A Brawler's Purpose (Red Tree)

[AZAlex86]

Hi there,

I'm a bit confused as to what the Brawler's purpose is. They seem to be a single target melee DPS but are subpar to Burglar in seemingly every category?

• Worse survivability
• Worse CC
• Worse utility
• Worse damage (although this can be ignored until final balancing takes place)

In a non-beta world when the class is released to the live servers and all abilities are complete, what is the design philosophy and intent behind the class?

Thanks

[Treadstone87]

I think there's still time for their survivability to be buffed, in addition to DPS tweaks.

It'd be nice if Brawler could carve out a niche for itself among the more survivable classes in the game. Perhaps not as strong as Beorning and Guardian (though I wouldn't complain if they were), but maybe on par with or better than Captain. Certainly they'd have to be more survivable than Champion for them to make sense to me.

From what I've seen of Brawler, there's not a really compelling reason to play them yet. All the other classes that were added post-launch have (or used to have) more compelling aspects to them: Wardens were solo gods for years, Rune-keepers essentially brought mages into the game, and Beornings got a brand new shape-shifting mechanic and eventually rose to become the best solo class in the game.

Brawler, meanwhile, makes hand-to-hand combat - which is already in the game - a viable combat style. It's certainly cool but nothing dramatically unique or special. I think it needs to excel at something, whether it be raw DPS or survivability or convenience skills like travel buffs or *something*. If it doesn't excel at anything then all it has going for it are its unique animations, and from what I've seen so far, maybe 10% of Brawler skills look really cool and the other 90% don't look all that much different from the unarmed auto attacks you can get if you unequip your weapons on any other class.