[Shujin]

Matador has been a problem since a while now, it deals a lot of unresistable damage and with now a chance to add 30 Dark weakness, a Retaliate can deal easily 500+(with spirit) damage in certain cases while needing not a single point stat investments, you can just go 100% tank for it.

I do not want to entirely gimp it though, just add a certain weakness I believe it should have, its ranged power:

Stampede
Currenty it only removes 5 rage energy per step, Thats the same amount it removed back then when it went agaisnt defenses and was fair then, to not make the damage absolutely laughable. Now though even in a 10 tile range, this is a nuke that even deals massive cursed wounds, easily dealing 300+ damage while being a deadly mobile skill (pretty sure also not stopped by Immobilized), that can then be used to follow up with a second nuke if you are funny. People really do not care about the 50ish damage they lose in 10 tiles.

I want to purpose that either that gets changed to
A.) 25-30 rage energy per step, so taking distance is a viable counter measure. Making the matador, either move first, or gimp his damage by a meaningful amount.
Or
B.) remove the interaction of a spirit with matador to raise its rage energy to 400.

Though I rather have A, cause B comes with a weakness and it need to be charged to that level aswell, which can be fun and feels more fair. Also less braindead and rewardign for the person not taking the horns from pointblack.

[Snake]

I haven't been seeing problems with Demon Hunter as I have Ghost and Firebird, though. Fair thing to address, but not quite necessary when you can just have 30% Darkness Resistance and proc Evasion (In this case, a given, since you won't have SKI or LUC for Hit).

You can literally just swap your boots to counter Matador, or use Bulwark to retaliate 50% of the damage back.

[Shujin]

Except that I have seen 50% dark resist Vampire tanks get 300+ damage from it (without amplyfying it with Dark Eclair, but with Hunted or DK and you can stack all of these things.). So the counters are not as easy as you make it be. There are a lot of things you can use to enahnce the damage with and "Build against it!" is a bit silly. Its a tactical RP, not rock paper scissors.

Not to mention that this ain't even nerfing it that much, as the matador user needs to do nohing but move closer, and we do have a lot of 1 M movemnts

And tanks with heavy armor do not have the luxury of evasion either.

[MakeshiftWalrus]

While I do agree that Matador, if doubled down on, can be a little overbearing against certain setups, there are plenty they struggle against. Having previously spent no small amount of hours on a dedicated Matador physical tank, I think I'm qualified to talk about this particular topic.

An issue of the stance's skills lie in the fact that it isn't affected by resistance (%Magic damage reduction), and scales off your own dark attack, which often means your own resistance will be quite high. For Retaliate in particular, it goes beyond by not only ignoring your resistance, but also scaling off your raw rage, instead of any invested stat. This, generally, is not a problem due to how long it takes to get there, IE stacking up 400 rage if spirited, and serves as typically a singular nuke in a fight, after which it cannot be used again efficiently before the battle ends, unless you're fighting someone specifically enabling you to do so.

It's a strong skill, with a couple of strong ways to counter-play it, that being magic damage, which most classes back quite potent nukes of these days, or universal damage, such as Life Drain, or Ingrain, or Rebound, the latter of which is quite outstandingly popular due to how good it is. Darkness resistance (The elemental resistance), is, of course, also very viable in shutting down any Matador-centered build.

It could probably stand to be doubled in tile cost, making it 10 rage per square moved, but more than that, I disagree with. It's highly situational, can be resisted quite easily, and isn't typically that strong under normal circumstances. If you're specifically centering your build around Retaliate, I don't see why you shouldn't be doing a lot of damage with it, especially so if you spend upwards of 12+ momentum to set it up. There are far more efficient uses of your momentum, with fewer obvious points of counter-play.

[Autumn]

I personally think due to dark resistance there's plenty of methods in mitigating the damage of Retaliate itself, it takes a long time to build up to, especially if you're using Bellowing Stag as well which consumes a VERY large portion of your rage energy.

The biggest offender when Matador was too strong was when Bellowing Stag had no cooldown and could be spammed ad infinitum, ever since that was bit in the bud the only really strong matadors historically so far have been those that can mitigate crit effects, otherwise ignoring armor is how you get past Matador, or dealing magic damage which seemingly a lot of physical damage classes have access to these days.

Some setups are running methods in reducing darkness resistance but that can be counterplayed as well with the usage of effects like Negotiate/Cleanse Potion/Wash Away.

Otherwise Matador's biggest hurdle is getting over evasive builds, due to the nature of it being a tank buster mostly its not actually that effective against dodgy people, and will often not out-damage them due to practically permanent 30% reduction, which reduces its effectiveness to be basically below basic abilities.

As a side note, the only change I can see happening for Bellowing stag is making its cinders not 75% Fire ATK