I just added the Riposte idea in the hopes a few individuals would see it before/if Fatshark does another BBB. Fair enough though. Here’s the reasoning:
Traits
- Melee
- Swift Slaying at 20% results in it exceeding Resourceful Combatant for the purposes of cooldown in most cases/coming close too often. A small reduction to 15% should tip the balance back to RS for pure cooldown purposes on medium to long cooldowns. It’s also just difficult to make other traits match a trait that is more powerful than most talents, so a small nerf is called for.
- Off Balance is terrible. The problem is the effect is tied to the specific enemies that hit your block, making it trash if you have to move away from those enemies. Add in the fact that it doesn’t stack and it’s basically a meme. Dealing 20% more damage to enemies that are attacking creates a powerful alternative to Swift Slaying that is less safe, but can reach several strong breakpoints.
- Parry is very bad in a game where 60% BCR will protect you from almost anything. Making it increase attack speed by 30% for 3 seconds makes it good in high pressure contexts/on backfoot/clutch situations, which is inline with the original purpose of the talent - defense, just with a bit of offense in it with a focus on reacting dealing with a bad scenario. It could be less or for a fixed number of attacks, I’d have to hear the thoughts of others on it.
- Necklace/Charm/Trinket
- Healer’s Touch/Home Brewer/Grenadier are rng traits that don’t belong in their current form. Every third use is consistent and has more potential as a competitive trait without just bumping the % chance to an unreasonably high amount.
Properties
- Necklace
- Push block angle increasing push radius would make it an effective choice for things like a high stagger strength FK with the Greatsword, as it would make landing the push attack safer (currently it’s a very bad property that does little to nothing in practice).
- Damage reduction is essentially just more health and will always compete with it as such. Since health already successfully fills the position of increasing the player’s direct defense, and BCR/Stamina already do so for blocking, dodge range would be inline with other necklace properties as a defensive property.
- Trinket
- Movement speed is bad outside of stacking it, and even on the careers that can stack it 5% is usually not important. At 7.5% it should feel better without breaking balance.
- Revive Speed is mediocre outside of Handmaiden, and Respawn Speed is trash. Combining the two makes an at least very team friendly talent.
- Charm
- Most weapons don’t have high enough crit modifiers to make crit power increase their crit damage more than just a power property would. Changing it to be a simple damage increase of 20% will make it more useful on more weapons. It affecting stagger strength of crits, just as the other power properties do for all attacks already, lets it weave it’s way into more careers like WHC, without making it overpowered.
For most part criticals are unimportant or at least unreliable for stagger. WHC has no unique source of raw power, so stamina recovery from Cast Away is mostly for staggering chaff mobs. Unending Hunt is the only real strong source of stagger that’s unique to WHC (WHC’s aoe stagger is good, but it’s also weaker than Merc’s due to Merc’s power and even UC’s right now). That would only work vs boss overheads on parry with both the talent and the trait. Need is irrelevant as no one really needs anything, after all WHC doesn’t need Deathknell and Flense either to deal damage, but that doesn’t mean they should be different on that basis alone. The idea is to make Riposte a fun talent that can be used when under pressure. This makes it do something that is unique from just more damage.
Basically this is like how Riposte was before crit flinching was removed. It was pretty fun. WHC could handle a lot of things and clutch well but only if they parried frequently.