At the moment, these circles are… well, very underwhelming because of how poorly the buffs scale. As such, this thread is for ideas on what could be done to make Swordsman C2/C3 more interesting.
Please Note
I am only speaking with regards to Swordsman C2/C3 because I am familiar with the class. I’m sure many other classes could use balancing, but I only know Swordsman, and therefore please keep this to swordsman.
Attacks in general: Most of the attacks in the swordsman tree are fine because the class is meant to be a foundation for other classes; ergo the attacks are weaker and have situational usefulness. This is common for all classes (as far as I’m aware), so most of the skills under the branch of ‘attacks’ are fine as is.
Buffs:
Concentrate: Scales poorly, Basically a much weaker Blessing. Since this skill is self buff, the only thing I can think of is to bring it more in line with the priest buff, ‘Blessing’.
However, because that diminishes the ‘uniqueness’ of priest, an alternative could perhaps be:
Concentrate: Lowers attack/channel speed, but increases damage per hit and makes it such that channeled abilities can not be interrupted while they are being channeled. Lasts x amount of time, or number of hits, whichever comes first.
This would make the skill a bit similar to pain barrier, I admit, but I see no real other way to make concentrate something that makes sense thematically, where for a number of hits you hit harder (and perhaps slower?)
If nothing else, this could be an interesting attribute to tack onto the skill, and perhaps make it more useful *Since this thread is about Swordsman C2/C3, this attribute should be limited to C2 or higher
Gung-Ho:
This ability is fine as is; it just scales very poorly like many other flat damage buffs. Perhaps this will be changed in the future, but as it is, I have no real comment for this without it also stepping on DoV’s territory.
Pain Barrier: Fine as is.
Restrain: It would be very nice for this ability to have an addendum to it which says something along the lines of; If the target is immune to stun, then instead the target takes +% amount of damage, or gains a very low damage bleeding debuff that bleeds for 1 second which can stack upon itself.
Either way, this would make the ability much better for PVE, and also make it so that plague doctors basically just tell this skill to go **** itself.
Double Slash: As an attack, this skill is fine. As a cap stone for Swordsman, it’s basically a terrible version of skyliner (with more chance to crit).
This means it fails, in my opinion, what should be the goal of C3 of most classes, which is to give access to a skill that people are actively willing to trade for; for example, highlander’s Skull Swing. (Barbarian has a similar issue with both C3 skills currently are pretty terrible, but it has other skills which make up for it).
Since Swordsman is supposed to be a foundation class, I propose the following for double slash:
It gets changed into a buff that, for as long as the buff is active, allows all attacks (auto or otherwise) to swing a second time in terms of damage.
Code wise, I think the way to do this would be to program such that there’s a % chance for a property attack based off main weapon damage to trigger off any other attack. Not all attacks would trigger this skill for good reason, and the % chance to activate would likely be very small so that swordsman C3 doesn’t immediately become a ‘everyone must take it’ circle.
I think that this would make it such that Swordsman is in a better spot for people willing to take Swordsman C3 (or Even C2), as opposed to,
“Oh you took Swordsman Beyond C1. Better re-roll if you want an optimal swordsman!”
Thanks for taking the time to read everyone.