I’ve been playing through NRftW with my friends recently and we kind of fell into two camps:
- One friend and I decided to be mages. That friend has discovered the OPness of fire/lightning (more on that later). I’m a lightning mage through and through, so naturally only chain lightning would satisfy me.
- The other decided to be a dual dagger assassin
First up is the dual wielding. We discovered after a good 15 hours that there’s almost no difference between double daggers and gauntlets statistically. However gauntlets seem to have an advantage in poise damage, and more rune spam options. This is troubling for my friend who discovered fairly early on that his chosen playstyle doesn’t work because when he dashes in to unleash a flurry of blows, he has no interrupt power and is immediately counter attacked by opponents. This wouldn’t be an issue, if it weren’t for the fact that he has no way to be evasive or defensive at all while doing this, so he folds super fast. Coupled with the very high focus cost for dagger runes (seriously, why are they all 100?), he finds he can’t do much every fight.
This leads me to my suggestions for dual weapons:
- For double daggers, make it so that they have two advantages:
- When attacking, they activate a “guarding” property. Since guarding doesn’t negate damage, it merely reduces incoming damage, this seems fine. The thing about dual wielding is you are seldom relying on the two weapons for attacking. You’re using one at a time to attack, and using the other to pry open defences or act as your own defensive option. Think of it like a pointier shield. If you want a bit more nuance, you can make it so the double daggers do normal damage until you actually guard, then halve the damage for a short period (perhaps the remainder of the attack string) to reflect guarding tying up one of the daggers. Effectively this doubles or even triples the staying power of skirmishers who would be able to dive in, deflect the worst of a counter attack, and survive a few quick follow through strikes to disengage. But because it’s a guard option, it’s still affected by poise attacks and can be overwhelmed. Perhaps make it the worst guarding option so it’s “easy” to overwhelm with sustained fighting. It should last just long enough to help against a single big attack or a weaker attack string. Overstay your welcome and you’ll be block stunned and made vulnerable.
- Turn off recovery delays for the defensive options. Double daggers are a skirmisher option; get in, deal damage, back off. Harry the opponent, not destroy it. This means you should have the option to parry on demand mid dagger combo, and you have the ability to dodge on demand (with the usual stamina restrictions). Overall this gives dagger unparalleled mobility in combat, something which secures its identity as a nimble weapon.
- For fist weapons, a slight difference:
- Punching should have slightly reduced damage per swing (weakest of all weapons) but higher poise damage so it can make enemies flinch with a series of blows.
- Make the gauntlets have better focus generation than other weapons, adjust their rune attacks accordingly, and make unleashing rune attacks give temporary stacking damage bonuses (liiiiight bonuses, like 25% at most after 3 rune activations that lasts for a few seconds while in combat). This makes it so the gauntlets for offence now work on a combo structure: Execute a series of attacks, smack them with a rune attack, build up more. You become a poise abuser to beat the stuffing out of a target.
- Afford it the same dodge on demand ability so you can interrupt your attack strings, but make it more intimate. Rather than dodging the full distance all the time, if you dodge during an attack string, you circle your current locked on opponent to attack from the side (if side dashing) or back (if forward/neutral dashing). This cements the gauntlets as an infighter weapon.
With the above changes, both weapons become finesse fighting styles. Your skill can make you a combat god, dodging attacks.
Double daggers have the advantage of aggression giving you a guard option so you don’t have to worry about an immediate counter attack before you retreat while dishing out decent damage. Gauntlets can be used to stun lock single smaller enemies (non-elites/bosses) and are a more active playstyle because they generate a lot of focus to abuse special attacks.
This brings me to magic. Having spent more than 15 hours using just lightning, I can say I don’t feel like it’s overly powerful. It’s adequate, useful, on par with other attack methods. Thunderstrike seems a tad overpowered, but number adjusting is easy enough.
However, fire and lightning combined is I feel quite imbalanced. Overload seems to do a number of things which are multiplying their damage and area of effect. My counterpart mage friend is capable of using two abilities to solo higher level zones than he and his basic gear should be able to survive while my dagger friend and I engage with opponents in equal combat. What’s worse, if my dagger friend is in the thick of things and the mage friend does an overload combo, it seems to do nearly full damage to him despite the friendly fire reduction.
What I believe is going on is a compounding effect: Fire by itself makes things explode on death. Lightning makes things explode in a slight AoE when over killed. And if lightning procs, it does a lightning strike on the target which is itself a small AoE. Those AoEs and damages appear to be multplying together to affect a humongous range and dealing absurd damage. While I’m lucky to do close to 500 with higher Int at my best, said friend’s combo does over 2k in two quick spells. It has in the past accidentally one shot my slightly hurt dagger friend when he dashed in to attack an opponent without the mage checking his blast zone first… This makes playing with him less fun, because stuff tends to die before we even encounter it, let alone help with it. I can be charging my chain lightning to zap a crowd and he’s already blown everything up.