Half? Only melee i´d call outright bad is the 1handed sword, all her careers can make use of the remaining weapons to either a decent or a significant degree.
MWP is a monster in its own league but beamstaff actually does more boss damage than both hagbane and moonfire if she is safe and able to hold it down on them. Even when they have a strength pot and she does not.
Beamstaff melts superarmor too, might be one of the better ranged weapons against them.
Modded difficulty aside where she competes for the nr 1 horde clearing expert spot, even on cata level she has several excellent staves for horde clear which beat grudgeraker which is much worse without true hyperdensity. Griffonfoot meanwhile is also overpowered for BH but people do not really note it because moonbow and SoT are overshadowing it.
Also if you really wana clear stuff without blinding your teammates you can drop the 2x dash for the kaboom. And honestly the Coruscation staff is far from underpowered in how you can drop a heap of geysers that passively let you output notable horde damage without much thought or effort.
Even works well on certain bosses to the point where it melts them.
How so? I use it on unchained and i´ve never had any problem with it, beams to demolish distant durable targets and popped beams for specials. Fireblasts for hyperdensity + barrage into melee and heat.
Wait… we are talking about famished flames DoT abuse again? Am i right? -_-
Sure. BW with crowbill is the best class in the game.
2h mace? I didnt see it for like few years(after flail introduction) even once. Not in games not in videos.
I am pretty sure that you forgot that 2h mace and crowbill even exist
…I mean, you can just bodyshot em too, takes a little while longer, especially since you cant pop the beam early, but it works.
And i havent seen any elves use 1handed sword, glaive or even dual daggers in ages. All i see is SnD, spear, DS and SnS. Doesnt mean the above cases arent usable or even good though.
And i never said sh*t about anything being the best or not, what i wrote is that they are either decent or even lowkey good. A trait they share with the zealot flail builds which most would probably never guess based on how silly rare those are.
…
Also as far as mace and crowbill goes i am almost completely certain unchained can build and use both just decently well if she wants to, royale with cheese even has guides for it. I had no problems with the mace in the wastes with no particular boon aside from a 20% attackspeed one.
But them being decent or even good does not mean they can compete evenly with the flail which is overpowered, or other such weapons, however.
And yes the flail is overpowered, a weapon that can drop a heavy into a stormvermin/goat patrol while doing significant damage and stagger all of them easily is not balanced. Goes for what it does to hordes and chaos warriors too if you build for it.
And it needs no crutch like famished to do that, and it even ignores shields on it´s heavies!
That thing has more stagger and control than a shield does when used aggressively, i would know since its the main weapon i use on UC and even on BW for some builds.
I agree with you on the flail. When you play it, in any of the 3 sienna carrier, once you go back to older weapon they really feel weak.
And the weapon work well with thp on stagger and thp on enemy hit.
Also for the sword, yeah, I don’t know why so many people act like it’s a trash weapon…
It’s top tier on pyro and a very good option on UC (weaker than flail but more versatile).
Only BW seem to have no synergie with this weapon.
I call bull on that, not many weapons can easily just walk up to a stormvermin patrol and start abusing them without having some manner of significant downside. For instance the only elf weapon that can is the spear and shield.
Only saltz weapon is the flail, but his is just generally worse than the fire one, and it cant do that to chaos patrols.
So having given this more playtime and more thought, I still feel Kerillian outshines Sienna by quite a bit, but it’s mostly down to SotT and Moonfire being OP. Still, there’s something really off about Sienna.
Sienna is relying on either one talent (BW - Famished Flames) or career passive (UC - Unstable Strength) to make TWO of her melee weapons viable (Fire Sword/Flail)
Pyromancer is only half-way playable if you use Coruscation Staff, but let’s face it - that’s getting nerfed, and her melee options are craptastic.
Playing with high Overcharge comes with it’s own risks, so I wouldn’t change Unstable Strength.
I would, however, nerf Famished Flames, either by playing with the numbers or limiting it to only work with her ranged options.
Then I would completely remove the slowdown on high Overcharge for all her careers. It feels like a double negative - you can’t use your ranged option at high overcharge, but you can’t melee effectively either. Your only option is to dodge/parry your way to safety or self-damage to lower overcharge.
These are just some base changes. Her careers will need individual tweeks.
Even beofre Sot and moonfire Sienna was played like 10 times less then elf.
I recorded about 1000+ lobby games. (find 3\4 lobby and record who is taken already)
From top to buttom
Elf. 90% 3\4 lobbies allready had elf. Now it is 99%. Pretty much every host is elf
Bardin
Victor
Kruber
Sienna with like 20% pickrate
Is a part of this not down to the whole “Legolas” thing, though? Elf will always be more popular. I know it is not the only reason and most likely not the main reason.
And pick rate isn’t a perfect heuristic. Sienna is one of two heroes with no DLC career and she has a lot of gems hidden in her kit that a lot of players don’t necessarily know about.
I have a lot of fun with her careers and don’t have access to the flaming flail. Yeah famished flames dominates the battle wizard meta but that doesn’t make her FF builds bad or useless by any means. I think her FF builds are a great example of exactly how useful she can be.
My personal favorite of dot/cc/enfeebling unchained notwithstanding
Firesword h1 by default does like 12 armor damage, that´s not abusing them as much as slapping them and as mentioned, it does not handle chaos warriors all that well. Her Flail suffers from neither of those problems.
Works on chaos patrols, yes, stormvermin or goat patrols? No, they´ll ram charge attacks into your face until you are outa dodges and stamina and now you are dead. Only counter is staggering and disrupting them from doing that or just having a very high amount of mobility, like 6 dodges rapier style.
Legolas thing is probably part of it but it´s probably more a thing of Sienna´s melee arsenal being the most boring one even if at times (build dependent) very overpowered. Mashing heavies into everything for all your melee needs does get stale.
Personally i’ve played an ungodly amount of waystalker just because i get sick of watching too many of my teams otherwise die to specials but i do enjoy merc, GK, slayer, WHC, zealot and handmaiden a lot as well.
