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@Doink I really like the long post and is explaining the real situation what is happening even if some like it and some don't. I would love to play my BK on combo's that is for sure and regarding the points that I mentioned, it is just my own opinion and the benefits that I personally think would make a difference for BK character. This is the reason why I posted in suggestion to hear many other opinions and once more, I appreciate you taking the time to explain in detail all the different points. p.s Let the BK be a BK and not a one standing character using twisting slash only to stun target.

Let me preface all of this by pointing out, that bk stun is glitched. It's supposed to last for 2 seconds, yet half the time it only lasts for 1 or less. I tested it with different rings/elemental resistances and the result was always the same... Now let me break down bk for you so you understand why it devolved into this cancerous braindead fenrir hold rightclick +Q +TS meta even in the 1v1s. 1v1s/Arenas Personally I play bk to combo and have entertaining fights where the players skill can shine, fights that don't revolve only around stat checking each other while holding left click + Q. Contrary to the popular belief of clueless macro BKs, a lot more is happening under the hood than just pressing 1,2,3 to get the optimal performance out of combo bk. Now if you do decide to spend 2-3 weeks in test server to figure out and get good at the mechanics of bk, you'll soon realize that the rest of the character roster is almost impossible to combo against, unless they get stunned. Why is that you may ask? Is it lack of skill of the bk? Low attack speed? I can assure you after playing max attack speed on 28ms ping and spending hours in test server figuring out if there is a way to combo through the stagger reliably, there is not. First of all, apart from rage fighter all the other classes get access to a mount, which eliminates stagger and gives them extra bonuses on top including higher movement speed to kite and reset from an unfavorable position. BK has none of that, you have to build tanky because by the time you reach lets say a DL, you're starting the fight with no SD and the DL can still knock you back once more. Getting low and want to reset a fight? Almost impossible to run against range characters as them hitting you quite often results in you being straight up unable to move. On MAX attack speed with the fastest possible combo, hitting a DL that's spamming deseier (which can't be juked, the radius is massive) or really any other mounted class with high attack speed, if you time your combo perfectly right as your stagger animation ends, it will still process only around 10-20% of the time. Why is that? The stagger frequency is faster than the maximum combo speed, thus your combo gets interrupted before you even finish it, even if your bk is running MAXIMUM attack speed. So your main source of damage - if you do everything 100% correctly and make 0 mistakes, is still based fully on luck. Either the combo processes or it gets interrupted, there is nothing you can do to influence the outcome. You have to play perfectly and in the end the result of the fight is fully determined by LUCK - either you get a lucky stun thus being able to actually hit a few combos before it ends or you get enough combos to process through the stagger to kill the enemy before they kill you, which if you're up against good players is incredibly rare and again - fully random. This makes all 1v1 matchups apart from Rage Fighter (which I never see anyone play, please for the love of god make that class viable for more than just DPS in hunts and buffing team) and BK mostly fully luck based, really boring and essentially turns them into a stat checking coin toss where the bk has to put in 100x more effort while still having lower odds of winning. You can of course build your bk around that but that results in a rock-paper-scissors problem, which other classes don't seem to suffer from as much. You build tanky with a shield to be able to survive the stagger fest and slowly work on getting an opening with a stun to actually use your main class ability? - Well if you build tanky enough to be able to survive the bursty builds you end up dealing incredibly low damage with combos. That is because you lose 10% damage from not dual wielding, all the bonuses of a socket weapon and to top it off falling slash (mace skill), requires far more attack speed than cyclone to make combo possible to use and it's still SLOWER than cyclone, despite dumping 4k extra points into agi. This destroys your kill potential but allows you to get an opening against most high attack speed mounted classes, giving you some, albeit very mediocre outplay potential. It won't help against glass cannon builds who will just outdps your defences and slowly kill you while you block, or instantly oneshot you the moment you let go of your shield and will do absolutely nothing against characters which bypass defense - rage fighters, SMG, BK combo. You decide to go for a high damage build to hopefuly oneshot the enemies before they oneshot you? - You're back to the coin toss gameplay, every single fight devolves into if you get lucky or not. Either way, you're not running a balanced build but a gimmick made to give you a chance to possibly win matchups against characters that hard counter you, while sacrificing a lot in other areas. SInce you can't change items inside of arena/gamble, you're forced to fully commit to 1 of these two builds and pray you don't come up against a character with a build that counters you - rock paper scissors. Fenrir build returns the coin toss meta, either you get lucky and get enough stuns to get the kill or you die to the superior damage of other classes. Is it healthy for the class or fun? No. Is it better than putting in 100x more effort than your opponent for the exact same result while running the risk of losing the whole event to a hard counter with absolutely nothing you can do to win? Absolutely. I'm all for making combo bk the better option, but as of now you're forced to absolutely play your heart out and play at a disadvantage compared to all the other mounted classes who can kite, reset fights by running away, get no stagger and get 10% dmg/DD on top of all that. Now regarding teamfights... In teamfights BK gets demoted to a support swell bot who helps by stunning the enemies. You have 2 options, either making your character useless for all sorts of content but teamfighting, going max vit/agi/ene with a mace and shield and being a swell bot that can't be killed but that also can't really do much in terms of stun considering any AOE damage or god forbid targetted damage will stagger you to oblivion, barely allowing you to attack to proc stun. Your other option is to have a more balanced build that allows you to experience other content in game as well, which absolutely requires you to be on a fenrir, otherwise you're dead meat. In non gens maps twisting slash on fenrir glitches out frequently, forcing the user to do various gimmicks just to be able to hit the opponent or only attack with left click, dealing minimal damage. In both cases this is a support BK who does not combo under any circumstance, unable to play dps/killer. Why is comboing bad in teamfights? 1. With a large amount of people on screen this ancient poorly optimized games performance drops to a point where combos become very unreliable. 2. Even if there was NO stagger and combos worked well in crowded areas, if you combo an enemy in a teamfight situation, you move the enemy and yourself. This causes every single one of the DPS players on your team to stop attacking as now both you and your enemy blinked away, at best trading the damage of your entire team for a single combo (with swell, erf buff and sm buff I'm not sure it's even possible to combo someone out by yourself, and with the nature of the combo it's impossible to use it in a team...), at worst having your own teammates killing you in the process. 3. You are chasing people who can't be staggered and have double the movement speed than you, with a measly 2 range gapcloser, good luck targetting someone and comboing them down... I would love if the best playstyle for bk was high skill high reward combo playstyle. In group settings bk gameplay gets very dull, all you can do is buff and support, but generally BK always shined in 1v1s where he could hold his own and had some of the biggest outplay potential if the user was skilled enough. As of now the only place where it's worth to combo is CC, where BK is indubitably the strongest character (apart from characters built to kill most mobs and then run for 10 minutes).