ‘Righteous Fury’ rather than incentivizing taking damage
Made Pyromancer and Outcast Engineer buffs a bit more conservative
Made Battle Wizard nerfs more targeted to the problem talents, ‘Famished Flames’ and ‘Burnout’, without nerfing Kaboom!, which is already in a good place
Addressed a couple other popular requests like Zealot thp conversion and Kruber’s greatsword
New Perk ‘One with Aqshy’ - 50% increased max Overcharge
Replaced ‘Volans Doctrine’ with ‘Flamestrike’s Tutelage’ - Sienna gains 80% reduction on Venting damage
Outcast Engineer:
Increased Engineer Health to 125
Increased ‘Gromril-Plated Shot’ damage
Increased base fire rate of ‘linked compression chambers’
Reduced base Crank Gun starting fire rate
Reduced base Crank Gun fire rate gain per shot
‘Build Pressure’ no longer loses stacks while firing
Can ‘Build Pressure’ while on max ability bar
‘Build Pressure’ stacks no longer lost on full bar
‘Superior Gaskets’ now causes pressure to be lost upon firing instead of over time and each stack of pressure grants 4% power.
‘Experimental Steam Capacitors’ replaced with ‘‘Perilous Overclock’ - Building Pressure at Max stacks restores 25% charge and grants 15% crit but damages Bardin. Each Overclock increases damage suffered.
‘Bombardier’ now also causes Bardin to start missions with 3 bombsmakes Bardin create a bomb every 80 seconds, and explosives no longer deal friendly fire damage (listening to feedback)
‘Piston Power’ now also restores all stamina when triggered
Warrior Priest:
‘Righteous Fury’ now activates the next time you hit an enemy with a charged attack, rather than the moment the bar is filled. Full bars of fury can be held for 15s before beginning to decay.
Battle Wizard
Raised the cooldown and decreased the burn damage of ‘Burnout’ talent, which previously doubled the value of Fire Walk without any tradeoff
Reduced the bonus damage to damage over time effects from ‘Famished Flames’ to 100%
Reduced the reduction to normal damage from ‘Famished Flames’ to 15%
‘Volans Quickening’ now also buffs the burn damage of ‘Fire Walk’
Increased the damage of ‘Lingering Flames’
Necromancer
‘Army of the Dead’ now reanimates 6 additional Skeletons that decay after 20 seconds (these can still stack)
Reduced the amount of Overcharge vent needed to trigger ‘Lost Souls’ and increased their damage
‘Curse of the Undeath’ stacks are no longer consumed by venting
Bounty Hunter:
‘Double Shotted’ bug fixed. No longer triggering twice and reducing cooldown by 40% twice. Instead increasing the cooldown refund to 80%.
Javelin:
Significant reduction in cleave and a slight decrease to reload speed to maintain breakpoints while reducing the weapon’s extreme versatility and spammability.
Coruscation staff:
Reduction in overall damage
Decrease in the duration of the damage over time effect of the flame patch
Increase to the tick rate of flame patch
1H weapons:
Push cost cut in half
Modest increases to dodge distance and finesse (crit and headshot multiplier)
Kruber’s greatsword:
Increased armor damage on heavy attacks
Sister of the Thorn:
Crits from ‘Briar’s Malice’ no longer consumed by swinging weapon
Zealot:
‘Holy Fervour’ now converts green hp to thp with each hit during its duration
Bardin’s throwing axes:
Increased projectile speed
Note on boss killers:
Fatshark isn’t wrong that certain setups let teams delete bosses faster than intended. But the playerbase generally does not complain about boss killers being OP. Boss killer builds and dual daggers are perceived as making investments and taking on risk for a specific payoff. The negative reaction to the upcoming nerfs is a sign that a different approach may be needed. Perhaps specific encounters like Skarrik Spinemangler need a buff, rather than nerfing classes and weapons. Finally, ahem… if boss killers need a nerf, why give Warrior Priest a party-wide +Monster dmg talent in the same update?
Wait you just turned the double shotted nerf to boss cooldown but buff to normal enemy cooldown into a straight buff???
Currently Double Shotted depends on whether you are client or host. If you are client, you get 40% refund. If you are host, you get 80% refund. I kept the bug fix so it will consistently give the same number and made that number 80% instead of 60%, due to player feedback that 60% was an unnecessary nerf.
What you explained is correct. But what he means is the usage of the career skill against other enemies for example Chaos Warriors. The career skill is so strong that it one shots Chaos Warriors on Cataclysm. That means that the second bullet technically lands nowhere and is a miss. This means that against Chaos Warriors in the current set-up you get only a refund of 40 % under every circumstance (client or host).
This means that against non-boss enemies the 60 % is already a buff. You now went a step further and buffed it to 80 % making the talent stronger than the pre-patch version.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. No, the intention would be that if you land a headshot, you get the 80% refund. Period. No additional cooldown reduction if the second one also hits, no missing cooldown reduction if only one hits. That’s a good clarification, thank you!
EDIT: If I understand correctly, their language already states that. “No longer triggers twice”. So it’s a single trigger, you either get the refund or you don’t.
So you effectively buff the talent. And that is what Alsozara wondered about.
EDIT: Yes, the 60 % is already a buff against non-boss enemies. The patch version is both a buff and a nerf for the talent. Your suggestion is only a major buff.
Sort of. It’s making the bug ‘canon’ and mechanically consistent. The original skill is only supposed to give 40% refund, max. It gives 80% in practice but only if both bullets headshot and only if you are hosting. Players really like that behavior, obviously, but it’s also not even deemed overpowered by the playerbase. Their current rebalance makes the mechanics consistent at a middle ground between the intended 40% and the bugged 80%. Players complained that 60% is effectively a nerf, because players build around the 80% on bosses. And again, people aren’t complaining when the BH kills the boss fast. So I made the 80% consistent.
I have my own gripes with the WP changes but this isnt really good either ,some WP weapons like the hammer/shield&flail all rely a lot on heavies so this is just uncontrollable activation anyway.
That is all good and fair. However, it is still a major buff for the talent. Because outside of boss fights the career skill can now be used a lot more often. A non-boss fight time is arguably the larger part of the mission. So you made it consistent but also increased the career skill usage by a lot. Overall, a notable dps increase for BH.
Fair! I am personally okay with that. I think landing consistent headshots is worth rewarding, and Bounty Hunter was arguably deserving of a small buff. Waystalker has Piercing Shot with 100% refund but because consistent headshots are so difficult for players to land, it’s an extremely niche pick. Bots use it well on bosses tho, lol. Huntsman can oneshot regular enemies with headshots without using his ult. I don’t think it will be too strong in practice.
If they want to avoid trivializing bosses, reducing monster damage on Locked and Loaded is an option that would maintain player’s desired gameplay. My read on player sentiment is that letting boss killers that successfully land consecutive trick shots (backstabs and headshots) clinch the kill is… fun, healthy, and an appropriate reward for dealing with their squishiness and lack of horde clear. So if anything, I might nerf griffonfoot’s spammability and consider a passive +ranged pwr buff to BH so his other ranged options can compete. Anyway, this is good discussion I think and asks the right questions.
I’ve thought about special attack or a new button as well. But here I am presenting the simplest possible solution in hopes that it’s elegant. Building fury on taking damage incentivizes exactly the wrong thing, and the other WP changes that came with it are all bad, imo, so I really want to show a viable counter-proposal.
I think players in the highest skill, highest difficulty minority will agree with you. The majority of relatively casual players disagree, as they’re not consistently landing headshots in the heat of battle, and they like how rewarding it feels to do so. The question is always where balance is struck (or around what difficulty), and at what point is fun more important than balance. If rapidly killing bosses negatively impacted teammates’ experience, that to me would be the biggest reason to nerf. But as far as I can tell, most players celebrate a fast boss kill.
he is a boss killer and trivializes the bosses, just like kerilian trivializes the special ones, the bazzoka trivializes the patrols, the mercenary trivializes the damage suffered by allies, the grail trivializes the elites, the battle mage trivializes almost everything in the game, the sister the thorn trivializes all enemies, the iron breaker trivializes the damage suffered, the unchained trivializes enemies with a shield using a flail… this nerf on victor turns him into a plastic huntsman with no talents for gaining a lot of temporary life.
Don’t worry, I deleted all the WP changes. It’s just the one Righteous Fury change. What you see is my proposed update, so the stuff that’s missing, I deleted. WP would be keeping Divine Excoriation, not getting +Monster damage for party, not getting Unyielding Blessing baked into base invuln bubble.
even in lower bracket play players can pretty easily land constant headshots, why? Because you literally only need to land one and all the rest were free.
That’s the reason why the cooldown reduction was fixed. Maybe FS should have changed it by giving monsters more randomized unpredictable stagger animations, but that’s a bit too much just to balance a single talent
