What We're Working On

This feels like you just did the equivalent of removing the darkness from Delve.

I think removing the alert level on kill stripped any tension that was originally present within the league mechanic. Following this change contracts are now functionally equivalent to the gameplay of maps, but paradoxically they remain significantly more rewarding. As it stands now, heists have had their core identity as a gameplay mechanic removed, are overly rewarding for the challenge they present, and are no longer enjoyable.

The primary question I have at this point is what, if anything, is being done to provide a gameplay tradeoff to the rewards provided by heists and reintroduce or differentiate the core feel of the league from existing gameplay?

Flame Wall Feedback---

If i had feedback about Flame wall which I have taken on as making a main skill it's this. When you Spec as a full burn damage character focusing on just Flame wall the damage is actually really good. Only a few improvements I would make:

1) AoE on Flame Wall doesn't have any effect (or at least no noticeable), from my tests I've put on and taken off increased AoE support, concentrated effect, and AoE points and the width of the wall doesn't seem to change at all.

2) On that note, concentrated effect does not work with Flame Wall. You get the mana multiplier but the damage or area modifiers does not effect it.

3) The max cast range is pretty painfully short. I'd allow it to be cast at a larger range as right now it's hard to get it cast accurately on enemies. The lack of AoE scaling up wall wideth doesn't help this. I'm pretty sure that if the AoE actually scaled up the wideth a noticable amount this would be far less of an issue. But compounded with point #1 targeting is tough.

Right now I use Void sphere to vaccum up enemies then cast flame wall on them when they're bunched. I was going to use Decoy totem but it's pretty weak without having a decent investment in totem life.

As an aside on Void Sphere, I'm working on a Void Sphere main character, and from both build I've done using it I can say that it gets really expensive to use, is great against norms, magics, and rares, but is painfully slow to try taking out uniques/bosses.

So, wanted to give some feedback on Crackling Lance. I tried starting with it and it just fell flat very quickly.

The main issue, I think, is that it’s supposed to be basically Arc with worse clear and better single target. The problem is, even with 4 stacks of intensity up, the single target damage is only marginally better than Arc (since Arc has the multiplier for remaining chains), and it requires you to stand still to get those stacks up, which is a huge liability when it comes to survivability. Casters are squishy! We can’t be standing still that long!

I’d suggest a few things need to happen: A. single target damage needs to be way higher, perhaps at the cost of some AoE to emphasize CL being a high ST damage skill, and B. intensity stacks need to be faster to get. Maybe CL needs to gain stacks per hit rather than per cast so things like unleash and spell echo work. I think the solution is to make intensity stacks both more impactful (maybe tack on an extra 5% more damage per stack or so), and make stacks easier to get through the aforementioned use of unleash/spell echo. Base damage could use a small buff too. Maybe 5-10%. Maybe decrease the base angle and width of the beam by 10% or so to compensate for much higher damage?

Basically, as-is there’s no reason to use CL of Arc currently. Arc has fairly comparable damage, much, much better clear, and works with unleash/spell echo, and can be used in trigger builds. CL... looks cool? Self-cast Arc isn’t even a very strong build endgame as-is, so having a weaker version of Arc that can realistically only be played self-cast isn’t great. CL just really needs something to emphasize that single target damage advantage it’s supposed to have over Arc.

Great patch, great post and thanks for being honest and replying to the meme :) <3

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dragonsroc wrote:

In conclusion, the intensity mechanic has all the downsides of channeling skills, and has very few upsides that do not make it worthwhile.

this so much. you are just playing a worse channeling build.

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Bakudan wrote:

Haha you are the best so its fine, at least like every time you are pretty quick to respond to issues .

About the new skills :

Void Sphere is supposed to "remove" bodies or dead ennemies, but it don't work properly on Porcupine.
I mean the main "Youhou" of this skill was to remove Porcupine "on death" spikes be Void Sphere does nothing about it (currently it only help i think against monsters that explode dead bodies).


About Heist :
It would be nice to store in the Heist Chest or our own chest the Green Hesit parchment (the quests ones) because it stack pretty quickly in the inventory and for half of them you can't even do them right away because you need "skill level 2-3" to do them.
So its another 2-5 slots of inventory lost until we unlock the corresponding skills.

Good luck for the debugging part ^^'.

This!

Looking good!

Now my main issue left is the huge lag with Delirium, never had that in any previous league.

<3

Thanks for the hard work.

Still levelling, not much to say about Heist specifically, but in term of skills I do have a few things to talk about.


1, I suppoese Doomsday end the hex field after 1 second is a unique 'situation', which do not trigger other abilities 'when hex end, do this and that'... I felt this is quite... Undewhelming. Maybe i havent figure out the actual uses of this notable, but so far that it isnt triggering any other skill when it ends after 1 seconds makes it kinda weak?

2, how much doom can accumulate for specific curse and hex anyway? I not seeing it mentioned in the gem description, maybe just me blind?

3, Void Sphere... oh how much I just want it as a chanelling skill, rather then the current version.