If LE had higher mob density, I might not disagree as strongly. But it’s extremely common for there to be enough space between packs for the buffs to fall off. So the choices are:
Spam it between packs and get your forward motion set back.
Engage a pack without the buff long enough for the rewind to not significantly disrupt your positioning.
Engage a pack, rewind position, then Lunge/run back in.
All of those options feel dumb.
I actually think that would make the situation with VR worse. Being able to remove the annoyance/disruptive drawback of the skill would only make it harder to justify not taking it for the short duration buff. It would also take away the only remaining flavor of the skill that keeps it from being something you just throw on autocast and forget exists. What I’d like to see is the Warped Time and Catching Up nodes removed/reworked/replaced.
I don’t think it’s good design for an ability to require that you to hold a constant, rolling account of your location X seconds ago in your head for it to not disrupt your gameplay. I can’t imagine how it would be feasible to implement, but IMO that is something the game should provide a visual cue for.
The movement rewind is least disruptive when you’re fighting in a static general area, so I’d actually argue that it requires less skill to use without disruption in boss fights.
I’m with OP about these skills being just a “click tax”, if you see them in this light then these become a kind of proto-aura rather than the originally intended substitution.
One thing that I’ve started noticing long time ago is how (in my memory) Sigils have been mentioned more than once but from what I personally recall I’ve never read any complain about Devouring Orbs
The uptime mechanics are very similar if not about the same, but somehow Dev Orbs are never mentioned as “annoying”, maybe because they do deal direct dmg while Sigils are mostly buffs?
While DO is balanced by its cooldown, Sigils is balanced by its mana cost. DO has no limit so you want to cast it as often as possible to get max amount of Orbs. This favours the “autocast” with num lock mechanic. Only complaints people have is that DO is not an instant cast and cannot be cast while spinning around with Warpath.
I don’t like Sigils very much because of its clunkyness. The only way it can be build ok-ish is with increased duration in the tree. Also there are idols that increase its duration. But I find it a very bad tradeoff to “waste” skillpoints or idol slots for convenience. These kind of tradeoffs I don’t like. In mist cases I would go for more power instead of convenience and end up with something that doesn’t feel smooth to play.
With the 4 second buffs this is very similar. 4 seconds are a very short duration and it’s hard to keep track of your buffs if you even have several different ones.
Would be cool to have idols with secondary stats that maybe increase duration if said buffs. If this is overpowered there could be a mechanic that works like this:
Your self buffs last 100% longer, but have 33% [tweak numbers at will] reduced effectiveness when the base duration is exceeded.
The difference with DO is that skill is offensive and if not cast it just lowers your DPS, while sigil or other defensive skills if not cast most likely lead to your death.
Having your overall resistances and endurance making a yo-yo effect between super-high and super-low depending on their cooldowns also means that it becomes difficult to gauge the toughness of any encounter because we don’t know how hard the next strike will hit us for.
With the changes to the Acoloyte Minions announced for 0.8.3, largely away from “I have to constantly recast” to “the Minions stay with me permanently”, EHG has already taken a path that I think is better received by the majority of the player base.
Why should someone with 5 permanent minions be allowed to play nice and passive, while others have to struggle with AURAS, which are classically NOT situational like a sword strike?
If you ask me [I think quite a lot of people see it that way], 0 to 3 active abilities are enough for most builds, the rest can run/be activated on the side.
I’m not sure I really view Sigils a particularly strong defensive buff. It can give you up to 12-15% block chance, higher health regen (100%-125% / 200-250% with the Meditation node, which is quite a bit if you’re adding in some flat regen as well) & act as an automated heal on damage taken (Faith node) but I think many people take it more for the flat damage (28-35 which is quite a lot, especially if you’re using a skill with a big added damage effectiveness modifier) & % damage (120%-150%) it adds.
That flat damage alone is not far off having an additional half of a weapon (a Dawn blade gives +48 flat phys & a t5 damage prefix is +26 for a total of +74)!
Even something like the Shuriken node that makes them a shield: it’s absurd to have to recast it every 3 to 4 seconds. I give up on their long range damage in favour of a defensive buff but I have to constantly recast it.
Macros also work with those devensive Shurikens or with Sigils of Hope, or with anything else without a reasonable cooldown.
And in a world in which many, many players/streamers/grannies/biscuits/etc. trainers/cheat software/cheat hardware/exploits and the like are used to profile themselves in any other way, super easy to use software suites from various hardware manufacturers don’t seem to be an obstacle anymore, do they?
Just take the thing’s (forgive me for the expression) dick comparison potential, i.e. the rankings, and the whole envy or player behavior that follows envy will largely stop.
Let everyone just play away. In Diablo (1), there were no rankings, and we still played it forever and 3 days.
It’s clear, it’s not going to happen. Today all “lengths” must be compared, the world human pack must be able to present its “pecking order” somehow. *laughs
Yes, though Shurikens is a bit different since you can have other skills (Shift, Dancing Strikes mainly) cast it for you while you’re doing your normal combat stuff.
Just… it is nevertheless operated/used by VERY MANY players.
→ Whether shooters, strategy games, ARPGs, MMORPGs or whatever… heck, even Mario Kart has online cheating or Macro-using.
And almost no matter what effort EHG puts into it, or what ANTI-cheat software is used, 10 to 30% of all players will already fiddle their preferred ways of playing.
→ Personally I don’t like cheats, but I use macros in cases like the Sigils of Hope.
(One or the other may reproach you for that. It’s just: Either that, or the ability is NOT used).
I, for example, only use Sigils of Hope under one of the following 2 conditions:
a) I use the Last Wish skill point.
b) I use a macro
…because this ability is just CLUNKY, it’s really, really, really no fun to press the one button every 4 or 5 seconds in the middle of combat just to have all the Sigils permanently “up”.
That’s another thing: why would changing the Shuriken skill change how another skill works?
Balancing the functionality of a skill on the presumption that you’ll use it with other skills and and unlock specific nodes on those skills is preposterous.
Autocast meaning external methods such as macro/numlock gimmicks?
If yes then from the game perspective it still remains a Click tax, no way to look around it
In general we want to move away from or adjust skills that just feel like they need to be clicked every periodically to maintain a buff. If people feel that they need to autocast a skill, that’s a design failure on our end, because we’ve given them an active skill that’s taking up one of their active skill slots, that’s effectively just a passive skill. Sentinel unfortunately has quite a few of these.
Skills like these aren’t always easy or quick to fix though. We have plans for how to do it, but they won’t all be implemented soon, so please have patience while we address it. In the meantime I’d like to confirm that you are allowed to autocast skills with numlock, the fact that that can feel necessary is our problem not yours.
Permanent Acolyte Minion skills, for example, are also quite passive - who cares about that?
If skills are called “auras”, they should probably be permanent rather than situational, right?
Personally, I appreciate the almost abnormal (is meant positively here) diversity of all Last Epoch skills, hardly one plays like another.
The only thing that would scare me (and some of my private comrades-in-arms) would be a design-technical “as-good-as” compulsion to always and with every build have to perform a “5-skill rotation” permanently to be halfway “good at it”. If only all the summoners were an exception, that would also be hard to handle for some.
Personally I feel skills like Sigil or other skills that need constant recast to simply to a toggle that drains mana per second equal to their current mana per cast divided by their duration, and change the duration nodes with mana cost reduction. The skill would automatically turn off the character’s mana regen is lower than the keep-up cost.
ex:
39 mana * 3 sigils with 15 seconds duration = 7.8 mana per second
39 mana * 4 sigils with 25 seconds duration = 6.24 mana per second
This would require a rethinking of the whole Soliloquy/Divine Flare costs and interactions, but I don’t think it would be a big impact since I’m guessing not many people are using it…
It would also need the Faith node reworked otherwise it would be a 200 hp heal (affected by your heal effectiveness) everytime you took a hit for 20% of max hp (or less with the node behind it). Which sounds awesome.
