u/Rexnos

The various military faction traits in this game are flavorful and faction defining. The Kin advance as a big shielded ball thanks to Stand United. The Necrophage swarm their enemies and pick off the corners of formations thanks to Unceasing Hunger. The Aspects favor a mixed unit composition with a defensive front line and damaging backline thanks to Harmonious Tactics. There's just one glaring exception to this rule: The Last Lords.

I think Gifts of the Fallen was good on release. Before the advent of counterattacks, a 25 hp heal did a decent job of keeping the Last Lords healed as their tanky stalwarts marched into the enemy and started swinging. However, with counterattacks now being a thing, a 25 hp heal is basically inconsequential outside of the first monsoon. There's just a lot more damage being thrown around in combats and with late game HP bars easily breaching 300, a 25 hp heal being a faction defining trait just doesn't cut it anymore.

I'd really like to see Gifts get some more gas. The heal could scale as a percentage of HP, it could scale up with Last Lords techs, it could be a larger heal targeted on the lowest HP Last Lords unit. There are a whole lot of ways to make it feel faction defining and powerful instead of irrelevant like it does now. I personally feel like the Last Lords military is the weakest in the game, and I think Gifts of the Fallen is largely to blame.

I was pretty hype about the reaver rework. I personally never really understood why they catch such flak for being weak since dragoons and magelocks always seemed pretty good. Sure their faction trait was pretty irrelevant and they lacked build diversity, but they never seemed unplayable to me.

So I check the patch notes and things look pretty good. War spoils can boost econ, reworked spells look a lot stronger, faction trait is more versatile (though still kinda irrelevant?). Seems great and the variant faction looks cool. Case closed, right?

Wrong.

Little did I know that a stealth nerf made its way into the system. For you see, the federate reavers have a tier 1 skimisher that has a magelock sidearm. This sidearm has a 1 turn cooldown, mostly to synergize with their versatile skirmisher identity, gaining bonus damage when they bounce between ranged and melee combat. Interesting unit, looking forward to working with it.

Unfortunately, dragoons appear to have received the same treatment to their magelock sidearm. They now have a 1 turn cd on their ranged attack.

Unlike the pistoleer, dragoons' entire identity is contingent on their ranged attack. They have no bonuses to melee, no shield, no first strike, no shock, no bonus durability, simply no reason to be there. In fact, they have the master skirmisher passive, which means that even when they shoot their gun they can be virtually untouchable because they run away. Their identity is to shoot things and leave.

With a 1 turn cd on the gun, this identity is gutted. Running a dragoon into melee feels bad. I can understand that a proper dragoon build is a big problem (since only ranged units, other skirmishers, and spells can interact with them), but this isn't a fix, it just breaks their legs and leaves them with nothing.

I hope this change was an accident. It's not listed in the patch notes, so I hope the dragoon pistol and pistoleer pistol just happen to be overlapping and dragoons caught a stray. If not, I can't express how little of a fix this is to the dragoon issue. Mono-dragoon armies can still kite, they just have to skip a turn between volleys, which is super lame. Dragoons which aren't in only dragoon stacks are just bad, forced to be bad melee units half the time so the rest of the stack doesn't get overwhelmed. There are fixes for this, but boy this ain't it.

My main suggestion would be give them versatile skirmisher if the cd is staying. A melee damage bonus gives them a reason to actually engage in melee other than desperation. Alternatively, remove the cooldown and master skirmisher. Let's be real, kiting done right is extremely toxic. I'll miss my unassailable dragoon build, but anything is better than the current "fix."

The reaver rework still seems like an overall win to me, but dragoons are going to be in an awful spot on release. As the imperial reaver's tier 3 unit, it's really going to hurt the sub-faction. I hope Triumph takes a hard look at them soon.