I think it's no exaggeration to say that Hikage and Tsukikage used together is overpowered, and everybody knows it.
They are by far the strongest daggers. You get massive range, a gap closer that puts you in the enemy's back without fail, FREE SILENCE, and FREE BURN.
Honestly, the burn and silence could be removed and it would still be the best daggers around.
The silence really hinders many builds. It being an added bonus is insane value.
The burn shreds away a lot of defense which makes these daggers do a bunch of bonus damage. Free burn on a pure phys build is very powerful!
The teleport is ridiculously good. The sheer utility could only be justified if burn and silence were removed, at LEAST. Keep in mind these predate the throwing daggers skill and were untouched from then and back then they were still the best, comparable to seiryuu tessen which has been nerfed since then. Nowadays it's the only real option for twindance, anything else doesn't come close to their power.
The Hayabusa Set have only really gotten stronger in comparison, with Mundane's release allowing for them to negate having to build STR at all.
Hayabusa's problems are a few fold.
1 ) Burn/Silence (Silence for free hardcounters Bards. No cap. Volume Up being a silence cure/immunity could help but. That's another thread)
2 ) 7 range. Throwing Daggers increases the set from 4, to 7. Which makes it-- frankly-- longer range than some guns... certainly some bows without gust arrows/longdraw. Tack on the fact that you're building high GUI, and you're more-or-less not caring about the longrange penalty outside of small bit.
3 ) The Wombo Combo in the room. Hayabusa set is basically designed for teleporting behind someone. Dealing 80% of their HP + burn + silence in one attack... and ALSO giving Knockdown ontop of it due to Cutthroat (which is guaranteed silence MOST of the time).
Them getting to stand behind you, without an ally, is also giving them (10+GUI)/2 hit to you. Which does not apply to the hit cap. At all. Which is.. generally an extra +30 hit...
The only 'good' way to fight against Hayabusa is to just build so much dodge that you're untouchable-- but that's immediately ruined by guile-backstabbing by yourself. Just hop on behind the target and promptly obliterate a dodgy.
How do we fix the Hayabusa set?
Probably one step at a time to address the issue.
1 ) Reduce the range. Have the Hayabusa add an extra tick of Throwing Daggers buff to the wielder (2 per turn, or 3 with Monoclass Rogue)-- rather than increasing their range to 4-- and GETTING Throwing Daggers ontop of it. This allows for hayabusa to not be.. quite as long ranged, instead and makes the wield unable to be chain from one end of the battlefield to the other.
2 ) Remove the Burn/Silence/Teleport effect on the daggers. This makes positioning actually matter, instead of just lolteleporting behind people when you hit them. It's dumb. This allows it to keep it's 7 range. It's a bit heavy handed.
3 ) Remove the Burn/Silence on hit. Take the range changes from 1. Add in Movement Becomes Teleport to them... and maybe change the effects on crit to.. anything besides Burn and silence. I'd take Spelldaze and aerial razor (-5 def) at this point.
There's a lot of issues I have about VA and the consistency at which it can do it's damage, but Hayabusa is the primary problem right now, the ability to move and attack at the same time in a fairly large range is quite the issue. The on-crit effects are also just, stupidly powerful since having access to burn means you're shredding off an additional 8 DEF for just critting your opponent, something VAs excel at exceptionally.
VAs are probably the 2nd most powerful class in the game with momentum, just behind Evoker, you never want to give VA an inch and the teleport daggers gives them a mile. And while it is drastic, I would strongly suggest that the teleport effect and the burn/silence effects are the primary issues to be addressed of these daggers, they used to be garbage scaling and only 4 range, but that's no longer the case. The Teleport effect on-hit should be removed at least, cause why else would you use any other dagger since no other just gives you your win condition for basically free.
Really I just think removing the burn and silence would be enough. Or to at least make them status infliction checks instead of 100% chances on crit. I don't think the Hayabusa set is that oppressive personally. Or just give the teleport a 2 turn cooldown. (Riposte teleport spam is hilarious and very dragonball-esque, but I can see why people think its overpowered.)
We have 1m winged cobra spam to stay out of range.
I don't think they're as oppressive as a lot of other stuff in this game, personally. Flip shot, self titan gale, Dancers. . . Impure element. . .
Its not like they were really used before mundane became a thing. Which also means they can't abuse holy very well. Additionally if you had good crit evade, they wouldn't be able to reliably crit you without using up all their void energy which would be a big benefit against them. Not to mention the usual metal aegis/building dodge benefits. Pretty hard for a dagger to hit a dodger without flanking bonuses.
If its somehow really that bad, then frankly you could give the fire one the tool attribute or something. No reason to remove their entire identities.
Kiss farewell also didn't really deserve its mega nerf at all.
Hayabusa was used before Throwing Daggers were a thing, there were just different strategies involving it, and you'd run Tessens for the raw DPS most of the time, the most recent strategy is the most oppressive of the bunch and spells out a lot of the fundamental issues with the dagger set. Even if VA still has bad matchup spreads into super crit evade tanks or dodgy characters.
I'd say it should just not benefit from throwing daggers and it should be enough. Instead of Silence it should inflict Soaked.
I don't think removing the throwing Dagger interaction would be super fun but I do think the range can eat a nerf. 1 off the Hayabusa passive as the starting point.
Editing to be clear that that should just be the start.
I think Hayabusa set is very powerful and does alot, but they are not exactly the "Strongest" dagger set out there. Depending on what you actually want to do. They are however the most fun and versatile set.
You can do alot of shit with other sets, and damage wise Hayabusa is more on the low end. Its super fun to play around with though thanks to the teleport, but everyone who actually uses them and fights against a speedy person, knows that you won't hit anyone from the 7 tiles range with that sweet farshot penalty ontop of your Dagger hit chance (the hit check comes before the teleport so no guile flanking bonus). and against Boxers you are basically doomed to almost always fear the Geist.
It does however put you in a great position against tanks, so they are super useful against those. Combined with burn you also shred a good chunk of their defense which makes your damage comparable to other daggers again but it still won't win a damage race against Fans or even fangfare or Stingers. And the Silence is nice to have even with its pseudo-immunity it applies.
It does have answers to alot of different playstyles just by existing and doing it passivly, thats probably the main problem. Being able to swap damage types is also very useful.
If I were to nerf it, I'd probably start with the Status effects rather than the teleport. Make them Infliciton based, maybe have it a building up status effect like:
1. crit of Tsukikage->Spelldaze, if enemy has spelldaze already, consume it and turn into silence. Or something like that. So it needs two crits to apply.
Burn I don't know, Hikage with its str scaling really sucks, and mundane only raises it to normal dagger levels for an enchantment slot. I think thats fine, honestly. To use daggers effectively is already dooming you to be one rounded in any teamfight, it only really excels in duels, which I think very much fits "assassins". And even then we have a couple of more threatening things outthere, that can kite you, while doing half the things Hayabusa does, without putting you in the center of attention. Teleporting behind someone IS a downside in a team fight, half of the time, as you get focused to death that very instance. (Many people do not realize it, but you put yourself in the perfect position to give the enemy full Flanking bonus against yourself. This is horrible in both PvP and PvE)
Or I don't know, remove Silence and replace it with something more watery. Soaked has the issue of Burn basically instantly deleting it, so I dislike that one.
I'd say they are amongst the strongest in the way their very gimmick makes it so they essentially erase any remaining fighting chance of classes that VA commonly fares well against. (Those being Mage classes, Tankier builds, and Bards too because why not) , on-top of dishing extremely high damage in usual VA fashion.
Though that imo is pretty bad game design. SL2 has a pretty glaring issue where the game is built in such a way that a lot of mechanics, skills and passives serve little other purpose than to dig further into an already existing gap between counters and the countered, letting the latter with little to no other option than to cry and weep.
(See - The BK- Duelist matchup with Watchful Eye, On-dodge passives as an existing mechanic that punishes you for...being punished, Elemental Resistance working the way it does...)
A Hikage- Tsukikage VA effectively wins thrice as harder against any archetype that VA fares well against in the first place. Sure it may not exactly be good at teleporting behind an evade but thanks god it isn't- that's supposed to be the one thing barely holding daggers back in the first place, let alone removing it on a pair that specifically works in a way where it's downright oppressive to play against. And that again can be counteracted by things like Vanishing Strike, Rough Tumble, Shadow Gi, Quick Slide that allow for a flanking bonus or to ease up the farshot penalty ( already being quite watered down due to a dager user obviously having no issue building GUI)
I would say that the argument of VA instantly being rounded down in any teamfight is not really a valid one and moreso stems from the fact most of those are built in an extremely glass-canony way. That in fact applies to any kind of frailer builds, though I'm sure can be avoided by just not building in such a way where you just immediately die the second you step in. I would go as far as to say VA's STR critting melee cousins suffer even more from that same issue due to sharing the niche of high single-target damage, except with stats spread way thinner.
That, and the very specific issue you state can be fixed by, y'know. Not rushing in blind. Having a minimum of preparation or thought before an action.
Things like swapping to a shuriken/other weapon before striking.
Band-aid fixes such as making it's status inflictions roll a check beforehand won't work as the most affected parties oft don't benefit from it all that much.
Making it so there has to be a build-up that can possibly be counteracted by the opposite party before the status can be applied is a good solution, much like toning the range down a bit.
(06-15-2023, 08:29 PM)Ray2064 Wrote: [ -> ]SNIPÂ
I would say that the argument of VA instantly being rounded down in any teamfight is not really a valid one and moreso stems from the fact most of those are built in an extremely glass-canony way. That in fact applies to any kind of frailer builds, though I'm sure can be avoided by just not building in such a way where you just immediately die the second you step in. I would go as far as to say VA's STR critting melee cousins suffer even more from that same issue due to sharing the niche of high single-target damage, except with stats spread way thinner.
That, and the very specific issue you state can be fixed by, y'know. Not rushing in blind. Having a minimum of preparation or thought before an action.
Things like swapping to a shuriken/other weapon before striking.
Thats because building daggers in a way that they can even dish out damage in the first place, meaning they HAVE to crit, else their numbers are a joke, leaves them with very little options to be tanky unless you do something gimmickey like a no skill VA/Hexer that uses curses and such. Most VAs have about the sameish stat spread, copy pasted. Its equipment/race that makes the difference mostly.
So yeah that's kinda by design of how the class works. Not a huge fan of it either, but it is what it is. Glass cannons do be glass cannons.
That specific issues "not chargign in blindly" means however, that you do not do your one thing you are good at, at all and applies to the other team as well. It makes each fight more of a chess game waiting for one side to mess up and i LOVE that aspect of it. And a good coordinated team will be able to outplay it.
this makes me think that Hayabusa is not as bad as people think, I have been playing it for a while and even in Duel situations in most cases my fights are extremly hard foguht and won but not because of Hayabusa, but because I strategically outplay someone or flat out win a gamble.
Hayabusa is a very useful tool, if you know what you are doing. But its also absolutely kills you when you mess up. I honestly like that about it, because it makes me actually feel rewarded for playing this style, threading the line of being nuked or do the nuking. Its just fun, so I would hate to see it all be gone with it being over nerfed.
Here however what I think, that its doing too much against too many playstyles. It probably doesn't need to be Anti-Tank AND anti-mage. Remove the Silence so mages can breath a little more. But make it good anti tank daggers by leaving the rest.