Since I haven’t been engaging in the community as much, I’m not exactly sure what the general opinion is surrounding these changes. I don’t really mind either since I’m not going to be the biggest proponent of these changes.
However I have noticed a few alarm bells ringing in regards to this topic, so I’d like to clear up some false impressions. As a disclaimer, I’m not here to change your opinion on how good these changes are, nor am I here to silence any criticism. I think that this is a topic where it’s extremely understandable for people to be apprehensive. That doesn’t mean, however, that people aren’t still getting the wrong ideas. So let’s break things down.
Reason for the Rework
FYI: This is the longest section here and the other ones are a bit more relevant to common complaints, so you’re free to skip this.
Some of the competitive members of the community have been quick to point out that in PvP, fighting styles are already some of the strongest classes, and should be receiving nerfs rather than buffs. To respond to that, this is about more than just “buff fstyles”.
Dreay is the primary proponent of these changes and I’ve talked to him about them over a period of months. I’m not exactly sure how strong he believes fighting styles are, but these changes wasn’t so much about how strong they are moreso than it is about design flaws.
The argument behind these changes is that the way fighting styles are played best doesn’t reflect the way that they should be played, where FS users often have to resort to abusing their ranged attacks and using copious amounts of attack size because playing at “melee range” comes with a host of issues.
- You can’t keep people in melee range
- If you are being statchecked in any way (including level-differences in PvE), melee becomes useless
- The ranged options are actually good. They just don’t reach far enough and have too high cooldowns to be effective in PvE
What competitive players tend to point out is that while these arguments apply to PvE, they don’t really match in PvP because fighting styles still dominate. But what I think people are missing is that this isn’t mutually exclusive with the core problems mentioned before.
Because fighting styles primarly operate at close range, but don’t have any way of locking people down, that means they need to rely on numbers to win. Problem is that everything that works at a range also works in close quarters. If you were to just nerf the raw numbers on fighting styles you would start getting more complaints of “why can Shadow Mage outDPS Berserker?”
However, adding ways for fighting styles to dominate at close range and keep people at close range means they don’t have to rely on just having the higher numbers, because now part of the objective of FS is to effectively lock people down rather than just flinging out attacks. On the PvE side of things, it also allows you to fight back against enemies that are stronger than you.
This allows fighting styles to appropriately be nerfed without just making them bad. However it is on us as testers to actually make sure that happens now that these changes are in-game, otherwise this argument is moot.
Intent of the Design
Since it was never made clear anywhere, many people have assumed that the goal of the Poise mechanic is to incorporate it into the gameplay loop of fighting styles. However, poise breaks aren’t something that are meant to trigger frequently if at all during a fight.
Poise is intended to solve the problem I mentioned earlier where some people would complain “omg why is a Mage outDPSing me as a Berserker,” which is a complaint that frequently comes up depending on who is complaining or depending on what the meta is. Poise break would serve as a deterrent to anyone who tries to contest Berserkers in their designated range.
It’s meant to be an extreme mechanic for a specific situation, not something that you’re supposed to aim for. This is to say that if both players are playing the game properly, poise break should never trigger at all.
Severity of the Changes
This was already partially dicussed above for Poise Breaking but a similar case applies for Stagger. Stagger is the mechanic that is supposed to be triggering frequently but it’s probably not as bad as you think.
Stagger is a brief status that disables your ability inputs and slows your dashing. It does not:
- cancel abilities
- slow down walking
- disable blocking
Stagger also triggers at an extremely close range. So it’s not possible to run Sailor/Ileg Berserker and spam 150 size attacks to stagger people. Even without Attack Size, not all of your attacks will Stagger.
And as it stands right now, there are no possible true combos. The stagger ends before the attacker’s next ability finishes casting. It will 100% slow down how frequently victims attack, but it won’t ever prevent victims from acting. However, the duration of stagger is likely subject to change and I could be wrong about this.
