I am making this post to bring attention to why Pyro is suffering in the current iteration of the game. It’s still not a terrible career. It’s much better than Engi, for instance, but Pyro went from being one of the strongest careers in the game to one of the weakest without ever being directly nerfed. I am just bringing up a few past changes and explaining how they’ve combined to make Pyro one of the weakest careers in the game.
Reducing CD Regeneration from Ranged Attacks: This change was made largely in response to hagbane’s interactions on Shade and Waystalker. However, unless you are regularly finding specials to kill, Pyro can no longer maintain thp without meleeing when shooting her staves into hordes. This means that, in the times in which you’re supposed to be filling your career’s role, you’re either stuck in melee or you’re losing hp.
Removing Flinch on Crit for Elites: Before this change, Pyro could use weapons like the Dagger (which has a high finesse multiplier and fast attack) to chain stun elites with light attacks. Although the interaction was janky and I’m personally glad it’s gone, it is one of the mechanics in the game that made pyro a strong melee career. Without the Flinch interaction, Pyro’s low hp pool, lack of DR, poor melee weapon selection, make her a mediocre (not bad) melee career.
FIreball Animation Change: The change to explosions animations made it much more difficult to see when explosions are going off immediately in front of your character. Thus, Pyro strongest ranged weapon (Fireball Staff) now effectively blinds your frontline. Although something like this won’t be reflected on the score screen, it will be reflected in the pick rate of a career. No one wants to play with the fireball guy.
Having said all of this, I want to make it clear I think the first two changes are good. The fireball change is… not good. However, the main point of the post is to explain what happened to Pyro, so maybe it could be easier to find a solution going forward. Pyro has been pretty much the same career for all of WoM, so it can make it hard to pinpoint why she feels so bad now. Hopefully this post helps rectify that apparent contradiction.
I’ve played Pyro with Bolt Staff + Flame Sword since beta on Xbox since it was my favorite combo on Verm 1. It does ok up to champion, but once you try to do legend with it, it really suffers. I still go back and play Verm 1 with that combo, and the biggest thing that strikes me is how much less knockback/stagger there is compared to the first game. I can hold hordes into place with the bolt staff on Verm 1 that I can’t do on Verm 2. It slows them up a bit. But I really need to kill them outright because they’re going to be in my face with melee. Once you get to legend, there’s too many hit points in most enemies to make that viable.
That’s my favorite weapon combo of all time in these games, but it really underperforms on legend nowadays.
Been playing a lot more Pyro lately, specifically Dagger + Bolt.
Good fun and more than capable for regular cata, deeds and twitch mode.
I do agree there has been a couple big indirect nerfs to Pyro.
Reducing her cooldown back down to 40 seconds would be a welcome change.
Could just be she’s lacking something interesting or flashy tbh.
Something like Bloodshot/Hail of doom on crits could work with her high crit chance although potentially broken.
Improving her DR talent among others would also help.
To be fair though, ranged careers arent supposed to have melee perks like a high consistent source of THP which would also remain active when they are also pretty much always staying far away shooting.*
Additionally in my cata experience, its hard to go more than 10-20 seconds without at least 2 specials spawning or running around.
…
As for pyro being weak or not, well, she is supposedly a ranged damage career but i do not see much in her talents that promotes that which i think is part of why she does not feel great. One can go for the critroll build with a premade WHC running unending hunt but…all that just to make her somewhat good?
Well that’s not exactly true for all careers. But even to the extent that it is, ranged careers are given access to unlimited ammo (or close for most builds), for the wiz, hp is ammo. Either something needs to be done to give more thp, or more needs to be done to manage overheat. Currently, pyro’s uptime is pretty poor.
Exhaust could halt overcharge for a certain duration like Deathly Dissipation rather than removing overcharge. I personally don’t like the fact Deathly Dissipation is tied to special kills.
Something like V1 Earthing Rune would also be pretty neat.
A cooldown reduction would buff Exhaust and Bonded Flame uptime.
Good idea. Another could make a talent that competes with deathly dissipation that works like Conduit for UC. More consistent venting speed and less health cost vs spikes of uptime.
Poorly phrased on my part in hindsight, edited it.
Meant that ranged careers should not have high THP gen like melee careers whilealso being able to keep that THP without going into melee at least somewhat frequently. But as for pyro the present situation with her healthbar being her ammo pool isnt ideal indeed.
Not sure what ought to be done though, i do not play her enough to say what talents could be changed to make her ammo efficiency better or what manner of passive could be added to help.
@Sleezy I’m adding another problem: beamstaff’s “shotgun” blasts happen to increase the FPSs for my allies incredibly, so they have asked me not to play her (I generally don’t, but that day I wanted to try her out again).
It’s really bad not being able to play a class for a reason like that.
First of all, something I’ve only realised two days ago.
Soul Siphon stacks up to 3 times even though the tooltip doesn’t say so. In retrospect, the three shields on the talent should have given it away. Whilst this makes the talent more competitive, I believe that Volans Doctrine is still a far better choice regardless of what build you are running.
Fleetflame, like the vast majority of movement speed talents, is useless. How this is meant to compete with no overcharge slowdown and 30% DR is beyond me.
Not to mention Burning Head. Pretty damn lacklustre in my opinion.
I played her a lot in the last month and I liked the crit melee build with sword and bolt staff.
At first I started with fireball staff but later I changed to bolt staff to be able to shoot specials.
Her ult is really unreliable and weak but the THP gain is good. So if nothing else the ult regeneration time could be lowered. This would help to use the trait which gives 10% crit chance on high hp level.
Or any other buff.
Her melee crit build is quite uniqe in the game and I think it should be preserved in any case.
It seems I played WHC a long time ago.
Shade Mist build feels like cheating. I’m not sure that one should be preserved.
Anyhow, pyro’s crit build has no time limitation.
WHC crits hits harder though, and having nearly perfect uptime against hordes is when it shines c.
.-…
That said, Pyro needs a rework of some kind for being too bland and being worse than BW at pretty much everything while also not even being that much better at ranged stuff than UC who is the best at melee anyway.
Eh I don’t think a rework is necessary. She’s pretty close to being the in between hybrid between BW and UC. I’m pretty sure flame sword is the only reason anyone says BW completes with Pyro at melee, and that’s really just one weapon with one build, which suggests to me that that one build is the problem moreso than Pyro.
A few well designed talent tweaks, maybe replacing one or two with new ones could easily put her back in a great spot. She’s not even bad right now, just a bit outcompeted and held back by her meh Ult and lack of choice in a number of talent rows.