In my opinion, the Rapier is fine for the most part.
We need to see how well it will perform in PvP Arenas before nerfing it too much.
As of now, Rapier is a situational weapon that doesn’t win Wars and doesn’t win OPRs.
It’s just good against melees in 1v1 situations. It’s also good in 1vX & World PvP, but that doesn’t mean you can actually kill stuff with it in 1vX. You can, however, be annoying and force a lot of players to chase you, and thus increase your team’s chance of taking a point.
You will rarely see a Rapier in the middle of a fight in OPR. It really doesn’t matter how many Rapiers a team has. Big fight outcomes are dependent on who has better/more Healers, GA/WH melees & Mages.
Dex players usually use their Bow or Musket and shoot from a distance. And with the amount of iframing & poor netcode, hitting your shots is not even consistent. (compared to a mage who can do consistent damage in big fights no matter what, while also enjoying good escape mechanics)
The only time Dex players pull out the Rapier is when they’re being attacked by melees, or when they wanna finish someone who is half HP or less.
So it’s basically a defensive weapon, that also has finisher capabilities.
I feel that much of the frustration against Rapier (and Dex in general) is coming from people who are annoyed at the fact that they cannot catch Dex players.
But people forget that when you run away, you’re basically giving away the point.
I’m genuinely baffled by the constant flow of these posts about riposte. Why do people still not know that you can easily block, dodge, and even riposte the riposte stun? I’m totally OK with a nerf to riposte’s cooldown, but the people who call riposte a broken ability are clueless. I do not know the last time I was hit with a riposte stun because I can easily dodge it.
I was even rapier dueling a level 33 the other day, and he was easily dodging my riposte stuns. Even asked him if he was on a second account, and he assured me this was his only account, so I congratulated him for knowing how to play around riposte when hundreds of people in the game are clueless about it and think it’s broken. Then, sure enough, I fight some level 60 right
after and dude gets hit with my riposte stun every time. It’s not that the ability is OP. It’s a skill gap for real.
Okay so let me give you another example, for fun I run SnS/Rapier sometimes. Sure against ranged it’s not great, but melee literally can’t touch me. It doesn’t matter if I’m not using dex or int because the abilities are too strong.
If you say “i’m just gonna feint” it won’t work because what I’m waiting for is your shockwave, maelstrom, or wrecking ball. These are choreographed, easy to read moves you cannot block or dodge riposte once struck. But even if I were to miss, using fleche and leap to stay away long enough to get riposte back is child’s play. And it’s this part in particular that should be fixed.
It doesn’t matter how careless you are with riposte because you can still escape very well after missing/not having it activated.
Implement this kind of riposte into any game and it’s very much broken. Comparing it too dark souls is a joke. The best parry in DS2 activates on frame 0, active for 18 frames, with 49 frames of recovery. Which is insane within its own game. In NW riposte literally activates frame 0, active 60 frames, 0 frames of recovery. I don’t mind keeping it like this on successful activation. It’s when it fails to activate where recovery should matter.
Adding 30 frames of recovery on failed ripostes would be good enough. This would give the pursuer a window to punish a riposte rapier user. And would promote good riposte usage.
So on live, in a situation where I have a shield and a rapier is just beating the shit out of my stam what would I do? Assume that I’m a str build using str weapons.
(In the PTR I would feint a heavy and take some dmg. Either it hits or they get baited)
I tested on ptr so it could be different but I didn’t test it against somebody attacking me so I could be wrong on the dodge aspect. When you riposte and do nothing, a recovery animation is played showing your character put the sword down. This was entirely skipped on PTR by dodging but there still may be a small window in between dodging and the defensive stance
Even if you successfully manage to not trigger a riposte, the rapier user can evade, dodge and and then fleche. At this point if you catch them with a gap closer/pull/root it’s GG. but it may take somebody with a gap-closer on cooldown 10 seconds to catch back up to the person by which time riposte is back up. Should ranged players be allowed to indefinitely kite melee regardless of whether riposte is successful or not? I think not. They shouldn’t be given a full 1 second immunity to regain stamina or their other cooldowns while sitting in riposte’s defensive stance and not be punished for it.
Ideally, you should think ahead and manage your stamina well enough to predict an incoming riposte. If you’re holding block, don’t let them get you under 50 stam and just go for it, even if you know riposte is coming out.
Another thing to note, if you run out of stamina on PTR, you can’t feint an attack until stamina is fully recharged (even though feint costs 0 stamina to perform but /shrug).
So what is your argument for future arena players? 2v2 would be dominated by life staff/rapier musket/rapier users. Melee would be next to useless against that combo. Unless your’e using SnS+something.
Well my argument is that further balance (for all weapons) should be done around small scale PvP. I also think the devs are quite aware of this, and that’s exactly their plan.
As of now, the number of Rapiers in a War or an OPR is not a predictor of the side having more of them winning. And those are the only organized forms of PvP right now.
So to say that Rapier is OP is highly subjective & statistically incorrect.
Rapier is not op in the same sense as a one shot weapon but one that is almost impossible to kill solo for a melee you would need at least 2 people to kill a rapier in a reasonable amount of time.
Na you just spam light and blocks and out trade them, or use leaping strik from close distance so they cant rispote react to it because its too fast, and then you can 1 shot them to death with leaping strike into shield bash into wrecking into shockwave into heavy attack
Even if you successfully manage to not trigger a riposte, the rapier user can evade, dodge and and then fleche. At this point if you catch them with a gap closer/pull/root it’s GG. but it may take somebody with a gap-closer on cooldown 10 seconds to catch back up to the person by which time riposte is back up. Should ranged players be allowed to indefinitely kite melee regardless of whether riposte is successful or not? I think not. They shouldn’t be given a full 1 second immunity to regain stamina or their other cooldowns while sitting in riposte’s defensive stance and not be punished for it.
See so this is where you go wrong, firstly you should save your gap closing abilities from after they have evade and fleche away etc and the main thing you are forgetting is that all rapier players that kite have a musket or a bow. BOTH of these weapons now have to stop for a good 1.5 seconds to shoot each shot and they can easily be iframed by anyone competent while catching up to them.
at least on PTR.