Steelskin and the Guard Skills

To micro manage this is not appealing to me (sorry)

As long as we do not loose the intrinsic value of using CWDT with any of these I am fine with whatever is going on.

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Do you think reactive gameplay fits the monotonous and repetitive nature of the game that revolves around repeating the same action for hours in order to grind for XP and drops? I mean, penalizing the player for getting distracted for a second or two seems too much. Specially regarding XP lost, or worse, a whole HC character lost

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Yes, this was the intent of the game.

Loot tension, difficult monsters, death around every and any corner.

Listen to the early recordings & videos of chris talking about the game.

-juo

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I get your point, and yes, it sounds much healthier for the game dynamics in general. But having so much clear speed right now, and requiring to invest so much time to really success at the endgame, it feels like something is very flawed in the game itself.
Let's hope this is a change in the correct direction.

100% agree -

I think with the inevitable power creep of a game with 20+ updates and 5 years under it's belt, a commensurate increase in the power and difficulty of the monsters would have been a smart way to slow the flow of the slippery slope.

That opportunity is now lost.

Most of the complaints and negative comments on these forums and Reddit are born out of something being taken away.

Therefore, the devs can no longer take away speed, or risk Exile anger and mutiny.

That said, since they have never shied away from scary monsters, ridiculous encounters or the specter of imminent death, danger is the only card they have left.

-juo

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DAKKONx wrote:

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Riftshadow wrote:

I'm not really concerned about it not being 100% reduction anymore. I'm more concerned about the meaning of "These skills are all Instant and share a cooldown which won't expire while any of the skills are active"

Let's imagine it has a 4sec cooldown. Does it mean that we will have to wait that time AFTER the skill duration finishes? Or does it mean that you won't be able to cast it again (or other guard skills) until the existing effect finishes?

The first case would be a HUGE nerf. In the second one there is still hope depending on how much you could scale the duration.

The way I read it is that the cooldown would only start AFTER the skill effect has finished. So it is not possible to chain / perma any of the guard skills. In addition to it seems like we can only have 1 up each time as they share the same cooldown.

I just checked baeclast video again and you can clearly see how molten shell is completely disabled while it's active, and the cooldown starts once it finishes. The cooldown seems to be 4seconds, so you will be able to mitigate a couple of hits every 5-6 seconds. The nerf is bigger than what I thought

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Riftshadow wrote:

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DAKKONx wrote:

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Riftshadow wrote:

I'm not really concerned about it not being 100% reduction anymore. I'm more concerned about the meaning of "These skills are all Instant and share a cooldown which won't expire while any of the skills are active"

Let's imagine it has a 4sec cooldown. Does it mean that we will have to wait that time AFTER the skill duration finishes? Or does it mean that you won't be able to cast it again (or other guard skills) until the existing effect finishes?

The first case would be a HUGE nerf. In the second one there is still hope depending on how much you could scale the duration.

The way I read it is that the cooldown would only start AFTER the skill effect has finished. So it is not possible to chain / perma any of the guard skills. In addition to it seems like we can only have 1 up each time as they share the same cooldown.

I just checked baeclast video again and you can clearly see how molten shell is completely disabled while it's active, and the cooldown starts once it finishes. The cooldown seems to be 4seconds, so you will be able to mitigate a couple of hits every 5-6 seconds. The nerf is bigger than what I thought

Just watched the video. Molten shell has a 3 second uptime and 4 second cooldown that occurs after the spell has expired.

Molten Shell
Base Skill = 3 seconds
With Increased Duration = 4.95 seconds uptime
Assume 30% cooldown reduction gear = 3.08 seconds cooldown
Total uptime = 61.6% or 55.3% without cooldown reduction gear

Steelskin has a lower uptime based on the dev post compared to Molten shell. Immortal call with 5 endurance charges is 3.6 seconds which would be approximately 55% uptime. Increased duration would have less effect here but the base cooldown is shorter.

Immortal Call
Base Skill = 0.4 seconds
With 5 Endurance Charge + Increased Duration = 3.86 seconds uptime
Assume 30% cooldown reduction gear = 2.3 seconds cooldown
Total uptime = 62.6% or 56.3% without cooldown reduction gear

Guard skills hence would be situational and no longer perma based on the video. Uptime is above 50% which is not too bad. Overall abit mixed about it but it does encourage proper timing of skills now.

I think the key issue with the change of IC in favor of more reactive gameplay is that the endgame really isn't supportive of reactive gameplay. Many of player deaths are extremely difficult to be anticipated, either from on death effects or offscreen projectiles.

They added better telegraphs to early story act bosses, okay...but that's only a small part of the game. I actually agree for the change to happen to be more reactive but the gameplay has to support that. I think they shouldn't change this YET until they finally made adjustment for enemy telegraph for most endgame encounters and league content enemies like syndicates, to actually allow player chance to manually time their defensive manoeuvre.

Oh and screen clutter, especially in group play. How in the world do you expect player to react when skill effects and mtx are blocking everything you see??? They didn't think this through enough.

So in my opinion, this change happen a little too soon, as I don't believe it's fair to expect players to react to incoming damage when the game currently isn't designed around quick reaction but more about stacking more eHP with passive defensive layers, some sustain mechanics like regen, and as much as damage as possible to kill enemies before they have a chance to hurt us.

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Universalis wrote:

To micro manage this is not appealing to me (sorry)

Agreed.

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NexiieQT wrote:

I think the key issue with the change of IC in favor of more reactive gameplay is that the endgame really isn't supportive of reactive gameplay.

Even if it was, why is this kind of reactive gameplay desirable? Don't we already have this kind of reactive gameplay in defensive flasks? Why not just delete IC?

Edit: Is this even reactive actually? It's preemptive. So, the claim that it rewards "responsive play" is a little misleading.

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awoak wrote:

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Universalis wrote:

To micro manage this is not appealing to me (sorry)

Agreed.

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NexiieQT wrote:

I think the key issue with the change of IC in favor of more reactive gameplay is that the endgame really isn't supportive of reactive gameplay.

Even if it was, why is this kind of reactive gameplay desirable? Don't we already have this kind of reactive gameplay in defensive flasks? Why not just delete IC?

To increase the skill ceiling and risk vs reward. If you've played other ARPG or action games like Dark Souls or Kingdom Hearts, the developers like to allow players to time their block/parry, which leads to a much reduced damage taken and even give players chance to retaliate.

The problem is right now, those games actually properly support this mechanic, but PoE like other isometric ARPG don't.

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NexiieQT wrote:

To increase the skill ceiling and risk vs reward. If you've played other ARPG or action games like Dark Souls or Kingdom Hearts, the developers like to allow players to time their block/parry, which leads to a much reduced damage taken and even give players chance to retaliate.

The problem is right now, those games actually properly support this mechanic, but PoE like other isometric ARPG don't.

Just because they're both technically ARPGs doesn't mean PoE should mimic its gameplay elements. I actually think that's a huge mistake if that's the intention. Souls games' mobs and encounters are all deliberately designed with those mechanics in mind. Trying to force a reactive mechanic into a game that has always been based on grinding large, procedurally generated packs of mobs just sounds ridiculous (and more and more so, the more I think about it).

Truthfully, I don't play PoE to feel rewarded for being "good at the game". I play it to watch my *character's power* grow, as I grind levels/loot and watch my build become reality. There's obviously a full spectrum of opinions on this, but on a scale of watching-a-bot-farm to naked-soul-level-1-challange, I'm definitely a lot closer to watching-a-bot-farm when it comes to PoE.

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awoak wrote:

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NexiieQT wrote:

To increase the skill ceiling and risk vs reward. If you've played other ARPG or action games like Dark Souls or Kingdom Hearts, the developers like to allow players to time their block/parry, which leads to a much reduced damage taken and even give players chance to retaliate.

The problem is right now, those games actually properly support this mechanic, but PoE like other isometric ARPG don't.

Just because they're both technically ARPGs doesn't mean PoE should mimic its gameplay elements. I actually think that's a huge mistake if that's the intention. Souls games' mobs and encounters are all deliberately designed with those mechanics in mind. Trying to force a reactive mechanic into a game that has always been based on grinding large, procedurally generated packs of mobs just sounds ridiculous (and more and more so, the more I think about it).

Truthfully, I don't play PoE to feel rewarded for being "good at the game". I play it to watch my *character's power* grow, as I grind levels/loot and watch my build become reality. There's obviously a full spectrum of opinions on this, but on a scale of watching-a-bot-farm to naked-soul-level-1-challange, I'm definitely a lot closer to watching-a-bot-farm when it comes to PoE.

Agree that the ARPG genre of games is not entirely well suited to mimic high skilled playstyles that Dark Souls require.

GGG is trying to change some of that here to benefit melee playstyles by having more telegraphic movements from mobs to allow us to either dodge OR cast one of the new guard skill cooldowns. This is not viable for the normal map grind where we take on 5000+ mobs and have infinite flasks but more for the 1v1 boss encounters where careful application of cooldowns and sighting telegraphic movements is easier to spot given the lack of a gazillion MTX buzzing around. This however is applicable to only very skilled gamers like Alkaizer where you need good understanding of boss mechanics and incredible reflexes to dodge damage. Most players as mentioned here want to see "character power" which appeals to the genre of ARPG players.