Why Orendi and Benedict are Already More Balanced Than You'd Think

Battleborn Battleborn General Discussion
#1

It seems like there are constant complaints about these two characters, especially in regards to Hawkeye and Pillarstorm. I don’t think it’s the characters/skills that’s the issue but the gear. These guys/skills are only “OMGWTF OP” when they’re rocking Legendary gear that breaks them. With normal gear, even best in slot, they’re well balanced. Yeh, Benedict still hits hard and so does Orendi but the damage they do with non-Legenday gear is in keeping with what you’d expect from a glass cannon.

Eg. Voxis Core alone on Orendi can push her into the WTFBBQ realm of dmg BS and something even like Bola’s Target Finder + Symbiotic Gauntlet on Bene takes it from “ow, Hawkeye really did a number on me” to “Wow… pretty lame I got 100-0d as a tank by friggin Hawkeye.”

Seriously, when you get the impression these characters are unstoppable kill monsters, check their gear. Similarly, play them w/o Legendary and feel the difference. I used to run 2x Legendary on Bene and it was broken OP af. I’ve since removed all Legendary gear from all of my PVP loadouts and it was immediately apparent the issue was the gear, not the character. On PC there are a few people who run triple Legendary Orendi/Bene and I honestly don’t have a lot of respect for it.

#2

Benedict with white attack speed, attack power and reload or cd or skill dmg is broken af more than orendi.

Benedict with attack speed means 133+ 2115= 1188
Attack power 133+2294=1029
Both? 133+299*5=1278
And dmg increas in 4% every lvl while hp increase in 65(iirc)

Oh and lets not forget what happens when Beni hits lvl7, a 20% dmg buff is nuts already.

Who else can do this? Orendi maybe lvl 5 but benedict do it lvl 1. Shadow pillars deals 300 dmg and her ult 500 so… No she is not broken unless legendaries while benedict do it with white gear.

#3

Actually, the problem with Orendi is that her level 5 mutation helix allows her to shave time off her Ultimate’s cooldown everytime she uses Nullify. This in and of itself, I don’t mind. Adds variety where there is none.

However, with the Chronokey, and a few other pieces of gear with secondary cooldown effects, you can have Paradigm Shift up every 10 to 15 seconds. Coupled with pillar storm, this becomes overpowered as sh*t.

That mutation is what is causing her problems. If they change it to do something else, Orendi is golden.

The only reason it needs to be changed entirely, is because you could just fix that one helix and be done with it, or try to rework the stats on chronokey AGAIN, and make the thing worthless for anyone.

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#4

Build that with benedict legendary and chrono key and get hawkeye every 5 sec

#5

Just going to let you know that Pillar storm in a normal compet game with just blue/purples/greens is likely to 1 shot everyone except the tank player. A lot of the time its happens with one skill damage item because they are running shard gen + wrench. You’ll still see two-three people leave the map in an instant.

Most Orendi’s now run shard+voxis+firmware so they can literally ult you almost every 30 seconds.

This character with pillar storm can burst a single person up around 3k just by clicking R + RB at the same time.

Also with Benny why would you ever need to run legendaries? I myself do Reload, AS, Damage because in about 900 shards you can have 30% reload speed then with level 3 you are at 60% reload speed. You can get it to 70% max.

He’s pretty much the same as Ernest and Marquis when it comes to stat building. You can also run the build for whiskey. Although Benny and Ernest function better off the “more reload for reloading”, whereas, marquis and whiskey function better off 21 + 9 for shield damage.

Note: 3 loadout pages and you can run every pusher in the game.

#6

I have made this argument before, gear is what makes this game unbalanced. I wish they would get rid of gear or make it on nonoffensive/defensive stats, like move speed only. Hell, make it so you can only have one legendary item per match or make it take up 2 gear slots. There are creative things that can be done, but since this is a gbx game, gear is what they want you to grind for and I don’t see it anytime soon. It really makes me sad that a character is balanced on their own, but with certain gear combinations, they are an unkillable assassin, looking at you Boldur.

Back to the Original topic, Orendi is a glass cannon that can be taken out quite easily and has some pretty strong counters. Bene is a good character and there are ways to tweak him as to not make him seem so OP, but he his pretty balanced right now. The problem is, he doesn’t have enough counters and the counters he does have are not very good or underutilized.

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#7

This may be wrong but I remember someone testing this and finding out it doesn’t work. For the same reason Vyn’s Quiver doesn’t work right on them

#8

Try benedict legendary, symbiotic gauntlet and a shard generator.

Everytime you land a rocket while flying you reduce in 1 sec cd of hawkeye, this skill lvl 7 increase your dmg in 20% by lvl 7 your dmg is around 266-277 without gear with dmg buff is 319*4 rockets. All you have to do is land Hawkeye and double jump while firing rockets, reduce the cd to 15 and double jump and Glide while shoting at minions can reduce the cd.

Plz name a character lvl 7 who can deal around 1500 dmg every 10-15 sec (even without gear his dmg is 1200), and remember this is not his ult just a skill with his base dmg

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#9

I’ve ran orendi without gear and still got a good K/D. @epicender584 and Blaine can attest to this with that match in Overgrowth. I was only running a shard gen. This goes to show that even without gear, Orendi is still top notch…

#10

That’s a solid point, but I’m not sure if you’re a fair model. You’ve been good with everyone I’ve seen so far

#11

The issue with this is that some characters are gear dependent. If you take away my mobility gear with Rath I might as well be useless most of the match against a decent team. And the only way to play El Dragon right now is by stacking an extra 910 points of health on him.

The issue is that some characters are so good they don’t need gear to get ■■■■ done and when they do get gear they wreck everything. The problem is with those characters not gear itself.

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#12

They can still do well w/o Legendary gear, of course, they just don’t typically get the insanely unbalanced damage spikes that make them broken. Their damage is what you’d expect from glass cannon tier, not god-tier.

Yes, Bene can still bring the pain if he lands all of his rockets but that requires both skill and for the enemy to let that happen. With Legendary gear, Bene can drop most people in 3 rockets or just spam Hawkeye like mad. With Legendary, it’s unlikely anyone will kill him before he kills them. Without Legendary, it becomes much more apparent how bloody squishy he is, as it takes several seconds more to deal out the (still not as much) damage and Bene is notably more vulnerable.

Same with Orendi. A good Orendi player can still do fine but the damage she deals is fair and balanced for how squishy she is. I’ve watched a 3x Legendary Orendi 1-hit kill an Attikus with a Shadowfire Pillar. W/o the added jank of all of the Legendary gear that makes Orendi broken, Pillar does reasonable damage. Her Ult is still scary w/o Legendary gear but it’s not “I WILL die if I get hit by this” scary.

Both characters will, of course, still do their jobs as damage dealers with non-Legendary gear but they aren’t unforgivingly cheesy about it.

#13

I can vouch for orendi with multiple legendaries, one pillar and BOOM all shield and most of my health gone

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#14

O-O-o-O-Orendi!

But hers is more in 3 seconds every 12 seconds. Probably shorter with Firmware.

#15

Orendi is my second most played character with over 130 matches and I can’t think of a single time when I’ve ever thought that anyone was a hard counter to her, although Galilea is probably the closest thing to a true counter. Some of the tankier characters can be problematic, but she’s so agile and has such high burst damage that only the bravest or most foolish players dare chase her. I don’t think she has any in-game counters, only better opposing players.
Even Benedict, who I’ll cover in a moment, isn’t really a counter to her, it’s only when he lands Hawkeye that he’s problematic for Orendi, and you can see it coming, one Nullify and Benedict’s failed while you go on the offensive and kill him to death.

This, I don’t agree with. Benedict fires high damaging rockets which can home in on you if he lands Hawkeye, along with his ridiculous level 6 and 7 damage increases, an ult that he controls and therefore rarely misses (except for when the wonky hitbox fails you) and he can fly (albeit his flight is limited).
If Benedict lands Hawkeye, running wont save you and if you’re around half health with most characters you’re as good as dead. He can chase you eternally and safely dive deeper than any other toon, and even if you get the drop on him he just flies away. It takes a solid group effort to bring Benedict down in most cases, and you’ll usually die in the attempt unless you too are Benedict. With splash damage he doesn’t even have to hit you, and unlike most launcher wielding characters in many other shooters Benedict can just face-rush you because he doesn’t have to worry about splash damage killing him and therefore doesn’t have to lead his targets like most launcher users, and leading is even less necessary if he lands Hawkeye.

That’s the short version without the technical details, but with what he’s capable of doing compared to the rest of the cast there is no world where Benedict is not OP right now, he was fine before the buffs as his health was adequately low and his damage wasn’t as high nor was Hawkeye’s duration as long, back then only the most skilled players could do with Benedict what any amateur player can do today. He most certainly in no way is balanced. There’s a reason Benedict is fast becoming one of the most frequently seen Battleborn in PvP and often has among the highest kills in most matches where he’s present, and it’s not because he’s balanced.

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#16

I used to defend Legendary gear, and there are a lot of Legendary pieces
that aren’t broken and others that are only broken on certain characters,
but they definitely hurt PVP imo. I’m totally fine with anything Epic or
below, however, as you can’t do cheesy bs with that stuff and the costs are
appropriately balanced. Legendary just breaks the bonus caps and adds too
much wonky unfun garbage that needs to be kept in PVE only. Sure, dishing
out absurd damage as Orendi is really fun but not at the expense of other
players who are getting one-shot by things they shouldn’t be. Most
importantly, it leads to balancing misconceptions in the game when common
tryhards use common tryhard characters with Legendary tryhard gear. It’s
not possible to strive for balancing perfection with Legendary in the
picture without testing all the different janky Legend combos on all the
different characters, which is an insurmountable task for the
studiocompared to the much simpler task of balancing via the normal min/max
stat caps on normal, non-bs gear.

PVP would be healthier and far more balanced if Legendaries were greyed out
from gear selection for it. Also, the people who whine about being at a
disadvantage because they don’t ever want to do any PVE no matter what cuz
lolreasons would be happier. There’s the legitimate risk of alienating
people who spent a lot of time getting Legendaries but you get them by just
playing the game like normal anyways, so, meh? Then there’s the
illegitimate concern that people who run Legendary gear expressly because
they like having an advantage for tryhard pubstomping would be upset.
There’s already enough of an incentive to earn bis normal gear, though, and
having just taken all the legendaries out of my loadouts I can say there’s
still great fun to be had in min:maxing common, uncommon, rare, and epic
gear pieces… it also gave me a new appreciation for just how effective a
lot of the pieces can be. Every character handles in a more balanced, fair,
and appropriate way w/o Legendary in the loadout and I strongly feel the
community and game would benefit from banning Legendary in -public- PVP.
Let people do w/e they want in private matches, just add a toggle in the
setup menu that says “Legendary Gear <YES/NO>” much like we have one for
"Unique Characters."

This all being said, I usually play the objective and therefore still need
Worthy of Song. For that reason, I have a single loadout that I call
"■■■■■■■■" with some Legendary gear in it that I throw on if I suspect the
match will last long enough for me to get 25 kills.

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#17

On the contrary, I think legendary gear hurts PvP for very different reasons. Not frequently, but often enough, I’ll run into a player - sometimes several in a match - running a very expensive loadout, three legendaries or two and an epic, like really expensive. These players focus so much on collecting shards for their precious gear that they flat out ignore the objective, and this detriments the whole team. You’ve probably seen it too, the players who wait at the big shard spawns ten seconds before they’ve even spawned, ready to grab them all. Sometimes the speedier characters will overtake you just to get the shards that you were heading for. Absolute scum. Now, I’m not saying that everybody who has those expensive loadouts do this, but enough do that it’s noticeably frustrating. Anyway, how do they detriment the team? Because there’s a neutral turret that is unbuilt, or a supply that a low health player needs, or an accelerator that could stop a minion wave or enemy diving, but the hoarder is being a selfish ■■■■ and is more worried about his/her gear while everyone else is starved of shards because while we’re holding lane and playing objective, they’re collecting all the shards and not using them for things that onlt they can afford that could make the difference.

So, while I don’t think removing legendaries is necessary, or in any way a good thing, I see them as having a negative impact for opposite reasons to you. I seldom use them myself anymore, I used to run double a lot but lately I prefer a cheap loadout with two exceptions being Orendi and Whiskey Foxtrot. I could live without them but I don’t think they break the game enough to warrant being disabled altogether, they add variety to the game, assuming the teammate using them knows how to distribute shards efficiently and not selfishly that is.

#18

@theavarchivist @Slif_One

This is what I have been saying since the beginning, welcome to the Anti-Legendary in PvP Club! I will make you members 3 & 4 respectively.

I have always said for every loadout that takes up over 2000 shards, you are actively hurting your team and with some game breaking effects of the legendary items, I can totally see why some characters would be so OP with certain items. With that being said, there are simple changes that GBX can do to keep legendaries in the game and keep it balanced. First, they could change the cost of all legendaries so the game breaking ones cost a ton and Shadoculars would be like 500. GBX could even build in a formula behind the scenes that the price would reflect how much they are used. So Vow of Zealous Furry would reflect the market price. The other option would make legendaries take up two gear slots.

Obviously, for PvE they, shouldn’t touch anything.

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#19

I’m not anti-legendary, I just find cheap loadouts to be more cost-effective, the more I can build the more I level and my team benefits. Even when I do run legendaries, I never activate them until I’m level 5, early legendaries are a waste of valuable shards.

#20

I will take that as a maybe then…