In defense of Whiskey Foxtrot

Battleborn Open Beta Whisky Foxtrot Discussion
#1

After the beta I went on these forums and I have noticed a lot of negative discussion and Whiskey foxtrot, I was honestly surprised I mained WF for my over 30 hours of playing the beta and found myself consistently performing highly. Though as I read more of these comments I found consistent complaineds which to me showed people misunderstanding of WF should be played. After a couple of discussion with a friend he has convinced me to adress these complainds. Before I start thoguh I will say considering the number of complainds and agreement of other players who enjoyed WF it is still clear that he is underpowered in some aspect I simply don’t believe it is down to his kit.

‘he doesn’t have enough burst damage’: yes, but burst damage is not his role WF is about consistent damage, you can harass from most distances and you can fight at most distances, WF lacks any situation where he is number one as his job is make sure he simply ends up in a scenario where his opponent does worse. Get close to a thorn or marquis by knowing the map and use slowing stickies and knocback shrapnel to keep your distance from melee characters.

‘the shrapnel cannon does nothing’: yes the base of the cannon is very weak but its augments are very powerful if you have flak off and scarp bank you can become untouchable to most melee character if the enemey team has none shield scrapper and swiss cheese can set someone up for some seriouse hurt.

‘what are you talking about flak off knockbakc sucks’: aim slightly upwards, the knockback applies both horizontal and vertical velocity and once most characters are in the air they can’t change their velocity until the touch the ground without burning an ability, and thats where scarp bank pays off as with 2 charges if they try to use their ability to close the created gap you cna re create it normally larger as they are in the air and can be launched further.

‘he can’t lane push’: sticky+small minion+passive, 25% damage is a lot, again there are other characters that have much better lane clear but there just as many as bad and once you get the scope you can clear the lanes from a safe distances.

‘why not just play oscar mike’: well a as his grenade does damage instantly most opponents fight on that knowledge the delayed but reliable damage of an attached sticky causes a lot of foes to stay in a fight longer then they should. or the delayed explosion of a sticky to a minion cna result in a sudden 25% damage increse causing a foe to have misjudged about who could kill the other faster. As far as basic attacks go I have always prefered burst fire over automatic but most prefer automatic over burst fire I feel this ocmes down to personal preferance. Now for escapes, OM escape only work against foes who can’t spot the cloaked OM and if there are NO status ailments on OM as any one of them reveals him to a greater or lesser extend. WF escape is either a slowing sticky or knockback scrap cannon or non depending on you level 1 pick, either of the first options is somthing that can only be made up for by use of a skill form the effect opponent and you can decide which is most useful for what ever enemy team you are faceing. and as far as ults go its apple and oranges one is massive area denial and the other is single target sustained massive dps. I am not syaing either is better both achive similair jobs in different ways the only advantage OM has really seems to be raw numbers when it comes to basic dps.

TL;DR WF main strength is versatility once you know what the enemy team can do you can kit WF out and adapt his playstyle to handle almost any other battleborn, ‘you don’t live long being easy to kill’ and there is no scenario WF is easy to kill that doesn’t apply to every character. Overall WF seems to relay on planning ahead and having a plan hence the slow start up to his ult its not to scare someone off its used to have massive damage against a target you are engaging.

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#2

Hey, so I’m pretty sure no one on this forum has been calling for changes to Whisky more than me so I’m probably the right person to respond to this lol. Great points you’ve made and to a degree I can agree with your position; but as you’ve said, quite a few people have had called for changes or just straight up written him off. I’ll offer my rebuttal to your defense,

I have never managed to use knockback shrapnel to keep melee characters at bay so as to get a shot at the long range characters like the Marquis’ and Thorns. Whisky just doesn’t have the survivability to make a charge at the snipers and THEN manage to land a sticky bomb on them. You are right that he doesn’t do burst damage though. Consistent damage, sure, but when that damage is so low then consistency isn’t worth much.

The only issue I have with this statement is the fact that you call it’s augments “very powerful”. It’s just not. And the augments you have to pick just to make it functional come at an annoyingly high cost. There are augments that would have been fantastic to use that I could never pick or be stuck with a useless skill. Every other character I played had functional skills that had purpose and THEN had upgrades. The scrap cannon is only functional after being upgraded. That’s some bull ■■■■ in my books

Flak off and knockback were the only viable way to use scrap cannon. I don’t know who would even argue that point lol

He can’t lane push. Not without another 1-2 team members (preferably melee) getting in there to help. I’ve stuck plenty a sticky bomb onto the weakest minion bots and it can’t even take one of them down. If you get the napalm helix augment then it works much better but that requires a different tactic of shooting it at the ground well before the minion group roll through so that it detonates while they’re in that AoE. If you shoot and stick it to a minion then by the time the napalm AoE is on the ground they’ve walked past it and it does nothing. By the time I managed to clear a wave of minions on my own, I would run 10 metres and have another wave already on me again. The 25% passive sounds good on paper but he just can’t get the kills. He’s too weak to get kills on his own, and if he’s got the support of team members and allied minions then his chance of actually getting the credit for the kill is very small considering his damage output by comparison.

I AIN’T NO GODDAMN MIKE UNIT

^that’s why. Whisky Foxtrot 4lyf, yo

I can agree that his versatility is his strong point, but most of your defense is based on your own experience and how you played him. Which is fine, obviously, but just different to how I’ve played him and my own experience. I was left with the idea that he was more a support role, giving suppressing fire from mid-range behind the front lines and lobbing sticky bombs into the fray. I never had much luck with him at a longer range, or running in to push the enemy snipers. I couldn’t get him to clear waves or lane push with any success no matter how many different ways I tried to play him. All in all though, his dps just falls too far short of the mark for him to be competitive and his very basic skills need some tweaking/complementing with extra traits, reduced cooldowns, or shorter and less limiting animations.

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#3

Just to clarify my experience with WF and the rest of the beta at the end of the beta with WF I had over 75% win rate, over 3 K/D ratio (across more then 20 games)and was the top player of either the team or game in nearly every game, and I played most other character at least twice and all except ambra and reyna at least once with vareying degress of success. So I am sure that my end record with WF was neither me just being good at the game nore being lucky and getting carried by good teams.

The range the knockback is effective is pretty short and the change in effectivness over distance is very rapid which with the readying animation I will agree is overly punishing for getting it imperfect but I do still think is effective once you ahve the hang of it. Though your comment about the charging at snipers is an issue, to fight a sniper your not ment to charge them you are meant to flank them.

I agree with you on that and think the easiest fix for this is not to add damage as that changes the porpouse of the skill but to give it some default debuff either related to setting the target up or helping WF escape.

not quite sure what you are syaing about the nepalm upgrade but the nepalm ends up where ever the sticky detonates not where it is fired.

considering he has 3 shot bursts and can do 3-4 bursts a second the damage output is more then sufficient to get minion kills.

and here is the re occuring issue you seem to have his basic DPS looking at videos his per shot damage ranges between 33-49 (without passive buff) with the range of 3-4 bursts per second thats abotu 10.5 shots per second making his dps range between 345-515 depending on level. lets go with 345 for now, my accuracy avarged at over 70% this includes shooting at far away enemies and missed shots form the ult so the actuall accuracy (and hence effective dps) will be a bit higher then calculated, 70% of 345 is 241.5 with just under 3 seconds to empty the clip and about 1 second to reload that is just over 181 dps wihtout abilities. including shield characters health ranges from about 1300-2300 at level 1 so it takes 7.1 - 12.7 seconds to kill a full health enemey with no help from teamates and no abilities. considering most abilities for most characters have over 10 seconds of cool down as they are desgined to be used once a fight but long fights can often last long enough for them to cooldown this seems reasonable damage for a consistent damager to have.

#4

Yeah, that last bit were you try to calculate his dps in numbers doesn’t mean anything because we don’t have hard data to confirm any numbers other than his per shot damage being 33. 7.1-12.7 seconds to solo kill an enemy at full health? Even factoring in a 70% accuracy rate? That’s just not going to happen.

I get that you had a much more successful results with him, and more power to you for that, but I just cannot agree that his damage output is fine where it is or that your calculations prove anything all.

I’m glad that you have defended him though because I wouldn’t continue pushing for a buff or rework of some description if I wasn’t so heavily invested in the character myself. He is by far my favourite and does have some great things going for him. I just don’t think he’s reached his potential yet, and GBX owe him better than what they’ve made him.

#5

I have to agree with everything you said kit wise but his damage just isn’t there. In comparison with Oscar Mike i would pump out around 100k+ damage on average per game if they didn’t quit while with Whiskey i was getting around 60k. I was landing more consistent crits with Whiskey but was under performing for my effort. If they gave him a boost to his crit damage and a slight buff to his base damage he could be a much better character but where he stands now he just doesn’t cut it.

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#6

I am not really goign to spend much time arguing his raw damage as shinobido pointed out it is hard to get hard numbers right now and this was more about defending WF playstyle and kit right as it seems several people are getting the wrong idea about it, what I will say is that oscar mike does seem to be considered quite powerful as well, so I think if they are going to be filling similair roles in the future I think both will get stat changes as I don’t think oscar mike needs to get 40% damage nerf nor does WF need a 66% damage buff(going off you 100k and 60k numbers).

#7

I’m one of the people who thinks his rifle just needs an increase in damage.

Regarding Scrap cannon; it’s not like, for instance, Orendi’s Nullify insta-kills at lvl1. Abilities are ment to be improved upon with leveling.

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#8

What they said.

Though, I could do with a cooldown reduction.

#9

I think the real problem is that whiskey foxtrot is classified as an “assassin” but has literally 0 burst potential comparEd to just about anyone. Only with his ult