Feedback for Utility Skills

[Fokson]

Hi there! Nice to meet you all!

I wanted to give my opinion and feedback on some of the utility skills, most specifically Barrier. I was ( and still mostly am ) in the boat of 'some form of healing should be available', though I do respect your opinion that the game works pretty well without it. I simply don't believe that your claim that "healing isn't required because all damage is avoidable" is really valid, because you can't expect 99% of your players to avoid all damage 100% of the time (especially when playing hard instead of normal). Most players just aren't that good, and won't really get that good before moving onto another game.

This isn't a post about healing magic though, but rather how Barrier can be improved to be a more viable substitute for healing magic. My suggestions are as follows:

[ Edited to mark what's been added / will be added to the game at this point. ]

1. Remove the 15 second duration, let it persist until broken or changing areas. There's no need to have it wear off, and it's very damning to keep the barrier pristine for the whole duration only to have it poof away right as you're about to take damage. The character playing support ( usually myself ) could be paying attention and refreshing the shield constantly, but that takes them out of the more 'front and center' combat too much, especially when trying to balance the other buffs.
2. Change the cool down from "4 seconds after being broken" to "8 seconds after having it cast on you". This is again a matter of keeping out of trouble for almost the whole duration, and then being punished for taking those few hits. Chances are if you're getting hit, you're in a bad spot and need the barrier up again ASAP. Making the cool down count from the moment the buff is placed on you helps a number of things. First, the support player can't accidentally cast it twice on the same individual and waste the mana, something I tend to do when I'm panicking a bit. Second, it rewards the recipient for keeping out of trouble longer, since if they can avoid damage for 8 seconds, they can have the barrier immediately refreshed when they slip up. Finally, it stops the support character from constantly refreshing the barrier every few seconds to stop it from breaking. Planned.
3. Don't remove immunity frames when affected with the barrier. This is exceptionally annoying, when you get hit with 3+ projectiles and it instantly wrecks the barrier. The barrier should have the same immunity time as the player's health. Added.
   
4. No attack should instantly break / go through the barrier. I'm looking at you, [Cursed Priestess]. This was an unintentional side-effect of #3, and was fixed with it.
5. Remove the "5 hit maximum" bit. That's also very annoying, to be hit with a flurry of hits that do less than 10 damage, and the barrier is gone.

Now for an improvement to all buffs that share the same targeting style as Barrier. I would highly recommend making it so the target 'wheel' does NOT disappear when you cast on a target, but only when you let go of the button. This would allow you to 'roll' the analogue stick or press all four arrow keys quickly to cast on all players, instead of having to press the ability button again for each individual cast. When I'm trying to buff my team, I want to do it as quickly as possible so I can join in the fight. Planned.

Finally, I think it would be good idea to make the 3rd level of each utility spell substantially better, but have it cost a gold point instead of a silver point. As a support character, I have a bunch of gold points I'm not using since I've dumped all my silver points into the utility page.

That's all I have, thanks for taking the time to read this wall of text!

 

[Fokson]

All right, I've got a followup post with a couple more suggestions.

We'll start with Barrier again quickly. In light of one of my previous suggestions being taken, a friend brought up an interesting point. Presently you can cast Barrier repeatedly on the same person until it breaks, which also allows you to perform perfect guards on your allies. If casting Barrier was blocked for 8 seconds after the initial cast, that mechanic would be void. If this sounds fine to you, then we can leave it at that, but if you want to have barrier perfect guarding to still be viable, I would suggest the following: After being initially cast on a target, casting Barrier again while the effect is still active on a target will cost 10 EP instead of 30 and do nothing more than "fluff" the shield, serving to perfect guard an attack. It won't refresh the duration or the Barrier's strength.

Blink is a really nice ability that I imagine sees a lot of use. It doesn't need much change, but I thought it could use a little touch of semi-useful flair. Much like how you changed Marino to knock players away when he's escaping with the amulet, teleporting into an enemy could treat them like they got hit with a basic attack but do no damage, hitstunning them and knocking them away slightly.

I noticed that while Haste costs 20 EP, Empower and Fortify take 35. I'm not really sure what warrents that difference, and I don't really think Empower is worth 35. Fortify, maybe. Empower and Fortify were lowered to 30, which isn't a huge change but at least they're on par with Barrier now.

Fortify is a decent ability, but it sees a lot less use from me than its two siblings. The DEF and Shield Regen is nice, but the EP regen seems a bit out of place for it. I would instead recommend that it add interruption resistance when charging skills. If it prevented me from getting slapped out of charging my skills I'd probably use it as frequently as the other two.

Lastly, meditation. It's looking pretty good after the latest patch, but I don't really find the EP reduction of the next ability highly noticable ( nor did I find the free skill that useful either ). Keep it or replace it, I don't have an opinion on that, but I thought a nice change for it would be to slightly raise the CSPD of the next ability used when fully focused.

That's all for now, thanks again for reading though this mess! =)

 

[Fokson]

Beep boop, I'm back once again with a little more insight on some skills I haven't used much before.

Gonna start this party with Provoke. I want to like this ability, I really do, but the flaws in it right now are incredibly brutal. The animation is very long, and while I adore how it looks and sounds it makes it very difficult to use without being hit, because the moment you provoke most enemies they immediately zero in on you and start rearranging your face. Additionally, the EP cost is bonkers for what it ends up accomplishing, and it doesn't really accomplish much to begin with.

I think the following changes to Provoke would make it not just viable to use, but fun as well:

• Decrease the EP cost, maybe to 15 or 20. The ability isn't doing much more than taking the heat off your friends, so it certainly isn't worth more than Haste.
• Make the ability cancellable with movement much earlier in the animation, around the time it's cancellable with the shield. The shield cancel time is fine.
• Enemies that are afflicted with Provoke should be "rage stunned" for a moment, in sheer disbelief that you said something so savage about their mother. In other words, they should not be able to move or act for the same amount of time that you are locked into the animation. [Edit : This "rage stun" should not apply if using provoke on an already annoyed target, to prevent stalling. ]
  
• The time they remain provoked should be drastically increased so long as you aren't running away from them. If they remain in range to attack you, it should last closer to 10 seconds, but if you Provoke them and then kite them around it should last the same time it does now.
• The arc that the ability affects should be widened from the 40 degrees it is now to something more like 90-120, and the range could stand to be slightly increased, perhaps more near the front of the ability.

The maximum number of Provoked enemies, the damage increase to both sides, and the inability to Provoke bosses is fine as it is, I think. (Though as a fun tidbit if you wanted, a certain boss who is powerful and knows it could be affected with Provoke, and respond with a line like "So, you want to die first? That can be arranged!")


Next on the list is 1H's very own Dodge. This was my first ability, and I love it. I also love how powerful it's become lately, but I think it could maybe stand to be a little less savage. I'm doing an upwards of eight THOUSAND damage on perfect dodges, which seems a bit extreme to me? In return for a nerf to straight up damage, though, I think it would be much better for the execution and utility of the skill if you could not be interrupted on perfect dodge's return strike. It kills my soul a little bit when I return strike into a projectile or another enemies attack and I fall short of my target by a hair.


Smash has become one of my new favorite abilities, and I think it should remain mostly unchanged, but perhaps you could make some indication appear on walls to show which way it will bounce, should it reach a wall. This isn't critical, but I find that sometimes the world geometry differs a bit collision-wise from what it looks like, and the way I think it should bounce is radically different from what I get. I would also appreciate if the ability would either lock your facing direction to face the ball when moving away from it and still holding the charge, or "reorient" your character to face the ball after stopping and standing still. Fairly often I've tried to adjust the shot by a hair and accidentally faced the wrong way as a result.


Throw is now my absolute favorite 2H ability with the addition of the small AoE attack upon picking up the weapon! I do think, however, that the AoE spin should NOT occur on a throw that hasn't been charged to at least Bronze, because a lot of the time I am able to do an obscene amount of damage by just spamming no-charge throw at my feet. Aesthetically, I think the sound for retrieving your weapon should be a little closer to whirl slash's, maybe a little less powerful, and that the player should do a small spin to better illustrate the attack they're performing.


That concludes the third installment of my suggestion thread, thanks for taking the time to read it! =)

 

[Rdy]

I'm doing an upwards of eight THOUSAND damage on perfect dodges, which seems a bit extreme to me?

Come on man, you're not even close to extreme until you're dropping 12K Meteors on ghosts.

(8K sounds reasonable depending on just how much you stacked stats and buffs. I'll have to test the skill myself to see if it has a crazy upper boundary, though.)

 

[Fokson]

With 213 attack damage using Spirit Slash Gold Charge vs an Ancient Statue, I do ~1600 damage. Silver Charge dodge does ~1300. Gold Charge Dodge does ~4800. I think on it crit it does about ~8k. All of this is with no buffs or pet.

 

[Rdy]

With 213 attack damage using Spirit Slash Gold Charge vs an Ancient Statue, I do ~1600 damage. Silver Charge dodge does ~1300. Gold Charge Dodge does ~4800. I think on it crit it does about ~8k. All of this is with no buffs or pet.

The reason why Gold Charge does so much is that it inherently applies Reaper's Blade, which does a lot of added damage. If you add a self-cast Reaper's Blade, you'll find reasonable damage upgrades along the lines of what you see from Dodge. Your assessment would be correct still though as it seems the Dodge is the best skill for 1h damage (Flurry Blow is garbage but I think theoretically it does more?) but it's also extremely strict on timing - the same window as a Perfect Guard to pull off its damage.

Attached is a picture of Meteor doing 30K damage utilizing Reaper's Blade (a Critical of 17K from the Meteor, and 13K from the Reaper's Blade). The best I could pull off with Dodge under similar ideal circumstances was 23K damage.

 

[Rdy]

I thought I would add to this thread as it seems the best place to put these thoughts as it specifically concerns some of the Utility skills. To start with, from my testing I've found the baseline EP regeneration rate seems to be around 5.66 EP per second. For accountability, here's a summary of my numbers that I'm basing a lot of this math off of:

100 EPReg @ 100 Max EP, 110 Max EP, 120 Max EP (thus, total EP doesn't impact regeneration rate): 5.3~ seconds per 30 EP (5.66).
125 EPReg: 4.3~ seconds per 30 EP (expected value: [5.66*1.25=7.075] actual value: [30/4.3=6.97])
175 EPReg: 3.05~ seconds per 30 EP (expected value: [5.66*1.75=9.905] actual value: [30/3.05=9.84])

For Focus: Empirical testing is difficult for current rates, but my methodology is as such: Cast Meteor (-30 EP), regenerate 10 EP, hold Focus while starting my timer, stopping timer at Max EP. My numbers from multiple tests at 100 EPReg are [1.86, 1.83, 1.81, 1.75, 1.83]. I pruned my highest and lowest result and am left with an average 1.816s per 20 EP, or 11.01 EP/s. This puts Focus as having 5.35 EP/s by my tests, and I'm guessing that it's actually 5.66 along with baseline EP Regeneration.

At 125 EPReg, the same test gave me [1.32, 1.38, 1.42, 1.38, 1.32] for an average of 1.364, leading to 14.66 EP/s. I expected 13.94 given how Focus is supposed to scale with EP Regeneration, but if I was hitting any button slightly too late this could easily be explained away. For the sake of simplicity I think with this data I'll presume that Focus does scale as an affect of your current EP Regen rate.

So to start with, contrary to my original belief, Focus never really got nerfed, but I do think it's kind of mediocre in general still. Aside from the issue that I don't personally find standing around unable to do anything particularly fun, the way it works seems to have two extremes of not particularly helpful on one end and so absurdly but uselessly powerful on the other end. In terms of Arcade Mode, having EP Regeneration higher than 110 is incredibly unlikely, which comes out to roughly 6 EP/second and 12 EP/second while focusing. The cheapest spell is Fireball at 20 EP, which means once you run out of EP, you're waiting for 4 seconds before you can cast another Fireball, or Focusing for 2 seconds. This cuts down the waiting time by half, of course, but that's still a lot of waiting.

The Focused state would offset this a bit but in Arcade Mode there are a lot of very aggressive enemies such that you have very little time to actually devote to being defenseless for significantly more than 2 seconds at a time. I'll have to play around with it a bit more, but I really feel like Focus falls just short of doing a decent job of solving EP droughts, which is supposed to be its main purpose? (A side issue is that for spell-based builds, eventually tacking on Frosty Friend is almost a necessity to curtail enemy aggression as you do spend a lot of time standing defenselessly still casting spells. This intrinsically lowers your EP cap, which means you get less mileage out of the Focused state.)

But the main point of this EP talk is to focus on how Fortify is just absolutely awful in terms of EP Regeneration. To begin with: It IS currently bugged in that it doesn't actually increase EP Regeneration, and if the goal of the spell is more of a Protect with a few bonuses on top then adjusting it might not be necessary. But in terms of EP Regeneration for solo play, it's a joke. At Level 3, it will provide 15% EP Regen speed. However, it has a cost of 35 EP in the first place. At base EP Regen speed, you're getting about 15 EP back from the spellcast. Assuming it scales with your base regeneration like Focus, for Fortify to break even over its 15 seconds, you need an EP Regen well over 230! If it doesn't scale with your base regeneration, why does Fortify even have EP Regen tacked on to it?

My suggestion with Fortify:
1) Either make the EP Regeneration more noticeable, or;
2) Lower the cost to 20 EP and completely remove the EP Regeneration.

As it stands, having the EP Regeneration tacked onto it is a complete trap if people are looking to it for solving EP shortages.