Something that occurred to me after my last response is that your idea of a truly logical & understandable headshot bonus system can make sense with a slight tweak. Instead of being a modifier on the actual attack, make it a discreet damage instance, i.e. a proc.
We’ve seen that Fatshark can do calculated proc damage that doesn’t benefit from outside sources like stagger, strength portions, etc. That’s how GK’s Knightly Temper talent and Killing Shot work after all. By isolating the additional damage to a proc it is possible to limit the influence other damage modifiers have over the total damage gained.
Maybe that would be a better tack to take if one were intent upon trying to petition Fatshark for such a change. The same system could even be applied to crit power.
Why change Witch Hunt? This nerf changes close to nothing for those playing on official yet it would be a huge loss for BPs on modded. The Handgun would be near useless against Blightstormers on C3DWONS for example. More balanced? Sure. More fun now that a sniping weapon cannot effectively snipe? Without increasing the Handgun’s infantry damage, I wouldn’t say so.
Flense still isn’t capped though. It is the best option on that row not because of the damage per tick but because you can stack bleed like crazy. Or this just meant to slow down how quickly you can stack up damage?
Templar’s Knowledge. I’d rather let the talent allow WHC to tag either a second enemy or remove the tag cooldown.
How is I Shall Judge You All meant to be a team-focused burst talent when your version of the passive Witch Hunt doesn’t allow allies to make use of the debuff? Am I missing something in order for this work as advertised?
I’m also not entirely sure as to how good this would be. Not much use on official because strength + bomb is enough to significantly weaken patrols and destroy other combination of clumped up enemies. Modded is questionable because auras inherently don’t have good range and this’d require you to move around to “tag” enemies. Running away from the safety of your allies may not work out in your favour.
I could settle for a simple increase to the ult’s range. Maybe an increase to duration from 6 to 8 seconds? 10? You are the only one getting the increased crit chance after all. Perhaps add in that an enemy tagged by Saltz in the next 6 seconds takes 25-30% more damage as opposed to 20%. You may feel this to be too much but you are competing with 40% CDR + 25% crit for the team and 100% crit for Saltz. Something equally as powerful needs to be there.
I think the changes minus the Witch Hunt ones would probably be enough.
Templar’s Knowledge can become 10% (instead of the 5% it is on live) with an additional effect.
An additional effect like one of these. Makes it an attractive quality of life option that increases damage by a medium amount. The damage increase in actual practice would be mainly an aggregate thing, especially since WHC doesn’t have an Exec or other breakpoint melee weapon and already hits Crossbow breakpoints, so I think it wouldn’t be too much.
Yeah I get what you mean. My approach doesn’t solve the real issue. Less max stacks would be better.
You aren’t missing anything. I really didn’t think it through well enough.
The aura would be the same radius as Animosity’s effect. A duration increase would be good though. Mainly I was thinking the aura effect would extend the tagging to at least a full wave of enemies instead of what was just within Animosity’s immediate reach, but a duration increase would probably be needed for that to actually work out.
Increasing the crit chance allies get from Animosity is another option for I Shall Judge You All.
I’d just get rid of Flense and make whatever form Killing Shot takes as a talent instead of a passive.
Straight up, the proposed nerfs to flense I’ve been seeing has only ever had the sole purpose of making it do less dps than Deathknell. Might be a sign that it should just go, because I cannot see a purpose in that talent remaining outside of just slapping a Chaos Spawn while being sad about no headshots.
I don’t feel like Always Prepared needs changing. I understand it’s considered boring, but as far as my duckgun build goes it works fine (and I assume it’d still be fine if duckgun ever gets its cleave rightfully halved).
Making I Shall Judge You All an aura is great.
No mention of Fervency. I don’t consider it particularly OP either, but if changing it is something people decide is necessary down the road because of Killing Shot or wep traits never changing then what’s the thought on giving it a different effect completely? Like 75% crit and headshot damage or something, I don’t know math.
Since this has probably be the most hottly argued of your suggestions, I’ve been mulling it over and here are my thoughts. Not a new idea, but one I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned yet in this thread.
What if Witch Hunt was left basically as is, but only worked on enemies that Victor himself tags? I like this idea for a number of reasons. Firstly it makes Witch Hunt a little less “free”. Some actual coordination would now be needed to get the most out of it. Secondly I feel it’s a lot more thematically fitting with WHC basically pointing out the enemies he wants dead, fits his commander identity better than in live or the suggested version in the OP.
Of course for this to work smoothly in practice WHC would need his own tag colour or the like so team mates can clearly identify which enemies were tagged specifically by the WHC. I appreciate this is starting to sound quite fanciful as a suggestion but hey gotta at least try right? Would also be nice if a semi transparent version of this tag showed up on enemies hit by the suggested aura of I Shall Judge You All.
Lastly I’d take the current effect of Templar’s knowledge and add the ability to tag up to 3 enemies with no tag cooldown. I think then it’d be a pretty attractive option combined with the other talent/passive changes if you wanted to lean more into the team support aspect.
Why buff riposte? Its not like a talent that only do something on parries will suddenly attract people who dont use it because it only do something on parries.
Even if flense got removed and we only had the option between deathknell and riposte, the vast majority would pick deathknell since riposte force a certain kind of playstyle with high risk and not that much reward, compared to a passive buff to headshot dmg that can benefit almost all playstyles a lot more often than ripste.
Have been arguing this for a while so I will support it once it drops in a related thread and not a WHC one
I think this is actually a very important point. If people spent most their time playing modded content (higher difficulty or true solo) or to a lesser degree mainly with bots than they will have a warped perspective for balance on a subconcious level. So yea, you as someone who plays presumeable a lot of true solo (no offense) would have a different feeling on what may feel good or viable in talents or weapons. Which is why I have to congratulate you doubly that a lot of your suggestions sound reasonable and aim to tone down the overperformance of outlier.
In order to stay at least slightly on the actual thread topic:
Sounds good to me and also familiar:
So obviously I would support such a change for WHC.
I’m starting to think the simplest solution is reducing WHC’s crit chance to make light spam suboptimal dps outside of Animosity, capping the amount of crits during Fervency and nerfing/changing Flense.
If other careers were brought down to the level of what WHC would be in the original post, then it would be fine, but otherwise the above is likely the better route.
That would be great. Crit Power suffers from the same problem as the headshot damage bonus increase talents.
It might be too weak, but it’s a matter of baselines. If other careers are brought down to this level I like this suggestion, and the one for Templar’s Knowledge as well.
In my view, Eternal Guard’s purpose is to let WHC focus on elites in a horde first before focusing the horde, with relative safety. WHC blocks the weak attacks while avoiding the ones from the elites and whittling them down.
I’m not against evening the board here for WHC’s melee weapons by removing Rapier’s innately lower inner block angle block cost and replacing Eternal Guard with a 20% BCR though.
I think 5 seconds would still be enough. The change I’ve listed is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. It just means the enemy has to have died while being tagged.
A neat little synergy would WIld Fervour being proc’d by kills on any enemy like horde fodder during I Shall Judge You All, since they would be taggable in a sense.
Thanks! I think 8 seconds would probably be enough. If it’s too long it ends up being effectively just better than Fervency.
We are so few.
I was thinking about it and honestly it would likely only be useful for Volley Crossbow because of its long reload time. If Saltz had a Handgun (1 shot like Crossbow but longer reload time) my idea would make more sense but that’s not the case. It would kind of nice if a player just wanted to never reload BoP but that’s a bit more of a meme really.
Yeah Flense is odd. It’s too free. I think Killing Shot might be too strong as a replacement though (unless it’s the version I’ve listed in the op, which probably wouldn’t compete with Deathknell).
Flense could be made to work on headshots only, so both Flense and DK are single target focused, with Flense being dps for light attacks and DK for charged attacks.
Interesting. I’ve always gone for Charmed Life because of how good it is for clutching and making space for reloads.
I didn’t think it would need changes with the Killing Shot changes. At that point the team crit has picked up a lot of value over Fervency. (Edit: I misread your post sorry. Didn’t realise you meant if Killing Shot didn’t get changed).
Reducing the amount of crit chance Fervency gives is a straightforward solution that I like though. Could also cap the number of crits in Fervency, so it’s more a consistency thing like a cap of 5 or 6.
Edit: Animosity already gives 6 crits with good consistency so it would probably have to be 8.
It was mentioned first by Adelion but I failed to fully discuss it.
I like this idea on paper, but I think in practice the result is very similar to the tag only benefiting the WHC, just with more aggregate damage. WHC needs to be helpful to a team, and I’m not sure just being a dps that happens to be good at clutching without stealth really cuts it. I don’t believe a WHC can handle tagging all of the specials (I could be wrong, it’s hard to tell who’s tagging what in teams).
Commander WHC is really cool though. If the other careers were lowered to this level it would be a good change, and in that case I would like your different coloured tag, I Shall Judge You All transparent tag and Templar’s Knowledge ideas. Again it’s a matter of baseline strength.
I haven’t thought of any good talent replacements yet sorry (if anyone has any please feel free to contribute). With Flense also being an option for removal I’m not sure how to fill the gaps that would be left by both talents.
Riposte is reactive, bad with lag and has anti-synergy with stagger. It’s fun, especially as host, but its uptime and safety are poor, and it’s on a difficult row. Making the windows for parrying fixes the lag issue, but not its inherent reactive nature on a mobile career that’s good at avoiding having to block in the first place.
I like it a lot in true solo, which is the angle I was thinking of it from, and when isolated in a team, but I see how that’s not enough, and overbuffing the reward could be very silly.
Thanks. I think I was still letting my biases influence my thoughts though, particularly with the Riposte and Witch Hunt suggestions I listed in the original post.
That’s true but I’m more guilty of it than others.
Ah I originally misunderstood the first part of your post to mean the tag would affect everyone but WHC, yeah my idea is even more similar to yours than I realised. Definitely seems more thematic to the class that way.
I like the idea of Riposte and interested to see it as a main passive with talents fleshing it out.
Whether that be extra utility, reward or other means of activating it.
Probably something I’d get burnt at the stake for and not really feasible with stagger & lag.
Always Prepared allows the duckfeet to get 2 ammo from Scrounger procs instead of just 1. Makes for a fairly significant overall ammo increase over an entire level, especially with Unending Hunt. Unfortunately it’s only really useful for duckfeet & volley bow.
So I guess by that logic, if the goal was to make Always Prepared a more generalist talent, it could be changed from an ammo boost to “Ranged critical hits restore 1 ammunition.” At least then all of his weapons would benefit equally from it. I’m not sure how attractive it’d be in practice though. That tier has some stiff competition.
Flense could still be there for a cleave/horde clearing option. DK should be for a single target option. Currently, flense does more damage in both scenarios. Even at 100% headshot ratio.
What if interrupting an attack with a push gave you the guaranteed critical hit? You could perhaps put this on top of the already existing talent to not take away the blocking aspect? This would speed up the talent, so to speak, the player would be able proc it more often and it’d help with the whole ping problem. I think. Not much of a Riposte anymore though, arguably.
That 50% extra stagger strength would probably need to go. I am not familiar with how much stagger this would result in. Could you stagger elites with this in official? Legend? Cata? Is it possible to perhaps make this not be stackable with Opportunist? Or stacking it is exactly what would elevate this from good to great? How about only being able to stagger elites out of non-overhead attacks? Internal cooldown to mitigate Rapier push spam?
The more I write the more I realise that this idea needs a bit more detailing so I’ll just leave it here with one question to not waste my time writing something people may dismiss because I’ve completely overlooked one aspect that makes it busted, hence it’s going straight in the bin.
What if interrupting an attack with a push gave you the guaranteed critical hit? Yay or nay? I’ll put more thought into this if people think its a good idea otherwise I will try to think of something else.
probs have to slap on an internal cooldown so players aren’t pumping out crits with Rapier/Billhook (or any push heavy weapon)
doesn’t really matter if you can stagger elites, as pushing an attacking trash enemy would still proc it
I like the direction as it doesn’t force players into a different or slower playstyle, HM Asrai Alacrity had a similar problem before they added push proc
Interesting idea! Could do what they did with Asrai Alacrity and combine both current Riposte and your idea. So:
"Parrying an attack causes your next attack within 2 seconds to be a guaranteed critical hit. Staggering an elite with a melee action does the same, but has a cooldown of 4 seconds.”
So Riposte works as normal but additionally rewards staggering elites (this version I’ve typed isn’t taking the Killing Shot changes in the op into account for brevity’s sake). I think any elite stagger (with a melee action) should be fine if it has a cooldown.
Billhook already staggers elites fairly easily with its attacks and pushes. I think the cooldown of 4 seconds does enough to prevent it from becoming overpowered with its hook attack.
Personally, “I shall purge the all” which emits an aura, it’s a genius idea! And I want to see this. Whether it’s for 6 seconds, the 20% or 25% (with talent) more damage or a purifying aura that deals fire damage over time to enemies? And for the blow of nerve his passive by saying that there is only Victor who can target the enemies to kill in priority, it would be necessary that the target be orange for example and not blue to change the visual
