TFS
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I really dislike a lot of things about this class.
In short, I think the issue with DragonSlayer is that the class requires a lot of favorable RNG just to have baseline functionality, and then even with perfect RNG the class underperforms compared to nearly every other defensive class in the game (which come with the added bonus of their buttons actually working when you press them). There are already responses discussing the class's tuning, but that isn't really something that matters to me for as long as the class just isn't fun to play.
The core of the issue is that hit roll RNG impacts your defensive functionality (instead of something like Pirate, where hit roll RNG just gives you a bit of extra damage), so getting unlucky once will snowball into you being drastically disadvantaged or outright losing the fight. This is not a good place to be in if you both fish for RNG every single turn, and have low damage so fights last for a large number of turns.
I'm also not going to discuss the class outside the context of boss fights at level 90 because it is unusably bad outside of this context - ignoring things like upfront damage, mana costs, or how it performs versus classes obtained earlier in the game, DragonSlayer seems to assume that the player has at least 40-45 BPD from their gear, and is even worse otherwise.
First, let's talk about all the issues with hit roll RNG that this class faces, ignoring everything else. It debuffs its own BPD and then only applies weak BPD shields like +100 or +150 to itself, so you only have about a ~46% to ~71% chance to block a hit versus the average boss, assuming no buffs to bonus. However, you only need to only actually BPD past one hit in order to get an empowerment, so in actuality the odds of success can suddenly become much higher versus bosses that are animated in such a way that their attacks have many hit frames, or quite volatile versus bosses that are only animated to have one hit frame per attack. This is also made worse by the fact that DragonSlayer completely lacks any way to lower its opponent's Bonus - the only defensive class in the game with this distinction - despite being foundationally reliant on blocking opponents' attacks.
I can kind of see the vision that you're supposed to be layering these weaker shields together for more consistency, but this is unappealing for multiple reasons. First, the chance to even GET a shield is itself RNG reliant, with Instinctual Counter's accessibility, Dragonslayer's accessibility, and Wyvern Scout's duration both being dependent on your hit roll RNG on the prior turn - leading to horrible snowball situations where you need to defend yourself because you got unlucky but the ability to defend yourself has also been removed or reduced because you got unlucky. Second, because these defensive effects are reliant on hit roll RNG, you don't want to 'waste' them with downtime - in order to perform optimally, the class needs to be spreading its +100 BPD shields out across different turns, so that it is still able to have access to -Crit or status immunity or another shield, which means more gambling. And, finally, there's the issue where layering shields still isn't actually enough to make fights consistent; either due to enemies getting +Bonus buffs that you can't counteract because you don't have a -Bonus skill, or simply because of getting crit.
The next layer of RNG is that your shields/counters hinge on BPD instead of MPM, which means they automatically get pierced by opponents rolling natural crits (this is just bad RNG you have tools to counteract but cannot always due to rotation rigidity, or necessitate you to use Cysero's Hammer which is more RNG reliance), or buffed crits (your tools to counteract this are reliant on... hitroll RNG, which includes not getting Crit in the first place). This is just a second layer of frustation that can disable your counters, disabling further chances to defend or protect yourself from statuses, again snowballing into a loss state. There's also the obvious issue of the fact that critical hits lower your HP bar and can inflict you with debuffs - perhaps even those that will also prevent you from countering - but DragonSlayer is very far past the point of that being the primary issue.
There's also, of course, the issue of autohit and autocrit moves. Either one of these will also disable your ability to counter, causing you to get snowballed, but there's nothing that can actually be done about them - even with favorable RNG. Autohit moves are few and far between, due to how frustrating it is to not be able to defend enemy attacks when you press your shield (imagine that!), but nearly every boss of the past 10 years has an autocrit move. Again, I hate to belabor the point, but because something as foundational as your defensive skill effects hinge on you being able to BPD roll incoming attacks, actually getting hit is something that disadvantages you way more than it does to every other class.
Also, to add insult to injury, DragonSlayer just permanently debuffs its own BPD. Why are we doing this? It's not like this is some obscenely strong behemoth that needs to be kept in check by a passive debuff, this class is frankly terrible and its own self-debuff makes it even worse. I kind of understand the -50 MPM - the point is to get glanced, not to get missed - but why is there also a -25 BPD here? This should be a +25 BPD if anything, to shore up the issues of the shields being so weak.
The -MPM also serves to take the reliability off of pet dragon's Scales skill, which is a foundational tool used by every class. Like again, I hate to keep repeating myself, but this is just inserting more hit roll RNG and unreliability into something that every other class is capable of using with no issue. Like, your BPD skills all come with -MPM and you can't -Bonus so why is the -MPM even here? Maybe this is like an intentional hit to pet dragon's effectiveness, for the sake of flavor compliance with being a dragon slayer?
DragonSlayer's healing is also quite bad, which is very unfortunate when you're a low-damage defensive class that keeps getting chipped down through BPD reliance. Cleave's status immunity is huge for DragonSlayer - you badly need it due to how unreliably your defenses are and how long fights take to finish - but because this is a counter skill you need to actually get glanced in order to activate armor coating. Which means you can't use Slayer's Stand and then swap to -Health gear before using Cleave. Which means this actually represents a heal half as effective as it would be for any other class. Why not just make armor coating the default effect and then have the counter effect just be a bigger heal - more than you'd get from -healthswap? Also the heal has hit check because of course it does, so you can't even use it if you're trying to recover while the enemy is shielded.
Another drawback to constantly having to defend attacks in order to function is that DragonSlayer will be spending most of its turns putting up short shields, inserting a lot of rigidity into its rotation. This isn't something that's inherently bad or automatically counts the class out or whatever, but the lack of flexibility is another thing that just makes the class weaker when it already isn't great.
Finally, once you resolve all of the above issues - you fought a boss with enough hits per turn and low enough bonus to reliably counter it, your bad RNG was minimal and you were able to avoid getting snowballed (or recover from it), and the boss didn't deal enough damage to take you down in 80 turns - DragonSlayer is just worse than every other defensive class. Its healing and defenses are worse than Pirate, Ninja, Paladin, Kathool, Pyromancer, DragonLord, Necromancer, SnugglePanda, and even defensive DeathKnight. It not only takes longer to finish fights than Pirate, Ninja, Kathool, Pyromancer, or DragonLord, it takes five frustrating attempts to do so because of all the RNG. Why would you ever use this? I think many of the above complaints about the cooldowns and damage are a little exaggerated (though I understand wanting more damage - if every turn is a gamble of course you want there to be fewer turns), but the class fundamentally having an ineffective playstyle and being unfun to play are things that I think are far more fundamental than tuning.
So that's a lot of issues, but what about the class should actually be changed to improve it? I think first and foremost, the counter system should only be linked to offensive effects and not defensive ones (Armor Coating, Draconic Chill, 3-turn Wyvern Stance should just be default). I also think the low shield strengths are something that inspires frustration more often than it encourages players to layer them, and a good first step towards adjusting this could be changing the passive -25 BPD to +25 BPD. I also think Counter Stance and Wyvern Scout should inflict -Crit on the target. These would all be good steps towards reducing RNG reliance, and rewarding the player for good RNG rather than punishing them for bad RNG which is less frustrating to play.
Some other, smaller things:
-I wish Instinctual Counter updated your stats panel when you click the widget and not once you click a skill.
-Is it intentional that Dragonslayer and Counter Stance give you the same shield? Because the status refresh bug means you can use them to get 1 turn of +150 BPD and then 2 turns of +250 BPD, instead of the expected 2 turns of +150 BPD and then 1 turn of +250 BPD.
-DragonSlayer is kind of in a weird place because you get it at level 30 and it's a convoluted, ineffective version of Pirate that has unreasonably high mana costs and is only good for Level 90 content. Pirate itself is easy to understand, good at questing, better for bosses, and is a good investment as soon as you get it at Level 20. Not sure how much the Book 1 / reimagined playthrough experience is taken into account when these classes are designed but it's not nothing.
-Similarly, I feel like the widget, Attack tooltip, and status panel blurbs vomit a ton of information at you in a way that's overwhelming and difficult to parse, and is definitely going to be a player repellant in its current state. I feel like DragonSlayer is designed to have a sort of playstyle or character archetype that's foreign to DragonFable's combat system, which is why it so heavily modifies the player's stats every turn; as a result, the game should probably go a little bit further to try and communicate this information to players in a more digestible way.
-I don't like how the multi only shoots one projectile and that somehow damages all three enemies; this doesn't make a lot of visual sense. It's also kind of weird that Combo3 and the final have the same animation; maybe Akriloth should be the rightmost skill?
These race and racial changes were all pretty good. Yllmar is now a less annoying farm and some time-wastey challenges now waste less time, while IE, Vath, and Triple Trouble got some badly needed buffs. Most importantly, some of the flavor fails of monsters not having the correct race for balance reasons were fixed, which is great for presentation!
Ice and Dragons got a pretty significant buff, which might lead to frustration in the future since the opening phase of this fight is very RNG heavy and you now have to spend more time in it. However, these are already dragons with less than 10,000 HP and I think lowering them further would be a flavor violation lol.
Void Reunion and Willowshire Burns are also on the harder difficulty end (and WB even has a meta-relevant reward) but were made slightly easier by this change; if any fight does get adjusted it would probably be these two that 'need' it. However, it's only a 10% damage differential, which isn't very much lol.
The new scene with Konnan was a good inclusion. His motives are something that definitely needed to be better explained (and not with a cheesy tattoo like in the original quests) and this did a good job of doing that. Also like how the protag showed a little bit of backbone.
< Message edited by TFS -- 5/18/2026 18:12:34 >
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