I’ve been saying this for a bit. RTB has a lot of talents propping it up to make it less terrible and more predictable. Arguably it’s not made more powerful and inarguably it’s not made more “fun.” At some point you have to ask yourself… what are we doing here?
RTB and its talents are a bit like deliberately tying one hand behind your back, but also giving yourself a knife in your other hand. So with a little work, you have a fair chance of freeing your handicapped arm PLUS you have a knife, so, yeah, cool.
Unlike talents that improve an ability like Wake of Ashes by, say, making it less AOE and more single-target focused, or tying some other damage buff to when you use Wake of Ashes… those are pretty straightforward improvements or at least they’re gameplay changes. You press a button, it does decent damage with a neat effect. Every time you push that button it does that thing. You take a talent that changes it to do more damage, every time. You take another talent that makes it do even more damage differently (more AOE, less AOE, add a DoT, whatever), every time. Etc.
RTB’s buffs are centered around “make bad rolls slightly less bad, more often” and “make those rare good rolls last longer.” The problem is you still have bad rolls AND you need a mod to accurately track rolls in general.
RTB could remain if, say, its effects became steady damage buffs simply with cosmetic differences, if randomness is really something the developers want to keep. And, theming is fun. Rolling dice as an outlaw-y gambler type, I get it. I like the idea overall.
Or, if RTB actually changed how the class played briefly… that might be interesting. But that’s also another can of worms.
But as it is right now… you have very rare moments of truly awesome and otherwise you have bad rolls that get improved slightly by CTO. Or, SOH and LD try to give you a decent roll from the jump. CTO’s buffs wax and wane but given how often you press the buttons involved, the buffs granted could have decent uptime… and if the gods are lucky, you achieve an equilibrium where all the RTB buffs are either up, or they’re just around the corner with the next SS/Ambush/Dispatch. Maybe. Possibly.
