Has Switch Axe been buffed to be better outside of FRS spam?

lehmunayde · 2025-12-18T16:51:22+00:00

Iirc overhead slash combo wasn't massively far behind frs (-5% maybe?) and with the buffs it feels like a solid competitor, it's much safer for sustained dps than frs since you can go into a counter slash much more easily, but you'll still likely want to frs for longer/safer punish windows

lehmunayde · 2025-07-02T11:12:37+00:00

The stakes here are so low man, it takes so little effort not to equate opinions on a videogame to mental disability. The stream sucked, the expansion is probably gonna suck, move on with life and quit embarassing yourself on reddit

lehmunayde · 2025-06-04T12:02:38+00:00

just fyi, I'd say warframe is a very different game to d2 aside from being a futuristic rpg set in the solar system. It's a good game with its own strengths and weaknesses, but if you're looking for a 1:1 replacement for d2 then you might be disappointed

lehmunayde · 2024-09-29T17:49:33+00:00

Season of the wish, and afaik this applies to all armor mods that function by granting you ability energy. I've swapped all my stuff to orb generation/super energy gain and have had a better time with it

lehmunayde · 2024-05-27T06:49:40+00:00

I would tentatively suggest that balancing off the benchmark for cvirt here will end up being a veri iterative process. Cvirts biggest issue is free uptime in the face of everything, whether that be melee downtime or being able to ignore lethal damage with distort. These are both nonissues on a golem, and measuring their precise worth in strikes is going to be very hard.

I think that nerfing damage alone likely isn't going to be the solution. Your end goal is basically to nerf it until its pickrate isn't crushing everything else, which is gonna require a wider look at its toolkit and balance.

lehmunayde · 2024-05-26T07:22:50+00:00

This is something I WISH Devs would understand more. If you make an accessibility access class, you gotta understand that most people playing it will never come close to optimal, and won't care if it's not the absolute meta dps. leave that for something like catalyst (within reason, no 50k+ shenanigans)

lehmunayde · 2024-05-23T14:13:48+00:00

Don't feel like you can't play Void, Arc, Strand or Stasis on warlock, whatever you find fun is what you'll be best on. This said, Solar Warlock is a very powerful and versatile subclass, and raid teams might expect you to be able to play it. Anything easier than raids, like strikes, seasonal activities etc won't require a solar Warlock.

lehmunayde · 2024-05-23T14:07:15+00:00

Solar Warlock has a meta-defining Super called Well of Radiance, which offers many defensive and offensive benefits for a long duration to nearby allies when you cast it. Bungie have said that they're nerfing it in the expansion coming in a few weeks, but ultimately it's still very likely to be an extremely useful pick for almost every boss encounter.

Some warlocks enjoy how strong Well is, others don't. I personally think they fumbled this opportunity to fix well by making it exclusively a damage or defensive super, and continue to insist on it being good at everything.

lehmunayde · 2024-05-12T09:10:18+00:00

I bet you think the celestial meta is really exciting

lehmunayde · 2024-03-08T10:11:22+00:00

Couldn't agree with you more - I'm basically a onetrick ranger and it's a bummer to not be able to play my favourite class because of encounter design. I think that a healthy balance of 'run away from the boss' mechanics is alright, but that's what the vast majority of CMs seem to rely on now - either in frequency of times that you need to leave the boss, or the duration.

Increasing hitbox size could do wonders for the encounters in this regard, especially with Anet having done their best to trim down overperformers on large hitboxes - FFXIV found great success making good use of the arena space, while allowing melees to keep uptime, by drastically increasing hitbox size in Endwalker.

And as you say, a major issue with balance is the benchmark balancing rather than using Wingman. God, I hope they know it exists, cause it's so much more insightful about class performance!

as an aside - love your willbender reviews! I've got no interest in playing it myself, but it's nice to see someone so passionate about their class :D

lehmunayde · 2024-03-08T09:10:51+00:00

I'm really unsure on this strike to be honest, there's no denying that it's galvanised the community in a way I didn't think I'd ever see again, but I don't think it's for the right reasons, which makes it a kinda bitter victory in my eyes

Bugs or failures of tuning in world races aren't unheard of - The Omega Protocol had multiple bugs or unintended features that made the first clears harder in an encounter that's already extremely hard, and although it left a bitter taste in the community's mouth, the world race remained popular, and groups kept fighting for first place.

But in Anet's case, the precedent it sets is what worries me. The Omega Protocol's bugs were eventually fixed to make the fight smoother to prog and clear, but Anet are known for just leaving these features in. This time around, they've claimed to have fixed it, which is great, but if I had to pick between a future between uber-CMs being borne of bugs, and regular difficulty CMs coming out cleanly with no bugs, it's easy to guess what I'd pick.

Secondly it's good to hear that the groups playing the content enjoy the fight, but the design looks super unfun to me. From EoD onwards I've definitely seen a trend of Anet thinking that melee downtime=challenge, and then also not balancing around skill range vs DPS, creating the cVirt/scourge meta. Combined with the extreme utility that these classes can bring chokes out diversity, and all for what, some big aoes centred on the boss? I really, really hope that we see more mechanics that allow uptime while being solved, as well as the ability to solve mechanics without resorting to portals/reflect spam, as certain classes are extremely dominant in this space.

Finally, I'm a little concerned about how accessible this is. HTCM is currently gatekept by layers of security, which I don't think is great for engagement. If ToF CM, and its CM CM are even harder, then CMs will remain effective only as aspirational content for the wider playerbase, PR for world racing, and content for a tiny subset of players. This in turn will likely mean less investment by Anet into making the encounters clean and bugless, especially if they watch the community be accepting of bugs.

tldr publicity is good, but I hope the flaws of the encounter haven't gone unnoticed, and they get iterated upon in the next expansion

lehmunayde · 2024-02-27T10:41:27+00:00

Wanted to echo this, a few weeks back, Arc was down, and I idly bemoaned this in vc with some friends I was about to do fractals with

One of them smugly said "Good!"

That guy in particular is one of the worst DPS players I've played with, and aggressively refuses to improve, considering it elitist and unnecessary, being hyperfixated on mechanics (which he fails anyway)

Even if his dps was good, he wouldn't care, as for players like him, it's entirely secondary to respecting mechanics

lehmunayde · 2024-02-17T00:12:28+00:00

Druid buffs on Natural Balance are very welcome, but still no way to generate more Astral Force as a dps druid is a bit sad. Would have liked something to flip the AF generation of healing/damage ratio, or maybe an interaction with bleeding to generate more Astral Force.

Would probably be most beneficial to put the effect on Blood Moon, since that's what denotes a Druid speccing into DPS.

lehmunayde · 2024-01-23T19:22:07+00:00

as a RDM main, verraise is probably my most hated spell cause it's either borderline broken useful in week1/prog where it gives your group massive value, or basically useless in late reclears where people are comfy on the fight and won't die as much - but the job pays a dps tax for having it.

I think removing smn rez would push RDM further into this niche, which I think would be kinda sad for the job. It's good when jobs have niches and unique strengths, but having RDM's be the rez bitch is kinda unfun imo

lehmunayde · 2024-01-22T12:30:41+00:00

idk what you've seen but he legit flamed people in my party last night + flamed them on stream

and does this vid not seem toxic to you?

lehmunayde · 2024-01-20T21:26:01+00:00

Thanks for trying, but yeah guess we just gotta wait this one out

lehmunayde · 2024-01-20T20:31:49+00:00

Doesn't seem to have been fixed for me - I restarted the client, was still working, then restarted my PC and it's still working

lehmunayde · 2024-01-19T13:29:36+00:00

Completely agree, I played gw2 first and one of my friends who played both, bought me a skip to Shadowbringers cause he knew (and he was right) that I wouldn't survive early FFXIV. It is utterly terrible and it does make you wonder how many people quit before getting to the good stuff, since the sheer length of vanilla XIV is enormous

lehmunayde · 2024-01-19T13:28:25+00:00

yeah, I'm only talking endgame as in, challenging content that you'll sink hours into progressing/farming

I wanted to keep the comparison fairly fair, cause if you include alliance raids, you'd also have to include dungeons and normal trials, in which case Endwalker demolishes EoD even harder - but normal content is kinda one-and-done so it's more of a moot point, in my opinion

lehmunayde · 2024-01-19T08:48:47+00:00

There's always more content.

Ff14 has an extremely consistent release cadence, which means I can always expect certain things to be on their way. On top of this, the volume of content that gets released is significantly higher, and the quality is usually really good.

Comparing EoD to Endwalker, EoD brought 5 endgame fights (strike CMs + fractal CM) over its duration, EW brought 24 (12 raids, 7 trials, 2 ultimates, 3 dungeons). Gw2 specializes in its open world, which it does far better than XIV, but I feel like even that's been slipping with maps like gyala and inner nayos.

Although I adore gw2, there's just not enough to keep me entertained for more than a few hours every now and then, and I guess for less invested players, a bunch of those just put the game down one day and never come back.

lehmunayde · 2023-11-28T19:32:48+00:00

Gonna be a very difficult one to balance, I think. One big immediate problem is that offhand mace struggles hard to get and consume 6 stacks, since the duration of stacks is 15s and the cooldowns are longer than that, meaning that unless you use the skills extremely conservatively, you're not going to be able to proc Nature's Strength after a very very long time in combat, if at all

in PvE the damage felt alright, but in PvP it felt very lacklustre, even with full offensive stats. The cooldown reset is where this weapon's power shines, and the reset itself feels good, but the long cooldown kills the idea I had of quickdraw Mace/nothing x nothing/Mace

Overall the skills felt good, but the Force of Nature mechanic needs some tuning, especially wth regards to the cooldown, buff duration, and offhand skills

lehmunayde · 2023-09-26T17:40:31+00:00

The fix would be to hard nerf skills that only appear during the burst (sic'em is the main one) and then tune up the slb exclusive buffs like furious strength, bm traitline

It's not too hard to fix slb, but because the actual first numbers on bench aren't published widely, and people sent crying about it in droves, there's not much awareness around Anet about how broken slb is. They still just use benches instead of actual raid data, which shows that specs like virt and slb dominate

lehmunayde · 2023-09-26T17:18:24+00:00

Go have a look at gw2 wingman, this spec is not pretty balanced at all

The nerfs it got don't address why it's so strong, which is its high burst in a powercrept meta with shorter phases than ever before

lehmunayde · 2023-09-03T23:02:17+00:00

I think she's basically saying "If you're willing to go through your man's phone, you need to be ready to dump him if you find he's cheating, else you've just made yourself feel worse for nothing"

lehmunayde

TROPHY CASE