That’s funny, because I’ve always found health regen coming into more use with a character like Thorn - with my usual build i can get about +17 health per second, which is enough that if you’re retreating with low health, when you pop back up you can have quite a bit more health than your opponent expects. People usually get cocky when the sniper is low and try to dive, at which point you can pop your ult and nail them. Just my personal strat though.
Okay, numbers time. I am not a numbers person, and I may be misrepresenting the way debuffs and scaling works in Battleborn, but this does feel about right to me. Am totally happy to be shown I’m totally wrong!
A single strike from Ritual of Repulsion does 166 damage base (starting level 4, when you get it.) This much I’m sure about. I didn’t test, but at level 10, this should scale to about 196 (very rough numbers here) per strike. That’s 392 damage if you hit both strikes.
Let’s assume Ambra took the 15% Solar Wind damage increase at level 9. That makes it 451 damage if she lands both strikes.
Let’s also assume she’s running a Bola’s, and not her lore legendary. That makes it 492 damage (before accounting for the Bola debuff.)
Now let’s count in the debuffs:
Sunspotter is likely to be in effect, if the Ambra is good. +15% damage to 566.
If she’s using Bola’s, she’ll get a further 5.6%. That’s 597.
(I may be making a fundamental error by combining both strikes into a single number, but I’m sure it won’t matter that much.)
I can’t see a way to get Ritual of Repulsion to anything near 1000 damage, let alone 1700.
Think in terms of time-to-kill (TTK). 17 health per second is 17 HPS - that counters 17 DPS coming your way.
For perspective, Miko’s base DPS (at level 1, mind you) is 142 with just Kunai, no skills.
A gray health vest gives 280 max health. A level 1 Thorn has 1130 health. That’s a 24% health increase for her. That means an enemy has to do 24% more damage to kill you.
Now you could argue that regen has a special role to play in lane sustain, but it’s also worth remembering that simply passing briefly through a Supply gives a regen buff, as does any form of healing (Sunspot, heal chair, Miko beam, etc). There’s no on-field effect that will give you a max health buff save for a few niche items. So regen is common, whereas max health is rare and to be cherished.
Now you’ve laid the numbers out, it seems like there must have been something else in effect - even with Priority Target on that’s still only around 682.
You make a good point about max health, though - I may give some of my loadouts a bit of a tweak and see what happens.
To be honest, it’s actually a really impressive damage number, even if it’s not going to two-shot anyone any time soon. Of course, it’s better to take the range increase at 9, and taking Bola’s on Ambra is a Bold Choice, but still… she’s no slouch. Certainly competes with damage abilities like Spike.
I’m actually of the opinion that the damage of Ritual of Repulsion should have its damage nerfed a little bit. There’s almost no reason to choose the other two helixes in PvP. It has a large AoE, can be used to push enemies away while running, the knock back is sizable, and the damage is packed into two short bursts.
Definitely. It’s especially unintuitive that it performs better in an offensive-Ambra build than the “more damage the closer you are” helix. (It says a lot that I can’t even remember its name… Searing Winds or something?)
18/8: Benedict’s base damage reduced from 211 to 190.
Effective DPS reduction from 105 > 95 (for reference this is the second lowest DPS in the game next to Ambra).
Then on 25/8 this: “Increased the initial reload speed of Benedict’s UPR-SM23 Rocket Launcher.”
Now the wording of this was fairly unclear but it was later clarified by JoeK that what this meant in practice was no more reload clipping for Benedict which comes as a huge blow to his damage output.
Benedict’s 105 (or now 95) DPS used to be much higher when combined with a reload between shots which clipped the animation and kept your mag full. Removing the ability to perform this literally crippled his overall DPS.
People still have the placebo that Benedict is OP broken when in fact he’s been nerfed into the ground.
The reload clip thing was ambiguously buried in a battleplan.
The damage nerf was pretty straightforward and detailed in a battleplan as well.
You may have noticed a huge decline in the number of Benedict’s flying around since this time…
As someone who mained the bird in his original launch form I thought he was perfectly balanced from the outset. Then he was unnecessarily buffed for seemingly no reason, became super OP and the target of every complaint under the sun (rightly so). During this time every man and his dog jumped on the Benny bandwagon and jumped straight off it once the nerfs dropped. Then those of us intending to pick of the pieces are left with a hollow shell of his former self, hollower than the bones that inhabit a bird’s body.
I didn’t read all these comments but Ambra totally took over the thread so just by that she’s obviously the likely candidate here, not benny. He’s strong, but I feel like there should’ve been kleese in here instead of Benny or at least Benny could be the Berny Sanders while ambra and kleese be clinton and trump. Those two are monsters with they’re lock on attacks and their range once locked on
Benedict is fine. I couldn’t say if he is underpowered or not but certainly does not feel overpowered
Ambra is a very complex demon of a character to properly balance imo since she is basically a life siphoning support which sounds amazing on paper but difficult to balance. Out of the box ambra to me seems quite fine and balanced. The problem lies in 4 things that push her closer to an op side. Those 4 things are the ability to heal sunspots, staff slam, fireball staff, and her legendary.
Fueling her sunspots at 3 means that she is allowed the versatility to keep everyone and herself topped off without either waiting for the incredibly short 8 seconds to cool down for sunspots or the necessity to melee people to get it faster. Which gives her the flexibility to move in and out of lane without much worry at all
Staff slam gives ambras other skill a powerful displacing aoe effect that channels the all the damage in a double tap feature for increfdibly useful utility to save herself and others around her or even keep people from leaving her ults radius.
Fireballs and her legendary are incredibly powerful tools for her to finally give her a substantial ranged capability. Yes you lose out on cooling down your sunspots but you can keep them alive and worse case scenario you just wait 8 seconds for another one. 6 seconds at level 8.
Something about ambra needs to be tweaked. I feel like I can really effortlessly contribute to my team with no risk basically. When I play her I feel like her character is better than my ability to play
