… When compared to Kerillian? I mean Javellin/Moonfire Bow does everything Sienna does but better and it does not even matter much which Kerillian career we’re talking.
I’m not salty at all, I still enjoy playing Sienna it just feel like she is a bit of a joke when compared to her elf friend.
For example I just had a run as a Volcanic Bolt Battle Wizard and we had a Hand Maiden with us with a Moonfire Bow. Before I had a chance to charge my fire spear she had already killed whichever special/elite I was aiming for.
Another example had me running as Unchained again with Bolt. We had a SotT with Javelins… I hardly got to hit anything at all with the Bolt staff…
Her overcharge mechanic just seems as an outdated design in my opinion. It was ment to be a way to balance her not having to use ammunition, but there are so many ways of getting around that issue now. Sienna just seems overly weak when compared to the other heroes. I mean, at high overcharge she is slowed (unless you play Unchained) and she takes damage when venting. Compare that to the Moonfire Bow…
Her whole schtick was to be THE ranged hero because of not having to deal with ammunition and as such her melee weapons also seem weak across the board unless you go Famished Battle Wizard with the Fire Sword.
Like I said, I am not salty and this is not based on one or two games. I have about 450 hours in VT2, I am no expert, but with me starting to dip my toes in cataclysm diff I just find Sienna useless.
With all the power creep that’s been going on, I haven’t seen an elf not running Javelin or Moonfire bow in a month.
The javelins can stun-lock a CW on Cataclysm, without even needing to headshot, and deal 45-50 bodyshot damage through armour at long range.
Moonbow deals 150 damage on an uncharged headshot, and 250 (including 175 from the DoT) for a charged shot, in AoE. Not including 40HP in friendly damage.
Deepwood staff is instant denial of anything up to a CW with close to no drawbacks.
None requires ammo.
I’m seeing elves in QP who rely on being stupidly OP, who play like they didn’t have to learn any mechanic in the game and die for the most stupid reasons.
Fatshark, the Grail Knight was a good release. The Engi character was a good release, though the weapons were too much. Now this SotT is just broken in all regards. Please don’t make Saltzpyre and Sienna even worse. Stop the crescendo now, hold the reins. A new career sells regardless of its power, this is a coop game for crying out loud. I’ve spent my last Cata game asking myself “what’s the point ?” when the elf just killed everything before I could get to it.
This is not the “”““coop””“” experience I’ve been playing for countless hours, and not one I want to play for many more.
I feel like I would have lot to say on this topic but the only relevant thing is that Javelin/moonfire are obviously pretty dam overturned and in need of nerfing.
Too bad this game gets balancing patches maybe once a year or when something is so obviously breaking the game (Radiant) that it has to be fixed.
Honestly; I’d say get rid of Sienna’s heat mechanic, now that other classes have weapons with infinite ammo, and tweak her skills accordingly.
Or, make the overheat mechanic MEAN MORE. It’s always puzzled me that weapons that apply burn over time have no synergy with her overheat.
I’d love to use my staff to get to high overheat, then wade into melee, applying longer/stronger burn with every strike, while it also lowers my overheat per successful hit.
Imagine pairing that with those perks that apply more attack speed or movespeed at high overheat; a Sienna could up her Overheat bar, gain more attack (or move) speed, plus more damage per hit. But every hit reduces her overheat, which quickly reduces her move/attack speed & innate attack damage buff.
Or make it so enemies attacking her in melee (at high overheat) take damage, or a small stagger. I mean, she’s literally burning up; why not make that an effect that scales stronger with high Overheat, down to nothing with no overheat?
Or, as I said at the start; just remove the mechanic. Everyone has infinite ammo weapons now and, heck, even Kerillian’s staff has an ‘overheat’ mechanic, but it only seems to do HALF HEALTH instead of incapping her.
So her staff is Sienna but better?
Either make the Overheat more interactive (as listed above), or just remove it, honestly. It’s a poor relic from a time when Sienna was the only character with infinite ammo.
How is that not adding more power creep, but to Sienna ?
My argument, based on the same observation, is the opposite :
Go back (closer) to the time when Sienna was the only character with infinite ammo.
Obviously this can’t happen, but at least have similar mechanics to hinder the use of infinite ammo.
Throwing axes, and even more so Javelins and Moonfire bow have no drawbacks whatsoever.
There is so much sustain in the game that RV’s ammo dropping gimmick is useless. There was a time when people played RV for ammo, now people play him for MW pistol.
This is why I made my suggestions; we can’t go back to when Sienna was the only character with infinite ammo, and blanket nerfing everything won’t happen, so I made suggestions to bring Sienna up to par with everyone else.
I don’t know why they don’t just give elf a heavy bolter and be done with it.
If elf does get nerfs to the class and weapons, it’ll be a reduction to make elf merely excellent against everything rather than laughably overpowered. Elf is probably the most played class and ways talker is the entry level noob class so it’s going to be buffed to appeal to new players…
Javelins are not badly overturned, worst part about them is the CW interaction but that´s about it. Moonfire meanwhile could use a slower recharge and some nerfs that effective make it need some power stacking and whatnot to kill some specials but that´s it.
Standalone these weapons are powerful indeed but there are still specialist stuff like hagbane that do better yet.
It does half her health, locks her out of the staff for quite some time and it builds heat faster than Sienna does generally for a similar output unless talking single target DPS when elf runs bleed/crit build.
She never was the only one with infinite ammo, unless the previous game counts i suppose.
Bounty hunter always had easy ranged crits + scrounger, elf had fricking automatic ammo regeneration.
When in the world was this…? My earliest memory of vt2 include an elf with automatic ammo regeneration and access to the same weapon traits as today. And i am fairly sure huntsman always had the conservative shooter as a passive too.
And that was pretty damn sad really, there was a time he was so weak the only really notable thing he had going for him was those random supplies he dropped.
If they truly favored waystalker so much they wouldnt have left her with so many dead talents or outright given her more of them with a rework x)
That is kinda what should happen for better balance though, melee classes should lose access to infinite ammo and ranged classes on average should have to a be a bit more careful with their shooting.
Isnt WHC or BW the worst offenders in modded? I know some special cases like grudge ranger are also very powerful there but on average i do not think the powercreep that hurts cata is the same one as what affects modded.
Of course that is kinda ignoring SoT…who is mostly just a walking stat stick with radiance even now.
Last time they went about reworking talents the first 2 elf classes got a heap of dead and or bugged ones. Shade got very strong of several new talents which was eventually made worse with yet another talent update that only she got which was the start of the mist build.
Battlewizard got an update that saw her on the verge of ascending to godhood…for months. Even post nerfs she´s still hailed as one of the strongest classes.
Someone in the design team though it´d be fine to let SoT talent “radiance” include something like an addition of 20% crit&attackspeed, 50% power, 30% movespeed and more.
…
Yeah i am quite sure i do not trust the balance department a whole lot.
I really can’t be arsed to go into detailed argument, but at least hagbane is limited outside of WS while moonfire/javelin are pretty generic regardless which career you use it with.
I kind of agree. They are fun to use, just too powerful. They should have less cleave, less CW damage and way less stagger.
But they are stupid easy to use. Hagbane requires some degree of skill and knowledge, Moonfire is point and click.
Nah hagbane is very strong on Handmaiden and on Shade, though the 2s internal cooldown they added to bloodfletcher did hit the Shade quite hard…
It does 60 flat damage, not 50%. SotT has 120 HP, 150 with 20% health trinket (which everybody uses).
I always considered WS as the least skilled career, with a low risk-high reward kind of design - and that was before any of the new weapons came out. Since then it’s double javelins into my Kruber arse galore.
To OP: What you observe is not Sienna being weak though. All of her classes are very strong. Battle Wizard is the strongest and is among top choices for the game and even modded. Pyromancer is also pretty strong but is mostly tied down to a single build. And Unchained is at least for normal content extremely strong and has probably the most versatility in her talent tree.
What you see is new careers (mostly SotT) and new weapons being stupidly overpowered. The weapons we got recently, let’s say since Engineer, have for the most part been to strong, especially the ranged weapons. Masterwork Pistol and Moonfire Bow are in absolute dire need of a nerf. Coruscation Staff, Trollhamer Torpedo, Javelins and Griffon Foot could also live with a tone down.
But yea, I am also kinda sceptical for another BBB as we have not seen much adjustments down last time. I can’t even remember if even a SINGLE ranged weapon was nerfed despite ranged being already the strongest damage dealer in the game. And even if we get some healthy nerfs it is to fear that they would be on the same level as the SotT non-nerf which basically changed nothing.
But yea, keep beating the drum. Maybe FS will notice it better then. After all it has been a long time that I see this many people sharing the feeling of stuff being overtuned. Just keep making threads or use the existing ones. We may not get a summer BBB (with changes for careers) but maybe we get at least some nerfs done for the gross outliers.
And with that I simply don’t agree with. Moonfire for instance is infinitely more spammable on the 2 careers than hagbane ever will be. And for hagbane to be truly abusable you need pretty decent ammo pool to maximize its strength.
Honestly this is side stepping the issue anyways, all 3 weapons probably need changes regardless of what I think of this VS scenario.
Right off the bat I can tell you where the problem is.
Also the rest of your post is pretty focused on Bolt staff, and let’s be honest, Bolt staff has never been faster or more efficient than handgun. That weakness has been in the game way longer than Javelin.
I’m not going to say Sienna’s classes are perfect or that you should like them the way they are, but if ranged anti-elite/anti-special is all you want all of her to be, than you’ve got to compete with 4 other characters who can do it better. Stick a master player on footknight with handgun versus a same skill leveled Sienna with bolt staff and tell them to only shoot and FK is going to win. Sienna won’t edge out unless she starts shooting all the things hypothetical railgun FK isn’t, and that’s hordes.
If you want Sienna to be different than Kerillian than you gotta actually play different. You got 6 staves, might as well get comfy with the rest of them until FS figures out what Moonbow’s supposed to be doing.
and my original quote was to a person who said hagbane is better than the 2 but that is only really the case in extremely specific scenario which is WS spamming it.
Anyways I have said what I wanted. Don’t feel like i need to delve more into this point.
