I’m new to last epoch and have been loving the game very much. After 3000 hours of Grim Dawn I was looking for a new ARPG and found my replacement for GD.
I really love the Sentinel class (having been a pala back in D2 days) but one of my gripes with some the skills are you need to keep pushing them repeatedly. Skills like Devouring orb, sigils of hope, ring of shields etc. I know there is the numlock autocast trick but I feel this is something you need to do external of the game which should really be part of the game’s mechanics. Is there any plans to maybe bring in a node that can have you click the skill once and it becomes like a GD aura that needs to be toggled on and off. Spinning Devouring orbs around you (that should be toggled on and off), sigils of hope on you to buff damage (that should be toggled), Ring of shields (same story) you get what I mean. I am not saying punish players that like a more active button mashing playstyle. I will perfectly happy if the toggle option reduces damage slightly whereas the active use option gives you more power.
other than that. Love the game and looking forward to the next patch.
The devs plan to overhaul all skills that very strongly incentivice auto-casting.
They already did overhaul some skills that mainly were used as autocasting skills and now are more interactive, like Flame Ward for example.
DO and Sigils together with Maelstrom from Primalist are the most important skills IMO, that need such overhaul badly.
I never used RoS on cooldown though.
But it’s definitely on the devs radar, but it takes time.
Usually IF, they going to rework/overhaul a skill they go big and do sweeping changes to the skill, which in the past resulted in much better and interesting skills IMO.
They’ve also said that they don’t like the numlock autocast & don’t officially support it (before anyone else asks), they view it as a failure of skill design.
Right. So why can you autocast Judgement and the Fire Aura
The very first thing I tried was autocasting it and yes its extremely efficient as the initial hit doesnt need to hit anything at all, and then you have a 4? second DoT following you around
In the downtime you just throw 1 Javelin to boost the damage of your next autocasted Judgement
You can afk kill bosses that dont move, due to the fact it also heals you constantly, and for some reason you can now get ridiculous numbers of adaptive spell damage while holding a shield and healing effectiveness meaning Staves are useless for them
Basically my Paladin I made who was 3 days old and level 81 or something can 100% fully sustain Exsangious degen and actually never died on anything except when I went afk at level 12 in Welryn…
From the point of build diversity and stuff it may be interesting to have staves. Just I’m more fan of staying in some boundaries when it comes to fantasy. And for me it just doesn’t fit to have a Knight in plate armour running around with a wooden staff.
I know that now we could talk about “But throwing a hammer while wielding a sword is not weird?” This is where everybody has his/her own flavour. I also dislike seeing my characters holding an axe in the middle of the shaft and not on the end, where their have the biggest range and momentum. You also won’t see a carpenter holding his hammer not at the end of the shaft.
On topic: Is maelstrom really numlock-able? I thought it has no cd so it would just spam itself until you’re oom?
Same with Sigils.
I’ll admit that I’m using autocast on all abilities where it makes sense. DO can be a two edged sword. On higher arena it can be a bit unpredictable. And the stop and cast animation while you’re trying to dodge an attack can be a really deadly.
Ring Of Shields is a perfect example of a well working autocast skill. It doesn’t need super situational awareness to use and you can skill it to be always on.
I think that nerfing the duration would just cripple the skill. Maybe removing instant cast and adding a nice “on activation” effect like stun, immobilize or pull enemies would be nice.
@boardman21 suggested to just remove cooldown on these skill so they would be unusable with numlock. This would work well, imho, but I fear that it might incentivise people to use macros.
Flame Ward was altered since time ago. It think I saw people still use it in autocast. But for me personally the rework worked and im not using it in autocast anymore but situational.
Cooldown is one of the levers that the devs use to balance skills, if they remove the cooldown on DPS skills they’d need to either increase the cost or reduce the damage.
