Family Name: BRT

Region (NA/EU): EU

Many awakening valk players were excited when we first saw the changes on global lab, myself included, but as we got more information and now being able to test them ourselves most of us are left disappointed. The initial PVE changes were significantly reduced before we even got them and many skills were changed unnecessarily with big impacts on PVP performance. Awakening valkyrie really needed the PVE buffs to keep up with top tier classes at endgame spots such as dehkia thornwood, with most players prefering to FOTM tag for endgame PVE with just 48 hours tracked on Garmoth (succession and awakening) compared to 2333 hours for succession woosa.

To be competitive in PVE valk needs more AOE, less APM and slightly more damage and the changes in the 13/09 patch did help but some changes are out of place:

Castigatio damage buffs are appreciated but speeding up the animation leads to even more APM than before the patch. Please revert the animation speed increase (keeping the improved combos into other skills) and buff the damage per hit to maintain the same (or slightly higher) DPS. The skill could also use larger AOE to more consistently hit all the mobs in a pack. Don't forget to add the second CC back for people who use the core skill in PVP, which absolutely didn't need to be nerfed as it's generally considered to be the weaker core choice.

Purificatione was changed in the 13/09 patch to not debuff DR when used on CD. As your primary debuff this is a substantial nerf and doesn't belong in a patch designed to buff PVE. It also has a negative impact on PVP where you now cannot heal your ally and then debuff an enemy. This is made worse by the removal of the DR debuff on Divina Inpulsa and the fact Wave of Light has a bound CC and so should not be used in a combo.

Divina Inpulsa and Blitz Stab feel underwhelming in PVE with small AOE and average damage. The AOE can't be buffed without affecting PVP; so instead please buff the PVE damage of these two skills to be closer to the global labs patch to reward players who group mobs effectively.

Wave of light had its damage buffed in the 13/09 patch to make it more worthwhile to cast but it's still low with just 1250% x 4, please buff this further with additional PVP damage reduction to keep the damage the same in PvP.

Awakening valkyrie movement has probably been changed more than any other class and PA still seem confused on how the class should move. The changes in the 13/09 patch are understandable but have some issues:

Promptness was nerfed to use double the stamina (100 -> 200) and to not regen stamina while using it. This was done to nerf the so called 'valk train' but also affects almost all movement combos that players use. The stamina cost also feels very high for what is often an unprotected small dash when compared to other classes that have good iframes for just 150 stamina (drakania for example).  Please either reduce the stamina cost to a more reasonable 150 or add SA to the skill when on CD.

Hastilidium has been significantly buffed and is a lot of fun to use after the changes, however it's almost impossible to control. This is especially bad in smaller areas of the map, when trying to avoid terrain and when trying to actually hit a moving enemy with it. Please buff the turning control, especially towards the end of the skill and increase the cooldown to 9 seconds as compensation.

Death Line Chase and Shield Chase feel lacklustre, with multiple dashes needed to cover the same distance as other classes with a single skill, and are a big reason valkyrie players are dependent on high APM movement combos using promptness. If the promptness nerfs are not toned down please consider buffing DLC and SC to travel ~20% further to allow valkyrie to make small adjustments without using her stamina pool.

PVP has always been a strong point for awakening valkyrie and it doesn’t need significant changes, that said there are a couple of changes that would make the class feel a lot better to play:

Verdict: Lancia lustitiae was one of the most changed skills in the 13/09 patch, unfortunately not for the better. The second hit of the skill is incredibly slow, much slower than the original skill, forcing you to cancel out of it with Divina Vult which is unprotected and opens you to be CC'd even if you quickly cancel with Q block. Please significantly speed up the second hit to give you the option to stay in SA. The skill also has a +20 DR buff which doesn't stack with the buff from your block making it useless, either make this stack or replace it with melee DR or some other unique buff.

Noble Spirit is an ebuff that sometimes feels worse to cast than to not use it at all. The main stat it gives is +50% resistance which in practice gives you between 0-20% resistance since resistances were capped at 80%. Please replace this with a more useful stat such as the 'Deletes all DR reduction effects' that succession nova has. The ebuff also has increased HP regen which after testing is 100 HP per 5 seconds, please update this to fit more with modern HP values (I think 300 HP per 5 seconds would be balanced). Lastly, the unique sprint mechanic feels very lacklustre (preventing you from using DLC forwards and leading to many stupid CC's) and should be changed from FG to SA to match the amount of protection in the game. These changes would bring the ebuff more inline with the power level of other ebuffs.

There are also a couple of small oversights that the class has had since the reboot:

Divine Power is a great slow skill which is underutilised by some valks, however it only has -20% attack speed slow, it doesn't slow casting speed. This is really annoying as it forces you to memorise every class which uses attack speed and cast speed (its not always intuitive with valk using casting speed for example) as against some classes its good peel and for others it does nothing. Please add 20% casting speed slow to the skill like you did with Vindicta.

Terra Sancta is one of your strongest skills but it has had a gap in SA when using it for years now, leading to many frustrating and unfair CCs. The gap is after casting the skill and occurs regardless of what skill you follow it with. Doing an SA skill into another SA skill with no downtime shouldn't result in you being CC'd, please fix.

Vindicta was buffed in the 13/09 patch but it still sucks, please either buff the slow (similar to awakening caster slow) to reward you for landing it or increase the AOE. Or even change it completely, right now almost everyone just locks this.

I hope PA considers making these changes and thanks for reading.

Bert always coming with amazing suggestions. Valk definitely feels like she got given a pastry that looked good on the outside, but ended up being moldy on the inside. 

W bert post. Good changes, but for PvE they're underwhelming and in some cases not the same compared to what was shown and implied initially.

all you doing rn is asking for pvp buffs while letting it look like pve buffs. this class for sure dosnt need more movement, protection, multihit cc or aoe with this amount of utullity already in the kit. stop clowning around

I agree with most of what is exposed on the post.

Basically, we need mechanics to make our PvE more healthy, like adding some PvE AoE effects or hits into skills (as well as improving %dmg of some skills) to improve the DPS in the kit but without impact on PvP, like succ valk which has a passive PvE hit charge using Celestial Spear which adds 1x hit for the skill Sword Of Judgement. One of the principal issues of the awakening valk kit is that the skills flow so fast and have high CDs that eventually you end up using some pre awakening skills because you have burnt all the awakening CDs, such as shield throw or divine power to fill damage, it would be appreciated to get slight PvE dmg buffs on those aswell, considering the CDs of our awakening kit skills are long (and they are justified from a PvP perspective). Also it would be good to add another T3 skill, Verdict or Enslar could be good regarding this, all the new classes have 2 T3 addon skills that can infinitely rotate for PvE and this fact makes us inferior PvE wise.

Regarding most of the QoL exposed, i agree in general, we need more fixes on the skills rather than straight buffs (vacuum change, for example, was positive in my opinion, while purificatione, terra sancta, verdict or hastilidium are horrible changes in general), but i think that the best solution should be to revert all the mobility changes proposed as i consider that the new Hastilidium is a bit unbalanced, and if you buff the other dashes a bit while keeping the current kilometric hastilidium the class might look even more broken than it actually is, personally i dont mind losing this new hastilidium if we get a decent rework to our current mobility skills and fixing and making more relevant skills such as righteous charge or shield chase, mostly regarding hit stagger, unprotected movement and the clunkyness between shield chases which are the main concerns in terms of valk mobility before this patch.

The general problem i think that this class suffers is that developers have linked the PvE and PvP performance too much, to the point that touching PvE can cause several problems to the PvP kit in terms of balance (for example, regarding AoEs), so i think the devs should try to unlink the PvE and PvP sides of the class as much as possible to make both of the contents enjoyable (i would be fine if some skills had a huge AoE and great dmg for PvE but remain useless on PvP!), while keeping the balance in the class and not going crazy with changes that the valk community didnt ask for (which is, personally, 80% of the patch PA delivered in my opinion).

I can understand your worries about those suggestions, but Pearl Abyss made changes that also touch at valk's performance both in PvE endgame and PvP, since which the main goal is to nerf valktrain ONLY.

But we hoped for a good buff for PvE Endgame too, Valk awk is behind many classes in the game and with high apm, while other classes can cast less skills and do more damage, different from you... not all players have an interest in linking to another class and grind with her. PA also can keep the same amount of PVP damage while increase the damage for pve. #Peace

Using the E buff feels like shooting yourself in the foot. 

True, I feel that even after this changes, Valk will still struggle to keep up with other classes both in PVP and PVE. 
I think they need to tune Valk again, Especially the E buff :<. but I'm happy they actually try after such a long time. 

And that Promptness stamina nerf is just painful.

Ngl, I am happy to see some sensibel Valk suggestions & feedback for once, instead of "let us stack our 3 dr buffs, onto the 30(?) dr we have from fitness training". 

The most important what I should to add here: return Sacrum ferit stiff and float back instead of useless FG!