Banner Feedback

This league I have been playing a Banner Champion Slam build to test the new Champion Ascendency node and how it feels, here is some of my feedback.


Base Valour gain should not be limited to once every 0.5s, this limitation of Valour gain makes it so that unless you are using the "Gain 5 Valour when you Warcry, if able" mastery you cannot use Banners for anything other then potentially Bosses, this kinda relegates Banners to only Slam builds or forces you as a non-Slam build to slot in an Autoexert+Generals Cry and taking the Warcrycooldown wheel. This means that ontop of the 2 Ascendency Nodes you need to invest 14+ extra points to be able to use Banners to a satisfactory level.


Valour needs to be visible somewhere outside of the Buff Icons at the top, with the introduction of the Large Healthbars the Buff Icon visibility has greatly suffered, most Bossfights its impossible to determine how many Charges you have, how much Valour you have stored or how long the duration of your buffs are because they are hidden behind the Enemy Healthbar.


Bannerman's "Your Banner Buffs Linger on you for 3 seconds after you leave the Area" feels very clunky and unintuitive in its current implementation:

1. It doesnt count as duration of the banner itself so Banner Duration scaling does not prolong it, this makes early use of it feel very useless and makes it very top heavy in terms of investment.

2. The Regeneration from Inspirational is not an effect granted to the Banner's Buff itself which means that it does not Linger on you when leaving the Area, wich feels bad and unintuitive.

3. The buff only Lingers if you leave the Area, not if you deactivate your Banner, this means that in small arenas you can easily get in a situation were you cannot leave the Area of your Banner and if you deactive your Banner the Buff doesnt Linger and has a cooldown to be turned on again, which feels pretty bad if you are reliant on your Banners for your defenses.

Yeah I haven't played a ton of banners since the rework, but I think as you are suggesting, there might be a few things to improve.

I will leave the suggestion to people who have played them more, but I tend to prefer the old banners. Similar thing for the totem changes and counter attacks to retaliations. Throw in tinctures as well, I'm not completely sold on. I know there was reasons for changing these things, and it could be the changes end up being better, but I also think there is some stuff to work out.

It's good that some attention was paid to melee, and there was a lot of melee changes that I think were good.

ive been trying to make banners 'worth it' - their power is evident but that power comes at a SERIOUS cost:

- passives (you ABSOLUTELY need to invest into Warcry Pump - aka pick warcry AND banner passives to make it recharge in)
- ascendancy choice and/or body armour choice - not a con per se, but it still limits you
- the CLUNK of micromanaging this stuff

without warcry pump you - literally - might complete a map and not charge it once. that .5s limit is disastrous when used with builds that have HUGE instant AOE damage - like.. Slams. on such builds this is a pure waste of socket

this is the major design failure, it makes banners very, VERY niche and hardly worth using even in such niche

ive been trying Dom Blow of Inspiration - warcries with Call To Arms and banners to boost angry horde. sounds nice but the cost to reach both minion nodes AND banner nodes makes it completely unfeasible and if you have to drop one you will always drop banners


the banners themselves are also.. weird. they seem designed for summoners (again - passive tree location prevents such usage) as they are a weird mix of useful and pointless when used on players. more melee damage (great) and accuracy (wtf?). block one is cool - but on 1h build it is overkill as getting capped attack and 50%+ spell block is TRIVIAL nowadays, suppress is also nice - but what with that -damage? even vs weak salvos it hardly makes any difference, vs big hits it is completely pointless. (that +movement speed supports the 'for minions' theory)

the banner passives come from flea market. excluding valour-per-warcry they all universally suck: 'gain 3 charges on placing a fully charged banner' is probably the worst node in the game. the 'explode when near banner' either doesnt work or has 'nearby' so small that it actually doesnt trigger at all. the rest are bland '+%effect/+valour' nodes you kinda have to take to make the entire deal worth it


in general, Ive posted several times about banners in the past and despite several tries i still consider them complete failure, frankly much worse than previous iteration (10% reservation). the change supposedly was to make people plan them - guess what, nobody plants them after the change neither