I love the idea of WHC a lot, the aesthetics, the ‘support’ type gameplay, the guy that keeps the elites in the mud.
But he feels a little lacking compared to the other two Saltz careers, and I think the biggest problem is that his ult is among the worst in the game, 3 minute cooldown to get 25% crit chance for only 6 seconds. I think a solid crit chance buff on it’s own can either be underwhelming or super strong depending on the number, and there’s a lot of other sources of crit in the game so it is tough to find a good balance between them and the ult.
This leads me to suggest that I think the ult should give something along the lines of 30% crit chance and 15-20% extra attack speed with a base duration of 8. I think this would be good because it would still follow the idea of an “inspirational boost” and it would feel better with lower attack speed weapons that the team might be using.
Following this ult buff, I think it would be really nice for the rapier to get a buff of 5% extra base crit, similar to dual weapons. I don’t think this would drastically shift the meta of Saltz weapons in any direction but it would be nice to have a weapon for WHC that really feels like it belongs together, aside from it just looking really cool.
As WHC Main i must say he is perfect how he is right now, you have with him perfect View over the Scene/CC, excellent Special/Boss annihilation and damn good Survivability on your own.
For your Issue with his Ult im going with 5% Crit /10% CdR on Trinket+30% CdR from the Talent and Resourceful Combatant on the Rapier(Which is natural with 5% Crit and 20% CritPow), Wild Fervour(cause there is always a little Special Boi) so Resourceful Combatant goes Wild and with that my Ult Cd is practical on half of its Original Cd.
So you have 5% Crit from your Weapon and Trinket 10% Crit consistent, Wild Fervour another 8% plus your Animosity so speaking of 25% from that makes a 43% CritChance Max. capable. So im save to say WHC Ult doesnt need a Buff neither does he.
WHC is definitely not perfect, in fact he is one of the weakest careers all around not only because of his low health pool, but because of his weak career ability which provides with a decent at best, critical % buff to him and allies, but the cooldown is brutal.
Without doubt, WHC was nerfed too hard after the beta - and in my opinion could do with a slight rework, and more hp for sure.
2nd thoughts, edit: in fact, as far as supporting your team goes Zealot will provide more crowd control with his charge, which has a lower cooldown and allows him to move to a team mate in trouble rapidly.
And there’s of course bounty hunter, who can do everything WHC ideally does in a party supporting his team, and more.
WHC is one of my most played characters and he is far from perfect. In fact you pretty much HAVE to play perfectly 99% of the time to not fail with him. He is fun to play when he works and i absolutely have a blast stabbing stuff in the head with rapier and his great headshot damage buffs. He even makes 2h sword somewhat useable because you can be able to 2shot stormvermin with a little bit of effort ( or mash LMB on their head and hope for a crit, kinda works too )
100hp -> 125 hp
Rework/buff active ability
Rework lvl 15 talents, they are laughable ( maybe make them gain the buffs for X seconds on hitting a marked target instead of a targetable enemies dying )
He is a support character. Its very nice to have him around to get that constant 20 percent damage taken debuff when you have some solid characters already.
I think base should be 10 second for that ability but thats just me.
Never bothered with crit power on it. Crits seem to not add too much damage to rapier hits. I still stack as much crit chance on it for swift slaying and quick decapitations with WHC ( it always feels nice to slash away at a horde and instakill a full hp mauler/stormvermin that comes under the blade by accident )
Edit: I also find the free blocks from the front light attacks passive quite bad as well. It’s very unreliable considering the angle does not seem very forgiving and even the dinkiest slave rats have attacks that count as heavy hits that go through it. I never actively play with it in mind anymore. It only ocasionally saves me a bit of stamina where it usually wouldn’t even matter.
I’m leveling Saltzpyre right now and it does feel that despite my best efforts, I keep lacking in output, be it damage, support or otherwise. Of course, without dabbling in Legend with maxed out HP, I can’t make any solid suggestions, but his Ultimate is really lacking. It pushes back the enemies, creating space AND putting them out of melee range, so it helps get a breather, but it’s only temporary, since you’ll have to actively wade into the now dispersed enemies to hack at them while the Ult buff lasts, which ain’t much to begin with. And with the 3 minute cooldown, I rarely use it since I’m afraid it won’t be available when the poop really hits the fan. While other classes can just spam their ultimates and homing-missile-kill specials or knock down lots of enemies (including bosses!) while keeping mobile.
Long story short, the WHC Ultimate seems rather pointless, it ought to be looked at from a design perspective.
WHC can work pretty well on Legend, but he is extremely dependend on equipment and his overall playstyle only allows for very little margin of error. I’d classify him as “High Risk - Mediocre Reward”. I dabbled with both maxing attack speed with swift slaying and with CD reduction, and in my oppinion, going with time extension on his active and swift slaying seems to be the best option. The CD on his active is too long to consistently rely on it being usable more than once a wave, and I regularly have it ready without any real reason to use it, so I use it as a clutch-ability or the cover a flank by myself. WHC definitely has the best horde-clearing ability of any melee-carreer in the game and imho, stacking anything but crit power or power vs. monsters on him is a waste. With rapier and stacked out crit chance, swift slaying and bonus headshot damage, you can absolutely rely on your light attack flailing to decap almost any mook up to chaos marauders. Anything not hit in the head gets wrecked by your extra crit-damage and with a good volley x-bow, you can put out decent boss dps and actually use your 10 seconds of ultra-crits to become sort of an off-boss-killer on anything other than the troll, though I run him with a regular crossbow for even better CC.
My personal gripe with him is that I rarely use him off-host, since you are soooooo dependend on not getting hit because of your abysmally small health pool. His “no block stamina on light attacks from the front” is absolutely forgettable since the angle seems to be about the same as that of shade’s backstab, nothing you can rely on and gimmicky at best.
That’s the whole problem. You look at his abilities and say “wow, he’s got some really good stuff”, but half of it is unreliable and a gimmick at best and you pretty much have to commit to a certain talent setup because without your extra-dodge distance, you are absolutely cat food.
WHC is not far off from being where he needs to be in order to truly compete with Salty’s other two carreers, which are, by and large, on the same level (Zealot could use some tweaking imho, but that’s another topic):
25 more health to be not so squishy anymore. He is designed as a melee character, he is wearing chainmail armour, he should be a little tankier.
Tweak his active skill. It needs both its cooldown looked at as well as its effect. Maybe the 100% crits from beta were too much, but for what it does now, even if it affects the whole team, it seems underwhelming considering you cannot exactly spam it. My suggestion would be to both reduce the CD and give it more offensive power. Maybe also increase Crit Power by another flat 20% while it is on.
Give him the extra dodge distance by default, replace lvl 5 talent with something else. Honestly, this should be the case with most carreers where only one talent path makes the difference between “Legend viable” and “not worth your time and effort”. When it seems a carreer only becomes viable with a certain talent setup, the carreer should have those abilities by default in order to allow a more varied playstyle. A CC with as little defense as WHC has, he needs to be able to dodge.
Imagine an automatic ping of the highest health target, within a certain range, with a distinctive outline color? Maybe a 2nd could be tagged as well with the regular default blue outline. Just a thought. His ult DEFINITELY needs a cooldown reduction tho imo
It does sound nice, but ideally I think WHC should just do more dmg to specials without having to ping
I mean he is a witch hunter, it makes sense to me, especially against leeches and blightstormers
Well, the main issue with the ping debuff on specials and elites is that 1) your teammates might not ping them, even though they benefit from it and 2) said specials and elites tend to die fast enough anyway, so the ping doesn’t really provide much help. The ping only provides a constant group-level support when it’s a prolonged boss-fight.
I went through all of this… including the overnerfing that happened both to the WHC… and by extension nerfs to the weapons which had in reality destroyed the job.
Basically in order to correct this job at this point they’d need to go back and remove all the prior nerfs to both the WHC and the weapons.
Try setting the level 25 talent to 10sec duration to give it an actual use when things go haywire. Get a crit built and ult cooldown on crit trait.
Works pretty decent on rapier.
I find the tagging nature of hes abilities and the class in general to be little bit, lets just say unreliable.
Not to mention the cooldown on hes ultimate is simply too long for what it gives. Yeah guaranteed crits on beta was maybe little bit over tuned but i really think the ability itself should have longer base duration or lower cooldown.
After seeing how shade, a squishy melee class that deals high melee damage, has become a very reliable pick and overall a very good example how to make this melee focused game more melee focused, we should take this experience and model other melee classes in her wake. I’m dead honest, Shade should be the blueprint: Melee with her feels powerful, engaging, exciting, you need to work for it, you are always on your toes not to get hit - which actually WORKS -, she has a powerful and VERY versatile active that allows her to play aggressively but also as a last resort retreat or utility option to either reposition, escape or even help downed teammates, it can be used as an impromptu CC option for her weapons that are not too good at it, she has a very good and versatile selection of melee weapons that allow for alot of different playstyles and almost all of her talents are valid picks and she can be tailored towards almost any job - boss killer, elite killer, survivability, ranged support - without commitment making you worthless in the other areas. And most importantly: An active ability you are encouraged to use, to experiment with and that isn’t on cooldown 50% of the map, even though it is very powerful. THIS is how you make this game more melee focused, not by nerfing and tweaking ranged characters, but to give melee characters this kind of variety and viability.
Anyhow, enough of my raging e-boner about Shade’s design, and back to how we can transfer that to WHC, sinc he KINDA does fall into the same role as shade: squishy but mobile melee character that has a certain default role but can KINDA cover anything a little bit. Difference is that his role isn’t boss killing but CC with good-ish elite killing power. Problem is that he just isn’t as geared towards this as shade both ability and talent-wise as well as when it comes to equipment. I mean, you can absolutely make him work on Legend, but as I’ve said, he is kinda “high-risk, medicore reward”, since he doesn’t have the same versatility as shade, his abilities are unreliable AND when picking Salty, he has to compete with two of the strongest carreers currently in game, BH and Zealot. He somewhere falls in between those two without having the damage potential of BH or the CC and survivability of Zealot.
The real offender here is mainly his talent setup and his active, as has been pointed out ad nauseum. There isn’t really much choice you get, you need that dodge distance and don’t get me started with “killing tagged enemies heals 2 temp hp on team”. Talent reworks, however, take much more time than what I have in mind. His active should be on the same power level as Shade’s and even though it can affect the whole team, it is sub-par at best and sits on a cooldown that is by no means justified considering the effect.
So, how about something unconventional here and apart from reducing the cooldown a bit, we make it that it gives Salty, and only him, 100% crit chance on melee attacks for the 6 seconds it lasts AND somehow make it that any “man-sized” enemy cannot get aggro on him because they are too stunned by his zeal.
I completely agree with you, I’m only adding a random thought. When thinking about the WHC, I always think of the glasscannon builds from WoW. Very squishy, relies heavily on CC to make it out of the danger zone, but in exchange for all this effort, he has a high damage output. Except, he doesn’t.
Maybe turn him into an inverse Shade, he does backstab damage, but only from the front. Call it… “Frontstab!”
(Disclaimer: I’m just kidding, please don’t hate me, WHC needs to be buffed somehow to offput the squishyness.)