Fernando Buffs (Talent Reworks)
So whenever you go into conversations about balance, one of the biggest characters to pop up is Fernando. The almost universally accepted consensus seems to be that he is weak, but that isn't necessarily true. It's not that his base kit is weak, it's that all of his talents are very oddly situational. There is no real universally useful talent, which is a problem on a front line like Fernando.
So, I think it is high time he got his talents reworked, and as such I decided to make a thread about how I think they should be reworked to be more useful.
Aegis: Your Shield has its cooldown reduced by 0.5 seconds for every 500 damage it takes while active, reducing its cooldown by up to 8 seconds when completely broken (or up to 10.5 seconds with Towering Barrier 5).
Our first rework is for Aegis. Now, almost every front liner has some kind of talent that allows them to shield much more effectively to fill a role of being more of a shielding tank. Makoa has his Half Shell that allows him to protect himself while still dishing out damage and CC. Ash has Fortress Breaker which makes her normally highly aggressive shield into more of a team shield. But Aegis on the other hand just doesn't really help much at all. Yeah, it reduces the cooldown by 3 seconds, but a shield on a 12 second cooldown is still heavily unreliable when Wrecker exists and there are no ways to reduce it any further without Chronos. With this rework, Aegis would make his shield much better by reducing its cooldown depending on how much damage he blocks with it, effectively rewarding him for blocking lots of damage. Not only that, but it would synergize well with Towering Barrier and potentially Heat Transfer. With Aegis, Towering Barrier 5, and Chronos III, his shield could have a minimum cooldown of 3.15 seconds. Now, that may sound overpowered, but it only happens if your shield is completely broken; and even then, it would take 2400 credits to buy Chronos III and get to that amount of cooldown reduction in the first place, which isn't going to happen unless you focus all of your credits solely on Chronos the entire game.
Scorch: Flame Lance's burning effect is completely overhauled: rather than applying a flat 200 damage burn over 2 seconds whenever Flame Lance hits an enemy, Fernando will apply a burn with a duration that gradually stacks from his attacks and abilities.
Enemies that are burning will take 20 damage every .2 seconds.
Flame Lance will apply 0.2 seconds of burning for every 0.1 seconds that it is fired at the enemy.
Fireball will apply 1 second of burning to every enemy hit.
Charge will apply 2 seconds of burning to every enemy hit.
The burn duration can stack up to a total of 10 seconds, potentially dealing a maximum of 1000 damage over the duration.
Now on to Scorch. Back in the day, Scorch used to be the universal talent for Fernando because it gave additional base damage to his Fireball which could then have its cooldown halved by Incinerate. This gave him a very powerful damage tool on a 3 second cooldown that also had a special niche of dealing big damage to enemies that are either bunched up or in a line. When they removed the base damage increase, it made the talent extremely situational because after that point, only the niche remained where it would deal more damage to enemies if they were lined up. This talent rework would make Fernando extremely fun to play with a stacking burn to all of his attacks. It increases all of his base damage, but not for free. In order to capitalize on the talent, Fernando would have to utilize his kit to keep the enemy team burning as much as he can rather than just giving him an instant flat bonus to one of his attacks like what it did before. It would also allow him to make sure enemies don't get out-of-combat healing as much as they would otherwise since the burn can last for up to 10 seconds.
Formidable: Immortal now grants CC immunity to allies, charges 15% faster, and heals both you and your allies for 25% max health over 1 second after it ends.
Last but certainly not least, Formidable. I've said this before in another thread; the current Formidable is weird. It lets him survive every once in a while, but that's it. The idea of talents is to provide a huge change in how you play, so having a talent that saves you once and then does absolutely nothing else for 45 seconds is incredibly jarring. I know that ultimate-based talents do basically the same thing, but the difference is that ultimates are under the player's full control, rather than being used automatically like what the old Formidable did. This talent would still be somewhat situational, but still useful for those who want to buy Morale Boost to save their teammates frequently from potential team wipes and afterwards with its healing burst. Also, the constant ult charge increase is always good.
Please reply and tell me what you think of these talent reworks. I really appreciate all feedback.
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Originally Posted by AyyDimitri
