Are we going to get a balance pass on channeled skills?

Grim Dawn Public Test Discussion
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In the recent Livestream, I think I remember Zantai saying something along the lines of: they pay attention to what the community seems to care about at any given time. So I just want to make it known that I have been eagerly awaiting any patch notes indicating a look at AAR, FoI, and Drain Essence (which weirdly doesn’t even have an acronym in my mind).

Consensus in the discords I haunt seems to be that these are all at best mid-tier skills and you can’t build a really good build around them these days — largely due to problems of “clunkiness” rather than necessarily damage numbers.

These are my favorite skills in Grim Dawn, but I can’t say I disagree with that assessment. With a new channeled skill coming in FoA that may fix some of the clunk with the existing ones (mostly by being 360°), I am hoping these old friends will also get some love and attention sometime in the near future. That is all.

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DE

*while it would not fix the “elite builder clunkiness”, i think one thing/a thing that could make beams bit more fun to play is the old Ceno exploit proper made vanilla/official: allow us to walk while beaming

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I don’t imagine that’s very likely, Gnomish. :smiley:

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+1 from me, levelling chaos FoI right now and while damage is good it doesn’t “feel” that good to play. Unwieldy is the best word that comes to mind.

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Chaos FoI is especially bad. I recently leveled a fire FoI paladin to have a better basis for comparison, and having Aura of Censure + Guardians of Empyrion makes a huge difference. Gives you untargeted AoE for common enemies and all your resist reduction is passive. You don’t have to interrupt channeling all the time for Word of Pain and maybe Solael component.

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I don’t know, if it’s possible to implement due to engine limitations, but one way I see to fix the clunkiness you’re talking about would be to allow casting some specific skills without interrupting the channeling.

Being able to reapply debuffs/rr without stoping to deal damage would already elevate those skills quite a bit, but what would add even more spice is allowing to cast movement skills.

I already imagine some unhinged shenanigans like a tactician with a phys FoI and some CDR gear for blitz. Would be absolutely unoptimized, but becoming a zooming flamethrower is sure worth it

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Isn’t that already the case for some skills? :thinking: I thought it was.

Just double checked. You can keep casting Drain Essence while renewing Blood of Dreeg for example, but not Curse of Frailty. But I don’t know how much it will help, the interruption is already quite short and you can just keep your DE button pressed to instantly continue.

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The cast animation for Word of Pain is long enough that I really notice it when channeling FoI. Like, watching the boss health bar drop, then it just — pauses.

If I don’t refresh WoP at the precise right instant, it’s definitely a DPS loss.

This is one of the things that makes it feel real clunky. I can get very nice chaos FoI dps — when I am directly channeling on somebody. But if I have to stop for any reason, such as to renew a key debuff or reposition, it drops to 0. If the damage while channeling is good enough, that doesn’t feel too bad. But even the damage while channeling doesn’t surpass the best, much more mobile melee builds.

Fire FoI again has an advantage here, because of the DoT component. I think chaos FoI might be the most clunky.

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And also I don’t know if by design or what but the pitiful range on FoI makes it a massive pita imo. And chaos especially, cause Deciever, a natural class synergy, has no extra movement so it’s always just out of range a bit more than other options.

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Thank you! I coudn’t really remember if BoD, WoR and PB are interrupting the cast and couldn’t check it at the moment. I’d assume if one of them doesn’t, the others work the same way.

Though, I’d still prefer a wider variety of skills to act like this, movement skills and debuff/rr appliers specifically.

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I don’t play channeled builds for the sole reason of not being able to bind them to left click. I’d like to see channeled abilities behave like ranged attacks and move you into range of the target. Even without this, I’d still bind it to left click and move by using the force move hotkey. I’d rather deal with that than have the channel on any other button.

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I wish we had the ability to bind any spell, channelling or otherwise, to the LMB and not just the RMB. :sob:

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We do. GDautocaster.

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This would be nice.

I don’t mind it too much being on another button, though I can definitely understand you want your main attack on lmb. It always seemed weird to me that you can have stuff like doom bolt on it (why would you want that?) but not the obvious base attacks like these channeling skills.

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guess we can file it under wishful dream or dreamful wish then :sweat_smile:

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One possible approach for supported skills could be the following: when a skill is used, it triggers a skill enhancement that, for the player, is displayed as a stacking buff reaching a value of X. When we stop applying the skill, the buff does not disappear but begins to decrease at a certain rate, forcing the player to quickly find the next group to destroy. Additionally, items could be introduced that affect both the speed at which the maximum buff value is obtained and the rate at which it decreases. Plus, this buff could be removed by enemies that strip other buffs, making the gameplay a bit more dynamic.

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You will need to be more specific if you expect there to be a “balance pass”.

The definition by some members of the community on what constitutes good is a rather skewed metric, especially when dealing with channeled AoE skills that limit your mobility. For example, I would not expect AAR to kill a superboss as fast as a single-target focused melee build, but by some metrics, that apparently makes AAR a bad skill.

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Pepperidge Farm remembers when AAR was a single target skill. :older_man:

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Alright, let me try to be more specific.

What prompted this post was watching PRM get buffed to the point where we’re seeing sub-4:00 SR & Crucible clears with it. With channeled skills, I have an endgame fire FoI paladin and an endgame aether AAR spellbinbder, but I have by far the most experience with my chaos FoI Deceiver, which I’ve offered some thoughts about elsewhere in the past: on energy regen woes, and Tainted Flame conversion. It’s probably fair to consider my feedback as focused on FoI, and specifically chaos FoI.

I cannot achieve sub 6:00-min SR 75-76, myself, with that build. Now, I’m not the best player in the world, so that could be the relevant difference. But I did get @mad_lee to play it once, and he offered this take:

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I think he’s a little bit ungenerous on the tankiness part, personally, but it is a weakness (no circuit-breakers except diamond component is a big issue). The damage is quite good, though, IMO. It’s not the absolute best build I’ve ever played for damage, but it’s very good. I think I did a good job of min/maxing to achieve that (at the cost of energy regen, AoE, and tankiness, of course).

So what makes the build clunky? Here’s what I think after running it through SR hundreds of times:

  1. When not channeling directly on an enemy, your damage output is indistinguishable from 0.
  2. Word of Pain (for resist reduction) and Symbol of Solael casting animations interrupt channeling for a noticeable amount of time.
  3. FoI’s range is short, meaning you spend a lot of time running slowly up to mobs that are out of reach to burn them down.
  4. FoI’s AoE cone isn’t that big, and enemies run around you, meaning a lot of times what’s sort of an AoE skill ends up feeling and playing like a single-target skill. This is especially noticeable when you’ve got like two hero mobs on you, right next to each other, and you just can’t get them in the cone at the same time. Being a cone, naturally, it’s narrowest adjacent to your character – which is also a place your enemies tend to like to be!
  5. Reliance on Inq seal and channeling for both damage and sustain makes you really, really reluctant to move/reposition, which is not a nice quality for a build to have – specially when your main damage skill at least in theory works best when you can “line up” multiple enemies. And you have to reposition sometimes to avoid dying, which means a big DPS loss (see point #1 above).

I try to mitigate #3 by taking Hydra constellation on my build, but it only helps so much, isn’t an option for many FoI builds, and makes the devo map extremely rigid (that’s why I can’t pick up any regen or tank devotions).

So our gameplay is: you walk up to a group, start channeling, get a tick or two in, notice that the ranged guy is just out of range. So you stop channeling, reposition, start channeling again, wait for stuff to die, then pivot to the mobs that ran around you, possibly repositioning to try to get multiple at once, or just slowly burning them up one by one. Or you can spend time trying to get the perfect positioning for maximum AoE, doing 0 damage and not leeching life until you find the perfect spot.

It’s just a lot clunkier than shadow strike, target the toughest guy still standing, reposition as needed without stopping your attack, and watch WPS delete everything else around them, rinse and repeat.

1 & 2 are not as bad on Fire FoI, because it at least has a decent DoT component that can keep doing some damage, not to mention Aura of Censure, and your resist reduction (at least on a paladin) is passively applied. But overall it tends to feel similar.

So in the end what you sort of think should be a good AoE build ends up feeling very single-target. Especially when you consider that the “single-target” melee builds you might compare to have WPS that hit multiple targets, often in a full circle around you, and seem to manage to delete common mobs just fine without ever explicitly targeting them. But as you say, it also doesn’t get to have top-tier single target damage, either. And has some of the worst mobility of any build – it’s a very committed playstyle, which also makes you want to invest more in tank and sustain and less in damage. (Compare my build to Voidsoul version, for example – the latter is tankier, but I find its damage to be low enough that the clunk makes it unfun.)

To conclude, this maybe came off as more of a negative rant than intended. I actually like my chaos FoI build! Some of the issues here are inherent in the design of FoI, and I enjoy FoI! So I’m not asking for a fundamental redesign of the skill or anything. But it would be nice if it were easier to mitigate some of the points above. Or in my opinion it actually wouldn’t be bad if a well-built FoI build that min/maxes for damage had similar single-target damage to a strong melee build. After all, it plays a lot like melee, due to point #4 and the very committed, stand-your-ground playstyle.

Edited to add: if you want a gameplay video to scrutinize my claims, here’s one:

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I think I was mostly comparing it to elite builds and in general tank was okay if we compare it to all of the existing (synergetic) builds. If I recall correctly tank problems were caused by sustain problems. You are right, with short range and cone and necessary but interrupting casts you are just ending up without sustain for short periods of times.

And of course the problem of those channeling spells (and ranged aa builds) comes to erratic monster behaviour - you are always getting flanked and surrounded.

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