Hi! I’ve been a raptor enjoyer for a while so I’ve been trying the new Fire Breath node. I’ll try to be brief:
Player cone-shaped skills require you to position well to make the most of them.
For minions, positioning is a much bigger hassle and becomes very frustrating.
Due to Raptors being melee, this is made worse since they’re usually in the middle of packs, so they’ll hit one or two out of a dozen monsters surrounding them.
Due to size, the raptor will sometimes be “inside” an enemy and the fire breath will miss targets directly in front of them.
This could be fixed by adding a small hitbox surrounding the raptor, so enemies directly next to them (or at least in front of them) are hit by fire breath. This is not necessary for player cone skills since you can re-position yourself much easier and makes for more interesting gameplay.
The fire breath has a long cast time, so the raptor is not attacking while using his skill, meaning you either fully commit to fire breath or it makes the raptor worse. This is okay since it’s viable damage-wise, but due to its clunky cone shape the gameplay becomes very frustrating and tiresome, so please consider making this adjustment!
I was looking and found ONLY this post about the raptor’s fire breath. I agree it has some serious problems, but I think there are two main one’s that are important to point out clearly:
Cone position relative to the Raptor, itself—It looks and seems very apparent like the Raptor is extending its neck beyond the hitbox of enemies that are too close to it, which it is aiming for, and the cone’s area is not overlapping their hitbox and dealing no damage as a result.
Raptor target selection—The Raptor is dumb as a bag of hammers, and cannot recognize when there’s a large pack of enemies in a nice group right next to it, and will often dump its fire breath in precisely the opposite direction of that group.
These are actually fixable things, and they can be fixed in a performant way. I’m really hoping this gets addressed. I’ve figured out a ‘way’ to play with it, by effectively using a combination of taunting and pulling with Leap Slam that helps ensure that enemies try to group on me as much as possible, and they get a nice nudge away from the Raptor once-in-a-while to help space its cone right. Still would be nice to not have to work quite so hard to point my dinosaur in the right direction…
I know I restated some of what you already said, but I wanted to add what clarity I could offer. Admittedly, in my own long-winded way.
EDIT: Oh, and the Raptor is hard as hell to target with Blessing of Eterra much of the time…Even sometimes when my cursor seems like it’s right over it, the spell still targets me, or a nearby sloth totem, or the rift beast that came out of my amulet… That’s annoying, too. Maybe a little feedback when it’s properly hovered, like a visual flare or something, would be nice. Plus, it gets LOST among clusters of enemies with lots of effects and stuff, and I can’t even target it then. It would be nice to have a toggle-able pillar of light for minions (especially companions) so we can see them better in combat.
