Albrecht’s Aether Ray - Analysis and fixes
I’ve been playing this game since before Arcanist was a playable class. Back then, some of the first teasers we saw included the Aether Ray, a visually distinct and conceptually awesome skill that has well-liked colleagues in other games of the genre, like Diablo 3.
However, when you take the time to actually build a character to use Albrecht’s Aether Ray (AAR), you quickly learn that the skill feels a lot less great to use than it initially looks. The goal of this post and thread is to try to pin down what works and what doesn’t about the skill and to talk about ways of fixing these things without creating an imbalance. So with that in mind, let’s start by going through the up- and downsides of AAR:
Aspects of AAR that don’t need work:
- Primary target DPS
- Synergies with other builds/classes
- Synergy within Arcanist
- Equipment availability
- Endgame scaling
Aspects of AAR that do need work:
- Sluggish feeling
- Secondary target DPS/trash clearing
- Energy cost
I’ll start by quickly going through the first list, to explain what I mean by each point:
- [li]Primary target DPS[/li] This one is fairly straight-forward. AAR has a bunch of problems, but the damage on your main target isn’t one of them.
[li]Synergies with other builds/classes[/li] A quick peak on the forums will show you that people have all sorts of ideas about AAR builds. Generally, most people will end up running Demolitionist or Occultist, as they offer the most relevant support-skills if your primary damage is Aether. There is a lack of Aether damage skills/buffs outside of Arcanist that could pose a problem, but this is somewhat remedied by AAR also doing Fire damage and by there being conversion options available to and from Chaos damage (Clairvoyant/Albrecht’s ring legendaries and Tainted Power, respectively), allowing you to combo with other classes reasonably well.
[li]Synergy within Arcanist[/li]There’s so many things in Arcanist that work well with AAR that I won’t even go into detail here. Devastation and Reckless Power are obvious examples.
[li]Equipment availability[/li]Iskandra’s is a solid AAR set if you go the pure-Aether Route and Clairvoyant/Albrecht Rings cover the hybrid area, whereas the next patch will introduce a legendary set for pure Chaos AAR builds. There’s lots of non-set items available too, like Aetherreach, Agrivix’ Malice, etc. All good here. I have previously complained about the Clairvoyant set being badly designed, but the new set coming fills the void that I feel like Clairvoyant should have covered, so all good on that end.
[li]Endgame scaling[/li]Every single caster build has endgame scaling issues relative to Blademasters and other auto-attackers running BiS gear, but AAR builds don’t suffer worse from this than the rest, and are perhaps even slightly better off than some.
The reason why I go into detail about these things in a fix-suggestion thread is that I feel like, ideally, any fix introduced should try to avoid also providing powerful buffs in these areas, to avoid creating new (player-positive) imbalances to fix old (player-negative) ones.
So let’s dive into the issues:
Issue: Sluggish feeling
Let’s be honest here. Using AAR feels like crap. It’s slow and cumbersome and in many situations you end up taking A LOT of extra damage from mobs compared to other spammable spells like Panetti’s Replicating Missile or Dreeg’s Evil Eye. It’s a general issue with laser-spells, that the feeling of “being rooted” and being unable to stutter-step while throwing out missiles can cause you to feel terrible about an otherwise great skill. Anyone who’s played Wizard in Diablo 3 will have experienced it there as well.
Fix: Speed up the ray
This is quite an easy fix, honestly. Making the ray feel better will require two changes:
- Greatly reduce the initial cast time before the beam appears, to allow for more stutter-stepping, quick movement and generally allowing players to actually “play well” and dodge missiles, etc.
- Greatly increase the turn-speed of the ray, ideally making it instantly follow the curser. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a ton of health from shooting at an approaching pack coming from the front, while some lone guy charges from the side. Having to switch to him and back again is an giant DPS drop with the way the ray works now.
These two fixes would make the ray feel a lot better without actually making it very much stronger, which for game devs, should be an ideal solution. Increasing player enjoyment without introducing balance issues? Great!
These fixes also have the added benefit of requiring and even encouraging increased player-skill in taking full advantage of them. Surely ranged-damage characters dodging missiles inbetween their own barrages is intended and desired gameplay on the end of Crate.
Issue: Secondary target DPS/trash clearing
To me, this is an issue not because of the ray itself but because of its synergies. It is basically impossible to do an AAR build where the ray is not your main, spammable attack for clearing out trash. Whether you run Demolitionist, Occultist or Arcanist skills as your secondary damage skills, these all have cooldowns that prevent them from being great trash-clearers. Devastation, for instance, is ironically better as a single-target damage skill, despite covering a solid area, because of its long cooldown.
You could fix this issue by improving secondary skills, but I feel like part of the charm of an AAR build is that AAR becomes your primary skill and main tool.
Fix: Give AAR a second skill modifier
This is a slightly more complicated fix, but one that I think would work well and would end up opening up more potential build paths.
Basically, give AAR a second skill modifier (but still keeping Tainted Power), that reduces it’s total damage by some significant but not overly destructive percentage – perhaps a 30-50% reduction would work – and then in return the width of the beam is increased by maybe 100-200% and it fully passes through mobs. There is some tuning to be done for the exact numbers there, but the general concept is straight forward. By keeping Tainted Power around as well, AAR would functionally end up having four different “settings” available: Single target Aether, Single target Chaos, multi-target Aether, multi-target Chaos.
Issue: The AAR energy cost is too high
The big reason why the energy cost is an issue is that what makes AAR do decent damage as a spell is all the +skill gear available to players for this specific skill. The default state of AAR is 22/16 or higher because of the great gear designed for it. However, the energy cost, especially once you go into ultimate levels on both AAR and Disintegration, which is unavoidable and highly necessary,
Right now, you have massive energy issues even if you lean heavily towards increased energy regeneration and reduced skill cost items, augments and components. Stuff like Aether Soul (http://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/2415-Aether-Soul) is functionally unusable because you need to run energy regeneration in the form of Ectoplasms or Arcane Sparks etc. to even be able to slightly keep up with the exorbitant mana costs of AAR.
I don’t mind that AAR requires you to itemize specifically for energy regen to a degree, but when you max IEE and Mental Alacrity and run energy regeneration components and augments in every slot and STILL constantly run out of energy, it’s too much.
This issue is amplified by the fact that endgame encounters increasingly feature large waves of mobs with multiple bosses, respawning waves and big HP-sponges in the form of Nemesis bosses. This is a natural result of players seeking out current endgame options: the Roguelikes, Nemesis bosses and Gladiator 100+ Crucible waves. In all of these, you have to be able to nearly constantly do your full damage to keep up with other classes/builds and with the amount of mobs.
Fix: Decrease the energy cost on AAR
Personally, I feel like a good balance point would be that 26/16 AAR with 22/12 Disintegration should cost the same energy per second that 16/16+12/12 does right now, especially as 26/16+22/12 is basically the default setup for any level 75+ AAR build. That would require you to compensate somewhat for the energy cost but also make it so that if you did compensate, you wouldn’t still be running out of energy all the time.
) Imma leave my thoughts here. Now not having played other classes and thus not having tried out other devotion/skill combos, my perspective might be somewhat lacking and thats a reality. But here I go…