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.
