nice replacement, for anti physical focus zaura is still better, magic nuaele is still better. but you can’t have both, armaos does well for both.
so i assume it was good for dungeon and cm kind of gameplay but is not good for world boss or solmiki tower right?
yeah, though for solmiki armaos is still useful
Dunno if it is just my opinion, but i wonder if they do still have a clear direction for fencer and rapier classes in general. Fencers shone at single target damage back with the old formulas, as it could crit all the time and thus profited all the time from its buff. And attaque coquille made piercing attack ignore def. So while your physical attack couldn’t match a doppel, and you likely didn’t have piercing debuffs to increase your damage (as there aren’t such debuffs with rapiers - you can increase slash damage at most, with lunge, in a class that has a single slash attack over 3 ranks - flanconnade - dunno why they thought it was a good idea) you did have other means to deal damage.
Then they changed formulas, made attaque coquille a 10% def pierce (and didn’t even correct the tooltip, in our version) and made much more difficult to crit (you have to completely build for it, thus neglecting physical attack gems in weapons, for example). Sure, everybody is impacted by this change, but other classes didn’t have buffs depending on it - as epee garde works only on crits. And due to how the attack formula works on high defense targets like demon lord bosses, by neglecting physical attack, you’re tanking the min {1, log10 ((Attack / (Defense + 1))^0.9 + 1)} part of the attack formula, so even if your crits can do better damage…you could just have had a better physical attack to start with and you would have gained the same result, without having to rely on buffs (that can’t be kept perma-up to start with, anyway). And that’s what kinda happens right now. But back when they designed the class, there weren’t such inflated defense values, and the formulas were different to start with.
And let’s not even talk about matadors - i do like the aesthetic and general idea, but they’re just terrible and not befitting for a rank 8 class (and especially ridiculous when compared to peltastas, a rank 2 defense class than can provoke better than a self-called rank 8 provoke class, and that even got further buffs in these last weeks).
Then they even buffed further doppels and left fencers as they are, apart from some shinobi changes (and imho, shinobis are but a plague for the balance of those swordman classes; it’s like they’re using them to patch’em up, and forcing people to take it if they want to be even remotely decent).
Imho, if they want to make fencers useful, while still differentiating them from doppels, they should make fencers have a certain degree of defense ignore. Make epee garde work as a partial defense ignore instead of the current crit damage buff, maybe make it dependant somewhat on dex, change balestra fente as well and put crit buffs and crit enhancements on matadors instead. In doing so you can make fencers a better choice in certain circumstances (high defense enemies, bosses, while being still limited by the low range of fencer skills, thus making them better for single targets rather than large groups).And going matador would specialize them further in that regard, but requiring a lot of high ranks to do so.
But well, those are just ideas. For all we know, maybe they think fencers and matadors are fine as they are.
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Yes, fencers are absolute garbage when you compared it to a doppel with the same investment. It needs a lot of rework, lowering SP cost of composee and removing cooldown might bring it back a little for the damage consistency department, but I don’t think it’s enough. You have garbage aoe to deal with and only bunshin and balestra would save you from it.
Playing with my fencer’s stats a bit, I have one last reset by tomorrow if this doesn’t work out.
Build wise (for fencer), I don’t think any other build can do more damage in bunshin with SW3>Barb>Corsair>fencer3>shinobi
edit: hmm yeah my rate of spamming skills is significantly slower with this much str
I’ll probably go back to full dex
anyone tell me in a % better for bunshin skills
sw3barb2dop3shin
sw3hl2dop3shin
What do you mean in a % better?
Total skill factor?
How we feel about the two classes?
Anyway here’s some numbers:
Lv5 Moulinet [no crown bonus yet]
Attack [125]% x 5 = 625
High critical rate with attribute
Lv10 Crown
Attack: [543]% = 543
Shock
Take into account that the two highlander skills have long cooldown when used during bunshins and CANNOT be cheated due to no overheat
Lv5 Seism [no cleave bonus yet]
Attack [201]% x 3 [x2 Overheat] = 1206
Lv10 Cleave [no stun multiplier yet]
Attack: [326]% [x3 Overheat] = 978
Critical Rate: +50 for yourself
Bonus damage on stunned monsters(not bosses), seism stuns and using this after a seism is a good idea
the bonus damage dealt on stunned status is x2.5? (correct me if I’m wrong)
Bonuses to ALL your slash attacks < this alone already destroys HL2 variant no matter what you do in terms of damage
Zwerchhau applies the debuff but does not give you bonus damage on plate monsters, cleave still gives you bonus damage.
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I don’t understand why we keep compare HL2 vs Barb2 ?
We all know most of the HL build will have barb circle 1 in their build.
I don’t hate barb build in doppel but i think we should compare it with a fair comparison.
For sw3>barb2/barb3 build will have stronger clone due to SW3 gungho(more patk) + double slash ( clonable + crit attibute + overheat) , barb 2/3 ( cleave for 50% slash dmg and 50crit ) , seism ( cloneable + overheat )
For those who going SW3>HL2 is a wasted, SW1>HL3>barb1 will be the best option if not going for barb.
Sw1>HL3>Barb1 is a weaker clone build compare to SW3>barb3 or SW3> barb2.
Sw1>HL3>Barb1 will stronger when clone is on cooldown due to HL cross cut ( 370%x2 hit + 2 overheat )+ skyliner ( 335% x 2hit + 5 overheat + bonus damage for bleeding opponent ?% ) , Vertical slash ( 826% x 2overheat + multiply debuff damage ?% * i can hit 777k with crit on boss fight) Skull swing ( 670% for level 1 , but my zourhau / redel deal at least 30~40% extra damge on that 3 second debuff)
PS * i overlook on SpeeD question. my bad
anyone tell me in a % better for bunshin skills
sw3barb2dop3shin
sw3hl2dop3shin
The person asking the question wants a barb2/hl2 comparison
edit:
nvm you found it
Imho, fixing fencers isn’t merely a matter of changing costs and cooldowns. Sure, that would help too, but there are underlying issues in the design itself. When fencer class was initially designed, it was based on formulas far different from the ones that we have now. Most importantly, you could get all the crit rate you needed from your stats alone, and until the new ranks were implemented even the defense of monsters was still comparable to players’ physical attack.
By making crit rate available only via equip, on a class that uses one handed weapons regardless (thus having lower attack to start with), fencers have no chance but to either miss out on physical attack (thus tanking the min1/log formula and having a lower result in the other part, since we still have another multiplication with physical attack) or to miss out on critical rate (and thus critical chance, thus making epee garde less effective, and raising the chances some powerful skill ends up not critting).Gem slots are limited, it’s either one or the other. And equip-wise, crit rate is also quite rare. Outside of fietas, the chance of getting str, crit rate, and good amount of those is low. Same for costumes and crit rate. It’
That’s why i was proposing to change how epee garde and balestra fente worked. A partial defense ignore buff would already have the advantage of not being random chance-based to start with, and wouldn’t require fencers to have to crit (thus making them able to use red gems and other equips). If it depended somehow on dex, it would still have some drawbacks (else we end up with pure str fencers) and still point fencers toward
making crit builds.And a class having crit rate/chance/damage buffs that can rely on fencers’ partial defense ignore skills would then avoid the pitfalls fencers currently suffer from (and since matadors currently are rather pitiful, they can just push them toward that direction and maybe they’ll be finally useful).
Either way, if they want to fix fencers, it has to address the changes they made over the time. The game changed since the class was initially designed, and those changes ended up breaking the design.
I’m asking about this, thanks 
You are right, but that’s not how fencers were initially designed, they were designed as a “crit rate” based class starting only at rank 8.
Most builds already went full dex to crit during rank 7 official release.
I see the initial design of fencers was to have strong consistent single target dps or equipping a lot of aoe atk ratio gear to cover for it.
I like the way how epee garde is right now, based on crit. Maybe something else on rework like the more consecutive hits we do on an enemy, the more crit rate we get. This gives a decent advantage on long fights
I’ve long accepted that devs were always bad with fencers.
Rank 7: no aoe, aoe atk ratio dependant, supposed to deal strong consistent dps but fletchers exist, shtty rapier durability
Rank 8: Epee garde introduced, lots of good new skills, it seems nice at start but a lot of cloth monsters were also introduced during this patch, we’re also stuck with venier or lolo/solmiki
Rank 9: Shinobi or you are useles, crit rate removed from dex on rebalancing
@Lostac & @jhgohrick
i made some tests on red album bosses with sw3 barb2 dop3 shin
and, comparison with sw3 hl2 dop3 shin i lost 818 crit atk BUT i have more multiple hits to use on clones = more dmg ofc and more white hits than yellow (crit) hits
if i have 2 rank resets my doubt would be resolved but no, i only have 1 rank reset T_T so…
sw3 barb2 dop3 shin vs sw3 high3 dop3
which is the best ?
I don’t think removing shinobi is a good idea now but I don’t like playing any highlander without barb 1.
There’s no difference in critical rate/chance other than moulinet, in fact barb provides you +50 crit rate per cleave. Making your doppel skills better also with it.
so choosing between the two I’d stay with sw3barb2doppel3.
if you like highlander you can try the old build I use which is SW1>HL3>barb1>dop3>shinobi, but you will miss SW3 skills by a ton.
In ktos thread I saw https://tos.neet.tv/skill-planner#111444eeej build . Is it a good build for fancer? Which skills you guys advice? Do the build in Google spreadsheet is better?
hoplite mix is always nice if you’re willing to switch several times
I don’t like switching so I’m ignoring the variant. But if you don’t mind, it works pretty well.
my fencer build in the google sheets isn’t updated yet, I’ll finalize it next week
for now only doppel and bm guide is updated
I am a completely noob about swordman. By “switching” I think you mean switch weapons due seems hoplite is a single hand spear class right?
I saw some of the latest comments before posting here. I understood from the discussion that fencer works best with critical and even with the patch it didn’t help the class . I will try to open an issue to IMC so they be aware of this , hope they reach the development team and they address this soon
Maybe one thing that might help is if they add an skill like Zealot which increases the critical rate a lot (there are very powerful critical Zealot2 builds)
yeah you need to switch to use spear lunge
you can stay on rapier for stabbing though
About the hoplite/fencer combo… Maybe this question is stupid, but can’t you swap your rapier for a spear, use Finestra to get an absurd amount of crit rate, then switch back to your rapier? Would that cancel the buff? I bet it would… 
Yeap, it cancels the buff.
you have to rely on archer and chrono to give you more crit rate.