With the recent re-addition of the stagger to Flourish it was decided to reduce Flourish’s damage from 90% to 60%, thus making it a CC oriented ability as opposed to a damage oriented one. However, the armor/weapon perk “Deadly Flourish” was left untouched, and with it being a Damage oriented perk I can only hope that it’s an oversight or simply just missing from the patch notes somehow.
A conditional 25%/39% additional dmg was already hard enough to justify when the dmg was at 90%, i.e the perk adding the equivalent of 22.5%/35% extra weapon dmg. With Flourish now only dealing 60% dmg, the perk only adds the equivalent of 15%/23.4% extra weapon dmg. 15% more dmg (i.e basicly the same as the new 14% attunement value) on an ability thats most often saved for safety reasons or at the end of a combo, that only work “half” the time thanks to it’s trigger condition, as well as taking up a valuable armor perk slot is just straight up silly.
The increase from the perk is now so absurdly low that I would never advice anyone run the perk on their armor and especially not on the Rapier. The Deadly Flourish perk now pales in comparison to the 12% crit from the Keen Tondo Perk, or the 29% lifesteal on Flurry via its perk. Hell, 10/19% empower on evade, 15%/24% rend on Riposte or 19%/33% cdr on Fleche Backstabs are all great comparisons for how weak the Flourish perk now becomes. Furthermore, with the now finalized intent of making Flourish be a CC/utility ability as opposed to a damaging ability, having the armor/weapon perk adding more damage to it no longer makes sense.
If anything the perk needs a revert to the pre-perk overhaul version where it granted Stamina when landing a Flourish hit, or ideally a rework so that it perhaps adds a short Slow like Crippling Reap does for the Great Axe’s Reap. This would not only make sense defensively for people using Flourish as a self peel, but it would also help set up the follow up Finish hits for the players who use it for the damage.
Alternatively it could be reworked into something affecting Finish to help double down on it being a high dmg burst ability. This way it would not re-buff the Rapier self peel like adding a slow would, instead opening up some creative design space for the Bleed/Burst setups.
Biased as I am, I would love something along the lines of having the Bleed Consuption effect deal increased damage to targets at low health, i.e from 150% bleed damage via Bloody End to 165%/185%. This would add 28.5%/66.5% weapon dmg to the realistic max of a 19s bleed being consumed on targets below the 50% or 30% threshold, thus making it worthwhile considering to gear for again, especially in regards to having it on the rapier itself.
Whilst having the idea of having the perk be reworked into a proper damage perk for Finish is most likely a fever dream, the perk has no bussiness reaching the live servers in its current state. Both in terms of the innate ability identity and especially in regards to it’s actual damage value, it’s now nowhere near any of the other options in terms of consideration (I.e Refreshing or Keenly Empowered).
