BK stun on twisting slash

[Doink]

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).

 

[Doink]

On 6/19/2024 at 6:15 AM, Azir said:

The topic is very nice indeed! Its not about who is who, who can beat who and so on.. The player said (and many support that too) that in gens map/ CS / even CC /  a BK with TS+stun can stun u for 8 seconds perma and u die from a Tank BK on TS just, imagine how overpowered and not normal is that. Maybe lets make Elf with stun on agility tank build - oh wait Ice arrow can be countered, just stun cant be. Or lets make DL on Tank + real speed on fire burst for crazy perma 10+ seconds stuns. Of course nobody will like it right? So yes, as a BK player too I prefer to have lower impact on my stun (duration/delay/attack speed on TS) in teamfights. My point is if I want to kill someone 1v1 =this should be a combo way, if I fight mass pvp then I should not be able to solo kill just with TS+stun.

Please make a bk, even if only on test server and play around with it, because you have no idea what you're talking about...

[Doink]

On 6/19/2024 at 11:06 AM, WhoKnows said:

Guys I am coming with a suggestion if you read my post, for me the way you play BK character is not the way.
BK needs combos to kill someone to have that high damage and not play full vit with mace and sit one point and twisting slash only.

This is the main reason why I do not play BK. I love the combos dont get me wrong but currently in here, every BK is mostly VIT build based on twisting slash stun. 

I like to hear opinions from everyone, as far as I can see you are a BK player Dominic and you seem to enjoy it the way it is.

I fully agree tweaking BK to make combo playstyle viable and stop the fenrir builds in 1v1s would be way more enjoyable than what we have now, but many of your main talking points were wrong and in Teamfight scenarios playing a bk without a fenrir, unless holding switches in CS, is pointless and you're better off offattacking your BK for buff and playing literally any other class including VRF

[WhoKnows]

@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.

[Doink]

16 hours ago, WhoKnows said:

@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.

I'm afraid that's impossible to do for groups, where bk will always be just the support/stunner. If they made bk combo deal enough damage to make bk a viable killer in group scenarios they would have to really overbuff his damage output. If you have a bk on the target the rest of the team can't really focus it down, so in order for comboing to not just grief your team and save the enemy you'd need to have enough damage to solo kill a target that's fully buffed. On top of that with everyone running around, standing on top of each other and the wild performance drops people get in group settings, combos are highly unreliable and unless you're running a NASA computer almost impossible (I wonder if we have a player with a pc powerful enough to combo at sufficient speed in a 30v30).
If you're running duellist/dps bk instead of ref bk and you decide to dismount in a big teamfight, you're already permanently interrputed/staggered dead meat even with a shield.
So you would need to have enough damage to compensate for multiple killer characters and on top of that you would need the survivability you lost from a fenrir as now you can't run away when enemies focus you (no ice elf, no stun needed, all they have to do is hit you and you can't move). There is just no way to make combo bk viable in a group setting without making BK absolutely broken.



In terms of 1v1s it would be interesting if they gave bk a gapcloser or an ability to dash in/dash out of combat to stick to mounted enemies instead having to rely on them wanting to fight you. As of now if you're not also on a fenrir anyone can just walk away and there is nothing you can do to catch them. If they get low they can just turn around and kite you until they heal up. On the flip side if you get unlucky with combo procs (once again against high AS interrupts/staggers there is no way to guarantee your combos will land) or you don't get a single stun in, you have no way of turning back and resetting the fight against a mounted character. Or maybe an ability on a lets say 10 second cooldown which makes it impossible to be interrupted for 2-3 seconds or whatever value would be balanced.
If the fenrir playstyle is removed there needs to be some compensation as bk is incredibly frustrating and unrewarding to play right now. If you do everything perfectly your main class mechanic straight up doesn't work and is fully based on luck against 5 out of 7 classes, you have no way to run from fights, no way to initiate fights (Cyclone has a range of 2, twisting slash range of 3, DL a range of 7. Even when fighting lets say a summoner or an elf I already have 0 SD before I even manage to get in range and start hitting them back). If that was the case it would be amazing if said compensation raised BKs skill ceiling instead of being an uninspired flat stat buff or dmg% buff.

I assume there aren't enough developers to implement any of the above, what comes to mind as a possibly less time consuming alternative would be enabling the castle siege dash skill outside of castle siege.

I wonder what the admins think about it, as of now I think that people losing to fenrir BKs are mostly having skill issues more than anything, yet I'd love if the meta playstyle would be to use combos, at least in small scale skirmishes and 1v1s. As of now the game punishes you for playing combo bk. You're mediocre in 1v1s and pvp events like arena, you can't use it in any group settings as you'd just grief your team and overall you're just better off playing a different class that performs just as well if not better in 1v1s without having to deal with BKs high skill floor and skill ceiling. BKs who still use combos as the main playstyle do it because it's fun despite being at a disadvantage doing so.

Now the same could be said about elves, degenerated down to a stand in your face and hold down multishot playstyle with ice arrow being gutted and mostly useless, summoners unable to use many of their core spells in the main pvp events essentially demoted to another right click and Q class unless in CS or Gens maps, SMGs defense debuff getting instantly cleansed forcing him to play with just 1 spell and RF still being weak in general... I might be missing a lot of other things but I think many classes would benefit from changes, not just BK.

Sadly most of the meta playstyles promote stat checking instead of individual skill expression with only a few exceptions.

All of this only relates to endgame Genesis gameplay on max stats/ML/gear.

[WhoKnows]

I can see you are talking about BK on fenir, I love it personally and I agree with you.
My issue is the way the stun works on Twisting Slash. (With fenir on or without fenir on). The stun from BK is to long and what 99% of bk's are doing is full vit and mace.

Do you like this BK play style full vit and twisting slash and mace without any combos ?

[Doink]

21 hours ago, WhoKnows said:

I can see you are talking about BK on fenir, I love it personally and I agree with you.
My issue is the way the stun works on Twisting Slash. (With fenir on or without fenir on). The stun from BK is to long and what 99% of bk's are doing is full vit and mace.

Do you like this BK play style full vit and twisting slash and mace without any combos ?

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My issue is the way the stun works on Twisting Slash. (With fenir on or without fenir on)

Can you elaborate on that? I didn't notice any difference in stun functionality with twisting slash vs with any other form of attack.

Have you ever been stunned for a significant duration by a bk using twisting slash without fenrir on 😄 ? Was this in group scenarios or in 1v1s? 
In group fights I have never once seen that happen as anyone not wearing a fenrir is getting interrputed 24/7. If it did happen to you in a 1v1, try casting literally any spell on the bk or even wearing items that have + ref... If unmounted targets take damage they get "interrupted"/"staggered" whatever you wanna call it. That interrupt makes it so you can not move, attack or cast spells, essentially the same thing as stun but any class can do it to the unmounted bk

In most group scenarios bk can just left click to stun, iirc the attack speed on left click is the same as on TS. TS is only good for gens maps where you can hit multiple enemies or for fenrir build BKs that actually deal some damage as the left click damage is nonexistent. In castle siege it's unusable 99% of the time as you'd be stunning both your allies and the enemies.

 

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The stun from BK is to long and what 99% of bk's are doing is full vit and mace.

Are you proposing the removal or a heavy nerf of bk stun? That leaves us with no viable crowd control classes in game, just dps and buffers. You do realize, that with full buffs even if you have 10 people attacking you, if you're on dark horse or fenrir, you can just move around spastically and dodge all their damage? It's very rare that I die in group settings at all without getting stunned first, even on low hp characters. Now if you do get stunned you should have a SM on your team (mana shield is a mandatory buff) that can cast teleport other to save you. Imagine how the fights would look like if nobody ever died...

Stun works the same on all bk skills, the duration is supposed to be 2 seconds regardless of what type of attack caused the stun effect (left click, death stab, cyclone, twisting etc.). As I said previously though it is bugged and the duration is random, ranging from maybe 0.5 seconds up to 2 seconds - sometimes it just displays the visual effect and doesn't stun at all. That is not caused by elemental resistance either, it's random, so it's not even as powerful as it's supposed to be...

As for mace, every BK has to run mace, the class appears to be balanced around the fact that you have a stun. Without it you have no way to kill people, they can just turn around and walk away after the first combo. Without mace your only purpose in group fights is to swell. SMG has the same problem with catching people as BK but unlike BK, SMG can at least function as a high single target dps character both in 1v1s and groups, thanks to his attacks not moving the enemy...

Regarding 99% bk's going full vit, there is only a handful of BKs running full vit + agi. These are very hard to kill but it's doable if you're character that bypasses defense or in a group fight. They themselves can't kill anything and can't compete in ANY content including killing mobs on spot apart from Medusa/Selu/BQ and World Bosses. Regardless the majority of BKs run 1v1 duelling builds.

 

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Do you like this BK play style full vit and twisting slash and mace without any combos ?

Please re-read my previous posts 😕.