[Autumn]

I'll do my best to provide some input on the topic of duelist, duelist and more importantly FLEUR is in a very important spot, tampering with it could leave it in an unrecoverable state without a complete rework.

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.

I wanna start off by saying that facing a duelist or Kensei really doesn't feel all too bad to me, I've never thought it once to be quite the hassle to face in any way, they excel versus anything that can't get critical evade, a lot of MAs and other tanks and dodgies end up struggling against them because they excel at one versus one fighting against anything they can critically hit, if you've ever built a critical evade tank, or one with slash resistance you'd quite understand what I mean.

Duelists end up struggling if they cannot critically hit a target or have to face against an alternative damage reduction method such as stalemate, this severely hampers the amount of actions they can take per round and ends up biting them in the ass since it ends up putting them into a very uncomfortable situation, where in they kind of need to stay close to you due to their lack of far ranged mobility aside from voltiger sidecut.

On the topic of attempting to critically hit with other classes, I believe the only outliers to this rule currently are VA, Monk and Sniper Rifle builds, as they both can achieve a large amount of crit from specific setups, I'd like to improve on the aspect of critically hitting with other classes however.

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.

Fleur changes were proposed on the OOC a little while ago as you said, and quite frankly after thinking about it I'd rather not change fleur in the slightest, given it NEEDS a critical hit to be effective it will end up fizzling out at some point, particularly any BK, Ranger or Bonder with a decent amount of FAI or LUC to its name, probably with boneheart, when critical evade starts reaching around 90-120, you can remain extremely safe versus duelists as usually preventing even 1 crit check can end up netting your more EHP than Giant Gene ever could.

Back on the topic a little bit, you are correct in that forcing it into Vent Petale severely limits the build pathes duelists can take (not to mention axes which are already weak will get a massive nerf), the ghost/monk burnout build is actually one of my favorite builds to play in this game, and I probably fight the most openly on mine, I'd rather not see this and instead suggest changes to the other classes for building critical hit. (Improving deadly arms while main-classed for example.)

Some other classes end up having hidden ways to help with critical hit builds, since hitting 2 criticals with no fleur still grants you 2 momentum you can use dagger dance to effectively play like one, but that requires a higher risk method of needing to hit 2 critical hit checks, while Martial Artist provides crane hop, which is 2m movement, meaning you can Crane hop > Critically hit and still gain another action to use like Dense Thunder or geldoren.

That said I think that granting the 2m crit to everyone is gonna be too strong, too versatile for its own good and severely subtract from duelist and serve to make crit builds start flocking to classes that just grant more passive damage and versatility like Spellthief/Hexer or Boxer, also on a side note I do actually believe Ghost to be stronger than Kensei in a sense, Kensei's passives and stats end up making it more diversified however.

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.

I like the idea of a flow meter, perhaps it could be touched upon a little better since I believe the kensei passives at their base aren't as strong as people would think, Ghost's fitting form gets similar numbers after all in 1 skill, using absolute death and fear causes you to spend momentum to do it as well, taking away from damage economy as a result. (A reminder, absolute death requires 5 hits total in order to gain you what is essentially 25% more of the damage you would of dealt anyway by instead just using another 3m attack.)

Getting back to the flow meter, I could see sacred art being reworked into this sort of thing to help kensei autohits start shining, as they still seem to be rather lackluster compared to just critically hitting most things.

===================

In addendum, I can just say that Fleur actually seems to be very fickle, some consider it frustrating but I consider it balanced, a lot of the fun of running duelist comes from being able to combo and crit with fleur, taking that away would likely cause a huge upset among the community somehow, most swords tend to be balanced nowadays, Sogensara with 120% SWA Scaling doesn't exist to cause duelists to be able to reach abnormal amounts of SWA without serious hardcore investment, and those with serious investment usually lack in other ways.

Also as I've stated over and over, Crit Evade serves as Duelist's biggest counter, a healthy amount of crit evade makes you MUCH MUCH safer from them, which in my opinion is quite the comfortable position to sit at balance wise for them, it serves to make it so that pure mixed tanking classes that have disgusting amounts of DR like Martial Artist can't just get away with having 70% resistance to a damage type, as duelists will shred through you regardless of that, especially if they're packing vorpal or rampaging.

Try a boneheart every once in a while on a build if it has the crit evade to support it, I promise it won't disappoint you.