Slow the game pace and increase combat inter-activeness

voice added

Definitely agree with this. Not that the pace itself of LE is bad. The rares with massive health do ruin the ā€˜flowā€™ of combat though. You cut through packs and packs, and then suddenly come to a halt and have to whittle down what feels like a boss for no real added loot. Saying that though the ā€˜blueā€™ mobs could maybe be a bit tougher to change up the pace and not just plow through them.

I love games with more interactive skill usage and less spam. Many ARPGs sadly have the 1-skill syndrome where you just go for one thing and build everything around it to buff it. Sometimes maybe having a single + multi-target skill setup. If it wasnā€™t for this type of combat Iā€™d be way more invested in PoE.

Having an arsenal of skills and them synergizing is much more my game. Things triggering off each other, comboing, charging, sequencing, multiplayer skills working together etc. just makes for much more dynamic game play. Like mentioned above some really enjoy just mashing mindlessly through enemies though which there should be space for too. While LE is very close, Iā€™d say games that have nailed this have been D3 and Wolcen.

Something else that changes up combat is crowd control. But in order for that to be relevant you have to be fighting enemies that are just tougher than regular or have some sort of special threat like abilities/buffs/debuffs etc. so that you have to split your focus between them and the regular mobs.

Would also be nice to see another set of movement skills for each class down the line. I really like the feeling of the movement skills in LE - which is also so important to make combat feel fun and tactical - I think has been nailed. Just nice with some variety to choose from or for different situations.

To finish up my wall of text I just have two more suggestions that can change the pace:
Environmental damage e.g. explosive barrels, oil, falling debris etc.
Random spawning ā€˜Championā€™ mobs with completely different abilities to the current ones so you have to pay attention.

LE is so fun though already and I am confident in the team making it a standout title down the line :slight_smile:

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I also prefer combat were you can synergize skills or have some medicore cooldown skills(like 4-6 seconds), they often give your ā€œrotationā€ something meaningfull that has impact.
(ofcourse make them impactfull enough to really matter)

I would like to see alot of skills have an option inside their specialisation tree to make them a cooldown with increased damage/effect if you want to go that route.

I also could get behind some very very powerfull skills that probably have even mroe cooldown(lik10seconds+), depending on the build this also can ā€œfeelā€ really good to have a big boom button.

Giving some skills the option to make them a cooldown would increase build diversity/usage in many cases i think. Most builds would still use one ā€œmain dps skillā€, but you always have alot of options for some burst damage/either singletarget or aoe, depending on the skill)

Also giving some cooldowns skills self-buffs or triger effects when they kill/hit mobs can fee lvery good in bossfights. As long as the buff/uptime is meaningfull and no auto-cast/permabuff(which the devs already try to distance from with some of the recent skills changes)

I also like alot of the skill specialisation nodes that make 2 skills synergize with each other.
Either by buffing other skills after usage(like one of the new meteor nodes) or skills that benift from other skills(like The Shield Rush Node which makes Ring Of Shield, if active, form a wall and charge with you). More stuff like that please.

Also one example which could be build upon is one of the swipe nodes for the primalist, which makes it a short cooldown and then i think the follow up node makes it possible to make a basic attack while the skill is on cooldown. I really liked that idea, could be maybe used for 1 or 2 skills on similar other skills for other classes.

Regarding on kill effects, i think some of those could use a %chance to trigger on rare mob hits. I think one of the Beastmaster Aspects already has something like that in itā€™s passive tree that is optional. That is the way to go.

LE partially is already doing some if the stuff you guys are suggesting.

We have skills that trigger other skills, like transplant triggering rip blood. We have skills that fit in rotations very well because they give a nice buff or debuff. For example spirit plague has a global spelldamage buff, debuffs enemies (slow, fear, damage reduction) and is a dot itself that can be buffed by global dot increase from souls.

Harvest deals double damage on cursed targets. Soulfeast works only on cursed targets. These skills need each other in a rotation.

Shield throw has global throwing damage buff as well as armor on ricochets so it can be used as an excellent opener before you lunge in with your Sentinel. Lunge itself is a superb example for a skill that fits in any rotation. Only downside is that it has only that one ā€œviableā€ route to go.

So for the skills that trigger other skills, this is nice. But it does not give us a choice. What if we could choose what skill we want to trigger.

Vengeance is a nice example @boardman21 brought up. The way this skill works only allows builds that spam that skill. If course you can mix a vengeance hit into your rotation to keep the damage reduction going during your rive spam. But this gameplay feels very clunky. Also Iā€™m not that confident with a skill that by nature is an attack skill but offeres the best damage reduction potential of the entire character class. Imho that additional damage reduction should be moved into the passive tree.

I think the approach to add cooldowns to skills and increase their impact would be a good way. Some time ago I made a thread about the lack of damage spikes of certain skills / classes that went in a similar direction.

Itā€™s nice to have some constant DPS skills but I also like that type of skills that hit less frequently but if they do, they hit like a truck.

But itā€™s not only about damage, itā€™s also about more control about crowd control. Forge strike (again) has a stun node. But how this skill currently works and with the actual stun mechanic this node doesnā€™t feel good to me. What about giving this node the ability to grand a 100% stun chance with additional stun duration with the cost of a cooldown timer.

There are so many possibilities to spice up the combat. The foundation is already there I think. But it desperately needs some attention.

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I just posted this and saw how long it is. TL;DR: Bread and butter spammable skills shouldnā€™t be part of a buff rotation (e.g. rotating vengeance and rive). Grim dawn has that and itā€™s bad. Offensive skills used for buffs should have noticeable battlefield impact when used. Specific feedback on sentinel skills below.

I just finished the campaign content for the first time with a double slash ignite Paladin (felt super strong, deathless until Lagon, who wasnā€™t tough once I knew to dodge the big beam). Even though things felt much too easy until the divine era, and pretty easy there once I started to make compromises for defense in my skills, I felt the pace and variety of combat was for the most part very good. But I agree with Boardman that it could be greatly improved by slowing it down a little and working to make it more interactive.

In general thereā€™s an important point on which I disagree with Boardman. While I think buff durations on a lot of skills could stand to be a little longer, I donā€™t think itā€™s necessarily bad for most builds to have a single ā€œspamā€ skill, and I think it could, in fact, be quite bad to encourage rotating in a weak, low damage spammable skill in order to maintain a buff. Thatā€™s a common feature of Shaman builds in Grim Dawn, for example, and itā€™s generally considered painful by the community.

Rather, players should be encouraged to pick multiple offensive skills, but each skill they use should 1) have a sense of battlefield impact, either through high damage or strong control, 2) should for the most part demand attention to positioning, and 3) should have their own gameplay niches. Alternating between vengeance for damage reduction and rive for damage, for example, would only really be a matter of managing a timer. Vengeance would lack its own sense of impact, it would only be as a button you would occasionally need to press, but there would be no decision making about when to press it, or immediate, visceral feedback as a result of using the skill.

Now for some more specific feedback. On my paladin, I tried a few different ways to work different offensive skills into my play style, but couldnā€™t escape rive as a main damage skill backed up by a rotation of buffs. But I think with some modest changes to the skill trees, a more complex, active play style would work. Here are some thoughts on three of the skills I used.

Rive: I tried the node that consumes ignite stacks to boost physical damage, but couldnā€™t make it work for what I wanted to do. First of all, taking that node was an immediate and dramatic loss of damage compared with just sticking with ignite, though the leach node after it was pretty nice. That might have just been an issue with my build, though. The main problem I had with it was that I was thinking I could use it to boost other damage skills like shield throw or smite with descend. But the damage boost was underwhelming. I think if the duration where longer, but the bonus smaller per stack, it would give you time to apply a higher damage bonus to other skills. As it is, the full bonus mostly only applies to riveā€™s third hit itself.

Smite: This was only a buff for me, which feels like a waste. I tried descend, but the node is just too awkward in its current state. Itā€™s buggy with idol procs on shield throw, the cooldown is too long, and it should be an instant cast. Also, I think there should be a node connected to fissure that removes the damage from fissure, but applies some kind of non-stacking debuff to enemies. That would transform the skill from just a button you press every 4 seconds to something that has noticeable battlefield impact and encourages careful positioning.

Sigils of hope: At first I found this annoying busy work, but it grew on me. However, for my character, I found block chance too important for any of the offensive buffs to make sense. Of course, thatā€™s probably tied to larger balance issues than just this skill. I think it would be nice to see a little more integration between the divine flare branch of the skill and buffs, though. Particularly, maybe the global melee damage node could be partially reworked and moved over to that part of the tree.

Overall, I think a lot of the skills I tried were halfway there to allowing a more complex play style, and the gameā€™s combat is overall very good. I hope with a little more work, there can be a good number of offensive, high impact rotational skills that better supplement bread and butter attack skills like rive or vengeance.

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The game is designed arround using one dmg skill only. If we had more masterys and more skills to use there would be a wider build diversity with more kills used.

The problem is thou the benefits of using different skills isnā€™t there. If I look at my Druid I spam Bearswipe 99% of the time with a roar and a charge every now and then. The other buttons arenā€™t intresting to me at all.
Same goes for other classes I use skill X as a dmg skill for my build but with the games setup I almost feel forced to use other skills that benefit my toon in an offensive or defensive (movement skill and cc included) manner. There is just no real possibility to toy arround with two skills.
The problem resulting in this is the uselessness of using different skills because there is little to non synergy.
Letā€™s take a look at vengence DRā€¦ if this was a 6 times stackable selbuff that lasts 10 seconds if you have 6 stacks you could use this skill + another dmg skill you realy like and not feel forced to use while pressing vengence every 9 seconds.
With the druid at least my roar forms a roots so I have a little synergy there but nothing to write home about.
If you remove the layers of LE that make the game outstanding because it offers the illusion of choice youā€™ll end up with a very blunt game. Pasive trees are nothing special so we leave these out for the moment because these are quite passive. No we are at skills and even there we have little choice there are simply outstanding nodes and shitty nodes, so make a good built that works or gimp yourself.
I wish skills would interact a bit more with each other and if itā€™s even skill X build stacks use skill Y to consume the stacks and deal XYZ more dmg or stun the enemy. This would be a good start. Or skills that make enemys bleed while other skills have nodes that offer big benefits vs bleeding enemys. I think thin is nothing only uniques should interact with but skills themself.
Stuff like chill enemy with a forst spell->freeze enemys with a frost skill-> use a physical spell to shatter them or a fire skill to shatter them or a lighning spell to charge them up and dmg them big time when they unfreeze. There is so much that can be done and we got attack faster, take less dmg, more aoe and so on and so forth. Again when you look at it itā€™s blunt and math and nothing else.

I like LE but if you look at it relasticly itā€™s not that much after all. I donā€™t want to make the devs bad in any way because they deliver a good product so far when I compare it to other ARPGs but after all itā€™s just another standart ARPG. So yeah Iā€™d love to see more interactions Iā€™d love to see a combat system not revolving arround having XYZ kind of defences and HP to not get oneshot and move out of voids and facetank the rest of the time. Most likely this wonā€™t happen unless you like a perma CC simulator like Lost Ark where itā€™s simply overdone.

Some more beneficial interactions between skills would be nice or system that link skills to each other with a different skill node layout to link reave and vengence for example to get the skill ā€œReaving Vengenceā€ and both skills add up to a certain degree and where you made the connection between the nodes. Like a link to one node of the other tree and the nodes arround it that interact with the skill you linked from. Would be bonkers but fun and kind of interactive.

So many possiblitys and so much as well as understandably wasted potential just to create another while very good standart arpg. Iā€™m okay with the game and will grind it every now and then but does it fix my urge for something new? Nah not rly.

Iā€™m pretty sure Blizzard came up with Fury (for Warriors) so the player can mix it up in combat to play optimally. This is both in D3 and in WoW. I theorize this is how they solved the problem that boardman is talking about, at least for their Warrior class, a class that has to hit up close.

But notice nobody likes Fury. Similarly I just started playing WoW and noticed I sure do tap a lot of different buttons to kill a guy but it may as well be one button as the pattern never changes.

Maybe concentrating on utility skills instead of just more dmg skills is the way to go? I whirlrended my way through D3 and did the same thing in POE. I had a good time even though I was essentially doing one thing for 300+ hours.

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Speaking of WoW: I really liked the Rogue combo system where you have attacks that stack combo points and have different finishers that increase in effectiveness with combo points consumed. AWESOME! I am sure this would work in an ARPG pretty well, too.

I have to admit I also thought about something like fury or rage system. Charge your big nukes with fast skills. I can see this working.

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I really like that idea.

I think of D2 assassin?

Rightā€¦ she had similar mechanics. Forgot about it because the only assault I ever played was lightning trap :grin:

I like these type of games to be based around 1 main attack skill with supporting skills for buffs/utility. I think the combat interactiveness is more than enough already, in fact if anything Iā€™d like like to be able to kill monsters more easily. They could definitely do with increasing the game speed a little as fights are too long currently. We need more flashy AOE skill spam, PoE is the most popular game in this genre for a reason.

2 Likes

I havenā€™t read through everyoneā€™s comments so this has probably been mentioned already but using one core damage skill is almost necessitated by the limit of only 5 skills at a time (Iā€™m of the opinion that when stances get reworked they should have their own 6th stance only skill slot but I wonā€™t get into that here).

I would much prefer that most damage skills were equally usable but for differing reasons and builds were built around one core damage skill like they are now but with the hope of all damage skills having their own specialty.

I guess the real question is, if all damage skills could be used together to take advantage of all of their unique buffs would that increase or decrease the build diversity?
IMO it would decrease as everyone would just use the most effective combination but technically that is already somewhat true for the current system so who knows.

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Personally I think the skilled players complaining about the game being too easy should be playing on Masochist difficulty and stop trying to make normal difficulty characters weaker but I suppose they wouldnā€™t be happy until regular Softcore is turned into Masochist difficulty.

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I havent read every forum, but i havent seen to much ā€œthis game is to easyā€ recently, there are so old post before some of the more recent patches, but most the ā€œcomplainingā€ i see is when something is overtuned mechanically wise. I think the campaign difficulty is in a good spot.

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I mostly agree with your main post itā€™s the first half of.

That Iā€™m mostly referencing, I agree that the difference in Mob and Rare health can be too extreme but if you want tougher trash mobs wouldnā€™t a difficulty where everything has more health and having the Rares health being reduced across the board solve the issue.

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Itā€™s not about difficulty. Itā€™s about balance. Playing on harder difficulty doesnā€™t fix the gap between white and yellow mobs.

What happens to a lot of builds is that they are super strong against huge armies of trash mobs. If you for example as a Sentinel fight big packs of thrashmobs you are super safe. They will trigger so many on hit and block effects that you just canā€™t die. And you just smash them out of existence with your damage skills. Then on a boss mob itā€™s like you changed your weapon into a wet noodle. You donā€™t do enough damage to feel as mighty as before. On top of it your proc effects are gone leaving you even weaker than before.

This is a core issue of LE imho. Thereā€™s so few single target skills that you could put into your loadout for that bossfight situation.

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To be fair, I think most of the long new player feedback threads say that the early story is too easy and some say they hit a bit of a wall in chapters 7 and 8.

Another solution could be very high resistances on mobs on high levels so you need multiple skills with different damage types. I think D2 did this very well.

Agree with most things. Lot of skills are built to be self sufficient like manastrike.

But that really depend of skills & passives. mage/sorcerer have a passive that give a big boost to spells all 3 sec (really need UI feedback!) or bonus when you rotate ice/fire/lightning spells. You can have cold spell that have bonus on chilled/freezed enemies and spell/effects that are great to proc those.
Problem is the really short buff duration like said and the fact you have duration everywhere! (buff, debuff, passives that give a bonus all x secondsā€¦)

Why not replace some buff duration with more engaging mechanic, like the buff apply to your next ability (or x abilities) ? That would encourage skill rotation over spamming 1 skill. Or create a sigil on ground (or banner etcā€¦) encouraging smart positioning. Or something like you get a buff while near your magma org, so you have to move and follow it.

But last epoch have a big draw back with the limited 5 skills : that donā€™t give much room to skill diversity/combos. I loved playing rogue in Wow or Rift and it was because you have to use lot of skills, something like 3-4 opener, 2-3 main skills and 3-4 finisher, that gave you lot of freedom with the combos.

D3 get a great combat gameplay, with good skill feedback, synergy (generator/spender), combos and a bullet hell gameplay where you have to actively dodge enemy projectilesā€¦ ruined by always online lag (and no character build & bad itemization).

Asian MMO/ARPG & Moba are based to skill rotation too, where you need to use the right skill (or combo) at the right moment.

Itā€™s often based on a more rock/paper/scissors approach. Instead of bluid up a skill to bypass armor, you have to use a combo, like your skill bypass armor if you attack a stunned/slowed enemy (have to use another skill to proc that) or shatter a frozen enemy. A different combo for every situation.

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