Take “Volatile Reversal” for example. It’s a skill I press to get more attack speed / move speed. I don’t want to press the skill - infact it’s super annoying to do so since my character get’s set back in time. Meaning sometimes I have to travel a path twice.
BUT - it’s a damage increase… and at the end of the day the goal of any ARPG is getting more damage / higher levels.
Another exaple: Void Cleave in a Manifest Armor build. I press Void Cleave to get a damage increase for my minion. Not because it’s satisfying to kill stuff with it since it hits like a wet noodle. It’s part of the “rotation” now.
A skill that should feel epic is now a mandatory piece of my damage rotation and that makes it feel a lot less cool / enjoyable.
Some skills don’t seem to be designed with beeing a “support skill” - so using them in a build where they are not the main skill makes them feel awkward.
Rotation? Wait what? Am I playing a MMORPG? A lot of builds are stacking 4 “support skills” aka abusing other skills to enhance their damage. While I don’t condemn that - in fact for a lot of skills that seems to be the plan.
Some of the biggest “I’m part of your damage rotation now” offenders (these skills are not used as main skills for my examples but only used to increase damage):
Void Cleave
Volatile Reversal
Anomaly
Shield Throw
Warpath (means to an end to summon Forge Weapons or procc Flame Burst)
Swipe
Fury Leap
Infernal Shade
summoning 15 skeletons to create Abomination and switching the skeleton skill off of your skillbar
Shift
I’d like to shout out a skill where I think “making it support” was done in a great way:
Javalin - The Battle Stadard is fun and smooth and feels like it fits.
Shuriken / Smite - proccing the skills passively is nice
Rogue seems to be a more comboy character - that’s fine - that works and is mostly smooth. For Sentinel, Druid and to an extend Necro it’s just not. Can’t comment on Mage since I’ve not played that much.
TL;DR
Some skills make the gameplay feel “less smooth” and awkward because they are part of a “damage rotation”. It feels they are not designed to be that.
This game works with its 5 skills super well, you dont have 15 buttons to rotate its not even close to an mmo like FF14 or WoW.
Many of them are utility pieces you use for specific situations. The game has to be designed this way or many builds will straight up not even use 5 skills, if skills didnt have ways to be built as many different options, its already where some builds get there 1 to 2 main skills a movement skill and its like “well I just filled the random slots with literally things I never cast because I had nothing else”
If anything more skills need interesting filler/connecting points. Look at upheaval, its my favorite skill now. You can make it a main skill, a buff skill in like 2-3 different ways, a filler skill, or even a big button to press that costs lots of mana or a combo skill. This is exactly how skills should be designed. That way the can fill slots on almost any build, but to do so they need to be a means to an end.
Like @DiceDragon I actually like this thing about the “secondary skills”
What I will say tho is that I do agree that certain skills dont feel like they “fit” in or are “smooth” as you put it…
Void Cleave for a minion build is a prime example… This is an edge case use in a pure minion damage build, but it does illustrate the issue of proccing a skill not for the skills sake but to get that one or two nodes that help an entirely different skill…
In contrast, there are lots of skills that do fit each other and make sense to use in a rotation - like Spellblade Firebrand/Flamereave/Echant Weapon - they match and work together well… but as you listed, there are plenty that just seem out of place and seem like they are being used not for their intended purpose…
Perhaps the devs intend for this “creative edge case” use to improve build variety and maybe how some more experienced players are “cheesing” the skill choices/use isnt how most people would play generally…
so yes, I agree, some skill combinations feel janky and are used for secondary reasons but maybe this is just a side effect of the beta state that certain skills are in and perhaps for better/worse, how we are all exploiting them?
I suppose its because in the minion build that I have used you dont actually use Void Cleave for any damage - its just to boost the minion with Molten Blades / Scorching Path… Void Cleave in this instance is almost irrelevant as a damage dealer…
Javelin with Smite… Both attacks work together to do damage actively… They are imho far more synergistic… LIke the unique Bident… more javelin attacks boost smite damage and javelin procs smites… all warm and fuzzy together…
Not saying its a bad thing to allow dps skills to preform as buffs with edge nodes…
Its just that some currently feel janky… Some are really smooth and work together well… .others seem like a “oh, we have space for a node or two on the skill tree - what could we put here?”… For example on Void Cleave, I think it would be better if that branch on the top left of tree had more minion focus… rather than the last 2 nodes… Toss in a few lesser minion boosts as secondary node bonuses… things that make it seem like the skill is a good secondary choice for minion builds, rather than just an afterthought…
I agree and slightly disagree here. But disagree only because of how some of these alt-function skills work.
Harvest, for example, makes sense. Hitting an enemy applies a (de)buff which causes your minions to prioritize it, and do additional damage. Although it defeats the purpose of a minion-build, by forcing the player into melee range. But it works smashingly with something like the Lich/Minion “Deathknight” build Boardman posted for 8.2(?) I believe.
Void Cleave, however, arbitrarily buffs your minions, just because you hit something. And, taking it a step further, then requires to you hit a minion to buff it. It just doesn’t work, thematically. And the requirement to beat on your pets/minions just seems…stupid?
I guess when I visualize this happening, in practice, it just seems ‘off’. Unlike Bone Curse or Infernal Shade, where you are using the minion as a vessel, to indirectly channel the power of your spell. Not running up behind your horde of skeletons (or whatnot) and clubbing them all over the head.
Rip blood has nodes specifically for hitting minions, and bone golem specifically gets better when you yourself can hit it.
I think Void cleave feels off because its not a hammer, if it was a hammer and you were bonking your MA to “buff him” would be more thematic, but void cleave is still locked to swords for now so thats not really an option.
But if we are going out of our way to mention necro, she literally clubs and steals the life from her minions all the time.
Void cleaves buff for minions is called “Molten infusion” its literally designed around the only minions that sentinel has which are the forged kind, to forge things you gotta bonk em
Well yeah, but even with Rip Blood, it doesn’t feel off if you visualize it. And, I understand how the forging of items works, but can you picture a Forge Guard (or whatever minion build) running up behind all their minions, in the middle of a fight, and stabbing/shooting/bonking/slashing them…?
Seems like an Oprah meme is in order here: stab You get a buff! stab You get a buff! slash You get a buff! cleave EVERYONE GETS A BUFF!
Or, more specifically, in this case ‘Cleaving’ a group of them, to buff them? Bonking them over the head with a hammer would be even more recockulous… this isn’t Last Looney Toons Epoch.
Strongly agree that this is a huge problem with the current design of many skills. I’ve largely come to expect that any given Sentinel build will have maybe 2 skills that I actually wanted to use and then 3 that are more like an annoying chore that’s obligatory to attain endgame damage.
I think it’s a bit of a trap of the skill tree mechanic. With ~20 nodes to fill out per tree it’s no surprise that the designers slip into overengineered synergies and utilities that overshadow the core fantasy for the ability. Imo it would greatly benefit the game if EHG could set a much stronger principle that skills have an intended fantasy and use-case.
Volatile Reversal would be an awesome ability if I used it when I wanted to go back in time. Games like Dota2 and LoL manage to achieve this with the mechanic and it’s insanely satisfying. But in LE I use it when I want some mana/208% DoT damage. Huge parts of the spell that represent the core fantasy are at best removed (hp change) or at worst - the position change - remain despite being totally undesirable. In this case the way the game incentivises me to use the spell straight up turns the core fantasy into a massive source of inconvenience and frustration.
Void Cleave is the same. If I actually used it according to the obvious fantasy - drag big packs then brutally cleave through them - then that animation and the forward step would be badass and satisfying. But when I’m holding the button down and sucking up the awkward way it clips me through enemies because it adds 3 stacks of critvuln to my Rive/Forge Strike rotation? It’s awful.
There’s obviously others but I’ll stick with your examples since I too have mostly been playing Sentinel and getting annoyed with those skills recently.
That said, some of the existing mixed offensive/support skills do work well. If you look at them closely it’s because they actually respect the principle that the skill has a certain fantasy that dictates its use cases. Rive can be specced as a damage support skill with the Execution node. It works great because it lets Rive fulfil a somewhat different function but triggers it in a way that very much respects Rive’s fantasy (hitting lots of mobs very fast). Shield Throw’s support interactions are all cool because they all still involve standing back and throwing shields like crazy. Using Harvest to egg on your minions by hitting priority targets makes complete sense. For the ones that really fail it’s not so much because it’s an attack with a buff but because the way the buff is delivered/incentivised to be used is actively in conflict with the play pattern that most fits the ability’s concept.
In that vein I think it’s definitely possible to salvage some of the current problem skills. Eg. if Void Cleave could bring back an incentive for me to plan big cleaves + make cleaving a big mob pack a rewarding moment, it wouldn’t be a problem if I was using it for direct damage or as a buff. Rather the issue is that rn it’s “optimal” to just spam it brainlessly which turns some of its coolest features into annoying. The intuitive solution would be to hit the buffing/debuffing variant of Void Cleave with a much longer cooldown (at least 8 seconds) but with stronger, longer-lasting effects (buffs that scale with number of enemies/rares hit would be particularly interesting and fun). Molten Infusion should scale with hitting enemies rather than hitting minions.
Additionally I think the game would also enormously benefit from introducing more spells that hold buffing + supporting a damage rotation as a core fantasy, to lessen the pressure to offer potentially awkward conversions for spells that were really intended as attacks or specialised utility. Variations on the concept of transformation/ultimate forms could be considered for more of the subclasses. There could be more dedicated buff skills with more interactive concepts like low uptimes or special conditions for maintaining/extending their duration. Vaccums, hooks and pulls are almost entirely missing rn despite moving enemies around being one of the coolest and most satisfiying staple concepts for support spells. D3’s Exploding Palm serves as an example of an offensive spell that inherently supports/synergises with the DPS in the rest of your rotation.
I think it comes more to the limit of skills currently.
I can certainly agree that some classes really lack a true damage rotation, or simply have too small of one. Werebear sorta feels like that for me. My “Big button” is maul, and then I swipe. Thats pretty much my gameplay if im playing just basic melee type beefy werebear.
Where as voidknight does have a decent rotation build, I like to play a Warpath → Voidcleave → Erasing strike build, where the war path is the basic dps skill, and I spec for warblade, so as I spin im building a big nuke, while also buffing me next voidcleave, which then in turn makes my ES crit and do more damage thanks to void shred or what have you. Then you are left 2 slots to fill in with buffs/utility like javalin, teleport smite, or VR.
As classes get more skills added I think it should get more interesting, right now some classes just dont have enough skills to really make combo builds work well, or they need too many utility skills to solve damage issues.
I also think more utility skills at a baseline are needed, like I was messing around with a build and I am almost at empowered and still have an empty slot. I need a mana recovery engine but I sure as hell am not touching tempest strike or swipe for mana regen on a non melee build… Id love more options like focus from mage so we have dedicated tools for getting back resources.
