Duelist sucks, let's make it better

Ya having riposte from skill tree would be a little frustrating for some newbies. It's basically having GS as a proc from the tree.

Maybe have parry from tree and an aura that puts in riposte. Honestly the best idea with it would be to link it to charges of some sort.

Maybe you cast a skill like enduring cry, every successful block gives you a frenzy charge, every successful riposte burns a frenzy charge, 20-45 second duration.

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flab wrote:

I'm not sure I follow the frustrating for newbies bit?

It's not having GS as a proc from the tree, the idea of a reasonable debuff (or char buff) from a sucessful parry seems pretty interesting to me.

Why would you want riposte as an aura? That makes very little sense and literally ends up being tempest shield.

Although I may be misunderstanding what you're intending with the aura.

Ya I'm working the details myself. Having a physical version of tempest isn't a bad idea though.

I go AWOL for 3 weeks and miss one of the most interesting and relevant (to me) discussions I've seen on the forums thus far. I'm gonna try to read this thread tonight and offer any suggestions/input I can. I just want to make sure something hasn't already been covered before I start spouting off.

This is my favorite class that I've played and after getting 4 duelists to end-game hopefully I can offer some constructive criticism of the class.

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TheAxiom wrote:

This is my favorite class that I've played and after getting 4 duelists to end-game hopefully I can offer some constructive criticism of the class.

noob

On the burning a charge idea.. For now, we have cold snap as a power charge sink, flicker strike as a frenzy charge sink, and immortal call as a endurance charge sink. Which charge should we couple to the parry/riposte system?

To me, the charge that fits best is power charges, but crit is not really on the dev's cards. :/ Next up is frenzy charges.

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So, the theme of passive skill tree doesn't really fit in with the idea of manual ripostes. There can be a lot of abuse (perma-charge) if parrying allows users to gain an endurance charge. That is, a player no longer has to cast enduring cry, just keep a couple of enemies alive from each mob... :/

In comparison, frenzy charges are fairly easy to get and has slight diminishing returns:

Blood Rage->kill xN ->Flicker Strike spam. Offensive, chaining combos
Frenzy->hit xN ->Flicker Strike spam. same as above
ParryxN->...Defensive

Frenzy itself gets a moderate benefit from having a quicker build-up - it'll be a no-brainer for general use. Also, the charge-comsuming riposte will need to compete with Flicker Strike to see fair use (unless we're consuming endurance charges instead).

In a PvP situation it will be dangerous to attack a duelist with frenzy-charge gain on parry though: whenever he parries, he essentially gets a free flicker or riposte.

Given the above, we would want to give riposte its own charge or debuff. e.g. successful parry places a 1.5 second debuff on the enemy: -50% evasion, -50% armour. Should probably scale inversely with base weapon attack speed so we don't benefit fast attackers too much. :P

I'd like to illustrate the exact debuff-duration we're talking about here with a separate example:

My current character on Beta is a Power-siphon shadow. The skill itself works when a monster is killed by the power-siphon hit or shortly after. The shortly after bit lasts ~0.5 seconds flat, and this is the important bit.

When I have a final APS of > ~1.95 per second, the most efficient use (siphon costs 15+ base mana) is to always follow up a siphon immediately with another wand attack. This gives you two opportunities to get a crit and insta-kill the target, thus obtaining the power-charge within cut-off.

The above phenomenon effectively means that until mana-leech becomes self-sustaining, Power-Siphon wand attackers should rarely, if ever use a weapon that brings him below the threshold - i.e., all wands below 1.50 base aps - this is most wands.

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I would really like to avoid that happening with the parry debuffs. If the buff lasts 1 second-flat and you can squeeze in 3 or 4 attacks with a corsair sword instead of 2 with a slower one... which would you choose? We're already using fast attack weapons for their better synergy with +flat elemental damage mods.

Hence: parry debuff scales with inverse weapon attack speed.
Say, duration = 1.50/base-weapon-APS seconds. You (and everyone else around you with the same APS) get a very leisurely opportunity for 1 attack, or if well specced for attack speed on non-weapons sources, 2 or 3 attacks. All of this regardless of the weapon that you're using.

So, a 2.0 APS corsair sword+mods will inflict a measly 0.75 seconds, and a 1.20 APS white double-handed blade inflicts 1.2 seconds.

I'm liking that idea, Could definitely work. Maybe we should sketch out the node layout and location in the current Duelist tree to illustrate. I'm not going to try it just yet, But it sounds like a good idea to me. Will need to work out the nodes some more before, though.