A concise list of issues with awakening witch in 2025, and how they can be solved.

This feedback list is primarily based off of the 2025 AoS Season

Note; personally, I believe that the only way to see awakening witch receive a relevant position in the game is by nerfing almost all other classes, especially their protection and mobility, as well as damage in a few cases.

That being said, if PA insists on continuing their balance trends, here are the major issues for awakening witch.

1. Overreliance on static skills with no cancel option to avoid changing battlefields. I can be using an FG at my maximum range, and many classes can gap-close and CC me at that range, without me being able to finish/cancel my skill, as no such cancels exist and the skill is simply too slow.
2. Overreliance on “protected CCs” in her balance budget. Protected CCs are only valuable when opponents have gaps in their protections. This is no longer the case in 2025.
3. Lack of mobility (in general, but especially offensively). If we iframe once, we cannot do so again to avoid a grab for 8s. This reality is easily abused by anyone decently skilled with a grab.
4. Lack of damage, especially in a combo sense. Although awakening witch can output sustained damage, she cannot do so quickly, or indeed react to enemies making mistakes (and eating CCs).
5. Abandoned pre-awakening, despite the heavy reliance on it. Witch has always used her pre-awakening more than other classes, famously using some of the most hotkeys in the game to facilitate swapping to pre-awakening. However her skills here have fallen off drastically with time.

Solutions:

1. Witch must be able to cancel her awakening skills with her dashes, elementalization, teleport, and any new mobility skills she receives. Also, some skills must be sped up to match the current state of the game (Lightning Blast, Equilibrium Break, Yoke of Ordeal)
2. Witch’s awakening skills should be given multi-tick CC to ensure her protected CCs retain their value. All awakening skills currently CCing, should have their CC effects extended onto every hit in the skill. Furthermore, awakening witch should receive a passive 100% ignore resistance, at least until resistances are removed from PvP.
3. Witch should receive a second charge of Teleport. Teleport should have its cooldown reduced to 6s, with ultimate: teleport to 8s. Elementalization should be a lingering iframe on landing. Magical Evasion should be an iframe on a 5s CD, with 2 charges of SA.
4. All awakening skills besides barrage of lightning should receive damage buffs, especially Yoke of ordeal and equilibrium break, as well as thunderstorm and lightning blast. The earth skills (Fissure wave, yoke of ordeal, equilibrium break) should receive 25% block damage effects. The lightning skills’ slows should be buffed in duration and strength, and applied to all skills. Two new skills should be added to awakening that allow for her to deal fast-unprotected burst damage on enemies foolish enough to eat a CC. These skills should have damage comparable to other classes’ high burst skills, and be on a uniquely long cooldown by witch’s standards.
5. Witch’s pre-awakening should receive universal buffs to damage, especially by reducing/removing the pvp reduction (again). Projectile skills should have their projectile speed greatly increased, such that they can again hit the fast moving targets of today (speeds comparable to stub-arrow should be considered). Earthquake should be given its multi-cc back. Fireball explosion should have its AoE increased. Blizzard should be buffed and have its split damage removed. Residual lightning should be changed to a Knockdown, and receive damage buffs. It should also be cancellable with teleport and other pre-awakening skills. Protected Area should be castable from awakening, have its duration increased to 10s, and have its cast time removed. Elementalization should be useable from pre-awakening. Freeze can be moved to a hotkey skill. Our total hotkeys available should be increased to 30~40, using Shift+/Alt+ inputs.

"This feedback list is primarily based off of the 2025 AoS Season, which on EU featured only a single awakening witch above the 1200 bracket... "

- On NA as well for the most part. There are only 1 Awakening Witch and 1 Awakening Wizard about the 1200 bracket (both of which did well on their first 10 games and have played 15 games or less in total).  There is not a single Awakening Wiz/Witch in "Shining Spear" (Red) tier.

Infact Awaken Witch/Wiz and Awaken Woosa are the only classes in the game without a single player in atleast "Shining Spear" (Red).

This clearly demonstrates it is not a skill issue, but rather the class is completely under-balanced.

"Overreliance on “protected CCs” in her balance budget. Protected CCs are only valuable when opponents have gaps in their protections. This is no longer the case in 2025."

- That isn't completely true. Awaken Witch often has unintended gaps. *dies*  Because of Thunder Storm and Elementalization using the "S" keybinding, it very easily cancels SA from a previous skill into S-block FG while trying to chain to another SA rotation skill.  I actually made a feedback thread on this today.

There are two FG inserts in there which ultimately mean you CC yourself. You can avoid this of course, but it is very picky finger timing with both buttons. Easy to be a few miliseconds off between full key clicks which causes a slight break, but enough to get you CC'd.  Ultimately, S-Block needs to be disabled during SA skills, but with slight SA input linger added if S key is pressed soon after. Incase it just cancels into nothing.) If ever wanting to transition to FG for whatever reason, Q block is still available.

Heck, Add 0.5-1s SA onto S-Block with a short cooldown (or none... so many grab classes out there anyway) and problem solved.

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I agree with most of what you are saying, but I'll add to the list.

- RMB pet stiffen (unprotected).   -    ..........  a slow unprotected stiffen. Who are we kidding. The animation takes longer than the CC itself if the stiffen hits or isn't resisted. :D 

Pet Stiffen needs to be much much faster and FULL SA or it may as well be deleted. Obviously we have our summons though so it would be nice if they did something beyond give away your location in PVP. :9        Much faster and full SA would be an easy fix for it to be useful.  

- Remove Fissue Wave as a Core option completely. In turn, adjust it so that it is ALWAYS FG....  hell, make it SA at this point. lol. It is a slow skill which it easy to CC people out of. Atleast if it remains somewhat protected, people can make use of one of the other Cores to their skills to make one of them a bit more useful.

- Movement...  GG.   A close to mid ranger squish class.  We can move in, do a bit of damage which most likely won't finish the job and will die due to being unable to get out again. (even if we don't break our SA due to bad keybindings).

Split TP - yup!   Magical Evasion... I mean this should almost be full SA given what other classes have, but atleast make it the first 2 or a very short cooldown timer.

I have a long list of issues with the class, but I havent written them out well enough as of yet to make a fully documented case on why it is so broken.

There is not a single Awakening Caster (Both Witch/Wiz) on NA that has been able to reach the Shining Spear (Red) tier in AoS.)
One of the Awakening Wizards is a few matches closer to it than myself, but most of his victories have come from playing Hashashin.

The only other class beyond Awakening Witch and Wizard to not have a single player able to reach Shining Spear (Red) tier on the NA servers as of today is Awakening Woosa. Though it looks like Jaykun may reach it soon. (Also Awakening Woosa got some buffs this week.)

This CLEARLY demonstrates that Awakening Casters are suffering from under-balance compared to almost the entire BDO roster in regards to PVP.

Sidenote: Its at the point where awakening casters literally can't get into siege guilds regardless of gear and are forced to reroll. lol.

Talking about protected CC...

Think about the current skills of the Awakening Witch being protected. 1. Voltaic Pulse (SA + Bound)  2.  Yoke of Ordeal (FG + Knockback  x2 over 2.5 sec or so).  In the mainhand, that's earthquake + frigid fog that each have the same issues as Voltaic Pulse being largely defensive/reactive. Saving grace for offensive protected CC is sage memory + rank 3 meteor every 3 min.

What I personally observe is that both of these protected skills are inadequate as a whole. In other words, a new class receiving the equivalent would be immediately called up in the feedback section as being weak/ not usable. And for staff, it's just on its own little island being very useless after the nerfs.

Start looking at Yoke of Ordeal, go into the Battle Arena and fight the dummies and study the range at which the knockback occurs. The range is very short compared to the skill itself. The delay of activation is also very slow. Yoke of Ordeal is a low quality protected CC by all objective metrics.

Secondly, take a fair look at Voltaic Pulse. This is a AoE around the witch, has a 0.8~something seconds something activation and is technically a melee bound. I don't think anyone sane would be using this skill to reliably catch opponents offensively.


What remains of protected CCs are then the core skills, which luckily are good. Fissure Wave knockdown is good, so is Stun on Thunderstorm. However, every classes got good core skills. That's just the normal expectations coming from Core Skills. Objectively, we're looking at a class with 1 very weak protected CC with Yoke of Ordeal + 1 mediocre protected catch with Voltaic Pulse + 1 core skill which is a variant of an awakening skill that comes with the cost of poor mobility, slow and clumsy cast. 

Your regular awakening class philosophy generally have 2-3 pre-awakening catch, maybe a grab. 1 core skill for protected CC in awakening. Some variants have 1 protected awakening skill + 1 core. But guess what, that 1 protected skill tends to be damn good.

Conclusion: Awakening Witch has 2 bad protected skills, (1 core skill to pick between 2 good options), no valuable pre-awakening catches, no grabs. All the while she pays for that premium kit at the cost of low mobility.

buff awa wiz and witch ty. +1

+1, awa wiz is in a similar boat. I don't even bother attempting to AoS on it because after 10 placements I knew how miserable it would be, at least nodewar is "decent", definitely a shell of its former self 

Dosa awakening > > > Witch, Wizard awakening. There is no easier way to see how bad those two are when threre is another class with practically same role but better at everything.

To add a few more points to my wish-list:
Lightning Blast: Combine hits 1 and 2 so that using the skill as an (intended) flow does not cancel half the damage.

Remove split damage from Barrage of Lightning.

Increase/Remove max-target limits from our awakening skills.

As PA has not yet addressed awakening witch in this month of rebalances (though we're expecting changes coming global lab patch each week), I'd like to take the opportunity to add more requests to the existing list: