Latest patch 0.9g added this function to the game;
“Thorn Shield now has a slight priority for targeting players over minions and mobile minions over immobile minions.”
This has had a negative impact on my Spriggan Form + Bleed Bear build. The character is based around applying as many thorn shields to the bear as possible and letting it kill everything.
The way thorn shield targetting previously worked was that anywhere I put the mouse that was around the edge of the screen far from the player and bear, as long as the bear was between my chracter and the cursor, the bear would get all of the thorn shields, which is what I want and expect to happen.
The new behavior giving players priority means if I have the cursor far away from myself AND the bear, but the bear is between me and the cursor, it gives the thorn shield to the player character, not the bear. This means that in order to have the build function again I have to specifically keep the mouse cursor close to or directly over the bear while moving around trying to apply the thorn shields.
What I would like to be changed from this existing behavior is to potentially keep the “preference” to target players as long as the cursor is close but not on either unit, but revert the “long distance between units” preferring the player despite being further away (sometimes a lot further away) than the minion.
What an interesting build concept. Sounds like it should lean towards closest target with maybe a little lee-way for priority. Or they should add a self cast key and lean towards strictly closest target.
Quick update. After continuing to play the build for several hours yesterday and today; the change in targetting priority makes the build much worse.
There are frequent instances where the bear is missing 600% global phys and 600% bleed because the game is defaulting to give it to the player. This means things take longer to kill, and have more time to attack me and the bear, while I am putting in a lot more attention on keeping the cursor over the bear when casting, only to have it go onto me anyway.
In the middle of large groups of enemies or when the bear runs behind terrain it is very difficult to continue to apply thorn shield to it, when I am right on top of the bear to try and trigger it’s retalitation skill it is almost impossible to cast thorn shield on the bear.
Please can you add a toggle to change the default behavior for targetting for situations like this, because the gameplay was smooth, doing exactly what was expected, and now it is very much not.
Thanks
Edit: Just did Heorot at 270 corruption. It was still good damage, and not at risk of dying, but during the fight ~25% of the overall damage of the build was lost due to this issue, and in the wolf phase more than half of the DPS was lost because of it. (17+ of the 30-33 thorn shields I am able to maintain went onto me).
Sad to say I am done with this build for the moment, as the change has made the primary emotion frustration, not fun. Not sure if this belongs in bug reports or here in feedback, but this was a hugely negative change for this specific build and others like it.
I don’t understand why the priority was changed to begin with. Surely if your build revolves around spamming Thorn Shield you’re either a) Playing a pet build i.e. a bleed bear or b) playing some sort of reflect build, in which case you most likely wouldn’t have a pet, except maybe a Spriggan, but it’s a ranged pet so wouldn’t be near the cursor most of the time. Besides the Introspection node allows you to bypass that issue completely.
I imagine this change was made to accomodate some sort of multiplayer issue. Bringing some QoL to multiplayer is always welcome, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of a reasonably popular build type.
I don’t expect EHG to foresee any and all outcomes of a change, it would be ludicrous to do so. But I do expect them to acknowledge and attempt to revert any unintended damage they’ve done with a change in behaviour of a skill.
Edit: I should probably mention that I don’t actually play this build. But I would find it completely egregious if my build was inadvertently made worse due to a minor QoL change. Intended or not.
Sorry about this! We were worried about how this change would affect Thorn Shield minion builds and tried to keep the prioritization effect to a minimum necessary to aid its targeting in multiplayer, but it’s clear that it still has a negative impact on minion builds.
We’ll work on a better solution.
