Welcome back, Travellers!
Been catching up on streams, and putting continued thoughts down on a keyboard - so here we go:
Buildup skills, big booms (as Lizard likes to call them), Cooldown Skills, or just Erasing Strike - whatever you call them, the category of skills that fall into “wait for it… wait for it… BOOM!” always feels good, except when they dont.
There are a few strategies for using these skills - and some are definitely better than others. A few that exist today include:
-Shatter Strike’s conversion of Ignite to Frostbite and damage versus Frozen enemies, combined with repeated strikes
-Flame Reave counting Firebrand/Mana Strike hits as their own for the Rythm of Fire node bonuses
-Void Cleave guaranteeing a critical hit on your next Erasing Strike
So far, all the bonuses we’ve seen involve “use another skill until you use this one” being the primary strategy - and this is fine, but not the only option.
Fury Leap shows us another big one - it provides a buff that is slightly longer than its cooldown - so we use the skill, and then use the buffs while it’s on cooldown.
The other category I can think of, but not think of an example for is “I haven’t hit anything recently” - such as a skill that does more damage if you haven’t dealt damage recently (or taken damage recently).
While this feels inherently unbalanced, it becomes particularly easy to adjust if you use buffs to control the growth; i.e. “Every second you have not been hit, gain X stack(s) of Y buff - when you hit an enemy, consume all stacks.” Some of these buff types exist on Items, but I cannot think of any nodes on our skills that provide this bonus [My memory isn’t perfect, and I’m not going through every single skill to look for one node just to write this down - feel free to reply with where I’m wrong, I’d love to be!]
We’ve finally started exploring the real concept behind Cooldown Skills - what is happening in-between uses? So I want to really highlight that’s what we’re talking about: for many of our skills, the answer there is “we’re dodging enemies until it’s ready” more than anything else, or sometimes “we deleted that pack, let’s find the next one, once this is ready again”. Those skills are the ones that feel bad. Any skill that we want to use when it’s ready needs to have something important happening in-between uses, or be ready by the time we hit the next pack of enemies.
From my own experience, Death Seal, Hail of Arrows, Reaper Form, and to a lesser extent Void Cleave all suffer in this department. Being on cooldown feels more like a punishment for having used the skill, with no real way to bypass them to use the skill again, rather than being rewarded for having used them. Void Cleave is the exception there - it feels rewarding to have used it, but there’s a too-long period in between uses without something else to do.
While I haven’t played through every Mastery (yet) - I’m hoping this gives enough feedback to improve our Cooldown skills in a meaningful way.
Happy Hunting, Travellers!