Improving some lackluster perks

[Mike]

Hello,
I think some perks need tweaking. We have strong competition for limited points, so some perks are simply worthless in comparison to better ones, while others are ok-ish but lacking. I understand no groundbreaking changes are coming so close to full release, but I believe there’s room for reasonable improvement.
Below I present the list with my suggestions, trying to make them better but not OP. It is obviously a subjective ranking so feel free to add your opinion – just please keep it constructive.

1. Fast Adaptation: the bonus is too insignificant for one that resets after hit, it’s also increasingly useless as your bros improve in accuracy. I’d change that for either a bigger number, one that stays active for some time (say, 2 rounds and stacking) or just get rid of it altogether.

2. Adrenaline – I understand it’s more of an “oh crap” button than a regular tool, still I’m unconvinced (I only use it on my Sergeant when I have fleeing bros… but see point 7). I consider the fatigue cost too high to use for a standard bro (wearing reasonably heavy armor, around 75 fatigue pool), if I have a bro with a lot of fatigue it’s either a lightly-armoured skirmisher already boasting high Initiative (therefore not needing it to move fast) or a 2h “tank” that can afford to take his time anyway. I’d lower it or make the skill a tradeoff – e.g. “move first in the next round, last in the following one”.

3. Recover – AP cost is too high for just a 50% drop, if I can afford to waste a turn then I’m obviously doing well enough not to need recovery that badly. Increase amount to 75% or drop AP cost by 2 so a bro can at least move (on a side note I see little point in making it a perk skill at all – IMO it should happen whenever a bro doesn’t take any action in his turn).

4. Executioner – injuries are random, and so a random 20% is really insignificant. I’d rather change it to bonus damage against targets that are low on HP, say below 33%

5. Head Hunter – not worth it as a resetting bonus, just make it a flat one instead so it can be used for tailored builds.

6. Gifted – trading limited perk points for grindable level-ups was a bad idea at least as early as Fallout 1 and a 1-time bonus to stats is meaningless. I’d move it to Tier 1 and make it give a +1 to each roll of a stat increase, which would amount to +30 points at lvl cap.

7. Rally the Troops – I like the skill but my sergeant with maxed Resolve, wearing Sash and with Battle Standard equipped regularly fails to rally fleeing bros standing 1 tile away from him – meaning that the skill fails at its single most important role. Adjust the percentages, please.

8. Polearm Mastery – with no damage and many better options for managing position (Rotation, Footwork, Knock Back) Repel and Hook are IMO the 2 most useless weapon skills in the entire game, I never use them. I’d rather see regular polearm attacks get a small chance to stagger.

9. Throwing Mastery – throwing weapons can be useful but are simply too weak to justify spending a precious perk point just for some added damage. It’d be a different story if it brought some significant bonus improving usability – increasing range by 1 (nets included!), adding a chance to bleed, that sort of thing.

10. Lone Wolf – with generally tight formations, morale checks and current AI behavior (rangers will run from you, melees will intercept you) I see absolutely no point in getting so far away from allies, even as a flanker. 15% is not good enough to convince me otherwise – I will not charge ahead a bro that doesn’t already have good stats and Underdog is better for extra defense. I’d change the bonus to be something unique, like gaining 1AP or +5 fatigue recovery.

11. Nimble – current perk description is uncharacteristically unspecific. I can’t gauge its usefulness in any meaningful way. Please bring back clear description with %.

Feel free to add your own suggestions or explain to me why I got my ranking wrong.

[le_souriceau]

I use Adrenalin rather extensive on heavy armored brothers to compensate their low initiative in critical situations. It saved me a lot of times. Very useful with right fatigue managment.

Fast apaptation is good for achers in duels with enemy snipers (with is pretty tense moment in late game, when you face 5-6 even 7 good shooters agaist you, somethimes with heavy crossbows, this things can pierce good hole even in heaviest of your guys).

Others are more o less useless/weak. Agree.

[Wargasm]

Agree about Recover, Head Hunter and (especially) Executioner. I suppose Recover could be useful for a Berserk archer, since you could kill someone with a Quick Shot and then still have 9 action points for Recover.

I believe the calculations for Rally the Troops were already adjusted for the .24 version (i.e. easier to rally fleeing allies, but no longer able to raise anyone’s morale above steady).

I also have found Adrenaline useful on heavily armoured troops. I tend to leave them lurking on the backline as “minders” initially, not using much energy, and then, as soon as an ally gets in severe trouble or a particular enemy seems especially menacing, they can all use the skill to swarm the spot of crisis and avert danger. It almost seems like “cheating” to combine Adrenaline with Overwhelm …

Fast Adaptation would be great with Riposte for someone with super-high melee defence but mediocre melee skill and max fatigue. Also for adrenalized “minder” characters lurking on the backline with maces ready to stun necrosavants or giant nachzehrers. And for archery duels, of course.

Throwing weapons are one-handed weapons, and so, if you combine Throwing Mastery with Duellist, missiles can do nearly as much damage as a crossbow, and without needing to be reloaded. So it’s tempting to try to make use of it for someone with good all-round attack and defence skills/talents, but it’s difficult to make such a build …

You didn’t mention the Taunt perk. Has anyone ever picked that (except me once, long ago, just to see what it was like)? I suppose you could try to use it to draw away enemies in a defensive position who are protecting ranged fighters. Maybe you could even combine it with Lone Wolf …

Now that fatigue is more of an issue (i.e. even missed enemy attacks now impose added fatigue), I think that Shield Expert should also be a “mastery” perk that reduces the fatigue cost of shield skills (especially since front-liners with one-handed weapons will be the ones most affected by the new fatigue mechanisms).

Maybe Polearm Mastery would be more lucrative if Repel and Hook continued to stagger opponents but also became effective against orc warriors!

[nope100500]

1. FA is weak for veterans with good skills, but really dangerous when used against player. So buffing has serious trade-offs.
2. Adrenaline. I see it as quite powerful under right circumstances. Like hunting Geists or double attacking Necrosavants. But usually don’t take it as too fatigue expensive. So maybe.
3. Recovery is expensive for what it does, but is still a very powerful perk, as there are no alternatives for fatigue restoration. I doubt it needs to be even better.
4. Executioner – never use it. But almost any enemy capable of sustaining a wound, would have one by 33%. So what you propose is actually a nerf.
5. Head Hunter – flat bonus would be more predictable overall, but current model allows you to prioritize where do you want to have better probability o headshot. Not using it either way, so I guess buff is in order. Then again – enemies using this would be terrifying, at least without Steel Brow.
6. Gifted – what you propose is god perk. I mean sure, with introduction of veteran levels and removal of +1 rolls gifted has become pretty bad perk. But you don’t have to buff it that sky-high.
7. Rally – in .24 changes
8. Polearm Mastery – polearms themselves are awesome, it’s only mastery that is bad. Because special attacks are so useless. But I’d say fix has to start with these attacks and then take a second look at mastery.
9. Throwing Mastery – unless you make it some sort of god perk, it won’t be enough. Because thrown weapons are just that bad. The basic math of having 3 stat-ups per level prevents existence of good first line melee-thrown hybrids. BUT enemies use tons of them, so one has to be cautious about buffs.
10. Lone wolf – +15% stats is a strong bonus, but it doesn’t compensate getting gang-banged by half enemy army. Maybe there is some tactics for using that i can’t quite wrap my head around.
11. Nimble – yep, needs better explanation. Though tooltip on effect after you take it is more informative.

[Wanderer]

Regarding Fast Adaptation. It is basically a necessity if you want to reliably hit Necrosavants at some point with non-90+ melee skill fighters, since Necrosavants have at least 30 melee defense.

Adrenaline I use on my Longaxe with Berserk Brother; weaken in one round, hit Adrenaline, kill and trigger Berserk to whack another guy in the same round. Since he has to Fatigue to spare.

Similarly, I end up using Recover pretty often on my Greatsword user, because he consistently racks up at least 35 Fatigue a round from setting up double splits. Among other things the reason he’s racked up around 350 kills on my 150 day playthrough so far.

The thing that Polearm mastery includes, but is rather rare to use, is the Warscythes, which give you two-tile distance AOE. You tend to draw up lots of Fatigue if you’re cleaving a lot of wiedergangers.

Lone Wolf assumes you have a badass with a Great Axe to maximize Swing potential. Not that you would train somebody up with a Great Axe while you’re still building a company of 11+ characters.

Edit:

Other things to note: Fast Adaptation stacks in order on AOE attacks. Meaning if you miss the first guy, Adaptation triggers for an additional 8% to hit on the second hit. If miss, that’s two stacks in one round. In reverse also, if you hit the first guy, but miss the second, you’ll still have one stack at the end of the round to use elsewhere.

Other uses of Adrenaline: getting two actions before doggies (Direwolves) or Necrosavants get another turn to eat your archers.

[Ferqal]

Resetting bonuses are useful because they’re so high and because the volume of attacks are high. Headhunter and Fast Adaption in combination makes for a murderous archer. Without resetting, the bonuses would be too good – and since you’ll likely only need 1 or 2 hits to gruesomely down your target, the bonus resetting isn’t a problem. And Executioner is very, very good. Stack it with crippling strikes and you can use a spear with high innate precision as a debuff inflictor.
—

Gifted does feel a bit strange. +[Random] stats is… +3-5 to a single line of stats, but then it does it to all of them and it turns out the bonus is in line with what’s given by other perks. Shield Expert gives 25% to shields, with is +3 to +4 defense anyway, so it’s actually in line with Gifted. The weirdest thing about Gifted is that its a single use replacement for other perks (shield expert, anticipation, fast adaption).

I too woul prefer if it was more of a long term thing, maybe adding a star on a chosen characteristic now that that mechanic exists.

Playing around a little, you can get some really wonky battle brothers if you combine together bright, gifted, lonewolf, dodge and underdog, simply because the stacking attributes rack up so high.

[Human Warlord]

Well with this new nimble perk and lone wolf perks i trying to ressurect old fashioned one handed swordmaster.
So i belive now nimble works like that- if it shows that you have 50% to try dodging the same attack you can count this just if it were +50% to your defence stats, am i right?

And i have question about anticipation perk, i dont really sure how it works, i do use it on all my archers but can someone show me how much actual defence i have with this perk?
Well i belive formula is like this-
Brother have 30 range def and anticipation perk.
Target is 6 tiles away, so my brother will have 30def + 6/60% = 50(kinda) so my brother with 30 range def will have 50def with working perk and if the target will be atleast 6 tiles away is this right?

[nope100500]

Human Warlord wrote:

Well with this new nimble perk and lone wolf perks i trying to ressurect old fashioned one handed swordmaster.
So i belive now nimble works like that- if it shows that you have 50% to try dodging the same attack you can count this just if it were +50% to your defence stats, am i right?

That’s not how nimble works. It gives you a single reroll when you would otherwise have been hit. So against 100% nimble bro enemy has to roll hit twice in a row to make it count.
Nimble chance is reduced roughly at 2% per equipment fatigue cost. So realistically you won’t have 100%. And it’s only good if your def score is ridiculous in the first place.

[bobombnik]

I agree with #7. The few times I’ve needed Rally, it’s failed. That is with Sergeant w/ 100 resolve and holding the banner.

Lone Wolf seems fine, and seems like it has it’s place to me. I have 2 brothers that are ‘scouts’, one on each end of the back line. I’ve been fighting in the noble wars, and those guys are crucial in getting to the enemy backline to take care of arbalesters and start hitting pikemen etc from behind. I’ve been planning on giving them the lone wolf perk as it should help them all around.

[Wargasm]

nope100500 wrote:

4. Executioner – never use it. But almost any enemy capable of sustaining a wound, would have one by 33%. So what you propose is actually a nerf.

Actually, I remember having a wildman who was hit on the head by a hedge knight with a two-handed hammer, and it completely destroyed his mailed nasal helm and took 93 of his 98 hit points in one go, but he didn’t get an injury (so I assume there’s a % chance, probably high, of an injury when the threshold is met) …

[Mike]

A lot of useful tips and combinations that I didn’t use before, thanks guys.

Wargasm wrote:

You didn’t mention the Taunt perk. Has anyone ever picked that

I take it for at least 2 of my “tanks” (shield users) to draw attention away from heavily injured bros that I cannot immediately remove from melee for some reason. Comes in handy especially when I get surrounded and rotation wouldn’t achieve much.

nope100500 wrote:

6. Gifted – what you propose is god perk.

I wouldn’t consider it a god-tier as the extra points would be spread around various attributes, but if that’s a concern it could only bump the weakest rolls – turn 1s into 2s and 2s into 3s. I just think it’s not worth it at all right now because you sacrifice a very valuable perk point for a one-off increase to much less valuable stat points. I consider the level-up completely meaningless, you can always grind more exp.

Wanderer wrote:

Adrenaline I use on my Longaxe with Berserk Brother; weaken in one round, hit Adrenaline, kill and trigger Berserk to whack another guy

Sounds really neat, will give it a try.

Wanderer wrote:

rather rare to use, is the Warscythes, which give you two-tile distance AOE.

It’s so rare, in fact, that in my latest playthrough I’ve already gathered a dozen artifacts, and not a single scythe. feelsbadman. Still, the fatigue reduction is a generic bonus and while other weapon groups get something interesting in addition, polearms get something that is useless because it improves an useless attack.

Wanderer wrote:

Lone Wolf assumes you have a badass with a Great Axe to maximize Swing potential

Still, I only need to get him literally 1 tile away from the others to use him as intended an also get benefits of having backup close by. The way it works right now I’d have to get out of my way and put myself in unnecessary danger just so I can benefit from a perk, which is counter-intuitive to me.

Wanderer wrote:

Fast Adaptation stacks in order on AOE attacks. Meaning if you miss the first guy, Adaptation triggers for an additional 8% to hit on the second hit. If miss, that’s two stacks in one round. In reverse also, if you hit the first guy, but miss the second, you’ll still have one stack at the end of the round to use elsewhere.

Just WOW o_O I had no idea. Consider me instantly converted to the Church of FA.

Ferqal wrote:

Gifted is that its a single use replacement for other perks (shield expert, anticipation, fast adaption).

I too woul prefer if it was more of a long term thing, maybe adding a star on a chosen characteristic now that that mechanic exists.

I beg to differ on Gifted as the boni bestowed by other perks go beyond a simple equivalent of stat points – shield expert for instance makes precious named shields a fair game against axe-wielders, something that I would consider too risky otherwise.
+1 on adding a star, makes much more sense than my own idea TBH

Human Warlord wrote:

And i have question about anticipation perk (…)

well you get bonus 1 + 10%(Base Def) per 1 tile, so in your example it’s 30 + 6x(1+3) = 54 total ranged def.

[Wargasm]

Mike wrote:

Consider me instantly converted to the Church of FA.

+1

[Namespace]

I think Executioner might be good on heavy hitting weapons in combination with a spearwall with crippling strikes maybe. Especially against those mega Nachzehrers that seem to have about 400-500 hp.

I tried lone wolf on a guy with a 2h-axe who was supposed to annihilate everything with round swing. Even with the bonus though, round swing doesn’t hit anything even at 100 or so melee skill maybe FA would help. In the end he died and I never used the perk again.

Polearm mastery seems like a utter waste of a perk point. Even if they change it to “repel and hook will never ever miss again” it might still not be worth it.

Headhunter might work on archers, but the only decent use I see would be on some guy with a named 1h-axe (since 50% dmg bonus to head) that has an extra 10% to hit head or a flail with 20%. Also.. Enemies have 2 different kinds of armor. Headhunter would distribute damage more evenly and possibly even prolong their survivability. Against raiders without head armor I recommend to just go for headshots with flails since they are way more reliable.
Might also work with weapons that penetrate armor – named orc cleaver with duelist perk f.e.

Gifted I only use for trash troops now without talents or nothing – it is one of the strongest perks in the early game but loses it’s value as they level up. Wouldn’t a respec function be nice.. Oh what many great things the veteran hall could have been..

Recovery is definitely a decent-ish perk but then again, there is the Iron Lungs trait. In the end I will try to have people with either iron lungs or very high max fatigue and weapon mastery. Aside from direwolves the new fatigue mechanic doesn’t really seem that overpowered but still SO unnecessary

nope100500 wrote:

5. Head Hunter – flat bonus would be more predictable overall, but current model allows you to prioritize where do you want to have better probability o headshot. Not using it either way, so I guess buff is in order. Then again – enemies using this would be terrifying, at least without Steel Brow.

Easy fix: just don’t give that perk to enemies. It baffles me why enemy trash troops have as many perks as they do. Sure, bandit leaders and hedge knights, etc. make sense. But why do some random raiders have rotation skill? The player can unlock this at level 6 but raiders seem to have that from the get go. The enemy usually has numbers advantage, so WHY do they have the perk advantage as well?
When I read “Changed Bandit Poachers to no longer have the Bullseye perk.” in the 0.9.0.21 patch notes, I wasn’t really sure if I should laugh or cry because it boggled my mind that they had this perk in the first place. And I suppose bandit marksmen and goblins still have bulls-eye, yes?

[le_souriceau]

Another consideration with all this: wounds and morale oriented feats, feat/maneuvering combos (even “lighter weapons”) somewhat inflated by new pseudoroman ancient undead (hardest enemy in late game IMHO). As for me, with them only heavy protection and brutal damaging power really works. You need to kill em fast. They very armored, have good melee protection (shielded guys) and deadly accurate with heavy weapons (pikemen). No morale or fatigue. And mages, who can destroy any tricky formation by gas spell or compromise plans with fear spell.

After several runs (when my arse was totaly smashed), I prefer to have ultra-heavy shieldwall with stupid brick-like guys who grind everything with hammers/axes. With feats only working for this. 4 archers to cover this clumsy brutes from anything fast and ranged (ocasianaly help in spliting shields from behind).

No fantasy or finesse at all. Fancy combos work fine (may be) until you stomped hard by this udead romans.

[Author]

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