Brawler Feedback Thread

[Joedangod]

Brawler Feedback

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Let's get this up and running. Feel free to comment with any thoughts you have on Brawler after trying it out. If you have no thoughts of your own, feel free to quote someone else's thoughts in solidarity.

I would just like to say:

Brawler so far seems like a really cool class for an MMO. Whilst I certainly have some personal issues with how it handles I have to admit the core idea/mechanics present are really cool. I love the idea of rapidly knocking out a couple of minor setup punches that you follow up with a hefty blow, the mettle system right now absolutely pulls that off. Moreover, the Innate Strength buff management gameplay is utterly fascinating to me. Right now we have a lot of classes that require you to focus on managing target-based effects in order to perform your role (just about any DoT spec as an example) but very few classes in this game focus on maintaining self buffs to this degree. Brawler has a lot of depth here and I love the buff management gameplay loop you've created. Seriously, a friendly hats off to you here, you've done a fantastic job of building the foundations of this class.

~ Bugs ~

• The trait "Dextrous Hook Training" in "The Maelstrom" line does not modify Dextrous Hook in any way, instead it is a damage boost for Mettle Spender skills.
• "Innate Strength" traceries still mention "Set-up Buff"s in their green text descriptions.
• Low Strike contains the tooltip text "Certain skills may take advantage of a vulnerability for added effect", no skills are modified by Vulnerable.
• You can't hide the Battle-Gauntlets cosmetically, if you toggle them on/off they will be hidden but only until you logout.

~ Gameplay ~

Overall the gameplay of Brawler feels just that little bit off to me. We have a whole bunch of mechanics that are excellent in isolation but don't quite mesh together. Each of the mechanics also seems to be lopsided in some way i.e. you're given a bunch of options but one of the options is just blatantly better than the rest.

Set-ups

We have three different set-ups; Low Strike, Dextrous Hook and Sinister Cross. Each set-up applies a modifier to the next Mettle spender, only the last used set-up's modifier will be applied so you can't combine the 3 set-ups to "supercharge" an attack or what have you. The modifiers applied by these set-ups are as follows:

• Low Strike: Gives the next Mettle-Spender a chance to apply a debuff to the enemy that increases incoming damage by 1% for up to 30s (modified by traits).
• Sinister Cross: Makes the next Mettle-Spender tier its related buff by 2, instead of the default 1.
• Dextrous Hook: Increases the damage of the next Mettle-Spender by 35%.

Looking at the above you run into one glaring issue; Dextrous Hook is vastly superior to every other set-up. It's not really that close either. The Vulnerable debuff does very little (and only needs applying once every 30s) and the only reason you want to maintain the tiered buffs is to boost your damage...in which case you get more damage by using Dextrous Hook as the set-up. I don't really get the point in having 3 different set-ups if one is the best choice in just about every single situation.

Dextrous Hook is also awkward in practice, you pretty much want every spender to be empowered by it but in the (admittedly rare) periods where you're starting overflow on Mettle it has too long a cooldown to weave between each spender (honestly sometimes you don't have any room at all to weave in any Set-up) and so it feels like you're missing out a bit if you have to chain Spenders.

It's also somewhat worth noting that the icons for set-ups are really hard to distinguish at a glance, they're all black silhouettes on an orange/red background, t'would be nice if these could have different background colours (Brawler in general goes a bit overkill with practically every skill having an orange/red background, would be nice if they could have the colours based on type of skill i.e. reddish orange for damage, green for defensive buffs, blue for offensive buffs...).

Finally we should observe that set-ups have very low damage values (less than half most spenders), this really isn't helping the class as we generally need to hit 2+ Set-ups to fuel a single spender. Most of the attacks we do are set-ups and they just don't deal damage.

I'd also say that Set-ups feel a bit sluggish to me right now, this might just be due to the lack of damage but I often feel like I'm waiting around for a Set-up to finish so I can finally knock out a big spender.

Innate Strength

The next thing I'd like to mention is the Innate Strength buffs you can build.

For those who aren't yet familiar; Brawler Mettle-Spenders fall into 3 categories: Quick, Heavy, and Balanced. Each category applies a different stacking buff. Quick attacks increase your melee damage, Heavy attacks increase crit rating, and Balanced attacks increase your finesse. The skill breakdown is as follows:

• Quick:
  
• Backhand Clout
  
• Helm-crusher
  
• Helm's Hammer (Not a Mettle-Spender, unclear why it is in this category).
  
• Knee Strike
  
• Fulgurant Strike (Not a Mettle-Spender, unclear why it is in this category).
• Heavy:
  
• Strike Towards the Sky
  
• Mighty Upheaval
  
• Fist of the Valar
• Balanced:
  
• Overhand Smash
  
• Shattering Fist
  
• Pummel
  
• First Strike (Not a Mettle-Spender, unclear why it is in this category).

The skill categories here are not at all intuitive, only reason I even know the category for each skill is because they're listed in the skill panel under those categories, if that wasn't the case I would have to purely go off of trial and error to figure it out. It's also somewhat annoying having to be concerned about the categories, when I'm spending Mettle I'd really prefer to focus on using the spender that is most suited to the situation i.e. Do I use an AoE spender or do I go with ST, do I need to reapply armour debuff or am I overcapping Mettle so much that I should fist of the valar myself back to 0.

These buffs suffer from pretty much the same thing as the set-ups; one of the buffs is notably stronger than the other two (in this case the % melee damage boost). On the tank end of things the threat modifier is notably less valuable than the parry/mits.

I know you haven't gotten around to putting in the effect icons for these buffs yet but could you please ensure that each buff has a different background colour to help users distinguish them more easily.

I also don't really understand why Fulgurant Strike (an interrupt) or Helm's Hammer (corruption removal) are included in these attack categories, you're effectively incentivising using the interrupt to maintain the buff when really interrupts should be something we hold onto for...well...interrupting casts, similar deal with corruption removals. That being said...I've always gotten somewhat used to chaining these skills together early on in the fight to build stacks faster so...I mean, I'd be happy to unlearn the behaviour.

Next we have Pummel, this becomes a very problematic skill in regards to these buffs. The 3 buffs have a 15-18s duration. You really don't have time to pull off a 5 second channel whilst trying to maintain those buffs due to how slow Mettle generation is. If you want this skill to be useable it's pretty much going to need to continually refresh any active Innate Strength buffs on the player or do a frankly ridiculous amount of damage to outweigh the dps loss from letting the buffs drop off. Right now, it doesn't deal anywhere near enough damage to warrant using. Right now I just ignore it entirely which is a bit sad because that animation is so cool. Oh, and self-rooting for 5s on a melee spec without a sprint is rough.

Finally we have the Share Innate Strength buffs. You pick these up from yellow line, they require you to tier the personal buff to rank 4, at which point you can share that buff to your fellowship. The 3 buffs for red-line are as follows:

• 16.65% melee damage boost
• 34020 Finesse
• 32130 Crit Rating

Again, same problem as ever. Only one is really a meaningful boost to share. I also find the fact that these skills don't share a cooldown a bit strange although I suppose I'd only ever care about sharing the Quickness buff anyway.

Buffs

For a class that is billed as damage/tank, Brawler really does have an excessive number of self/group buffs. What's worse is that several of these buffs do basically the same thing and have basically the same cooldown.

• Feint: Restores 3-6 Mettle, gives a damage boost, 30s cooldown (with tracery).
• Get Serious: Restores 6 Mettle over 6 seconds, gives a damage boost, 30s cooldown.

Is just one example, we also have Strike As One/Follow Me! as two 30s goupwide damage buffs with 1m cooldown, we're basically always going to be popping these things together so having as many buffs as we do just leads to stilted gameplay where we can wind up spending 3+ seconds just applying buffs.

I’d also like to suggest that short-ish cooldown buffs like Get Serious or Quick Feint shouldn’t have player animations. I don’t mind it so much on a 3 minute cooldown buff but having a small pause like that every 30s feels unwieldy. Better off if these were treated more like Wardens masteries, i.e. pretty much instantly resolve themselves and just play a little animation overhead.

Another issue is that we really do have a lot of % mastery boosts. There's mastery from the stance, mastery from the mettle count, mastery from innate strength, mastery from Get Serious/Quick Feint/Joy of Battle/Battle Fury/Strike as One!....it's just a bit too much mastery overall and it puts Brawler notably further up the diminishing returns curve. Some of these buffs really need to split into alternative DPS boosting effects or just merged together.

It's also worth noting that Brawler does not have access to a runspeed buff, as a melee spec that's kinda important. Not everything can be slowed and we really should have ways of closing a gap in those situations.

Finally I’d like to talk stances. Right now we have two stances on Brawler, I’m mostly going to focus on Aggressive Posture here:
Aggressive Posture doesn’t really work out as things currently stand. The design clearly seems to be going for some kind of “Gain DPS but become more vulnerable to damage” thing but in reality the DPS boost is minor (again, mastery) and the mitigation debuff can be pretty easily ignored. If this stance was a multiplicative +15% outgoing damage buff and +10% incoming damage debuff placed on self you’d have a reason to consider toggling it on/off, right now, it’s an always on button that’s only off if I didn’t notice some CC toggle it without my input. Defensive Posture somewhat suffers from much the same issue and could probably rectified by just making it the inverse (-10% inc damage, -15% multiplicative outgoing damage).

Traceries

Brawler traceries are also fairly awkward. We generally fall behind in terms of damage scaling compared to other classes here as most of our skills do not benefit from any kind of % damage boost tracery. As much as I hate those kinds of traceries, if everyone else has them, Brawler needs them or it's not going to scale properly post 50. So far the only things getting boosted are Backhand Clout and Hurl Object (does Hurl Object really need increased damage? I don't think it's something that should be rotational...)

~ Suggestions ~

I'm going to try keep this short and sweet:

Quality of Life

• Give the Innate Strength buffs different coloured icons to improve readability.
• Generally tweak background colours to distinguish skill types more, everything is a bit too orange, could do with green backgrounds for defensive abilities, maybe blue backgrounds for utility and so on.
• Increase Strike Towards the Sky range to 5m to keep it a bit more in-line with other AoE skills.
• Let pummel channel whilst moving. (Self rooting as a melee feels a bit rough)
• Have pummel refresh all active tiers of Innate Strength buffs, a 5s channel is hard to fit into a rotation when we're trying to maintain those buffs.
• Let Weather Blows cast whilst moving.
• Add a combat runspeed buff skill.
• Potentially reduce the damage of utility skills such as Hurl Object, Helms Hammer, and Fulgurant Strike to ensure they don't become rotational and are in fact used primarily for their given utility.

Balance/Gameplay Changes

This section has been pulled out and placed in its own post:

~ Conclusion ~

I really, really would like to see Brawler become a well-rounded class with engaging gameplay but right now it's just falling short. There are some really fun animations, and cool mechanics, but it just doesn't work out that well in practice. Fine for blasting landscape, but too unwieldy and undertuned to take into group content.