Brawler Feedback Thread

[Thranthir]

Speaking of a gold jacket... Why oh why do we have Brawler armour set with Outgoing healing? Any explanation from a dev? Brawlers have 2 roles, Tank or DPS.. so why add a 3rd set in the first place, but if you want to make something, at least make it something people might think about using.. else it's just worthless developer time spent..

Sorry for maybe sounding a bit annoyed, but hearing in the stream last Friday that there are no plans to drastically improve the Brawlers dps although there are clear signs something needs to be done (especially for endgame) just baffles me.

[Joedangod]

Speaking of a gold jacket... Why oh why do we have Brawler armour set with Outgoing healing?

They mostly copy/pasted Beorning sets, before this patch the class was also locked to Beorning.

[Mephizto89]

Speaking of a gold jacket... Why oh why do we have Brawler armour set with Outgoing healing? Any explanation from a dev? Brawlers have 2 roles, Tank or DPS.. so why add a 3rd set in the first place, but if you want to make something, at least make it something people might think about using.. else it's just worthless developer time spent..

Sorry for maybe sounding a bit annoyed, but hearing in the stream last Friday that there are no plans to drastically improve the Brawlers dps although there are clear signs something needs to be done (especially for endgame) just baffles me.

Those pieces have the same name and stats as the Beorning set.
At Estolad Lan the set can be upgraded but not initial bartered for.

I count zero ####s given here...

[Ainworth]

Yes, they only have Tank & DPS trait lines, But the Brawler Tank has self-healing traits, so outgoing healing applies.

[Joedangod]

Yes, they only have Tank & DPS trait lines, But the Brawler Tank has self-healing traits, so outgoing healing applies.

Brawler has % healing stuff, there are no ratings based heals. Outgoing healing only applies to ratings based heals, it does not apply to %.

[Halphast]

Has anybody mentioned that Pummel doesn't even work most of the time? I mean in addition to the fact you can double-click and accidentally cancel it. In addition to how easy it is for an enemy to interrupt. In addition to the fact that you can't move while doing it.

Most of the time it just does a single hit with no animation and no 5 second channel. I know it gets interrupted easily but that's not what I'm talking about- it's not getting interrupted, it's just not functioning. When I check the combat log it just says something like "used pummel for 435 damage." No interrupt, not moving, enemy isn't dead, but it just did a single hit and no channel.

Also, Fulgurant Strike's skill icon has a blinking border that won't stop changing color.

[Frisco]

Has anybody mentioned that Pummel doesn't even work most of the time? I mean in addition to the fact you can double-click and accidentally cancel it. In addition to how easy it is for an enemy to interrupt. In addition to the fact that you can't move while doing it.

Most of the time it just does a single hit with no animation and no 5 second channel. I know it gets interrupted easily but that's not what I'm talking about- it's not getting interrupted, it's just not functioning. When I check the combat log it just says something like "used pummel for 435 damage." No interrupt, not moving, enemy isn't dead, but it just did a single hit and no channel.

Also, Fulgurant Strike's skill icon has a blinking border that won't stop changing color.

Maybe it's similar to Beorn's Relentless Maul, where the skill says it requires 20 Wrath, but it does a Wrath check mid-channel and just cancels if you don't have 20 at that point. So you really need 40 Wrath to use it.

Maybe you need 6 Mettle before using it. I don't know, I think I've leveled to 115 without using it once, it's so useless.

[Halphast]

I think I figured it out- it's because the option "Enable movement assistance in combat" doesn't play nice with a couple of Brawler skills:

-For the throw-item (mug) ability, movement assistance makes the character run toward the enemy while throwing (as if it doesn't register as a ranged skill- a couple of ranged Warden skills/gambits do this as well).

-Movement Assistance also seems to cause Pummel to fail the majority of the time (even when I am already in close melee combat). Without movement assistance, Pummel works as intended.

[Thranthir]

Quickly putting this out there.. while I appreciate the "significant" dps boost. The boost has only increased our dps by about 50% during longer fights. Where I was able to get close to 40k on the training dummy I am now ending around 59-61k per minute.

So, yes it's been increased, thank you for that! But it's not enough, especially in longer fights. Because the attacks per second are still very low and the difficulty to keep all the self buffs active, this increase sadly wasn't enough.

More changes need to be made to make the brawler more fun to play.
Most have been mentioned in this thread already but a quick summarize about the most viable changes in my opinion, this list is more of a list of options to choose from, not all should/can be implemented I think or it will overdo it..

- Attack duration needs to be lowered, maybe tie this to Mettle, the more Mettle you have the faster you fight, having only 1.6 attacks per second just doesn't feel like a quick paced unarmed fighter.. I'd expect to be able to fight faster than someone who's wielding weapons.
- Set-up skills need to have their dps increased, and need to fire of quicker
- Make Follow Me and Strike as One raid wide buffs, increase the 5m range to maybe 10-15m and possibly combine them into one skill
- The innate strength buffs that give crit rating and finesse rating are useless.. make those into percentages and maybe they become worth keeping up.
- All innate strength buffs need to tier down when they end instead of disappear, this will make it less of a chore to keep them maxed out all the time.
- Joy of Battle - damage: duration needs to be increased or cooldown decreased to make this more powerful, or make the max amount of stacks lower and increase the dps % on each stack to make it a really powerful but short/long cd buff.

[Zyot]

Another useless update. SSG has no issues with hunters sitting on 450k+ parses but somehow they make sure brawler can't get past 100k.
I bet they didn't even test the dps "boost" and just added another 50% and let it roll (amazing increase from 50k parses).
Pure rubbish...and they always get away with half assed content.

[???????]

thanks for the new class . they are interested in playing by the fan. but I don't see much change. I think I'll put it away. and I will play with the old classes. I don't want to waste my time on a half-dead classroom anymore. I'll wait a couple of years. maybe the ssg will come up with something, coordinate it. good luck to everyone in the free testing of the raw product) patience and health to you. then tell us about your impressions.

[JLotro]

DPS is still low, and aggravated by how slow mettle builds.
Suggest either faster mettle build or lower mettle consumption per skill that uses it.

[Joedangod]

I will say that I generally don't have much issue with mettle generation as things currently stand. No, it's not generating mettle at the same pace a Champion generates Fervour or a Hunter generates Focus...but then those classes generate resource so quickly that the mechanic is barely considered at all. On Brawler Mettle requires some pretty constant consideration and that's a good thing. With Battle-wise Mettle procs generally allow you to average just under 2 Setups per Spender and that feels about right. The issue there is more to do with Setups themselves doing virtually nothing, the DPS bump hasn't really resolved that issue.

[Xelander]

The biggest issue I've experienced so far is the lack of passive Mettle generation in longer fights. If there was some form of mettle refunding or way to trigger Revel in Victory mid-fight many of the DPS issues would resolve.

The issue is with stabilizing the baseline, the damage itself isn't bad the issue is the drought when Get Serious is down or Battle-wise just doesn't want to proc. As it is I would say the damage is closer to burglar range than say Champ or Hunter. I know it may different at later levels with LIs and traceries but just from experiencing the class without LIs and comparing against other classes the mettle is just the big speed bump in the whole experience.

The issue was similar with tanking pre-buff pass. The biggest issue I experienced was attempting to recover after going down on a boss fight. The overall experience is a bit dampened by a momentum loss whether from bottoming out on mettle or not being able to re-establish aggro after dying when tanking. The latter issue seems to have been resolved so bottoming out on mettle just dampens the experience.

[Zyot]

As the class doesn't have any dots, they have to increase the base dmg on skills in order to close the gap (or increase the latent light proc rate/dmg per hit to cover as much as a dot skill).
Also the animations need to be sped up, similar to what burg has.

[Dervacus]

At the Classic skirmish camp barterer I noticed the Pugilist's Dressing armor set that is class specific to Brawler. These items are under the "Helegrod - Beorning and Brawler" section. The Pugilist's Gloves and Pugilist's Boots do not seem to have a level requirement and I was able to equip them at level 41 (my kin mate's Brawler was able to equip at level 31) . The Beorning equivalent is minimum level 60 and the rest of the Pugilist's armor is minimum level 64. I believe the fact these items have no level requirement may have been an oversight or the gloves and boots are bugged because for my level, these items are AMAZING. With both the gloves and boots equipped you also gain a +50 Might set bonus

My kin mate confirm that this equipment can be worn on a level 6 Brawler... this should probably be fixed if it is intended for level 64 Brawlers...

[Joedangod]

If there was some form of mettle refunding or way to trigger Revel in Victory mid-fight many of the DPS issues would resolve.

How so? Even if you could chain spenders you'd still be doing significantly less damage than a Champion as the tooltips are just way lower (especially the ST spenders, no idea why AoE's are allowed to out-perform the ST stuff as much as they do).

As it is right now I'm generally pulling a 1-2 Setup per Spender average, if it was generating any faster it'd essentially stop being a mechanic. A fervour/focus situation needs to be avoided, right now Mettle actually matters.

[Xelander]

It would still matter even if we generated faster. The issue is bottoming out and having a longer time between actual damage dealing skills. The optimization and skill ceiling would be in the form of maintaining a higher amount of mettle while chaining skills vs being at the lower end. If the goal was to be comparative to champs or hunters, then mettle should work more or less the same way with some kind of passive generation. As it is, it is being used as a blocker for skill use rather than something we can strategize around reasonably. Our options are to really focus mettle management or to focus getting off more damage skills while scraping the bottom of the mettle pool every second or so to actually use a damage skill.

Even refunding 1 Mettle on Crit would not do nearly as much as refunding 1 Fervour or Focus point on crit because the mettle pool is so large. It would be more of a QoL adjustment than a massive DPS boost. I'd expect our Set-Up attacks to do roughly the same damage as a burglar's Subtle Stab. The actual damage from our damage skills seems about right, if we could get them off more frequently. 1-2 Setup skills is a quarter to a half of most DPS rotations and that's when we get to spend 1 Damage skill.

The only changes I've really felt that are sorely needed are some way of passive Mettle generation (this could be Revel in Victory proccing on Crit or some kind of Mettle Refund) and maybe speeding up the animations some. When I'm envisioning a brawler, I'd expect it would either be a really heavy hitter (big but slow DPS) or someone with smaller more frequent attacks. The damage numbers lean more to the latter but mettle starvation means we have to wait longer between meaningful hits.

I would expect some kind of meta build where we could stack 9 mettle, and essentially weave in 1 set up between big hits while we work through the mettle pool. As it stands, I might get 4-5 attacks out of this rather than 7-8 which would kind of fill the time between buff cycles.

[Joedangod]

It would still matter even if we generated faster. The issue is bottoming out and having a longer time between actual damage dealing skills. The optimization and skill ceiling would be in the form of maintaining a higher amount of mettle while chaining skills vs being at the lower end. If the goal was to be comparative to champs or hunters, then mettle should work more or less the same way with some kind of passive generation. As it is, it is being used as a blocker for skill use rather than something we can strategize around reasonably. Our options are to really focus mettle management or to focus getting off more damage skills while scraping the bottom of the mettle pool every second or so to actually use a damage skill.

It being a blocker is the point. If it's not a blocker there's no purpose to it. Take your example where you're just weaving 1 setup between each spender; in that situation you could straight up remove Mettle entirely and just rely on Dextrous Hook's innate +35% damage on next Spender as the reason to weave a Setup in each time. Your blocker at that point just becomes skill cooldown, which is what every single class in the game currently has as their blockers.

Mettle right now is the one resource that means something and honestly it still gets generated pretty quickly with the +6 every 29s from Quick Feint and the 6 ticks of +1 per second on a 30s cd from Get Serious being available for moments you are mettle-starved. The 1-2 Setups per Spender is honestly hitting the sweet spot here, it trends upwards at a solid rate. You can't chain spenders but then you don't want to, you want to be empowering as many spenders with Dextrous as you can. The big problems here are that you don't have a reason to mix up the Setups at all, if they can bump the value of Low Strike/Sinister Cross to match Dextrous then we'd get a pretty solid system where we constantly want to be mixing up our Setups. Setups also don't deal damage, which they absolutely need to do. They shouldn't be doing Spender damage but they should be at least 70% of a DPS-focused Spender such as Backhand Clout or Strike Towards the Sky.

I will admit that I'm primarily looking at this from the resultant skill-combinations. The 1->2->Spender/1->Spender mix feels solid to me. It suits the class fantasy of being an unarmed fighter quite well, you do 1-2 medium blows before going for the big hit. Shortening animations on the Setups by 25% or so would be fine but adding any kind of passive mettle generation will just turn the class into a discount Champion.

[Xelander]

Tweaking any animations or damage will more than likely overtune the class. As it stands set-ups are doing damage between the ranges of Subtle Stab and Swift Strike, which seems fair. All of the Brawler skills are flagged as 'Fast' which should imply that down time was not the expectation with the class. It is built around cycling buffs and contributing to the group while putting out midrange DPS. Adding 1 Mettle point refund on crit to mettle spenders will not make this a discount champion, it would open the class up to being a better experience for most players and potential usage in end game raids. Right now there is no reason to take a Brawler to anything.

I'm speaking from the point of view where I don't have capped LIs to shorten CDs on anything and looking at essentially just the base class where Get Serious lasts 6s and has a 30s CD and Quick Feint lasts 10s on a 40s CD. Between these there's a lot of downtime scraping the bottom of the mettle pool for any kind of meaningful buff upkeep and DPS. Battle-wise has a 25% chance to get me an additional mettle so a lot of the time I find myself having to use 3 setups just to get a single skill off when I'm in the period where Get Serious and Quick Feint are both on CD.

Landscape Brawler is fine because Revel in Victory procs off of kills but in any kind of extended fight, there's going to be drop off due to mettle bottoming out. If they changed it to proc off Crits instead it would be fine. Brawler is like a blue burg that offensively buffs the party rather than debuffs the target.

I would like them to also make Vulnerability something that could stack or maybe do like 5% incoming damage rather than 1%.

[Joedangod]

Tweaking any animations or damage will more than likely overtune the class. As it stands set-ups are doing damage between the ranges of Subtle Stab and Swift Strike, which seems fair. All of the Brawler skills are flagged as 'Fast' which should imply that down time was not the expectation with the class. It is built around cycling buffs and contributing to the group while putting out midrange DPS. Adding 1 Mettle point refund on crit to mettle spenders will not make this a discount champion, it would open the class up to being a better experience for most players and potential usage in end game raids. Right now there is no reason to take a Brawler to anything.

Ah, that's level 50 screwing with perspective. At level 130 Setups essentially do ~1/3rd the damage of Swift Strike. The class in general isn't exceeding around 33% of an equally geared Champions DPS. They'd have to do a monumentally large damage boost/animation reduction to even remotely run the risk of Brawler becoming overtuned.

I'm speaking from the point of view where I don't have capped LIs to shorten CDs on anything and looking at essentially just the base class where Get Serious lasts 6s and has a 30s CD and Quick Feint lasts 10s on a 40s CD. Between these there's a lot of downtime scraping the bottom of the mettle pool for any kind of meaningful buff upkeep and DPS. Battle-wise has a 25% chance to get me an additional mettle so a lot of the time I find myself having to use 3 setups just to get a single skill off when I'm in the period where Get Serious and Quick Feint are both on CD.

Honestly that is probably the worst point to be looking at Brawler then. Perhaps it's worth having them bake the LI battle-wise increase directly in to the class, that would go a fair way towards resolving the issues at 50. Or just give the "Setups have an additional chance to generate 1 Mettle" set bonus to the Rift armour. Anything else screws with post-60 Mettle generation which as mentioned is pretty much right where it needs to be.

[Xelander]

What I'm saying is that your view of the class is skewed because LIs have alleviated some of the issues so all you see are gaps when compared to other classes. The issues you seem to be facing could be addressed with Tracery scaling. What I am sharing is an observation without any kind of adjustment from LI against other classes without any kind of adjustment from LIs. So it is purely base class against base class. A class should not require an LI to resolve base class issues, it should boost the functionality of the class rather than make it almost useable.

Mettle is may not be an issue when you build specifically for it at the pace you'd like to play the class but it should not be a requirement to enjoy the class. What you're asking for can be addressed with the Set-up Tracery adjusted to have a damage increase that puts it within the range that you would like. What I'm asking for and what you are asking for are not mutually exclusive solutions. I would rather the rotation be Setup -> Spender -> Filler. I consider skills that do not build or consume mettle as fillers. Hurl Object or First Strike would fill this nicely and the damage is higher than setups.

Base Mettle Gen needs to be looked at whether it be changing the trigger for Revel in Victory to be on Crit, making Battle-wise red line passive (honestly have had no issues with mettle in Blue due to having more effective builders), or implementing some kind of small mettle refund on spender crits where it does not give a full use of another spender but does slow the rate of bottoming out.

[Joedangod]

What I'm saying is that your view of the class is skewed because LIs have alleviated some of the issues so all you see are gaps when compared to other classes. The issues you seem to be facing could be addressed with Tracery scaling. What I am sharing is an observation without any kind of adjustment from LI against other classes without any kind of adjustment from LIs. So it is purely base class against base class. A class should not require an LI to resolve base class issues, it should boost the functionality of the class rather than make it almost useable.

That's why I suggested baking in the Battle-wise tracery. It'd give early-game Brawler the same general Mettle production as late-game Brawler, only mild difference being lack of access to the additional +3 of Quick Feint. I get the idea of comparing non-LI to non-LI but then most of the game is spent with LI's (and honestly quite a few classes lean heavily on LI's to function, Champs have a rough time without Battle Frenzy as an example). You can't do the pre-LI comparison and make changes without considering how it effects the class after getting an LI.

Most of this can't really be solved with Tracery scaling either. I mean, it 100% does need the generic Setup/Spender damage boost traceries so it can stay on the same scaling curve as most other DPS specs but the base damage of the skills is also absurdly low.

Those are the tooltips for each of the skills at 130 with near-cap Mastery and full Mettle. Unfortunately I forgot to build up Innate Strength/Dextrous modifiers for this but overall those don't contribute too much more (+65% mastery damage sounds great until you realise that it's already kinda at +245% mastery to begin with. So a mere ~18% or so actual damage increase, assuming you have the time to apply Dextrous).

The most obvious issue is that the ST spenders in general are incredibly weak. Those tooltips are pathetic, the AoE skills outperform pretty much everything. Even Fist of the Valar struggles to have reasonable ST damage. I also have absolutely no idea why the utility skills were given higher tooltips than the Spenders. Let's throw up Red Champion skills (same mastery, also full Fervour) as a comparison:

The difference in tooltip damage is massive. Brawler ST skills are doing 1/3rd or less damage than similar CD ST Champion skills. That's not even accounting for Champions generally higher crit magnitude/chance. This isn't stuff that can be fixed with traceries, the class needs some major baseline tweaks if it is ever to reach competitive levels.

*Deep Strikes is also worth mentioning as it generally performs a similar role to Latent Light, but Latent Light on Brawler is barely scratching for ~12k per tick at 130 and has a much lower application chance.

Mettle is may not be an issue when you build specifically for it at the pace you'd like to play the class but it should not be a requirement to enjoy the class. What you're asking for can be addressed with the Set-up Tracery adjusted to have a damage increase that puts it within the range that you would like. What I'm asking for and what you are asking for are not mutually exclusive solutions. I would rather the rotation be Setup -> Spender -> Filler. I consider skills that do not build or consume mettle as fillers. Hurl Object or First Strike would fill this nicely and the damage is higher than setups.

No, that wouldn't work at all on my end. I am highly against filler skills like Fulgurant Strike, Helms-Hammer, or Hurl Object being part of the main DPS rotation. These are utility skills, their primary purpose is utility, if you're spamming them in a DPS rotation they can't really fulfil that utility purpose. First Strike is admittedly a bit of an oddity in that it doesn't exactly do a whole lot by itself, perhaps that's something they can add a point of Mettle to (essentially turning it into a 4th, situational based Setup).

I will admit I don't understand the objection to having 1-2 Setups per Spender if "Setup -> Spender -> Filler" is your ideal combat loop. You're already playing at an average ratio of 2-non Spenders per Spender. So why not just have the Setups occupy both of the non-Spender slots? (and as mentioned at 130 you currently bounce between 1-2 Setups rather than being fixed to at least 2 per Spender). I think it's fair to say we both agree that Low Strike/Sinister Cross need their effects tweaked to be competitive with Dextrous Hook, so if that change were to be made we'd essentially end up with a pretty varied mix of Setup comboes being thrown out.

Base Mettle Gen needs to be looked at whether it be changing the trigger for Revel in Victory to be on Crit, making Battle-wise red line passive (honestly have had no issues with mettle in Blue due to having more effective builders), or implementing some kind of small mettle refund on spender crits where it does not give a full use of another spender but does slow the rate of bottoming out.

And again, you can get that from baking in the Battle-wise tracery to give it a 40-45% chance to generate additional Mettle when the trait is capped out.


Apologies if any of the above/previous posts comes off as a bit blunt/rude, just generally trying to explain what I mean in as clear/concise a manner as possible and don't often take a moment to hear how it sounds. I mean no offence.

[Lillipia]

While I usually get the Utimate Edition with new expansions - I didn't really have money to spend this year with new home expenses. So got the standard and decided to try the Brawler with a little hobbit woman. It's been really fun, but I haven't found any vendor or auction item available to updrade my weapon - so when you start playing higher level content with a level 5 weapon - you die.

No big deal but even the Brawler training doesn't have any weapons for sale. I just got an upgrade from Class quest, but if that's all that's available - this isn't looking good. Let me know if anyone else has come across a place to pick up new gaunlets. I'm only 15 so, I haven't explored too much.

Other than that, I'm having fun trying to figuare out a play style that works for me and doing low level content again is kind of fun - no LIs to worry about

[Joedangod]

No big deal but even the Brawler training doesn't have any weapons for sale. I just got an upgrade from Class quest, but if that's all that's available - this isn't looking good. Let me know if anyone else has come across a place to pick up new gaunlets. I'm only 15 so, I haven't explored too much.

Itemisation is completely missing. You need to craft gauntlets until 45 where you can go get your first LI.