Bainshee Feedback

[.karidas]

Let's talk about stats.
Bain is, at the point of writing, sitting at the lowest end of the popularity, with quite a distance to the next highest.

Spec Breakdown for context and how I feel about them:

Ethereal Shriek
The ranged AoE nuke spec. AoE Bolt, Damage, Root, NS pulse, single target damage, ablative chant.
This is what you run in zergs. I have not much complaint about this specline, it is very powerful damage wise. You trade some utility for the extra oomph basically.

Phantasmal Wail
The PBAE spec. Uninterruptible PBAE pulse, uninterruptible root, D/Q debuff, pet fear, buff shear, demez.
Note the lack of any kind of range. Everything is PBAE. You need to use the SG baseline nuke, it is your only way besides PBAE to deal damage. The pet fear and buff shear are on a long timer. The PBAE damage is fixed at 3s per tick.

Spectral Guard
The cone spec. Cone Bolt, Damage, Root, Taunt, single target damage, ablative chant.
Note how that reads almost exactly the same as ES? You lose the AoE component on your long range interrupt and need to stand within 500 to hit someone now. Cone has damage falloff, isn't 180° like the animation would suggest, taunt is not an uninterruptible cast. On the upside, your single target damage is the best you can get. But .. why spec this? There's nothing standing out that the two other lines or even other classes can't do equally well or better.

Summing that up, there is two possible ways to play Bain. Zergsurfing with 50 ES, or bomb spec with either 46 PW or 41 PW rest SG that ONLY works in tower/lordroom fights and feels like you forgot to spend your spec points in any other scenario.

Bain simply massively lacks utility:

- 1 form of CC (Root), which is heavily covered by other classes (Druid, Warden, Enchanter, Animist) and actively sabotages snares
- A long range interrupt (AoE NS pulse / Taunt), basically the equivalent of castable Amnesia, without the part where it interrupts MoC
- Cure Mez
- A PBAE pet fear on a long timer with high resist rate

This is it. That's the utility you get out of a Bainshee, unless you want to cripple your damage potential by speccing high PW and suiciding into the enemy group to land a buff shear and D/Q.
Why would you bring this over any other Hib caster? (You don't. It's not even comparable.)


Suggestions

The basics, fix the stuff that makes no sense:
- Add a spec DD to Phantasmal Wail. it is the only spell line in the game that requires you to go to an unspecced line for a single target nuke (Well, besides the pet-lines and the more esoteric ones like Animist/Necro, but the point stands).
- Improve the RR5 RA to give a noticeable boost in survivability for all group members, especially the cloth casters who get their nonexistent ABS multiplied to still have nonexistent ABS. Compare this to the Heretic RR5 which gives a whopping 75% (!!) spell damage reduction for everyone. Can we get something approaching this power level, only for melee damage, maybe?

Increase utility:
- Make the highest level taunt uninterruptible. Give SG spec a 8v8 niche as interrupt bots.
- Add an unbreakable or no-immunity snare spell to SG (See Wizard-Cold/BD-Supp/Necro-PW). Hibernia currently does not have access to this mechanic. More 8v8 utility for kiting.
- Replace VP with TWF. Hibernia is the only realm where this is on a singular support class, whereas the other realms get it on multiple damage dealer classes.
- Unnerf cones. There is no casting cone through walls on Eden, and bolts do not stack anymore. If cones had no falloff and maybe even 180° coverage I still don't feel like it would be oppressive given where you need to stand to actually use this spell and the lower delve than standard bombs, but it would be a huge boost for what the spell is intended to do: making a large space in front of the Bain VERY undesirable to be in for multiple enemies, instead of being a 500 range single target nuke with a large area of enemy CC break tacked on.
- Make PW do something besides it's ability to ghetto-MOC. Change the PBAE D/Q debuff to an omni debuff. Change the buffshear to a castable spell without recast timer. This would make PW an actual threat in bombing scenarios and would massively help in 1v1 (I swear, there's at least ONE Bain doing soloing around).

Spitballing:
- Instead of adding a boring ST nuke for PW: A GTAE nuke without a recast timer, that requires line of sight (so not like the standard GTAE that goes through walls). This would give the specline a means to deal damage at range, is highly skill based in non-zerg scenarios, a boon to the solo gameplay, and gives something to do during sieges.


Summary:
ES is very much fine if you add TWF and a proper RR5 on top of it.
Make SG the 8v8 spec by adding 8v8 specific utility.
Make PW just .. more powerful in general, since it has basically nothing right now, and give it solo potential.

[penteles]

Dunno about bainshees in general because i dont play them, but few things:

1. Game does not need more interrupts. Its already frikkin full of them.
2. I dont think any class gets spec dd and pbaoe in single spec, so you might be asking bit much here.

[Kadorna]

Hibs not play much bainshee because they got too many good casters to chose...Bainshee got his role (aoe dmg in zerg fights) if you want fill another role just chose other of the hib caster class.

[.karidas]

2. I dont think any class gets spec dd and pbaoe in single spec, so you might be asking bit much here.

Wizard does, so does Eld, they also get spec AoE AND baseline DD on top of that. But even disregarding that, Bainshees only have a single baseline-line that is for Spectral Guard. By definition, any spell added to Phantasmal Wail must be a specline-spell.

Hibs not play much bainshee because they got too many good casters to chose...Bainshee got his role (aoe dmg in zerg fights) if you want fill another role just chose other of the hib caster class.

That's what's currently happening. Noone's playing Bain because it is a one-trick-pony where 2/3 speclines are basically useless / better done by another class. Don't you think that kind of .. sucks for the people who bothered playing a Bain and are locked in to a very specific style of play? We don't have RP sharing between characters. I doubt many players have enough time to make 1m RP across two characters to keep up with the RR cap. It's not like custom changes to make certain lines / classes more attractive are unheard of on Eden. I feel saying "just play something else" defeats the purpose of the devs having channels for offering feedback.

[penteles]

Eld version has same damage as baseline DD. Wiz version is kinda ok (dd+debuff). But if you are complaining about lack of utility, before mentioned wizard (and eld too) has basically none.

I think main reason people dont like to play bainshees is the constant screaming, not that its a bad class.

[shoke]

Eld version has same damage as baseline DD. Wiz version is kinda ok (dd+debuff). But if you are complaining about lack of utility, before mentioned wizard (and eld too) has basically none.

I think main reason people dont like to play bainshees is the constant screaming, not that its a bad class.

The screaming is definitely an issue haha, it does get really annoying, but you need game sounds so can't just mute everything.

Bainshee doesn't really fit in anything that other classes don't already do on hib though, that's the thing.

When you look at the wizard, they don't look particularly impressive but they are the main dmg dealer of their realm, nothing comes close to what they dish out. A lot of players actually play wizards and with the heretic, they have a nice heat debuff synergy going on for big dps.

On hib, you already have 2 pbae classes (eld and chanter), and chanter has the debuff line in his pbae line, which is great. Eld has way more utility in his pbae line than a bainshee with str-con debuff, disease, snare nukes.

If you want utility, a mentalist is better than a bainshee in almost every way because they get a high delve spec nuke (not a baseline like the bainshee, which costs less power and hits harder), ae amnesia instead of ae NS which is way better than a focus NS spell.

So bainshees are annoying, have a big "kill me" target when they shapeshift, don't really offer anything that other hib casters already are better at. Their signature spell is the cone (which doesn't go through structures so why would you use that vs a pulsing pbae), the pulsing pbae (at low rank can be good but when Elds/chanters get MoC, not really good), a cone bolt that has extreme falloff damage.

Class needs a rework if we ever want it to be played. Ideally, they would replace the bainshee with the Vamp and Hib would be happy