[Senna]

I was thinking about this for a while now, though, I could have easily say fuck it and forget about it but, isn't it normally wise to say what's on your mind? You'll never know if it's good or bad, if it could make change or not.

Enough with the motivational stuff, today I've been thinking about duelist/kensei and how aids it can be. Although I know the Nerf is coming, it's best to make suggestions so Dev doesn't actually murder the classes. Now, first thing's first, how they work. Duelist is a class based around high hit, critical and low FP usage. It's bad enough, to the point, you need this class if you want to build any type of critical damage build else you'll set yourself at a disadvantage. I've ran different tests on different characters (Because I aint about to re-level/fruit one every two days when I have other characters with the free rewrites still open). I've tried different builds and different item paths. With the recent update, it helped quite alot.

Conclusion: They're usable against other classes EXCEPT anyone that builds into Kensei/Duelist.

What makes duelist so great; It has three main passives and a few that makes it strong, but one that stands out a lot; Fleur, the +1 momentum bonus for hitting a critical strike.

What makes Kensei so great: The five main Innate and a few, but we'll be looking at three for now; Sakki, Touki and Kenki, the Innate skills that makes other non-kensei basic attacks ALMOST a rare sighting. (If you're lucky, you'll find someone using Ghost instead.)

Let's start with Duelist's Fleur. I saw a suggestion about adding it to Vent Petale, and in all honestly, I'm kinda against that. It's a good suggestion on paper, but if you look into it, it's not that great. One, although it'd forces people to build into spear/polearm second hand to get that bonus, it'd also kill other's way of making different unique builds (Such as Ghost/Monk burn out build). People won't be able to be extremely creative with such. With that in mind, one also needs to think about the advantage it has over other classes that can build critical strike like Void assassin, archers and so on. Making a suggestion for this is kinda difficult. At best, what I'd suggest is to completely remove it and buff critical strike bonus throughout the classes by +2 instead of +1 (Most of the times, the +1 isn't that useful). The second suggestion is to give it a trigger chance base on some stats. This way, it'd be more a gamble than a always given; allowing people to take risks and suffer if it doesn't pay out.

Let's finish it on Kensei's three Innate skills. Naturally, nerfing the numbers can either lead to nothing or completely murdering a class. The problem with these skills; they freely weaken whoever is targeting them, or is the target. This is why they can trump some others non-kensei critical builds--Or other builds in completely. Sure, you use at least half your points into these Innate skills, but that shouldn't make it this crazy powerful class comparing to others. Now with that in mind, we also need to keep what Kensei was design to be; lowering the numbers could possibly kill the class while leaving it like this kills creativity when it comes to building other basic attacking classes without a duelist class involved. How to fix this? My suggestion? Firstly, the problem is that it gives those dangerous Innate skills too freely without any real risk, repercussion aside from using up some points. Not to mention the absolute skills that doubles them. What I would suggest is simple; Just like Void assassin, Monk, Tactician and so on, add a Flow meter. If possible, attach it to something like Peerless or Sacred Art. What does this meter do? Each time a Kensei uses their skills, it increases this meter, with the max being 25. At 20 Flow, those innate skills can trigger. However, once they're at 20+ flow, absolute skills will double the given Innate skill and subtract 20 flow from their current amount. So basically, absolute skills, unless the user's flow is 20 and up, will not affect those Innate's passive. As for something like absolute fear, although it applies fear, I'd suggest it applies the hesitate with the 20 flow cost instead. (Because Hesitate can be AIDS sometimes consider how free they could use it).

I know the balancing and suggestions can be a REACH but still, It's best if I post and see what others think about it. Feel free to bash it to death, it was just something on my mind.