Battle Stomp is a strong, cheap AoE skill that applies the strongest CC in the game; knockdown. This is the status with the least immune enemies and also benefits from no prerequisite status (wet/chilled for frozen, etc).

Unlike Battering Ram, Battle Stomp has extreme ease of use, not requiring any tricky Line-of-sight or pathing to attack enemies. Stomp can even hit enemies on higher ground. Also unlike Battering Ram, Battle Stomp also deals good damage, the same as a standard melee strike, and is on a lowish 4-turn cooldown.

This is one of the starter Warfare skills, and can also be used effectively by Rogues. It is a strong, very efficient AoE knockdown skill that requires very little thought to use effectively.

It is, in short, overpowered.

Some easy fixes to this, I think, would be making Battle Stomp have friendly fire. This would force players to think a lot harder about positioning and when and when not to use this skill, with the potential risk of hard CC'ing one's allies.

I agree that it is a it strong but not OP.
One thing i can think of about this is that a target have to be weakened by some sort of aoe spell from warfare and then you an knock them down. Its like most spells need a pre require status in order to have a strong effect like stun.

I like it as the way it is. The game's already been way over-nerfed, so I'd really rather not see yet another ability compromised.

I think it's fine. I am also sure Knock Down is the most common CC immunity. I would rather Battering Ram be buffed.

it's not op at all it's just good

battering ram's tradeoff is that it does less damage but repositions you, so you can knock someone down and also be in melee range

It is OP compared to all non source elemental CCs who all need to combo with something else to actually CC, have friendly fire and usually less aoe or damage (they do have better range though).

Whether you think it's too strong or they are too weak is up to you.

Warriors also have limited utility and options in combat. Knock Down is the flavour choice they have, and them having a reliable way to cause it is fine by me. Other CC being nerfed is because a mage can toss two magic spells in one turn and do big damage on top of the guaranteed stun.
I think the argument really is that Battle Stomp is the one ability they have that is unique and works consistently. Taunt, provoke, deflect, etc all are very situational and unreliable.

I like how you can give it to a Rogue and it's better CC than any other Scoundrel skill.

This argument either proves that Scoundrel skills suck or that Battle Stomp is just to strong, or even a bit of both.

I agree. It's a bit too strong imo.

Battle Stomp is by far the premier skill of the earlygame (when Magic doesn't have the damage or skill support for CC and other abilities aren't available yet), and maintains a usefulness throughout the entire game, this much is true, but overpowered it is not.

The issue here isn't Battle Stomp, it's the severe underdevelopment of abilities in D:OS2 as a whole; Battle Stomp is a well-balanced, critical early game, and foundational skill for Warfare that is further helped by ease of use (no-FF, no LoS dickery) along with early availability and a weapon-based damage scaling that allows it to be relevant as more than just CC spam later in the game. There's nothing 'wrong' with Battle Stomp, it's the epitome of what these core abilities should be: useful, easy to use, and appropriate at all points in the game.

More abilities need to be like Battle Stomp, it's the example to follow.

I don't think abilities need to be easy to use, there's no fun in that.

Also, battle stomp allows warriors to do more damage and CC in combat than most mages and warriors have plenty of utility. Mages do catch up later on, but earlygame it's more powerful than almost anything they can do.

It should do friendly fire to be honest. It would still be s-tier. It would still be a complete no brainer must have skill for every build that uses a melee weapon.

I agree. The game is balanced just fine. I'd rather see more dialogue added as I love that part.

Where's my upvote button mods??

GG, GG. GG.

Battle Stomp and Shield Toss(or whatever the name is) is bread and butter. Every other Warfare skill is gradually more situational, but not useless, however. I remember that the second time the Doctor's demons came after me, my Incarnate's Taunt made them split in a very nice way, giving me a good win. That was probably the only time I used the skill in the whole game, lol!

So far I must say this skill is surprisingly useful. When I find myself in dire situation, stomp is usually way to go... when enemy armor is down. Since enemies have tons of it from midgame on, it's not that easy to use.

Friendly fire as way to balancing it doesn't seem that bad. Reminds me of some hardcore DnD rules for games, where all aoe skill also damaged your party. Though I must say, you already need to watch where to use that ability, so that it doesn't remove some surfaces you have placed in order to prevent enemies from getting to you etc.

Personaly I found totems, which are quite strong and can be cast every turn much more closer to something that could be called op, but I still would not want to nerf them, maybe rather fix AI pathfinding :P or buff few armors. + It's not like AI cant use those skills against you too and should, maybe even more.

Aerotheurge is the only skill discipline of which I know that has no 'entry level skills' (ones available at character creation) which I considered spiffy enough to seriously use throughout the full game. Electric Discharge is handy, but it requires a liquid surface in combination to work properly.

This was probably play-tested and discarded. Singleplayer you can work around that, but think about multiplayer. People would constantly stay in each other ways, making the skill a no-go or even worse, player stun each other constantly (either because that is the best tactic or they don't care).
Magic spells have quite some friendly fire, but they are either single target or you can place them wherever you want.

So for short, I don't think any spell in the game is overpowered as of right now.

Hm, I would argue that "overpower" is the one skill that truly lives up to its name - at only 1 source point.

But other than that, Battle Stomp is a close contender, along with Chameleons Cloak and Chicken Claw.

I would actually like to see 70% of other skills buffed to be as efficent and doing its job well as battlestomp is instead.

This is how power creep starts.

Battlestomp is good because there are so few conditions on its use and so few opportunity costs.

Movement, offensive actions and defensive actions cost AP. You can therefore think of spending AP to CC an enemy as costing you AP to damage them because the cost is paid from the same shared resource.

With Battlestomp, you don't have to sacrifice damage for hard CC, you get both. You don't have to think about party positioning and lines of sight because it doesn't do friendly fire.

This messes up the risk/reward part of tactical combat. Setting off a shock/stun combo has much stricter requirements in terms of AP investment and the positioning of allies. You might think the more elaborate setup would have the bigger payoff but it doesn't.

This is where you have to be careful when buffing and nerfing numbers. Battlestomp being strong isn't about the damage numbers or the hard CC. You won't make it less of an outlier by making it do less damage or soft CC instead of hard CC because that was never the problem to begin with.

Its ok to have skills that do multiple things really well like damage + CC. However, if you want a tactical combat system with a reward mechanism that promotes tactical play, you have to make your biggest payoffs require the most elaborate and technical setups. There must be opportunity costs and conditions on use and the player must be aware of what those conditions are and be required to create those conditions on the battlefield before they can benefit.

I like Battlestomp. Its powerful and it has a satisfying crunch when you smash your weapon into the ground. It looks good, it sounds good, it has a tide turning effect in combat.

But when I first used it, I thought it was going to hurt/KD my party members because the cone highlights allies as well as hostiles. For the first couple of hours I played with Battlestomp thinking I had to plan around friendly fire.

Then I decided the cost of KDing 1 of my guys was worth the tradeoff of KDing 2 of theirs. That was when I realized there was no price to pay because there was no friendly fire. I could stomp right through my entire team to KD any number of hostiles on the other side. I was a bit disappointed. A tactical aspect of the game vanished when I realized this.

Yeah, the highlighting of friendly units it pretty irritating.

They should make it cost 3 AP.

I wouldn't say "overpowered" (because you still need to destroy the physical shield), but "better than every other cc" :

- KD is the best form of CC no contest (no buff/debuff to resistances, only a fat CC ; only rare spells can save you from it, unlike the other forms of CC and magic shell/fortify, spells that can be used by even a random magister swordman)
- Battle Stomp only costs 2
- Only 3 turns of CD
- No build up (unlike chilled/stunned)
- Easy to apply (electric water is a bitch sometimes), and huge range
- No friendly fire (that's crazy when you think about it) : I thought at the beginning of the game that it had FF, but well...
- Only 1 point into warfare needed (and let's be honest, warfare is the top dog of physical school)


But I think Larian knew it was crazy strong, so they decided to NERF IT.
Yeah, you hear me, it's a nerfed ability : enemies can STILL DODGE YOU when KD.
I'm pretty sure that, irl, nobody can evade an attack if unconscious and lying on the ground.

I never got the impression being knocked down meant you were unconscious. If you're on the floor, you can still roll to the side to avoid an attack, I think.

The issue is that that isn't animated, so it looks silly as hell.

Applying Friendly fire is the change I made in my balance mod.

It does force you to be a lot more careful about where you use it and positioning, but honestly I think that didn't help it enough. I think you'd need to reduce the range or cone angle or bump the AP Cost to 3 for how incredible an AoE Hard CC is.

Ah! I don't care about BattleStomp, I just spam KD/charm arrows till divinity!

It doesn't do FF? Really? Well, there's 100 hours wasted.

(It definitely should though, it's extremely easy to aim, unlike those pulsating AoE spells which still get me from time to time, even if not doing their horrid lock-on-target thing)

I don't find Battle Stomp to be overpowered at all.

IF you happen to have targets in rather narrow cone of average length..

..and IF they happen to have their physical armor already removed..

..and IF the attack is not dodged or avoided..

..then you can force impacted targets to miss one turn with a knockdown using an ability with a 4 turn cooldown (an ability that is already being used late in the battle due to the necessity of removing the enemy's physical armor first).

I've not been in too many battles where I've gotten to use it more than once.

On top of that, it removes elemental states in the impacted area, which can be a boon, but can also be annoying if said elemental states happen to be beneficial to your party or battle plan.

And unlike the claim in the original post, from what I've seen it does not affect targets on different elevations.

Simply not true. The CC is applied after it's damage effect, so often I use it to shred their last armor and instantly cc them afterwards. There's absolutely no need to wait till armor is completely gone.

I disagree, and I am also speaking in terms of reliability.

I've had the knockdown component resisted on an opponent that had 1 point of physical armor left. It was pretty face-palm worthy and I ranted about it for several minutes to the "delight" of the friend I was co-op'ing with. However, I have also had knockdowns successfully trigger on opponents that have several points of physical armor remaining. You are always gambling whenever you use it on opponents that have physical armor remaining.

While there are skills that do remove armor prior to applying the CC effect (such as Chloroform), Battle Stomp does not appear to be one of them. A knockdown resist is not guaranteed to be avoided unless your target has 0 physical armor remaining before you use the skill, and even then the knockdown can still result in a "miss".

I am not implying that the skill stinks, but I would certainly not call it overpowered (especially when opponents are scattering and you end up impacting only a single target, only to regret not having it at the ready two turns later when an opponent's ability has managed to convert the battlefield's terrain into a environmental hellscape).

Could he be, that those with 'remaining armor' regained armor because of Perseverance or how the skill was named?

If you destroy all armor the effect will apply. If the slightest amount of armor remains, it won't in my exprience.