[Autumn]

Fleur was brought up in a recent topic, and whilist I don't think Fleur is a huge problem for letting a duelist do what duelist does best (Stay an action above their opponent for scoring critical hits) I do think that receiving ludicrous amounts of critical hit damage per round is rather unfair when facing anyone who isn't a duelist, try finding somebody who isn't a duelist or hexer nowadays, you won't find many.

I hear all the time that duelist is in a balanced situation because it needs to rely on hit and crit checks, because it's a damage class and not a tank class, but that's simply just not true, duelist has recieved so many defensive skills that it's off tank possibilities are achievable at a minor 25-30 defense, this includes skills such as Wraithguard, one vs one and the very well known Eviter.

And on the other hand there are capabilities in duelist that allow it to be one of the highest damage dealing physical classes in the game, stuff like absolute death, voltiger, crystal rose, (Old Ether Invititation), so it's no doubt that almost everyone chooses duelist at the moment, it's very versatile and while I like that in a class, the class is too versatile for pretty much anything else.

Unfortunately, I don't actually have many solutions to the problems I've stated, I've tried thinking it over several times and there's just not much you can do to balance duelist according to the other classes without losing it's identity at this point, a duelist should be strong in a one vs one, but they're super overwhelming to the point where you don't really run a physically based hit class without duelist anymore, classic class combos for hitting such as BK/Monk is gone in the wind because Ghost will provide even more defensive capability than BK, and give you more critical hit.

I've thought up a couple of things to maybe combat this but ultimately they came up just being a bit too complicated to see use.

Scoring a critical hit will do full critical damage, when you score a second critical hit it'll do only half that, and the third one who do a quarter (VA Skill Deadly Arms would make this 75% and then 50% critical damage instead)

So I'm raising up a discussion topic right now, does anyone else have concerns with duelist? Fleur specifically? Or is it just critical hits specifically? Maybe it's their defensive capabilities in just being able to off tank better than a BK? Or is duelist actually truly balanced? Discuss.