Quote Originally Posted by D20ragon View Post
Just picked this up the other day! I played the first game, though not extensively, and I decided to give Sienna a go since I didn't play her at all in Vermintide 1. Any tips? She does feel a bit underwhelming.
She's unplayably bad pretty trash until you hit ~15 as Pyro and have the 3 heat reducing talents and she gets much, much more playable at 20 when you get temp helth on crit or kill, since that way you can use the temp heat to vent overcharge without losing green health. I'm halfway to 24 at the moment and can't wait to get the talent that allows flaming skull to clear overcharge.

For staves, any of the ranged ones can work well, they all have their niche, but the flamethrower is far better left for the dwarf since ther are better ways to melt hordes and it can't deal with specials at all and will struggle with elites to an extent while also being pretty trash at bosses. If you can get a orange bolt staff with heat sink as the special and get some crit on your gear, much of your heat issues go away since Pyro builds crit as overcharge advances stages and each bolt can sink 4 heat (which is more than it costs to fire by a fair way - IIRC, you have 50 max heat before you go nova). I'd say bolt or beam staves are the choice at 15+, but before then the fireball staff did a lot of work for me, especially since a fully charged alt fire should stagger trolls/spawn/rat ogre/stormfiend and will pierce smaller stuff easily while it's gonna take a while for your other options to being to pierce a notable amount of targets. Bolt right click or Beam explosion will brutalise specials, elites and bosses though, which should be a big part of your job as Sienna.

For melee, I like the longsword sine it's the only thing that gives reliable area clear when you're surrounded early and can't pewpew your way out. The charged swing is a nice horizontal sweep and has knockdown and cleave on smaller rats and a small amount of armour piercing for stormvermin or chaos warriors in a pinch. The dagger is also good since it's so fast. Some people like the mace for the better damage, but I find it doesn't get the horde clear that I need. The flame sword is just bad IMHO.

If you haven't found 'em already, go up the stairs on the left from where you spawn in the keep to find the combat dummies and check out the various benefits of each weapon on both the unarmoured one and the armoured ones up the top. Some of the choice will come down to personal preference, some down to what you want her to focus on doing for the team, and the remainder is, if you play in/with a regular group, what they need covered.

If there's one tip I could go back and give myself though, it'd be not to go nuts on pewpewing small isolated trash, they can/should easily be taken care of either by your melee or your team with very little risk. This means you'll have a fair amount of meter left to burn (pun unintended) when a horde/patrol/boss shows up and you really need to cut loose and make a difference. Once you ding lvl20 and get temp health though, then you throw caution to the wind and just vent on temp health and go back to safely pewpewing everything you see ... until you get to Champ/Leg where friendly fire is a thing and you need to be careful again.

Having played a bit of every character now, I'd have to say that Sienna easily gets the biggest boost from talents. Everyone else just gets nice to have stuff, she goes from trash to extremely useful once she dings 20, even though every character has roughly the same lvl 20/25 traits. Each of her 3 -ve heat traits at 5/10/15 are noticable too, but 20 makes her good.

Her Pyromancer special is one of the quickest to recharge at 40 seconds base and will stun bosses and deals high damage and knockdown to chaos warriors. Very handy against the spawn in particular when he starts munching on a team member to heal, you can stun him out of it. Also note that it does more hits the higher in the heat gauge you go, getting 2 more hits every stage. Also super handy vs specials like gutter runner or hook rat who can easily incapacitate people out of LoS. Pretty good vs blighstormer too since it'll track him desite his rediculous teleport shenanigans and can be fired around corners if you're pinned down by a ratling gunner. All in all, it's a great little ult on an already great class, to the point where battle wizard is just outshone everywhere and Unchained can be a liability on later levels where you can either take a hit or use a staff but not both.