How about we instead keep the team damage but limit the WHC to one enemy at a time and changing what you ping loses the passive (except for collectibles?). Meaning the WHC has to tag the enemy and the team gets the benefit for that one enemy until it dies or a new one is tagged by the WHC.
Why? WHC is a leader type character and having it so that he commands the team to focus on a certain enemy and therefore, gain a damage boost against them would fit thematically and it won’t blatantly make it so that 4 people marking 4 different enemies provides free damage all around.
How to diffferentiate WHC tags to team tags? Use a different color or give them an icon for the colorblind (but I know the map markers are very cumbersome to look at sometimes)
Since my changes would clash with this one, I’ll throw some random ideas out to replace this talent:
Demoralise: Enemies surrounding a WHC marked enemy are weakened by 20% (damage and defense wise)
Exploit: Shielded and Armored enemies marked by you lose their aforementioned benefits while marked"
Prioritize: Your team gains a 5% movement speed buff when moving towards WHC marked enemies
Ware!: Specials are automatically marked on spawn but the WHC must still manually ping them to receive the benefits of Witch Hunt
Just wanted to say this change because it would make using Great Sword Parry Victor feel so much better.
This should be a more reasonable list of changes than the one I originally came up with. I’ve only included differences from the original post to make it short:
Witch Hunt changes removed.
Riposte – "Performing a timed block causes your next attack within 2 seconds to be a guaranteed critical hit. Staggering an elite does the same, but has a cooldown of 4 seconds.”
This keeps Riposte the fun way it is now, but lets a player get a reward for proactive play as well, by staggering elites. The cooldown of 4 seconds on the crit from staggering an elite is to prevent infinite crits with things like the Billhook’s hook attack or the Flail’s charged attacks. Credit to SlashKex for the core idea.
Templar’s Knowledge – Changed to “Witch Hunt causes enemies to take an additional 10.0% damage. Victor can now tag up to 2 enemies.”
It doesn’t sound like a lot, but 10% extra damage for each player adds up, especially on tougher enemies. Being able to tag two enemies fits for this talent, since a WHC using it wants to focus on tagging a lot.
I Shall Judge You All – “Animosity’s duration is increased to 8 seconds, during which Victor gains an aura the size of Animosity that applies Witch Hunt to enemies.”
From the feedback in the thread, for this talent to really work as a team focused high burst wide-reaching damage talent, and to match its namesake, a small duration increase is needed.
If Killing Shot is not changed:
All versions of Animosity – The number of crits that can trigger Killing Shot during Animosity is capped at 10. Any additional crits during Animosity do not trigger Killing Shot. This should primarily rein in Rapier during Fervency on mobs that are perfectly stacked, as Rapier can make 16 light attacks during Fervency at base attack speed. This also lets Fervency retain its usefulness vs monsters, lords and Chaos Warriors.
Animosity description example: “Victor pushes back nearby enemies, and boosts nearby allies’ critical hit chance by 25.0% for 6 seconds. Killing Shot cannot occur more than 10 times during Animosity.”
Unending seems to be about 6 crits with light attacks on average for Rapier and AnF, 4-5 for Billhook.
Someone got a second wind? More effort stickers from me.
A bit sad that Witch Hunt suggestions was not changed to only enemies tagged by Victor to more towards the commander style. Overall, pretty tame changes not sure if they will reign in much. I think that was one of the goals.
I’ve thought about this more, and I think this could work (assuming it’d be possible to code). It would also be a pretty good nerf to bill hook which can get 2-3 killing shots per swing when attacking hordes. And personally, as you know, I think Bill Hook WHC is really more of a problem than rapier WHC.
I got mentioned by Hedge which was pretty cool. Always motivating to see that someone from Fatshark reads these threads.
Others pointed out I wasn’t really rebalancing WHC as much as establishing a baseline, which didn’t make sense for a thread about specifically WHC. If I wanted to do that, it would be more appropriate to make a thread dedicated to what the baseline should be. As such, I modified the changes to be inline with other careers, making WHC comparable to Merc without Mace & Sword, rather than worse. I did say Merc was too strong earlier but that was relative to content, which as Sleezy said earlier is subjective.
I like the idea of tagging being an effort on the WHC’s part, but for it to work as more than just a personal dps buff in practice vs whatever’s directly in front of the WHC, I think WHC would have to be able to tag two enemies at base, with Templar’s Knowledge increasing that number to 3. This would also be because there can be up to 6 specials on Cata at any one time. This could be decent enough, and if enemies tagged by the WHC have a different outline colour, would be quite cool.
It’s a big assumption on my part with my lack of code knowledge. I don’t know if the game can actually track Killing Shot activations individually or not, or if it can only track the number of swings that are critical.
Edit:
I was wrong. I think it’s four actually. I haven’t played Cata in a bit so my memory is fuzzy.
It is an interesting approach to make two tags as WHC passive. It would fit in my book. And then can be increased with the passive-related talents. I would just like some new rearguard playstyle which is more organizational: tag priority targets, dispose specials, keep the back clear. It would be something different instead of frontliner A, B or C and would fall more in a support co-op vein. The current tag passive makes WHC a passive support like Grail Knight quests instead of an active support like UC Enfeebling Flames.
EDIT: Are you sure about the six specials on Cata at any one time? I mean to remember it being five at max with a preference of three of five being the same.
Are we still married to the concept of Flense being a horde clearing talent?
Like, how much horde DPS does WHC really need?
Flense is obviously quite strong, bleed stacks do not discriminate and it bloats his damage output significantly. But I was thinking that in an average game the speed of his horde clear isn’t that much faster. To put it another way, it is factually faster at killing infantry, but not grossly so? A couple of swipes and a headshot is going to kill all trash in the game, Flense just happens to also kill the 3rd guy you consistently cleaved through.
So, what if it just didn’t? Repurpose Flense to have a different role or a different way to build bleed stacks that’s greatly diminished versus low health enemies.
For me, I think Flense’s highest value comes from the higher health the enemy is. Like bosses that won’t let you get easy headshots. And sometimes I just reeeally can’t hit a Chaos Warrior or five in the face.
Could change Flense to only work on tagged enemies, or require an enemy to be hit 3 or 4 times first before the bleed kicks in. Result would be that flense is still a dps talent, but one that’s not immediate damage and vastly curtailed against horde meaning that 3rd rat getting cleaved through isn’t bleeding.
I’m just thinking, if the extra damage is delayed, then perhaps it evens out against Deathknell; makes it not the essential frontal damage talent, but one that comes into its own if you’re failing to kill something quickly.
Another excuse: WHC’s whole stick is doing extra damage to taggable enemies so just go with that.
It’s cleave without cleave damage dropoff and is higher damage on single targets with light attacks than Deathknell, even at a 100% headshot percentage, let alone on hordes. Even in the hands of a good player it’s more realistic damage. Plus, it doesn’t overlap with Killing Shot like Deathknell does.
WHC certainly doesn’t need the increased damage in most situations, but I think the overall dps increase it brings gets very apparent if you have to fight a wave on your own or with only one other player for a bit when two team members go down. It increases consistency a lot.
Flense is good for bosses, but the bleed deals very little damage to superarmour. The Greatsword’s charged attacks, which have low base damage and don’t benefit much from Deathknell, deal higher dps to Chaos Warriors with Deathknell than with Flense at just 27% headshots. Flense is still better than Deathknell because of its damage vs everything else though.
I think it only working on tagged enemies could make it very weak. It would be effective with I Shall Judge You All though, especially the version listed in the op. It’s difficult for me to judge without playing with it to analyse its effective dps.
Delaying the damage until a certain number of hits could be neat.
That’s another good option. I would certainly like Flense to not be a free damage talent as it is now and still would be with a simple damage nerf, and your idea of delayed bleed makes it more interesting. It’s also more complicated, so I’ll leave it to others to come up with values for it. I’m not against it becoming a more single target focused option either.
To deal with Flense properly the philosophy for balancing tiers with competing talents in similar roles has to be decided first.
For example, should weapons just have an obvious preference for either Deathknell or Flense? Should it be left up to the player to decide which talent they prefer to focus on? Should high skill players with good headshot rates just always go for Deathknell while leaving Flense as an option for people who can’t or don’t want to go for headshots? And what role is Riposte supposed to play in all this mess?
These are all reasonable enough ways to attempt to balance talents. But the end goal has to be clear. And I doubt Fatshark will tell us how they want it to work, so any suggestions the players make are just stabs in the dark.