Controversial take: Remove Gunnhildr's Blade titles from everyone and fix the exploit

[ForteNightshade]

Whether it is or not the exploit should be fixed. I've witnessed duels that end in less than a minute. Cheating shouldn't be tolerated and the exploit needs to be dealt with.

Except it isn't cheating. The dev team simply didn't balance Chainspell properly nor test the overall potential of switching actions; likely because they assumed people wouldn't want to waste uses like that. At this point, fixing it achieves nothing except to punish the people who haven't done it already. They waited far too long, though I doubt they really care since it's Bozja and being stupidly overpowered is kind of the point. Even if being this overpowered wasn't intended.

Ultimately. It's their own fault for not balancing the new actions.

[CKNovel]

I don't understand the exploit.
They're using dummies (of which there are some in Bozja/Zadnor anyway) to load up on buffs, with very tight timing, in order to jump into the Duel with more than the basic lost actions load out, until those buffs drop off?
That just sounds like using the tools at your disposal to me.

Simply put: It's not an exploit. It's a massive oversight from the balance team.
It's possible because you can stack many, many buffs on yourself and during a 8s~6s window you will have all the buffs active. That's when you'd be able to land a few GCDs/oGCDs.
The problem comes from Lost Flare Star which inflicts a dot ticking at 350 potency for 60 seconds.

If you remember how DoT functions, they take in account every damage buffs when the dot is applied and apply those buffs for all ticks when calculating the damages regardless if they're still actives or not. Meaning every 3 seconds it's like you're using a Fire IV with all the buff that were up for that very short window of time. Not other role than caster can do it because only caster have access to Lost Flare Star.

It's not an exploit, it's simply a massive imbalance. I'm against it as I prefer watching someone doing mechanics rather than Cape Westwind but SQEX didn't hotfixed it, meaning it was probably intended or they didn't care.
It's a classic "You do you, I do me", as long as we get more duels in the future I'm happy. I just hope EW won't have that much imbalance and oversight.

[KageTokage]

There's still the issue of the FATE scaling on the northern zone being extremely screwy and randomly resetting even with 20+ people up there among other things, so I feel like we're liable to get a second wave of fixes sooner or later.

It does feel a bit silly that they even bothered fixing Dabog not spamming his enrage mechanic when the average player isn't even going to see it now with the vast majority opting to just melt him with Flare Star in less then a minute.