This perk needs to go. The living bomb ult takes too long to cooldown and you have to be operating at high overcharge all the time to make this career effective. Receiving half damage on cataclysm isn’t useful when it means you’re more likely die from an overcharge explosion rather than losing all your HP from attacks. This makes her useless as a tank.
The perk should be replaced with something like “Enemies around Sienna receive burn damage based on her Overcharge when she’s attacked.” and “Overcharge is lost on received damage”. This way, Unchained isn’t punished for getting hit two times by dying immediately. She remains unique by having a perk that hurts attacking enemies and it creates a challenge for the player to maximize effectiveness to avoid hits or they lose valuable overcharge damage.
She’s too much like the Zealot for me. We don’t need two classes that receive a damage boost by getting hit. But in the UC’s case her boost is very temporary and she doesn’t even receive any kind of invulnerability like the Zealot has to make up for it.
I think her core needs an overhaul so the player’s focus isn’t on trying not to die in one hit even though they have 100% hp. Even if you minimize how much OC she receives on a hit, there’s still the problem of her “tankiness” being utterly pointless if she has a killswitch.
There’s a lot of other ways to do this without a big change. Like making overcharge received going up by the minimum value. And instead of blowing up and becoming incapacitated, she could lose a fourth of her total health. But I still prefer my first suggestion since it would be less stressful for the player to just make attacks lose overcharge instead of gaining it.
There was a discussion about UC in detail about a month ago. Some of those points are addressed there. UC is a very different class then any other, including zealot, and playing her correctly and balancing her correctly are both very hard. It’s not a play style for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it should absolutely not be removed from the game.
This passive is what makes Unchained Unchained. I completely disagree with removing it, or even tweaking its numers. Unchained needs help in other areas.
For instance, part of what makes her so bad at exploding is that the 50% of damage being transferred to overcharge happens before any kind of damage reduction; so no matter how much damage reduction she has she’ll take 50% of the attack’s original damage value to overcharge.
Now THAT’S bad.
Just lower the CD on Living Bomb or give her a reliable way to lower CD through attacking and/or change the damage to heat conversion rate and/or give her more overcharge.
Though I do like the idea of UC passively igniting enemies around her at high overcharge. Could just be a very minor DoT and would feel fun. Just make sure that it’s not so strong that you can just hold block and ignite everything while running through the level
I think there are a few neater ways this could be dealt with without robbing her of her identity.
As pointed out already by @KaelusVonSestiaf, having all damage reduction apply after the 50% has gone into overcharge is hugely problematic and removes e.g. barkskin from being an effective mitigator of burst damage (which is literally its main purpose but it’s basically useless for UC). Fix this and we’d immediately have options to mitigate her one shot potential. This could be accompanied by replacing one or a few of her lacklustre talents with ones that apply damage reduction before half of it’s converted to overcharge, or bring back the increased heat pool talent, or any number of other options to allow you to spec into greater safety.
Alternatively the mechanics could be altered to give some sort of one shot protection. For example the passive could go on internal cooldown for a second after proccing, ensuring that only the first hit of any quick burst goes into over charge while subsequent damage during the cooldown goes straight to hp damage.
These are just some ideas that come to mind. Personally I enjoy the core mechanic as much as I agree it just doesn’t really work with the current state of the game/unchained.
They just need to remove the ability for friendly players to blow you up. Some matches it’s the only way you can die, and there are too many AoE ranged weapons for this not to be frustrating. Also BH Critting you for a ridiculous amount of Overcharge.
There is already quite a large buffer integrated in her overcharge. On Cataclysm, even if you are in the red overcharge area you need to get hit twice. I have not tested her on Cataclysm 2 and 3 but her risk/reward curve is good enough for Cataclysm and below.
Other than that I would also like to re-direct to the threads linked by @RandomLurker. This topic has been discussed to death and there is very little point that I repeat myself endlessy. There is like one talent which more or less everyone agrees being useless which should be replaced. And in my opinion there might be three other talents which needs some minor tweaks. Other than that Unchained is already in a very good spot and easily on par with Pyromancer. At least I have a far easier time with Unchained on Cataclysm than with Pyromancer on Legend.
Now that hyperdensity is fixed (it was really bad at the time of those other threads) the built in 1-hit prevention of overcharge is relevant again and UC is back to being viable.
I still think she’s tuned too far to the “risk” side of the risk/reward curve, especially on Cata where enemies do mega damage. This is an easy fix, just give her back 50 overcharge pool which she had before 2.0.
The philosophy behind Unchained seems to be to be a tough maniac, but to be most effective you need to do high risk gameplay straddling the edges between being an inferno of doom and overdoing it after which you die in an inferno of doom. I don’t think she was nescessarily designed as a tank-like character (and I don’t think she needs to be melee only to fulfill her class philosophy either by the way.)
Gameplay-mechanics wise, her combinated talents of more overcharge = more damage and damage taken = more overcharge work well to fulfill that philosophy. Replacing either would be a bad idea. I believe she needs a little buff though, since she is on the lower end of the distribution in power between between classes. An obvious tweak could be more overcharge capacity. A change I’d personally also like would be to have her damage buff also count for her ranged attacks.
Unchained is pretty close to being balanced. I think some tweaks could bring her up to scratch, she doesn’t need an overhaul.
As an Unchained “main” since the V2 Beta, management of her Overcharge, venting with Temp HP, and saving the Living Bomb for when it’s needed is almost like a mini-game in and of itself that I enjoy managing as I play. It’s rewarding and satisfying, like being able to drive a manual transmission car.
Yeah that passive currently doesnt fit well.
Instead of 50% damage being transferred the two parts could be seperated.
Give her 50% Damage reduction to keep the surviveability but only transfer 25% so she doesnt instaexplode after 2 hits.
If the idea behind the class is to play at high overcharge and then be a melee dps and/or tank, then neither of these solutions would really address the issue as you would still be in 1 shot range for almost every attack in the game. That is, unless you boosted the overcharge pool to 300% of current levels. In that case, you allow UC to spam harder than either of the ranged-based classes while simultaneously making it harder to ramp up stacks. This is counter-intuitive to the design idea of the class. The problem with the mechanic in general is that, to become effective in melee, you have to turn yourself into a glass canon, and there simply isn’t enough canon to make that enticing.
