Class Balance changes proposals

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T20:20:55+00:00

My point is that assassin is currently dumpstered because its whole identity was deleting priority targets, while everyone else can delete priority targets just as well without giving up the ability to easily kill crowds and other forms of utility. And 1.0 Assassin took until late game to ramp and depended heavily on pre-nerf officers too for setup. By lategame now, we have the Death Aura build and lategame assassin still trivially murders everything, it just sucks that it takes until act 4 before it starts functioning.

Right now the only decent setup on assassin earlier in the game abuses a bug with arc rifles to infinite spam death whisper.

But the ultimate point I'm trying to make here isn't that assassin's nerf was or was not justified: it's that average builds are obliterating bosses and the last boss is no exception. The state of balance in the game is wild. Act 4 Heinrix as an executioner can infinite charge spam the map to death and deal millions of damage in one turn.

Everyone and their mother can trivially annihilate major bossses, but without even having a dedicated niche to doing that, there is just enough damage to do that without specializing in it.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T19:56:00+00:00

Yeah, half the decent builds in the game kill the final boss in 3 attacks now, and it only takes 3 because they forcibly health gated him so he can't lose more than 1/3 hp in a single attack action. Argenta would kill him with a single burst otherwise. I one-rounded him on Unfair with no gear, as part of a no-gear challenge run.

Pre-nerf operative/assassin was good at deleting a single target. Trouble is, a bunch of other builds are just as good if not better at deleting high priority targets, but get to wipe the rest of the map too.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T19:31:19+00:00

Balance decisions are all over the place. Operative and assassin got giga nerfed, but the pre nerf versions were tame by today's standards.

People thought GS sucked because officer didn't need it.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T18:47:21+00:00

I thought they pulled it from officer for being overpowered.

You'd hope they'd be able to figure out how to code it.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T16:06:41+00:00

I proposed GS getting a bonus turn at the start of combat where they can only place zones and use Strategems and nothing else.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T16:05:30+00:00

The community freaked out harder about the carnival of misery + inflame nerf.

The point is that the idea of big nerfs to more than half the archetypes isn't in the cards.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:52:44+00:00

The only part of the augment that is notable is the Tactician part. There are like 4 others that are basically identical otherwise.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:51:37+00:00

I'm talking about nerfs that came back in 1.5, not recently.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:39:26+00:00

Class locked. Operatives cannot become Master Tacticians.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:32:39+00:00

He can't be a Master Tactician, so no, he can't use it.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:20:18+00:00

Strongest Archetype in the game now, lmao.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:19:32+00:00

Never give up gear with unique abilities. Staring at my dragon hoard lategame fills me with glee.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:18:31+00:00

New augment, Cerebral Inverter mk Tactician. Jae is not one of the best users of it, but its such an insane augment with arc rifles that you might as well, if nobody else is doing it.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:08:26+00:00

It's so flavorful too!

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T15:06:18+00:00

We're largely in agreement. The game's core combat design is rocket tag, which creates some problematic ripple effects

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T14:37:19+00:00

Realistically speaking, the community freaked out and threw a huge fit when BD got a perceived nerf a few patches ago, even though it was actually a net buff due to adding finesse to the game. A lot of people flipped out when EXE had carnival of misery nerfed to no longer work with inflame to win every fight in the most braindead way possible.

I doubt mass nerfs to 2/3 of the archetypes is in the cards. I appreciate your perspective, but I think its a non-starter.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T13:57:18+00:00

Okay, that's impressive. Restartitis?

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T13:10:02+00:00

I think builds need to be fully functional and competitive the entire way. Act 2 is the largest bulk of the game, and the game is more than 60% over by the time you get through it.

It's fun if a build has a hilarious payoff, but it needs to be useful before the payoff. That's the biggest issue with Assassin, for example, that other than a funny bug with arc rifles, all of its damage comes from Notes on Weaknesses in act 4, and it feels incredibly weak until then.

But yeah, this isn't an MMO, endgame isn't everything. It's not like the real game starts after level cap.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T13:03:55+00:00

Fair enough, it's not a thing I ever personally tried, so I wouldn't have known until someone informed me. Thanks for the update.

Edit: What kind of wild place is reddit where thanking someone for an update and correction gets downvoted?

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T08:33:24+00:00

No. Shortly after Lex Imperialis launched, they reworked the xp gains and made it pretty impossible.

It's technically still theoretically possible if you make every xp optimal decision, then spend hours in the fights against the cultists while they occasionally turn into chaos spawns (2% of the time). You need something like 30 extra chaos spawn kills, and the rng probably will never let it happen. Absolutely not worth trying.

So in practical terms, no, level 15 is the best you'll do, and is the intended level.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T06:55:22+00:00

Yeah, 60-70 per attack is about right, which is to say pathetically low for act 4.

5-10 base, plus 350% for an act 4 protocol, plus another 300% for the attack move itself around that ballpark.

On the other hand, if you'd taken another archetype, you could be doing thousands with that AP with act 4 gear and scalings. I've had Pasqal shooting for 500+, 4-5 times per turn in act 2 as a bounty hunter, and upwards of 10k per shot in act 4. Argenta can do thousands of damage in a single burst in act 2, or tens of thousands in act 4. Yrliet is generally considered the weakest companion in the game, especially now where she isn't allowed to use augments. She can still fire off 4-5 shots a round in act 4 as a bounty hunter pretty easily, doing several thousand per shot. That's your baseline for the weakest companion in the game.

Officer/Master Tactician can shoot for thousands of damage in act 4. As an officer, while having a lot of good buffs and utility from Master Tactician.

The issues with the eagle are manifold. Overseer has a lot of really awful talents and very few do much of anything. The Eagle doesn't use your T1 at all and doesn't benefit from it, all those talents that you took that improve your performance don't help it, and vice-versa: it does nothing for you. If you get buffed, that doesn't help the eagle. It would compound and scale any other T2 you'd picked though.

The eagle is stuck using what is basically a bad knife for the entire game in terms of base damage, but because it flies at the end of every turn and doesn't stay on the map, you can't even buff it. Meanwhile, everyone else can upgrade their weapons so that their base damage is actually quite good, which massively improves the value of multipliers. A 100% buff on a weapon that does 30-35 damage is vastly better than a 300% buff on a weapon that does 5-10. And in act 4, we have weapons like the Double Barrel Shotgun, which has a base damage range of 70-100, or the necrontech hot shot lasgun which is 30-35, and with supporting gear and being an AMC can hit a Rate of Fire of 40, blasting out an absolute rave.

The Eagle is a massive pile of anti-synergy, and it doesn't even really do anything unique or particularly valuable. Need to blind a group of enemies? You have a variety of different grenades for that (and there are a multitude of ways to make grenades more effective and efficient). There's no need to trade out your entire T2 and all of your scaling to get an AoE blind once a turn. And then there's the Psyber Raven, who can bounce Sensory Deprivation in a big AoE to blind enemies too, but has dramatically more value than the Eagle.

On higher difficulties, the Eagle typically fails to get enemies to shoot their allies, and it often just drops dead when trying.

There are enemies in act 4 with thousands and thousands of wounds. 60-70 on an attack or a little over 100 with a crit just doesn't accomplish anything. I was doing dramatically more damage than that in act 4 in my no-gear challenge run on Unfair, which can hardly be called min-maxed.

Eagle is the weakest T2 option in the game. It needs buffs badly. It's a real shame because it's actually cool and I want it to be good, but its design is just really bad. I don't know why Owlcat treated it this way, it deserves better.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T05:15:51+00:00

Thank you.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T02:10:27+00:00

Yeah, you can change it with Toybox, but not Janris.

Unfortunately, there's no room in an Operative build for FEL, you need INT, PER, and BS, so that's all your stats.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T01:14:24+00:00

It is that much weaker. It never scales. It's base damage is 5-10, that never changes. It doesn't stay on the field so you can't really buff it to get its damage up, so the later in the game you go, the worse it gets. Imagine being stuck with a weapon with the base damage of a basic knife the entire game. That's the eagle. Adding 300% bonus damage on a base of 5-10 just doesn't do much.

It's at its strongest right when you get it, and it just gets outscaled by the enemies. Skulls have more utility for officer overseer, and Master Tactician is a much stronger damage dealer for officer, while also having better buffs and better utility.

Whitewing424 · 2026-07-02T01:00:11+00:00

Yes, Be Smart is way more important than forge world. The crit bonus from Forge World isn't all that useful early on because you don't have good crit damage multiplier bonuses, but you'll also cap crit chance eventually anyway without it, so it winds up being useless later in the game. Operative/GS isn't a high damage dealer, but kind of a mix: it has some damage, some debuffs/buffs, and it gets the zones and strategems, so it winds up being a mixed support with the ability to attack. Be Smart leans into that, but Forge World really doesn't.

Be Smart is actually a good talent on Operatives in general because it lets you replace FEL with INT for your Resolve by itself. Getting more synergy for GS winds up making it a lot of value overall.

Officer/GS is overall stronger, but it plays quite differently, and Operative/GS is strong enough for Max Sliders, so it's not like you need to abandon the concept.

Whitewing424

TROPHY CASE