What would make you play battle mage?

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Feedback
21

First off, I’m not much of a Sienna player, although Unchained helped that a bit, so not much experience behind my thoughts here, more just looking at the character.

Inferring from BM’s passives and Talents, she seems to have a two-fold idea: On one hand, getting single big blasts out to kill a lot of enemies at once; on the other, pacing her activity between casting aggressively and defending and cooling down. Unfortunately, neither of these is supported that well.

Bigger trouble, I think, is the pacing approach: There just isn’t time and room for that in the game, especially at higher difficulties. You need to be alert and active constantly, as patrols, roaming enemies and specials try to get you, and with the pace of most (nearly all?) groups, new enemies are encountered constantly. There’s no time to breathe, cool down and let Tranquility do its trick. Unless you let your friends take care of all the random enemies, but I doubt anyone of us is playing the game to take a walk. You could take the ambient folk on melee, but as Tranquility stops if you take damage, it’s a significant risk.

The smaller trouble, if only because it’s (seemingly, at least) easier to affect and fix, is the focus on massive spells. But that is only somewhat supported by her Talents and passives. There’s Pyromantic Surge, which affects all ranged, not just the big blasts; some spell charge hastening (the most significant of which affects only the first spell cast after Tranquility, so quite situational) and… That’s it.

There also doesn’t seem to be much that BW can do that Pyromancer cannot, so BW doesn’t have a niche to fill exactly. Her Career skill doesn’t exactly support her role (either one) either.

So what exactly would make me more interested to play BM? First, find her a clear role to play (that fits the game too). Then, tweak and rework her abilities to clearly support that role. “Caster of huge blasts” is in my opinion a quite valid role, and one she could excel at. “Paced caster”, as I said, isn’t (at least in the current style of cast, wait a while, cast again). Paced caster could work if there was some interplay between her casting and melee, perhaps by dissipating heat through melee hits instead of waiting. Increased ranged charge attack damage at the price of a bit more overheat might reinforce the “Blaster” bit. And finally, rework her career skill to support at least one of her roles.

TL;DR: Her abilities and the general style of the game do not synergise well with her (apparent) role.

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22

A useful DPS oriented ult.

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23

A useful rework would then be as much about the pyromancer as the BM.

Oddly enough when you get started with the pyromancer, it feels as being the paced class. You overheat quickly, you don’t have the heat sink talent at level 25, nor tranquilitty, nor temporary health. So you end up doing small burst of damage followed by moments of inactivity. Fortunately, the screaming skull ult does let you delete stuff without using heat!

Of course one you hit 25 and get the useful staff traits, that feels completely different.

The question is, should BM active be about survival or alternative way of dealing damage.
If it’about survival, then it can stay as is, and then we remove/neuter the heat sink part of pyromancer. Then Battle mage/wizard becomes the “safe” variant. But other heat reduction methods will still be there.
if it’s about another way of dealing damage, I suggest the Pyro’s ult shouldn’t keep it’s huge damage but become entirely a long range tool. Then the first Sienna could get a more damaging but slower and unguided ult that reward good positioning and horde/boss control.

24

Make Tranquility stay active until hit and/or add a talent with vent on melee hits/kills. Alternatively just greatly reduce tranquility’s cooldown.

Make it so ground fire actually deals relevant damage, her ult as anything but mobility is lackluster.

And while you’re at it please put some armor penetration on Flame Sword, and buff dot damage to be relevant at the current pace of the game.

25

Bringing Earthing rune back in some form would be pretty cool. Either on BW or Unchained.

26

If they changed serenity to a simple buff which allows you to vent heat on melee, I think the class as a whole would be in much better shape.

Also all talents that mention reduce spell charge times should be changed to affect melee charge hits also.

27

Having a passive that’s better than other class’ talent. I would like more aoe dmg oriented active too, maybe the scrapped fire wave staff from v1 kind of deal.

28

As a Battle Wizard, Sienna unleashes spectacular area of effect spells, immolating large numbers of enemies and turning onrushing hordes into smouldering piles of ash.
Quote from devs, so yeah, they see bw as aoe dd. But even with thought that there has to be other roles for each career, pyro is more versitile by current “design”.
If pyro need rework, its just her talents (all of the careers need that rework, not just pyro, not just even sienna) and balance her active to be singletarget skill.
Pyros passive is in a good place and doesnt need any rework, unlike bw.
Bw passive demands so much, but what you get is mere.
Its a long list of cons of tranquility, but base is that her passive force you, to do burst, and then wait.
You could fight, but its a risk, that sienna should not take
But even worse, how does it helps you, when its inactive? Non. You have to wait, in order to even get her shield boost talent.
Its not safeplay. Fk is safe play, ib is safe play, but this is, this is not.
And her active? Why would i put my self in danger, especially with passive, that turns of as soon as i recive damage. “You can use it to relocate”. Then make it fast like handmaidens.
Overall i see bw had bad design decisions and those need to be fixed.
At least she is not alone with these bad design decisions.
And why nerfing pyro? I dont get it. Just because she can do consistant damage even with melee, because her passive works with it, doesnt mean she is op.

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29

Honestly if they fix teleport from being so borky that would also help a lot. I get that they nerfed it because people were going out of bounds with it… But now half the time I end up teleporting to the same place I was already in. Or taking longer to aim it and getting bopped by something.

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30

The passive feels pretty garbage and uninteresting and unrewarding unless you only plan to use your staff every once in a while; which feels heavily counter-intuitive to a battle-wizard

If they wanted me to use spells and then switch to melee to let the passive deal with my heat while I’m in melee mode then you’d imagine heat-slow to be less of an issue. Now that seems to have gone to Unchained which is fine, I love unchained, I mainly play unchained.

Instead they seem to have gone for a casting-speed approach for Battle-wizard which feels nice, and the 40% reduction to charge when tranq is up feels great - but it’s very situational and only feels great on the flamethrower staff to me personally.

Why? Because as soon as you use a spell on the other staves you’re given this massive 8 second cooldown in a game where every second counts. And to add salt to the wound the ventilation speed feels like a joke, 8 seconds for it to slowly vent a full heat bar over maybe 10-14 seconds? That’s an 18-22 second investment in a game that has clutch moments which means you’re likely to resort to venting or using the clear-heat-on-Special-ability talent more often.

Why does Battle-wizard even have that talent in the first place? Remove it and make the passive better or replace the passive. It’s overkill. One cancels out the other more often than not especially with the lowered cooldown on the ability.

Not taking damage and/or casting in the past 1-4 seconds increases passive heat-decay speed by 15-60% would make it a great deal more useful.

As for Burnout, perhaps a poor suggestion but maybe replace it with a big stagger that will interrupt a boss, either on arrival or on your point-of-exit. That way you’ll have a tool to use if your allies get caught by a chaos spawn, god forbid. Currently Pyro has an easymode here because her special ability goes on crack with purple potion and even without, as it also helps people out of chaos spawn grabs or when they’re cornered by a miniboss/etc.

Alternatively just make the passive vent any remaining heat over 3-5 seconds to make the 8 second wait worth it.

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31

Battle Mage is the best career for if you want to use a Conflagration Staff effectively. Between these two talents:

  • Voracious Conjuring - Increase ranged attack charge speed by 15%
  • Rechannel - When tranquility is active, Sienna’s ranged charge time is reduced by 40%

It takes nearly no time to get Conflag to full charge, and the Rechannel buff lasts a little bit past the initial use which allows you to get 2 or 3 fully charged conflagrations out during the window of the buff.

Also worth noting is that if you’re currently at no heat because it’s all worn off, you’re under the effects of Rechannel and can near-instantly drop down a couple of ground targets.

That being said, Battle Mage would be more interesting if Fire Walk was more interesting. Spitballing some ideas:

  • You could have up to 2 or 3 activation of Fire Walk ready to go, and that once it finished charging up it started over again - perhaps with a longer charge time for each additional stored activation?
  • Fire Walk gave 2-3 seconds of drop-target at the end of the teleport, similar to the Gift of Ladrielle talent for Handmaiden. Reason being is that fire walk should be an escape and repositioning tool, but since there’s no drop-target component it ends up being a utility teleport to get certain grims easier as well as an overcharge-clearing teleport that’s used while staring at the ground to avoid moving too far.
  • Improved run speed and dodge range for 5 seconds after teleporting.
  • Something more impressive than the trail that’s left behind right now, which doesn’t feel valuable in any way - indeed it mostly just impedes the vision of your allies. Perhaps have it have a snare effect like the Bile Troll vomit, that only applies to enemies, and the trail sucks targets into it’s wake? The level 25 Lava Walker ability could then increase this snare effect, increase the range of the pull, and increase the damage that the Fire Walk trail deals to a level that could at least clear some of the basic trash mobs.

The charge speed buff feels like it works better on Conflag than on any other staff, not sure if that’s a bug with Conflag or a bug with charge time on all the other staffs. I should probably test that…

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32

will near instantly full-charge a flamethrower staff, go try it out! Feels lackluster on other staves since they’re more single-target however and thus less impactful unless you only plan to quicksnipe something every 30 seconds. Whereas flame can chunk a horde in that same timeframe and conflag can zone/kill/redirect them.

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33

yea i think the teleport should just be thrown out the window as the flames dont deal that much damage and the teleport itself is gimmicky.

i really like your idea

another idea i had when i first played that character class was to replace teleport with an ability that sets the floor in front of you on fire in a lane, just to really deal damage to a shiz ton of infantry but the damage for the fire on the floor in general needs a buff in damage or a talent that goes with burning. like maybe add a talent that increases damage by 10-35% for all allies against adds on fire but increases damage taken to you.
(this is a good one as the burning is already a thing in the game and just remove the teleport aspect and change some numbers… easy)

another idea is a push back shot gun long range fire spell that is not like the beam staff shotgun spell but it actually has lots of range and its like krubers ability to push back but longer ranger and medium damage (good for infantry) and only pushes adds in front of you (very much like a force push but with fire)

34

Her passive is still underwhelming and to me it is pretty clear that the “not casting spells” condition has been added after her talents. Getting one huge spell every 8 seconds doesn’t fit the game’s fast pace, paired with the fact that both Pyro and Unchained not only have actives that better suit their playstyle, but also are objectively more useful than a wonky teleport that leaves some flame on the ground.
I do too think that her role needs to become more defined. If she is designed as ranged CC, than let her do that: get rid of the “no spells cast” condition and overall a flatout increase in charge speed. Make her talents give her choice if she wants faster charging while her passive is in effect, or larger AoE effect, better damage on fully charged spells, more stagger, stuff like that. I have played BW on Legend, sure you can make it work, but she just isn’t up to par. Her abilities sound good on paper (kind of at least), but in practice, the game is too fast for that.

35

Makes me wonder how it’d feel if every 8 seconds provided you don’t take damage, your next spell gives you a buff that causes any spells within the next 2 seconds to charge 30% faster and reduce heat instead or be free of cost.

36

A passive that makes the next charged attack free could be nice. With possible CD reduction on melee kills.

As for the ult I really think I’d like a powerful non homing attack instead of the TP. Such a movement skills is either abusable or useless depending of the tuning, alas.

37

A local meteor or brief firestorm would pair interestingly with the conflagration staff, but I’m not informed enough in regards to Warhammer lore to say that it’d fit with the game’s thematic.

38

Change Teleport to Wall of Fire. Really, poofing around the map is of absolutely no use since you are always blocked by enemies now. A knockback that throws up a barrier wall of flame about the same length as the old teleport but lasts about 5 or 10 seconds with a talent would be more useful than a “teleport” that goes nowhere.

39

Crowd control could be a cool thematic for the batle wizard indeed. Let the pyromancer remove a few nasties but the first Sienna manage larger groups.

40

I’ve been testing with all staves and seems that it works only for Conflag, Flame and Fire balls. Fire arrows staff seems buged, and those talents does not do enything on charged attack. At last I did not notice anything

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