(Edit: Rant OP plz nerf)
Title. Menders OP plz nerf.
Silkwings:
- Melee range
+ Can't be interrupted
- Can't heal themselves or other silkwings
+ Heal everything nearby slightly on death
- No special abilities
Menders:
+ Far range
- Can be interrupted
+ Can heal themselves and other menders at will
+ Can push players away
+ Put up a shield at low health, delaying their deaths significantly
+ Can revive other menders (and all the other extremely annoying gremlins)
+ Can create AoE healing fields that heal a large group of enemies too rapidly to out-DPS, making the area impossible to fight in for several seconds
Hmmm. Perfectly balanced, eh?
Maybe buff silkwings someday so they're not completely useless, but in the meantime, how about we instead nerf the universal menders?
A shadow weapon on the side is impractical to earn as getting decently leveled gear is extremely expensive. It's already a long, difficult grind to satisfy the Hall of Heroes progression walls - having to craft up several alternative weapons for specific situations (such as multi-mender spam) will take it too far without having access to the standard endgame grind-zones. Having a shadow weapon as our main weapon is equally impractical due to all the irritating enemies that are resistant to it.
Obtaining poison vials/barriers is unreliable unless you spend half your income on Basil, not everybody has Maskeraith, and I already covered weapons above. That, and poison doesn't work too well anyway in poison levels...
Now that I'm done with that brief rant, let's get to the actual nerf part.
We can't get rid of every aspect of them, but we can at least take off one or two.
Some possibilities:
- Get rid of their area heal, or at least nerf its duration significantly (if not just make it a single tick).
- Prevent them from using other attacks while their area heal is active. (via Nitronicx)
- Get rid of their shield; they still heal everything with their full effectiveness, but they can be killed more reasonably
- Get rid of their revive; they still are fully effective, but once they're dead, they're dead for good
- Give them the same disadvantage silkwings have; don't let them heal other living menders, but still allow them to revive dead ones and self heal
- Same as above, but also allow them to indirectly heal other menders without targeting them directly (via their two AoE heals)
Personally I'd be in favor of the fifth option. It's not a crippling nerf and they keep all of their abilities, but it should still make fighting them that much easier if it'll be more difficult for them to heal themselves. It'll also mostly just change groups, which is the main case where they really start becoming unfightable.
The second one is also good. Again, a small(ish) nerf, but it still may well get rid of the more unfair-seeming situations.
At the very least if everyone is insistent they want to keep them as they are, the sixth option is available as a compromise.
But they already have been nerfed - they used to have a melee attack every time they dodged away from you (making swords dangerous to use on them) and a ranged projectile attack that you can see on the knight wrench wand variant. This made healers a threat rather than a support monster. It wasn't the greatest time to be a gremlin hunter...
I don't think nerfing the healer who does a pretty dang good job at healing is the solution when you basically listed "don't tell me how to beat this difficult enemy via methods that are great for killing this difficult enemy". That's like saying "don't tell me to make a blitz for vanaduke because I shouldn't have to" - sure, you don't have to, but it's pretty dang handy for both vanaduke and literally the rest of the game.
I'd sooner have a darkfang thwacker's spin attack be more choreographed than nerf a darkfang mender to be a complete pushover.