In a world where Wisp can place motes and do nothing for the rest of the mission, Citrine can just give damage reduction, Saryn can nuke without line of sight, Melee Influence can disintegrate rooms and halls, Octavia can teabag while clearing levelcap, most frames have easy survivability with little input, Dante is the outlier?
His Tragedy detonation didn't need LoS, but slash procs from 3 did. Meaning that you still had to actively cast a lot and mark groups, especially if they were behind walls. It worked perfectly - mark groups, go where you need, cast several times, and detonate for a good finisher. Now, some enemies will still be alive, which feels terrible.
Overguard was paper-thin on any slightly higher levels. Plus, to cast his Overguard, he needed to cast 2 - and his main damage combo requires two consecutive casts of 3, so if you get Overguard, you reset your combo. It wasn't free, it was far more interactive than pretty much any other defensive ability in the game. Sure, it trivialised Star Chart, but what doesn't? Gyre can activate 3 and 4 and clear anything in lower-level content. Higher-level requires some more input. And if we're talking only survivability, Styanax with augment, Wisp, Citrine, Trinity, Revenant with augment, they all can provide that with less input required. Dante is really cast-intensive, he pretty much demands constant casting.
Not only that, but the issue of Overguard preventing on-damage abilities and mods is still present. The one thing that was actually a problem.
Pageflight's status vulnerability on top of that was just unnecessary. It's not like it's an AoE mark that increases all damage, enemies needed to be hit for slightly more status damage. We have subsumable Roar that double-dips on DoTs, Saryn can triple-dip her Toxin buff with some weapons, and slight status increase on some enemies is too much?
Seriously, those changes need to be reverted. It's so unnecessary. If anything needed to be nerfed, maaaaybe make so his Tragedy's damage boost and Pageflight's damage increase only work on his ability procs and not weapons, but otherwise, he was perfectly balanced, not even slightly OP. He was fun and that's why he was played a lot. His release was perfect - especially compared to the previous frame releases - and now he's only more annoying to play.
