New patch came out and it is certainly a hot topic, so here's my two cents on the matter.
Dante Balance Changes (and what i think about them)
- Increased Wordwarden’s weapon damage on warded allies from 30% to 50%.
No complaints here, but I do wish it would just scale on Ability Strength.
- Final Verse’s “Tragedy” now only affects enemies within Line of Sight
LoS restricted abilities have always been problematic to use, and Tragedy was self-balancing by requiring enemies to already be afflicted with damaging status effects.
In a Solo context, you had to go out of your way to inflict said status effects with your weapons. So by extension, it technically already had LoS.
and in a Mutiplayer context, it was fine since you needed, y'know, another player? Indirect teamwork is fun, so gutting this ability just makes Dante less fun to play as, and with.
Dante is also energy hungry, and the steep cost of Tragedy felt justified. But now, there's not much reason to use it.
tl;dr: please revert this nerf.
- Reduced the amount of Overguard gained from Final Verse’s “Triumph” from 5000 to 2000 at Max Rank
This is fine-ish. Dante was giving significantly more Overguard than other frames that could do the same, like Frost or Styanax.
So rounding it out is fine enough, but I think it should've been nerfed to something like 3500 Overguard yield at Max Rank.
- increased Triumph’s base Overguard Regeneration per second from 50 to 100 at Max Rank
This is a nice buff, but functionally speaking doesn't do anything significantly different. It still amounts to the same effect of "effective invulnerability provided you get a kill every 2s".
- Reduced the amount of Overguard gained from Light Verse from 500 to 250 at Max Rank
This nerf also doesn't really do anything, functionally speaking.
The Overguard yield from Light Verse was rather small to begin with, so the most you'd get out of it was triggering the gating effect of Overguard.
- Final Verse’s “Pageflight” no longer applies increased Status Effect Damage to enemies hit by its Paragrimms.
While not intended, its removal is certainly apparent once you try it out.
It wasn't that broken, since Pageflight's paragrimms only target up to 3 enemies at once. I think this should be reverted and just added into the ability permanently.
Other Balance Changes
- Enemies with Crowd Control immunity (ex: Overguard) have had the following interactions removed: ...
I can see why others would be upset at this, but personally I don't really mind the CC immunity. You're still going to be affecting many non-overguarded enemies, and having to deal with just one or two eximus units instead of an entire army is much easier to manage. And with how much mobility and damage warframes have, they're not much of a threat, if at all. (Spatial awareness!)
- While the “Divine Retribution” Augment Mod is equipped, the base range of Nezha’s Divine Spears is reduced by 50% (at all Mod Ranks)
This was warranted due to how insanely good the augment was, but the range penalty is a bit harsh. This only really balances those who specifically built for the augment (high/max range), and hurts everyone who didn't.
I think the penalty should either be adjusted to a multiplicative 35%, or a subtractive 50%.
In the former case, a 250% Range build would give Divine Spears a radii of 31~m, and 145% Range would be 18~m.
And in the latter case, 250% Range would be a 38m radii, and 145% range would be an 18m radii.
There's lots of good stuff in the patch, but the Dante nerfs are a bit egregious. I hope DE re-evaluates their balance choices!
