BW: Current state

[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

[Blkfiredrag]

[/quote]
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.
[/quote]

This is a city orchastrated by someone in Jempire and Dagga. Dagga said to fill a 12, we were able to fill a full Jemp 6 and pug enough for a "cordinated" 12.

https://killboard.returnofreckoning.com ... d76fcd95c5

[lumpi33]

I would have picked a scenario with 2/2/2 setups and a more even one. This one was more of a rofl stomp by order. Both sides only one healer. Jesus...

I'm more impressed by the Dok healer than the BW kills. Less than 1/3 of your damage was actually kill damage and they had only that one Dok healing. That's actually pretty bad. Not enough pressure. Anyway, not a good example at all.

[Blkfiredrag]

I would have picked a scenario with 2/2/2 setups and a more even one. This one was more of a rofl stomp by order. Both sides only one healer. Jesus...

I'm more impressed by the Dok healer than the BW kills. Less than 1/3 of your damage was actually kill damage and they had only that one Dok healing. That's actually pretty bad. Not enough pressure. Anyway, not a good example at all.

Sick dude, lemmy know when you re-roll; i'll send over some devastator boots and gloves

[wonshot]

Yeah that city was a good example of pug stopping honestly. I had to take over target calling during stage3. That destro group was not experienced in city and neither calls nor comp met city standards. That's what people refer to about it's different being an aoe bw in NA hours and how you can get away with murder, but that does show the good sides of bw which is topical

[lumpi33]

Yeah that city was a good example of pug stopping honestly. I had to take over target calling during stage3. That destro group was not experienced in city and neither calls nor comp met city standards. That's what people refer to about it's different being an aoe bw in NA hours and how you can get away with murder, but that does show the good sides of bw which is topical

Yeah, agree. When you face good melees then it looks more like this:

https://killboard.returnofreckoning.com ... 2ce11d54c6
or this
https://killboard.returnofreckoning.com ... 26531166cf

I've picked rounds where it was actually a fight and not just a stomp, with good BWs.

The pattern should be clear. BWs are mostly victims there without a AOE detaunt or an escape or other trick - as you can see on the amount of time they died compared to the others. The melees are taking them apart - as you can see on their killing blows and kill damage. At the same time the BWs are not really a threat to them. Their damage is mostly aoe fluff and it doesn't have enough pressure to get kills - as you can see on their low kill damage, the bad total damage to kill damage ratio and their low killing blows.

In the open rvr it's even worse for BWs. Melee blobs just roll over them.

[Blkfiredrag]

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.

At a certain point, when someone is this reliably wrong, ignoring their opinion stops being rude and starts being practical. You could always crawl back to your Shadow Warrior, though that would be just as unimpressive.

[lumpi33]

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.

At a certain point, when someone is this reliably wrong, ignoring their opinion stops being rude and starts being practical. You could always crawl back to your Shadow Warrior, though that would be just as unimpressive.

Just because you don't like my opinion doesn't give you the right to attack me. That's already your second post that goes below the belt. You better choose your words more carefully. Bring arguments if you think I am wrong. Where are they? Beside that I said "I don't need... , Id rather...". That means that "I" would prefer something. That doesn't mean everybody has to agree. That's the point of a discussion.