The new monolith design presents you with a target- the timeline’s final boss- and puts dozens of echoes in front of it as a gatekeeping mechanism. The best way to attack this kind of challenge is to run past it as fast as you can. So, the only characters I’m playing right now are my Maelstrom shaman and my Devouring Orb VK, who can both proximity kill hordes of trash while moving as quickly as possible to the echo’s quest targets.
Proximity builds also have an advantage when you finally get to the timeline boss, who will be confronting the player with a rapid and nonstop series of ohshit mechanics requiring near-constant movement. Any build which requires me to stop moving in order to do damage suffers in comparison to a proximity build which can DDR nonstop while still DPSing.
Now, these zoomer builds are fun and effective and I wouldn’t want proximity damage to go away as viable option, but I hate feeling like choosing any other playstyle is a strictly worse choice. I don’t have any specific suggestions but I wanted to raise this as an issue and ask you to consider whether you can design some of your systems and encounters to encourage active ability use rather than nonstop movement and autocast.