There are very few skills that don’t deal any damage of some form. Even support skills like Flame Ward, Transplant or Rebuke deal damage.
So should we have a main transplant DPS build? Or Rebuke? Or VR? Should they have a chance to become the main DPS skill?
I would argue no, because that would require removing some of the utility nodes to replace them with DPS ones, which would reduce their usefulness.
That’s not to say that Acid Flask can’t become a main DPS skill. It definitely could. But I don’t agree that any skill should have the potential for main DPS when they are clearly more of a support skill.
It does have a lot of utility nodes, though. It can give haste, shred armor or poison/cold/fire res, it can blind, slow, apply frailty and even ignite.
All of which can be done better by other dps skills let alone support skills. I just dont think it does a good enough job at support to justify it’s low dps or taking it over another support skill & it’s dps isn’t high enough to justify the sub-par support.
Sure, but it does have nodes for both DPS and support. So it could conceivably be pushed in one direction or the other.
Personally, I would like it if every single skill could become either a main DPS or a support skill. So you could have a teleport DPS build and you could use fireball as 100% support.
That would be extremely hard to achieve and would be even harder to balance, though.
It’s a nice idea in theory, though, and would be fun to play around with.
Yeah, I’m just not sure it can do either role well enough though. Like, if you wanted to use it for poison dps as the OP wants to it only hits once in a none too large area, compared to the likes of Umbral Blades that can hit 2-4 times per cast for a much lower mana cost with a higher projectile movement speed. It feels like it needs a significant reduction in mana cost baseline, probably with an increase to the area of each flask, maybe allow it to shotgun and/or have more % more modifiers even if they were just more poison damage.
This is probably my biggest gripe with the skill. It’s honestly pretty great! I’ve been using it as my primary damage source for the last 89 levels!
… but holy crap, even with Ballista rings, I’m only down to 4.5 mana per use, which gets pretty nasty when your have a birb and high throwing attack speed going, and meanwhile trying to take Mana Regen suffixes means tossing a bunch of other stuff that’s keeping me alive.
Dropping Acid Flask to either 5 or 3 MP as a base would seriously do wonders. I’m constantly jealous of all my other characters getting to whip out huge damage for 0 MP like it’s nothing (for real, my lightning flameblast spellblade can hit the entire screen without expending more than a portion of the cost of an auto-cast frost claw, and only using a single button – rogue just can’t come close to that).
Depends… is the skill specifically set up as a support skill (Like Frost Claw, which is meant to trigger other stuff basically in its entirety) or as a damage skill (Like Lightning Blast, which is just a really awful skill in itself)?
If it’s a primary damage skill then yes… it should be viable.
If it’s a support type skill then no, it doesn’t need to.
The amount of skills available are already low, so having even less then those existing as potential core skills to build around (rather then having them built into other core skills instead) kinda is a problem for build variety… which isn’t really large.
Which is kinda another issue. Acid Flask is the ‘jack of all trades’… but kinda does the one thing it’s supposed to do not really all too well… which is providing poison (Yeah, I know, Acid… but no stat available for that :p) in high amounts.
If the skill is meant to be a allrounder support skill then the naming sense is off, something like ‘Concoction’ would then fit better, but it’s not named like that.
So I would say it should actively be a damage type skill with the ability to use it properly balanced as a primary damage skill. And not solely one to be triggered through explosive trap for example.
Synergies are fine and great! But they should provide an alternative playstyle, not the only option at all. Currently the issue with Acid Flask is the same many many other skills have… a mess of interactions between skill nodes, damage effectiveness and specifically designed gear for it. And I don’t quite get what EHG is actually thinking with their design directions as it’s one utter nightmare to balance the way they do things.
Plainly spoken I would design every single skill from a clear-cut basis. Movement, damage, support for example, with a few extra ‘core types’ underlying it. Then deciding on the mechanic itself, thrown, AoE, single target focus, combination of stuff and what the task of it primarily is. Then attach the respective damage and effectiveness to it and only then starting to actively design the nodes for it to align damage and auxiliary nodes properly to it.
Because at the end of the day equipment for every single class has roughly the same acquisition rate, outside of uniques. A rare affix is a rare affix. A common affix is a common affix. So that leaves solely the skill and the passives to designing the character around.
So I don’t quite get why the passive design isn’t focused on the core defensive and offensive measures of the class itself (rather then synergizing ones with skills already) to then have the skills ‘play off’ from that… and uniques playing off of the hence existing outcomes which hence can all be fairly easily be kept inside at least a rough balancing spectrum instead of… this mess we have.
Instead skills are all over the place. Some play off of gear entirely, some can be used baseline naked and be OP as heck already, others can’t even get to a decent state by themselves even if you would’ve the ability to get 5 T7 items since they scale like crap.
To use the poison aspect well it needs to have a high speed of application and many hits. Acid Flask provides nothing of that.
What is has though is a decent base damage… for whatever reason because that’s nowhere used at all, unless you change it into fire.
So my question is: Why not give it a base damage of ‘1’ and focus on poison application? Damage effectiveness of 25%. Then increasing flask count substantially, do 7 or so to apply poison actually in a reliable manner. The conversion nodes can change the behavior anyway. Changing it to fire? Add 24 base damage and give it 175% damage effectiveness by doing so, burning field instead of poison and only a single flask, with further changes in those areas to adjust base damage, flask amount or maybe create secondary fields like a multi-staged firework.
There’s a ton of interesting possible way to adjust skills… but sadly we got… willy-wonkers balance wonders
I really appreciate the eyes on this thread and the action hopefully gets more notice - remember the original post I just asked if they could add more AOE to the smallest area of damage in the game currently - name a smaller aoe i’ll wait. I also asked to scale up the projectile speed this will greatly amplify the skill and to maybe add more dmg.
The thing with the armor shred/posion shred etc is keeping stacks on or getting them high - as mentioned in another thread where I posted my build with 166% throwing speed which doesn’t mean much when the projectiles max speed is a 1/5th of that the bottleneck is huge meaning even with 500% poison on hit chance I was getting like 140-160 stacks on things vs other builds - lets say hammer throw with bleed, 999. Kulze touched on this just above.
The multi-flask throwing looks cool but only 1 of X flasks hits targets I was messing with this on my build.
BASICALLY in closing I’m literally just asking for a skill to be buffed. If XYZ likes it now you’re going to like it a LOT more. It shouldnt have to be a support skill sure if you say “not all skills should be end game” great for you but I’d like this one to be and I feel lots of other people would like it too.
proj speed / higher application possibilty. It needs a lot more speed like every other throw.
better base dmg for on hit
set mana cost for multi throwing for clear
aoe increase, a lot its horrible. I wouldnt be mad to see a plague like spread effect, hah.
acid pool is a neat idea but adds cooldown making it a non option with straight flask
fire flask in comparison is willdddddddy over powered
toxin node to get to takes points and cooldown is added and isnt strong at all
It’s a fun skill, its very different to all the other skills in the game, it needs some love as it in my shitty opinion be able to be a main skill. It won’t hurt anyone to make this skill much stronger it just adds more options for builds.
If by other stuff you mean DoTs & mob death then yes, I guess. But Frost Claw has 5 damage nodes (6 if you include Chaos Whirl), 6 other dps-related nodes & 2 or 3 mana cost nodes.
Yes, but % more damage would be equivalent. 100% more damage would be equivalent to hitting twice. So there are other options. But yes, the speed of the flask, cost & the small AoE don’t help.
Yeah, they could do that too, though they’d need to allow shotgunning for Acid Flask.
Hammers have a smaller AoE by themselves (ignoring the void dot AoE node).
I actually disagree with this a bit. The slow travel speed of the flasks means you need to lead small/faster moving mobs but it doesn’t mean you would’ve be keeping up stacks by itself. It just means there’s a wait time till the good stuff happens, like with Meteor. Hammers can have 3 thrown & hitting the same target, potentially multiple times if it’s a big boss, so that means you’ll get 3/6/9 times the number of stacks per use all things being equal. If Acid Flask were capable of hitting a single target 3/6/9 times per cast then it’d be able to keep 999+ stacks on a boss as well. But that has nothing to do with the movement speed of the flask.
Hammers also donthave a particularly high movement speed, thoygh it’s probably higher than Acid Flask.
TBF, that node does actually make it a support skill.
Sure… but is that the goal of Acid Flask?
Seems like something leaving behind a puddle, so AoE and DoT related things would be the major aspect I imagine.
As OP mentioned, the AoE is kinda laughable overall, and plainly spoken… with using it non-converted it also kinda sucks in terms of application od the DoT
Which has kinda the same issue.
Higher lead time means more errors which reduces the actual incoming.
Those skill-types need more damage then others for that reason, to make up for missing. With Meteor it’s definitely the case as it’s a bonkers high damage output… but with Acid Flask?
Hammers cover a 1/3rd of the screen using aura/spiral and fire out in all directions using nova - no player presses the button once and watches a single hammer, dont be silly. The aoe clear of a normal player using spiral is most of the screen. Also have you seen nova hammer projectile speed? ITS FKN INSANELY quick one of the quickest in the game and using this can down uber abberoth (search it on Volca from maxrolls youtube if you dont believe me). spiral can be speed up 45 percent BUT it doesnt need it because the hammers move with you, the flasks do NOT. They are thrown and follow A to B. They do not follow ME.
The slow projectile travel of the flask is 100% what causes you to not be able to get your stacks up - 400% on hit is what, 5 stacks per time? You can throw 150% speed but your projectiles travel at 45% speed by the time your 4th flask hits your first stacks are already gone. You know gaming maths isnt my strong point but personal experience and common sense are a lot stronger - if your projectiles travelled quicker you would infact be able to maintain more stacks and without stacks of poison such as swarmblades ability to hit 999 poison AND frostbite due to attack speed then you’ll forever have a very VERY gimped, weak ittiration of a poison ability and as a support its weak because it’s speed of poison and hit ability is low. I’ve been watching build guides of all the flasks going back a few years as things changed in this game and personally dont recall seeing people spec into toxin node and before I get a generic “Not everyone puts their build online” - CORRECT and if they don’t then how would ANYONE know if they are , including you haha!
Circling back to my original post - Acid flask is weak, I am giving feedback and suggesting it be made stronger ORRRRRRRRRR EHG you could just ignore it and buff umbral blades, not work on snap shotting for all the minion classes, give VK moreeee damage multipliers and buff its 600% damage endless echos, buff pally some more ETC ETC
Please just stop trying to defend acid flask being good or not needing love or saying its a support skill because you probably arent even currently playing it lol.
Actually, projectile speed wouldn’t change that. It’s attack speed that would change that. It doesn’t matter if the projectile is slow or fast (other than for aiming issues, of course) as long as you can send a stream of them in a row.
If you can throw 1 flask per second, whether it takes 0.1s or 2s to reach the target doesn’t make a difference for the number of stacks you can inflict. What changes it is throwing more flasks per second.
Bro I have / had 166% throwing attack speed on the char I linked yesterday - you have more flasks in the air than are hitting the target - your statement is incorrect if the flasks arent travelling as fast as you’re lobbing them they wont hit the target fast enough.
if it takes 2 seconds to hit a target and the stacks are wearing off every second - does that not suggest to you they’re gone quicker than they’re applied? Bro c’mon.
I had t6 or 7 speed on both rings and gloves and 15% on amulet bleeding heart etc if you’re 2 meters from A producing at 166% but travelling at default 15% honestly if you think thats going to be some solid lazer like line, thats wild.
Anyways this whole threads gone to shit tbh the mods will probably pass over it so good day - another one thread on the mute list.
Other than for aiming issues (which I did mention), no.
I’ll use an example to show. We’ll assume you can throw 10 flasks per second, throw 40 flasks (over 4s) and that each flask applies 5 stacks and stack duration is 4s:
-Flask travel time is 0.1s. After 0.1s the target has 5 stacks. After 4.1s the target has 200 stacks. At that point, more flasks will just refresh them and you’ll always have 200 stacks.
-Flask travel time is 2s. After 2s (you’ve already thrown 20 of them) the target has 5 stacks. After 6s the target has 200 stacks. At that point, more flasks will just refresh them and you’ll always have 200 stacks.
The only difference projectile speed does is how long it takes for the first stack to hit. Of course, if it’s a mob that moves a lot, faster projectiles means you miss less, but the number of stacks stays the same.
To have more stacks, you need more throwing speed.
It would, substantially. Because it reduces the need to lead and hence with changing situations the enemies to avoid the damage because they change position.
That too, it needs both to be exact.
That’s factually wrong. The flasks don’t have a direct hit as much as I know, they produce a AoE which leaves - can at least, unless you spec out - a DoT behind. The trajectory itself is a no-damage zone. As much as I know.
Still ‘no’, the aiming itself is not the problem. You can aim perfectly and still miss. Because a enemy teleports, because a enemy has a movement skill used in the meanwhile, because you had to evade causing a change in trajectory of the enemies too.
It still doesn’t change the math. You can’t get more stacks by adding projectile speed and not changing throwing speed. So, outside of simply not hitting them (which I did say was a factor), whether they travel faster or slower doesn’t change the total number of stacks you can maintain.
Use the metrics of trajectory, percentile of enemies with movement skills and expected percentile of evasive maneuvers during travel time as values in a formula.
Then suddenly the math changes.
If you don’t put all variables in a formula obviously the math doesn’t provide the proper results.
If you wanna math then you need to math properly.
Simple way to look at it, is projectile speed wont change dummy dps in the slightest.
paper dps(aka optimal dps) wont change with projectile speed.
But real dps can change if you end up hitting more often because your damage is instant. Why do you think people talk about hitscan in shooting games? Hitscan causes the “Bullet” to be simply a graphic that has no real world mechanics. if your cross hair is over them when you pull the trigger, they take damage. Where as some games have actual bullet mechanics where drop and leading actually matter.
Its not that big of a deal all things considered, As projectile speed would help, but imo isnt the core of the problem, I shouldnt need to be exactly aiming my tiny little lobbed puddles in an arpg. my ability should probably have some level of AoE that isnt terrible lol. or multiple projectiles that dont cost an arm and a leg.
