Please deeply consider increasing "buff" spells duration.

[Honorable_D]

15 seconds is well and truly too short, imo. I often find myself not even casting my Protect spell because its simply a pain to keep recasting and recasting it.

I'd really like for the buff spells (like Protect and Haste) to last at least 1 min either right off the bat or have their duration increase as you invest into it.

Reminds me in a bad way of playing my Paladin in classic World of Warcraft where I had to cast and maintain a "Blessing" over and over... and that lasted 5 min!

 

[GarlicJelly]

I think that the reason for the buffs to have such short duration is because of Arcade mode. Protect is a really strong skill in Arcade mode and if the duration of it lasted for the whole duration of any room it would simply be too strong. I've never really had a problem with the duration of the buff since I only use it in certain situations rather than trying to keep it up all the time. If you're trying to constantly having the buff up then you're wasting a lot of time and EP that you could use to kill your enemies instead. In Arcade mode you can just cast the buff before going into the next room and you'll have the buff for the first seconds of the room which might let you play more aggressive in the start so you can save some time and maybe avoid having a room full of Bees.

I think that if you should increase the duration of the buffs then you should have to invest a talent point or two to do so. Having a talent that increases the duration of the buffs by 2-3 seconds per level wouldn't ruin any kind of balance in Arcade mode since you would have to choose defensive stats over offensive stats which would ultimately lower your clear time. Playing safe over fast and aggressive should have its downsides and I think that if you want your DEF buff longer in Arcade then you should have to invest something to get that. Just increasing the base duration of the buffs isn't an option IMO.

 

[Honorable_D]

Arcade and Story mode are two completely different styles and theres no reason you should gimp one for the sake of another. Simply have the Arcade mode version last the measly 15 seconds if its that important and have the Story mode version last longer.

This is starting to sound dangerously like PvP vs PvE balance where developers are forced into a situation where they can't make changes that make sense for one mode because it'll botch over the balance of the other. Thats no good, just separate the modes.

I mean seriously, there is no skill or fun to be had in recasting a passive buff every 15 sec. Its just tedium.

 

[KoBeWi]

But having skills different for Arcade and Story is over-complicated and probably requires engine changes. 2 spells alone aren't worth that effort.

 

[GarlicJelly]

Arcade and Story mode are two completely different styles and theres no reason you should gimp one for the sake of another. Simply have the Arcade mode version last the measly 15 seconds if its that important and have the Story mode version last longer.

This is starting to sound dangerously like PvP vs PvE balance where developers are forced into a situation where they can't make changes that make sense for one mode because it'll botch over the balance of the other. Thats no good, just separate the modes.

I mean seriously, there is no skill or fun to be had in recasting a passive buff every 15 sec. Its just tedium.

Well, to be honest I don't fancy the support buffs that much to begin with in Story mode because the stats are really not worth it. I can't confirm this but I even think that the devs have said that they are looking at maybe even changing the support buffs so to me it just seems like a waste of time to be tweaking them. While one might say that there is no skill or fun to be had with recasting the buffs another might say that it is. I mean there is a lot of knowledge that you need to have in order to cast a buff at the right time. You might not always need the buff active so to constantly trying to keep it active might be a bad thing in this game (just because WoW wants you to keep the buffs up all the time doesn't mean you need them up 100% of the time here, right?). I'm mostly speaking about the buffs as if I'm just talking about Protect since I think that's the most useful and important one. Haste is IMO the most useless spell in the game because the temporary boost is not that great anyways because of the limitations of ASPD in general (the limits of your attackspeed is based of how fast you can spam your attack button). I don't really see any benefit from the buff spells which is why I'm not too keen about tweaking them. They need a lot more changes to them to be relevant in the game IMO, at least from a Single Player perspective.

Keeping them separate sounds like a pretty good idea but it would also mean that the devs now have two different things to keep track of. Once the game is completed we might see that happening but during the developing stage of Story mode I think we're most likely not going to see that. It's a good thing that you bring that up tho so that we (the old farts here on the forum, including myself) don't get too caught up on the fact that everything has to be the same. Having different versions of some of the spells for Arcade mode might actually help balancing the game more.

 

[Honorable_D]

Yeah, I'ma have to agree with you on the support buffs not at all being worth it in Story mode. Not just because they last for so little time but also because they plain arn't powerful enough to be worth the points.

I'm going to drop Protect and spend the points elsewhere until, hopefully, the support buffs get... buffed!