So WPoS is pretty cool, I dig the design. There is one thing about him though that especially feels bad to me, and that’s the semi random activation of Righteous Fury. In the games I’ve played with him so far, it’s been a very frequent occurrence that Righteous Fury will activate right towards the end of a wave, have minimal uptime before everything is already dead, then be gone by the next wave. Yes, this is less of an issue the higher the difficulty, as combat becomes close to continuous and your uptime naturally improves.
However, I’d like to propose a change that gives players a little more agency in their use of Righteous Fury:
Instead of auto activating on a full fury bar, instead the bar is locked at full until manual activation. The tricky thing here is what you designate as the activation trigger. The best I can currently come up with is that Righteous Fury then activates on your first heavy attack. Whether or not the heavy attack needs to connect with an enemy to activate is probably unimportant, but all feedback on the idea would be very welcome. I do appreciate that intentionally avoiding heavy attacks to save your passive might be a little awkward for some weapons, but I figure with two weapons slots it’s likely you’ll have an option to mostly spam light attacks in the mean time. That said if anyone can come up with a better trigger that’d be great.
This would let you sit on your passive till an opportune moment arrives, without increasing your overall uptime, giving you more agency in how/when you use it.
The mechanic itself reminds of the fury/rage resource of the Barbarian in Diablo 3. Basically a mana pool that would fill up when whacking enemies with specific attacks and then you could spend it with more powerful attacks. Used to decay as well when out of combat, unless you picked a passive that stopped that. Anyway, more testing is needed for sure on my part as well, but I think that simply allowing it to build faster would solve all problems. According to what I’ve read, it’s build-up rate decreases as you go up in difficulty and for Cata it’s at 70% of the normal rate.
Yeah its also something that has been bothering me a bit. Seems especially annoying in early waste runs where the enemy density is not there yet.
Personally I think locking the bar until dedicated key is pressed is probably the best solution to make it have better on demand activation but really I can see Rats solution working perfectly fine too.
Either way currently its bit too random for my liking especially considering major part of his damage is tied to this.
I played WP on Legend Righteous Stand and Legend Chaos Wastes.
Was never a problem in Righteous Stand because there are enough enemies, and in CW yes it mostly acitivated after a Monster or if a small wave and Patrol came together, with the 3rd map onwards uptime was great.
But it is his Passive, you have your Ult on demand that is Ult is great and should be enough.
Having the Passive on demand would be like a second Ult, because of how strong it is, especially if you combine it with the “green HP on Hit” Talent.
It’s not really on demand though? You still have to fill the bar in the first place, and you have to consciously forego using it currently in order to hold onto it for later. I won’t pretend it isn’t ultimately still a buff, since obviously having the ability to save it for particularly tough spots is pretty impactful, but it also leaves you in a situation where you can risk sitting on it for too long and actually lose overall damage because of it. Generally I think something you have to actively managed is a lot more engaging to use.
Mostly it just doesn’t feel good to me at the moment, and it’s gonna feel that much worse in any party comp with a lot of ranged clear. I don’t think it’s something so powerful it couldn’t afford a small QoL tweak like this.
On Legend, Fury is generated at the normal rate (100% effectiveness) on top of enemies dying faster, so you get more uptime overall. On Cataclysm the Fury generation rate is 70% with enemies being more resilient to damage across the board. What ends up happening on cata is that unless you throw a +hordes modifier on top you don’t really get any meaningful use out of it.
Well but WP IS a support career, it was a mistake to declare SotT as support, it seems to have skewed the perspective.
Your Job is it to enable you Team to do stuff better, Killing stuff is secondary. In melee, thanks to the great stagger power you enable others to kill better and safer, thats why WP for me is a Support first, Tank second and DPS third.
I like the dmg buff on Fury don´t get me wrong, but I like the support capabilities of it much more, and find them much more useful. And having that on demand is much more powerful than the dmg buff.
Just sounds way to OP to me, but maybe that is a Problem FS created with the first three DLC careers, which were way to powerful, so some people (if you look at threads especially in the steam forums) seem to want always more power to have easy wins.
Every melee career has problems in ranged heavy teams, that is just the effect of mostly unlimited ammo and OP weapons like Moonbow/Javelin.
But we will see if FS wants to rebalance something.
Since GrudgeMarks release I did not play Cata CW, since I couldn´t get any wins but Cata was always over the top hard, if you would balance stuff for Cata, everything below it would be laughably easy.
Also should the activation still work, since for activation the kills around you also count and only on activation you have to keep it up with kills you make yourself?
And on the first two maps I can kind of see the problem with the 70% but with the 3rd map I was used to getting enough enemies that the 30% decrease should have been compansated by that.
But as I said, haven´t visited Cata-CW since GrudgeMarks.
First of all, this particular problem doesn’t really affect lower difficulties. You’d simply tweak the cata generation value for Fury to something closer to Legend, since the enemies take more time to kill anyway. And regarding the rest of the comment, you can just go up in difficulty once the current setting feels too easy.
“And on the first two maps I can kind of see the problem with the 70% but with the 3rd map I was used to getting enough enemies that the 30% decrease should have been compansated by that.
But as I said, haven´t visited Cata-CW since GrudgeMarks.”
I thought, that the 70% generation value was implemented to counteract the higher number of enemies in Cata-Difficulty to not make Cata easier.
Ofc it could be that they overtuned it, but raising it to 80% or 85% would be an easy fix then, at least easier then making it a Passive on demand.
Well yes if Legend should ever become to easy again I will go up to Cata, but since I work again, I don´t think I have the time to get my skill up to Cata-Levels again, so I will stay at Legend-Level
I’ve said it in another thread, but I like that it’s not a “press button to be OP” mechanic - and though I agree the fury state isn’t in itself OP by any means, I don’t dislike that it’s somewhat out of our control.
I do agree that, right now, it feels a bit off and lacking, but a slightly faster charge, as @Throne_of_Rats said, would be the best option for me.
Edit : Another option would be to have the ult give some fury charge.
Could be seen as a tradeoff between playing it safe and playing it aggressive.
He’s certainly interesting/flashy but a little gimmicky/underwhelming relative to other careers.
The uptime or lack of control of Righteous Fury could be improved.
Eh. Then it’s further barricaded behind a 70s cooldown skill, and there is also the heal/revive ult talent, which is probably the sort of thing you’re gonna wanna sit on for key situations, and generally would not appreciate being forced to use ult to activate the passive.
Problem with this is it’s already used for charging up with book with hammer + time. Though I guess that’s no less restrictive for that particular weapon than heavy attack activation. Might not be a bad option, I just can see it being clunky especially with that particular weapon.
