WOLCEN - Lords of Mayhem

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FCK42 wrote:

And that one fire elementalist mechaninc on the skill tree is pretty awful at the moment... the fire nova it triggers either deals no damage at all or pretty much oneshots you unless you are full tank.

A few patches ago, there was a skill in the Warden tree that would heal 15% of your HP when you used a dodge/roll. I think it still exists, but it's been nerfed to where it's not even worth grabbing anymore. But when I had a fire mage a few patches ago, I would use that dodge/roll heal to top off my HP, and keep that mechanic from killing me.

There used to be no reason to not spec fire if you were a mage, and in the current version of the game, now lightning is the go-to element. I think it's more of a lack of them having viable elemental damage attacks for the other elements than anything else. Fireball is not as good as Thunderbolt is. Rain of Fire is pretty shitty now, and it used to be really good. There used to be a "multiple fireballs" spell in an earlier patch that did a combo of different amounts of fireballs and in different directions the longer you held the button, and the last one did like a nova of fireballs for an AOE. They got some interesting ideas for spells/skills, they just need to update and refine them a bit.

There is a way to make umbra damage inflict shock/burn/freeze via damage conversions on the skill tree. On top of Umbra's debuff which lowers resists. That's why I use an umbra element staff even on my lightning mage.

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probably not worth playing fallout at all

thats not a bad idea at all, especially if youre a big fan of the first two

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Bleu42 wrote:

Not a fan of the umbra to rage mechanic at all. Diablo 3 'failed'(read: sold tons but severely fell off) because they decided to look at D2, and do everything the opposite. One of those decisions was taking the Attack-with-a-skill / Run-out-of-mana-drink-a-pot action, and replace it with a ridiculous Spender-Spender-Generator type of rhythm. In D3, it's super not fun to have to attack with a generator that quite literally does .001% of your spenders damage, then use your spender. In Wolcen, it's not fun to attack with the skill you WANT to use, then have to use another one to dump this secondary resource you've accumulated, while also generating back your first resource.

I feel the opposite- the spender/generator mechanic was fairly fresh when d3 attempted it. too bad they killed it at its infancy, not allowing it to flesh out.

resource management is a such overlooked part in arpgs because I dont really want to spam one skill all the time.

it beats the shit the way problems are solved in poe - removing the problem (ie, mana sustain) from the equation completely and forgetting about them

I'll agree the rage/umbra seesaw game takes some getting used to but it's interesting to see which skills the team have decided spend which resource. It's a limiter but in a good, 'figure it out' way rather than a 'blocking lots of cool builds' way.

I like the fact that there's not only spells with umbra cost, but also rage generators, which function differently.

I tested some stuff today and the results were... weird.
Dual two-handed is fun, high damage spikes, but rather inconsistent in damage overall.
Pistols are for some reason able to generate rage from multishots as long as you hit stuff which allows for an infinite multishot combo. However, pistol projectiles can't riccochet. Also, despite their attack speed being labled as "fastest", it seems almost the same as crossbows. In addition, even when dual wielding, it displays the one-handed combo, though this seems to only be a wrong description.
Speaking of dual wielding... dual wielding staves is not implemented yet, but you can use them with other weapons, which disables your combo. Same happens if you dual wield crossbows, which also completely breaks multishot, causing you to get stuck in the animation indefinitely.
And for some reason that seismic slam? something like that, don't know all the names yet... works with ranged weapons. Which gives you no real benefit anyways, so it doesn't really matter.

Tested the damages of 5 or so different setups again and crossbows are currently taking the top spot when it comes to consistency and dps, followed by dual daggers. I still need to test shield with basically anything, but thanks to the dodgeroll I don't really see a point in shields at the moment... maybe for a tanky caster with shield and staff...

By the way... what's the point of being able to rotate the center of the skill tree?

PS: I think I should write most of this stuff in the wolcen forum... most of it being bugs I encountered or balancing inequalities...

I wouldn't go down that rabbit hole. Bad enough that we got suckered into interacting with PoE players on here.

Oh, and regarding your earlier point: dual daggers still owns, yes.

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The_Scourge wrote:

Oh, and regarding your earlier point: dual daggers still owns, yes.

Thing is, dual daggers are all fine and such, but even those get outclassed by crossbows. Instead of heavy strike for single target you just use multishot with higher damage and reduced spread and you get even higher total damage due to shotgunning. And 5k crits agains regular monsters are just retarded. Even worse, due to crossbows being agility based, you can get 100% crit chance fairly easily. It's just... WAY beyond simply being "good".

Crossbows also need balancing, yes.

I was doing like 15k+ damage with spread shot, and all I needed was a rare bow I bought from the shop + some misc gear I found, and slotted gems in it.

Duel daggers can do 30-40k damage with brutal strike. What I did with my duel daggers character was used sequencing so I could chain dash attacks, and clear packs. then use brutal strike for anything the dash attack couldn't OHKO.

I'm talking about with some combo of shop gear + rags and gems you found laying on the ground, and proper routes on the skill rings.

Even though mages do considerably less damage per hit, it's possible to do 30-40k damage with a single cast of thunderbolt after all the ticks + shocks land. I know this because my quickest kill vs Groznar is with my thunderbolt mage, not DW melee, or crossbow.

are there actually spells that use rage or attacks that use umbra? Or you have to alternate between the 2 types of skills?

I only played it once through recently and I did a fire caster thing, was looking for some kind of rage spender fire spell and couldnt see anything.