V2.5 Duelist Tweaks | Patreon Weekly #269

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m to go over some balance tweaks I’m making to the Duelist in v2.5.0!

This weekly also includes an audio Q&A! You can find audio timestamps at the end of this weekly.

What’s Left to Do?

The Duelist is in a much better place after the changes in v2.4.0, but there are still some tweaks needed as some parts of her class benefited from that update more than others.

Firstly, I’m making various tweaks to weapon abilities to help out various weapons that aren’t doing quite as well as others:

• Damage increased across the board for lunge, cleave, spike, and retribution abilities. This should help these more direct damage abilities compete with abilities that offer more utility.

• Charged Shot now has new uses depending on what you do after charging. You can now knock back enemies with a melee crossbow hit, or deal bonus damage if shooting an untipped dart. This should make the ability more useful in general, rather that specifically only boosting tipped darts.

• Lash is the only ability getting nerfed, it’s losing its bonus damage but keeping garunteed hits on all targets.

Next, I’m making some changes to the Duelist’s T2 talents to make them more generally useful, after some testing I was feeling their effects were often too specific:

• Lethal haste now grants 3/5 turns of ‘greater haste’, a new buff that makes movement instantaneous. Moving a step consumes 1 turn of greater haste.

• Swift equip is losing the 5 turn window at +2, you can now swap weapons twice at any point within 20 turns.

• Liquid Agility now also grants 3x/inf. Accuracy on the first melee attack after using a potion, in addition to the evasion it already grants.

Lastly, I’m handing out some pretty hefty buffs to the monk, who is falling behind the champion after all the weapon ability focused buffs in v2.4. One thing worth noting is that these changes are meant to improve the monks overall power, while also scaling back the power of medidate spam specifically:

• The Monk’s abilities are getting buffed across the board: no more global cooldown, flurry gets +50% damage, focus has infinite duration and works on magic, dash gets +33% range, and dragon kick gets +67% damage!

• Unencumbered spirit is getting a numbers change to make mid-tier gear a bit more worthwhile, going to +50/75/100% energy at tier 3/2/1, from +40%/80%/120%

• Combined Energy is getting changed up to be more permissive with a 5-turn window, and refund one whole charge, rather than 50%.

• And lastly, the champion is getting one buff to the combined lethality talent. The talent still requires using two separate weapons, but the second action can now be a regular attack instead of an ability. This should make the execution threshold a lot more relevant as you can now lean on it to get kills without using a second ability.

Hopefully after these changes the Duelist will be in a better spot overall, with more options that are worthwhile. She’s already closed a lot of the gap between herself and the other heroes since v2.4, I think she just needs a final push.

I’m going to be spending most of this coming week writing a public 10th anniversary post and attending a convention, so expec tnext weekly to be a little sparse. After that I plan to start pushing for v2.5’s release!

Audio Timestamps

This month there were 17 questions from 5 different patrons.

• 0:09 - "queen fight! what say you?" - radiantchaos

• 0:23 - "how do u usually schedule ur weekly work plan and balance work and daily life?" - Oxide111

• 2:22 - "how day?" - radiantchaos

• 3:28 - "do you ever plan on releasing any merch?" - radiantchaos

• 4:57 - "There's a lot of changes coming to Duelist in 2.5, but no mention of her armor abilities. Do you think they are in a good spot right now?" - Veek

• 5:45 - "Piggy-backing off the last question, what are your thoughts on the Armor Abilities as a whole?" - Raynuva

• 7:42 - "do u plan to add more wands，artifacts and rings in future update? more chals?" - Oxide111

• 9:14 - "what will you do when you are approached by the White Pharaoh?" - radiantchaos

• 11:09 - "what do u think of some specfic chals origined from original PD weaken some classes and their subs in ShPD" - Oxide111

• 12:52 - "do you own an air fryer?" - radiantchaos

• 14:00 - "When or if the Cleric comes to us in an alpha, will they be bald like the Duelist?" - Veek

• 15:14 - "can we have the item used to upgrade rings like arcane resin?" - Oxide111

• 16:39 - "are you gonna watch the olympics?" - radiantchaos

• 17:24 - "You said you will buff late game enemies to compensate for the player having more upgrades thanks to the new blacksmith quest, yet that didn't happen thus far. Why?" - Block Vader

• 19:04 - "I know I have asked this one before, but that was quite a while ago. Any funny/unhinged suggestions you have received through e-mail recently?" - Block Vader

• 20:12 - "While you may not be able to share the 10th Challenge yet, what are your considerations when making new challenges, and what challenges have you considered and scrapped?" - Raynuva

• 22:54 - "what d u consider of the reworked demon halls since v0.8.0 update。is there anythin u dont so satisfied with?" - Oxide111