BW: Current state

[lumpi33]

LOL — I just noticed this edit.
How did we go from:
“I’m playing a BW and it feels lackluster. What are your thoughts?”
Reply:
“Yeah, sure. I think it’s very good for these reasons.”
To:
“NA trash, and you’re wrong.”
Also, it’s wild to me that you can say, IN THE SAME BREATH, “come to EU” and “your kills have 6–7 assists.”

I was just stating that NA time is a bit of different reality. I play it as well from time to time and the destros there are just not comparable to the ones of EU prime. Not only that but EU prime destro has usually 10-30% more players which makes it even harder. And then there are guild groups like TUP that completely dominate and you can basically log off when they show up because you wont kill them. No matter if they are destro or order but usually they play destro. Same with Formosa and a few other guilds.

Jempire usually dominates in NA on order. When I see your kills and lots of assists I basically know that you just walked over them. Your damage as BW didn't really matter. You could have done nothing and they would have killed them. In that case a class can feel stronger than it actually is.

That was my point there.

You’re complaining about poor morales? BW has M2 Ruin and Destruction, which is almost instant damage, unlike something like White Lion, for example. BW also has a great M4, again unlike White Lion.

BW m2: 1200 damage, 25ft radius, no range
WL m2: 1200 damage, 65ft range, IN A LINE in front of you
WH m2: 1200 damage, 65ft range, IN A LINE in front of you
Mara m2: 1200 damage, 40ft range, ALL in front of you
WE m2: 1200 damage, 65ft range, ALL in front of you <-- yeah, ALL in front and 65ft range... Why isn't it 40ft?

Id take any of the melee morals over the BW one. Especially the WE one is crazy good with 65ft range, on a mdps class. They have more range than the BW who actually is a rdps. So the WE with lots of mobility like pounce and instant disappear and parry can do damage in a large arc of 65ft while the squishy BW without mobility, without instant disappear, without much parry has 25ft radius and has to go into melee range. Not hard to tell which one is better.

Targets are usually in front of me. I don't need the 25ft behind me, Id rather have more range in front of me like they have. Forcing a squishy rdps like BW to go into melee range for their m2 or m4 is madness. The melees are made for the front line, BWs aren't.

Id even take the SH/SW m2 over the BW one. It does less damage but adds a strong snare and has 65ft range. BWs have ZERO fire and forget snares. Only withering heat with a weak snare but you have to stand still.

That was my point about weak BW morals.

You’re also complaining about Detonate, Spreading Flames, Flame Breath, and — (LOL) Rain of Fire.

- Detonate is a great way to proc Flashfire, or it can be used as a mid-tier execute if Nova is on cooldown.
- Spreading Flames should almost never be picked up.
- Flame Breath is extremely strong. It’s a cheap 20 Combustion builder and a great way to proc EF.
- Rain of Fire is a noob trap, so I’m no longer surprised that you’re using it for more than just a way to proc FF.

You also mentioned that BW doesn’t have a “finisher,” so apparently we’re not picking up Nova either. That’s another extremely strong ability that deals huge damage and is a surefire way to build 40 Combustion right off the rip when stacking to 100 at the start of engagements.

Take it from someone who actually performs well on BW: delete yours, remake it, and as you level and learn the class, then read each tooltip carefully as you obtain new abilities, these are things you read to understand the abilities the game provides for you.

As for now, I know not to take you seriously, and others probably shouldn’t either.

@Detonate: That's like telling melees that they first have to miss before having a chance to do actual damage - which can be resisted again. Not only that, they have to give up a tactic for it as well...
@Spreading Flames: yeah, garbage
@Flame Breath: extremely strong is a bit of an exaggeration. It is okish. You have to get very close for it.
@Rain of Fire: yeah, garbage and you can't stack that garbage.

So yeah, I am complaining about these skills. They are not good. Weak damage and adding nothing, no buff, no debuff, nothing but a chance of a backlash.

Nova is not a "finisher". It would be when it would say: deals xxx damage and yyy when target is below zzz health. And it does elemental damage. You can't debuff it in the single target build. Sorcs have lots of spirit damage, even in the left tree, so they can debuff with their dot and tactic. That's one of the reason sorcs are stronger in the single target builds.

Good for you that you like your BW, but my opinion is more in the line with Bomblings comments who pretty much hits the nail on the head when comparing it to the mSH.

[lumpi33]

I believe BW performance estimations greatly depends on context and especially on game environments. In general id like to note that some may miss out one thing about AoE BW, you cant think of it as RDPS gameplay wise, its played as melee bomber and it works then you have proper support from your warband. If someone is spreading the flames and RoFing from distance you are doing it wrong.

I could definitely agree on takes like "AoE BW sucks" in case we consider none organised environment and pugging. Then yeah, no critical dmg mass, no focused dmg into 1 spot and thus it feels that BW has no impact. Plus you have no proper support both from tanks and healers, if you even have them in your group thus it feels you are paper.

Situation is clearly completely different if we talk about organised gameplay. BW is shining bright, bringing insane dmg boosts for party thru procs and totally on par with WL dmg wise. It has much better tools than sorc to sustain and definitely at great spot. It has great bombing and utility morales too

This is true but we all know that bombing got nerfed long ago. They took the nerf hit but didn't get compensation for it. Same with the GCD change. Classes without auto attacks were affected more than others. Our damage went downhill. Same with the removal of the 100% damage boost moral. Same with the recent nerfs to aoe damage in general. Same with the change of RoF to not stack anymore. The crit damage bonus of the mechanic got nerfed as well. Then there was the stats contribution rework and people now disrupt way more. Deft Defender is much cheaper in RoR then it was in the initial WAR version. Our ranged kd got nerfed as well from 3s to 2s, yes it was 2s in WAR but it had shorter GCD. The kd further more takes off the ignite which is our debuff. Is there any melee with only 2s and such a downside? I don't think so. They have 3-5s, no downside and pull/pounce/charge to overcome range quickly. Hell, maras even do 2s aoe kds without any drawdown, and it is not a 13 point ability where you have to go deep in the tree as primary spec.

So lots of nerfs over the time and nothing in return to compensate for it.

The question is: Why would you take a close range BW over a slayer/wl today? The answer is you wont. You can see it in scenarios, in cities, everywhere that people prefer mdps over BWs. Why? It's not primarily the damage in that case. It is the weak toolkit. As BW you don't have charge or pulls or aoe kd or good escapes or aoe detaunt or break root or pounce or high defense. Not to forget that you hurt yourself trying to do damage with a slow ramp up in power. All that stuff matters in today warbands.

The city instances are currently not working on the killboard. Otherwise Id show you that BWs die way more often and their damage isn't better than that of mdps. So yeah, it is lacking, no matter how you look at it.

[wonshot]

In an attempt to stay on topic, and the state of BW.

Brightwizard can function, both its singletarget timestamping in orvr smallscale/scs. aoe build for funneling with RoF pugging, organized 2-2-2 melee closerange bomber fully supported and zergsurfting with FBB burning head annihilate build.

That, to me. Is a class that has it good.
My personal view is that Backdraft doesnt thematically fit into a closerange tree. Having a strong long aoe dot on an aoe punt is hard to use for its damage (combine it with a No Escape most likely) but due to how short fights usualy are, the backdraft serves mostly as a poor-mans selfpeel attempt when you get yoinked by a mara. It doesnt fit in with Annihilate and the Mastery M4.
Wildfire is something I used to run, but honestly ticking for 50 on guarded targets seem like Crown of Fire procrate for the whole group is just much better value if you wanted bonus damage on your aoe DD.

The class has a 0-100 mechanic, but majority of the time do we sit at max and only sometimes in a mobile fight do we use Sorched Earth as a one-two rotation between Flamebreath into SE. The fact that we need to spend a tactic slot on turning a frontal DoT into an aoe filler, is pretty bandaid to me. Id like to se BW get a themetical melee filler like when MSH lost his melee ST knockdown and gained an aoe filler instead. Backdraft getting converted into this would be cool, would free up Feiry Reserves tactic and Flamebreath spamming and using new 13point melee pbaoe ability as a filler along with SE. This could be an attempt of doing more up-down mechanical play.

Singletarget timestamping, ive commented on before. I personally dont belive a middleground can be balanced where you dont have a pugstomping monster in that playstyle and still have enough punch to play it in competitve 2-2-2 smallscale. It just turns into both teams focusing on catching or protecting the clown.

Also alternatives to crit would be nice, with all the anticrit added to the game. Pocketitems, TB, Healers granted ability, Choppa critimmunity etc.

[nocturnalguest]

1. So lots of nerfs over the time and nothing in return to compensate for it.

2. The question is: Why would you take a close range BW over a slayer/wl today? The answer is you wont. You can see it in scenarios, in cities, everywhere that people prefer mdps over BWs. Why? It's not primarily the damage in that case. It is the weak toolkit. As BW you don't have charge or pulls or aoe kd or good escapes or aoe detaunt or break root or pounce or high defense. Not to forget that you hurt yourself trying to do damage with a slow ramp up in power. All that stuff matters in today warbands.

3. The city instances are currently not working on the killboard. Otherwise Id show you that BWs die way more often and their damage isn't better than that of mdps. So yeah, it is lacking, no matter how you look at it.

1. Nothing in return thats true, just a simple fact that their mechanic pointlessly got a slight nerf for a reason that they were topping city charts in sweaty city tells quite a lot.
But the point is we live in an era of nerfs, many classes got a hit with nerfhammer. Class per class, ability per ability comparison is pointless. Main thing is if they function or not? BW functions, you can do any content and perform overally well is what im saying.
You point many worthless skills, sure, nobody argue on that, but its like overally classes balance issue which is still not fully resolved. And we dont talk about possible ways of improving particular tactics/abilities, you yourself started a discussion of how we value current state BW in general so people share their thoughts and feelings.

2. You would take close range AoE bomb BW in organised oRvR for procs. Thats how you build proper groups, its better to boost WL/SL dmg rather then taking x2 WL or SL. It always worked like this if we talk about oRvR, inb4 it was SL+BW stacks for most part, nowdays its WL+BW stacks if you form meta bomb warband. All that matters in terms of dmg is creating a spikes that will exceed HPS curves, flashfire+annihilate+fb dot+funnel power+flame of rhuin+flame shield does just that so BW dmg works fine, also just look into any skirmish where proper organised order warband was present (e.g. retri), WL/SL will have insane amount of dmg thru BW procs. WL spikes greatest atm, SL spiking with few IDs+onslaught into channel drop got nerfed a bit so i'd say BW is on par with SL nowdays. Overall scoreboard damage BW does is usually more or less the same as WL.
As for SCs its not optimal to go with BW in 2-2-2, if you take BW then you have to build 1-3-2 and then your group will shine. There are very very few SC maps where forming 2-2-2 bombing group with BW makes alot of sense and also funnily enough the bigger the scale/map the worse it becomes to bring bomb BW into SC. So tl;dr you are almost always better off as ST timestamp in 1-3-2 setting as BW for SCs. As for escape tools (if we talk ST timestamp in SCs/oRvR roaming), like in many other cases your best tool is good positioning and movement, nothing of any kit comes close in effectiveness on any class to good positioning. Selfcleanse unique for BW is a very great thing too.
City siege is a bit different tho, before they died out it was meta to have very few rdps, usually just 1 BW per order warband to get a champ. But it was before: 1) reviving of proc nightmare sh**tery, 2) sl nerfs 3) wl buffs. Class balance back then was actually much stable imo, everything (even sl rampage unnerfed) had counterplays, any class (sometimes in very odd spec but whatever) had an important place in city warband. And as far as i know there are no proper sweaty city matches nowdays, here and there you can see a great match but if you look up closer then you see that like 1/3 people both sides were on lowbie twinks etc.

3. I have no doubt that you will share such match. I suggest you dont even bother, i know how it looks like, so i dont argue. If before BW could be 10-20% above rest of DPS now its on par in best case and as city is pretty focused game mode and BW has no AoE detaunt unlike most melee it may have more deaths in bomb group yea.
Edit: this btw got me thinking, if bomb BW is actually a melee class, why dont just introduce aoe detaunt for its bomb spec. Fair play, huh, tie it into something in right tree and thats it