It’s late in this PT and probably more of an xpac thing, but channeling and most AA ranged I think suffer the most from mob AI quickly moving to surround you. If your skill is a narrow radius in front of you, unless you have omega damage (which most of these skills don’t be design due to the AoE vs single target Z talks about), you just have a frustrating time right now. PRM, as the recent buff example, shits out projectiles everywhere in the event you get surrounded, and with enough damage and coverage now that most of those mobs don’t get the chance to circle up in the first place. Majority of passthrough ranged and the AARs/FOIs of the world don’t have the extreme damage or branching AoE to do that.
We’ve gotten stuff like move speed recently, which is fun, but the mobs with AI to go check out your butt seem to react almost immediately to player movement and will reposition. Outplaying it, even with more speed, requires constant big movement or a wall to hug against. Having that much wider around the player attack radius (melee AA, CT, builds that can afford something like big WoP investment) is just hugely important right now for feeling at the same level in endgame. For the skills without it, even trying to say, build tank for full boss room pulls in SR, is pretty pointless when half the potential spawns are going to resist all your efforts to get them to line up nicely in front of you.
All of this is ofc through the lens of trying to play fast at end game. Although even without fast, it does mean those skills have to build more tank cause more things are going to be tickling you before you can aim your 30 degree radius around the entire screen.
I have to agree with the point about enemy move speed. I’ve been playing a bit of FoI yesterday and today and it’s hard to even line up two of anything for the skill. Almost every enemy (there’s a few exceptions that are extremely slow by design like ugdenbog golems) has the speed to surround you and does so all the time, without fault. All forms of passthrough are pretty much useless because of this, beyond the initial pull.
About the mobs being so locked on our precious character soft parts.
How about adding a small stacking (radius and damage-wise) AoE with the same damage type as the skill around the caster while channeling? It won’t affect the general performance (and thus would not interfere with any damage balancing that might or might not happen in the future patches) of channeled skills, but surely would make the life of builds using them.
Just wanted to add one more thought. When people have looked at my chaos FoI build, they often suggest ways to get more AoE damage at the cost of single-target. For example, swapping the FoI conduit for WoP version.
It’s not a bad suggestion, even though IMO it doesn’t help enough to be worth the trade.
But if the design principle is “FoI can’t have better damage because it’s an AoE spell”, isn’t it messed up that a problem builders working with FoI have to solve is insufficient AoE damage?
i legit always feel like that’s a skewed issue,
and it’s skewed by the perception (some) players have because the way other skills approach AoE, and likewise see many mentions in the thread that dont’ resonate with me the same
Easiesy, and probably also most unfair comparison is simply Callidor, it has similar/if not longer range than FoI and has full 360 aoe, ez, wonder skill, it wins at everything we can go home. “obviously” the solution is just to make every skill Callidor, no?
Meta play cannot accept skills fundamentally acting different, and they cannot accept that even when a skill is buffed, praised even, it still/will still fall behind again as other things are buffed, because the meta is aoe centric/about killing things faster and faster and doing so in more and more aoe pulls, because that’s just the more efficient way to kill things faster.
FoI was at one point praised for being great defensively while eventually sporting more dmg than AAR, #1.7AAR Nerfs
AAR has just gotten massive girth increase, so much so it looks darn fricking weird now, that you’re damaging enemies 2rows over compared to the width of the beam FX
Can some stuff be addressed to alleviate some things, sure, probably,
but i feel like we’re almost at a point, where unless we’re turning AAR DE and FoI into Callidor, nothing will please these players “in the end”, because there will always be an issue when either right after FoI/AAR buff that got positive feedback/massive praise #AARhaspassthroughnow new faults will be picked, or Callidor gets buffed next patch tipping the scales and compensation mechanics is needed.
I feel like at a certain point player also has to give a bit of leeway and accept not everything is the same race, and not everything has to be the same skill. - which has always been an innate tug of war between AAR DE FOI themselves; and now spread to general build comparison
If AAR gets single target dmg enough to nuke a boss in seconds, because it has passthrough, it can do so to an entire screen with either a swipe or the brief duration where enemies trail towards you “trailing which does happen and we do beam them when it does”(i dont’ understand why people are acting like it’s not a thing here?)
That was a tradeoff we got when it got passthrough it lost some direct tick dmg (which i’m sure has been buffed back up since with all the feedback over time?)
AAR got nerfed hard, for a reason, because at one point it broke Cruci records. Roman has tried hard to get it buffed back up a bit, and made a clear all content clairvoyant build, which suffers in terms of clear speed; when for some arbitrary reason there is a metric that everything must clear SR faster than 5mins or it’s literal garbo
An ever decreasing speed metric i’m personally not fond of because it’s leading to some weird stuff(imo).
Maybe the issue is other stuff got buffed too much skills that were once praised are now spat at for reasons they weren’t even raised an eyebrow of back then. And i can’t help but feel like it’s the powercreeping and constant reducting in clear times/expectations +clear all content setup demands that has led us to where FoI and AAR suddenly doesnt’ have enough AoE, when it used to be ST dmg they lacked. And where casting a screen covering RR that lasts 12seconds is considered interrupting, when you have stuff like mines, omen, corruption etc by comparison “totally fine interrupts” elsewhere or prior @_@ - while WoP was also considered so dank aoe it was gleefully used on other approaches but for foi/aar, nah, suddenly not worthwhile secondary aoe…
Do i feel like something could maybe be done a little, and even positively improve the skill(s) without mucking too much about it, sure, even suggested letting us walk while channelling. Can make the windup faster etc. - is it absolutely necessary? probably not
Do i genuinely feel like it’s as if things are getting a bit blown out of proportions, somehow, for some reason? absolutely darn i do, and i honestly think it’s a little weird all(past) considering
TLDR, suppose we can say i find some feedback a lil “Inconsistent” over time
That’s an entirely valid take. Game has gotten easier upon easier lately, sure there is more QoL (crafting changes, farming changes, affixes, perma wind devils etc) which are all very welcome but the powercreep thing has also happened. To the point where stuff that was ‘fine’ is now significantly (or at least, noticeably) behind the meta of sub or on the cusp of 5 min SR clears. It’s definitely a thing, not sure how it happened but fact is that it did. I’m all for buffs of course, but objectively the above is true.
Well, that’s definitely true. Standards have changed over time. In DA meta during AoE for example, you needed to complete single Crucible 170 run within buff duration, since it was improbable to fit in two and if you meet double Kuba and their combined healing pools, you just restart. After DA stacking was axed, you were able to fit in 2x runs more comfortably. Damage overhaul across the board and voila, you have runs under 8 minutes and you can have 3x runs within buffs, so you can sustain your runs. In late AoM (with DW melee buffs) you even had builds going sub 6. And in FG, you started having builds doing 4x runs, although if you weren’t great at piloting it was still illusive. Now ofc, the time standards are completely different, gradual buffs and added skill mods over time. That’s why it’s important to not have drastic difference in performance between archetype and some skills require occasional updates/buffs.
Also, important to note the QoL updates. Mines for once were awful, before their mechanic was changed. You have now permanent Devils and Blade Spirits were changed long ago. You have pet mechanics improvement and so on. The game has improved much over time and that’s why some of the channeling skills seems like bread crumbs, leading to a bygone era. I like some of the proposed changes, especially FoI ones.
You know, what I really think is that FoI, even chaos FoI, is fine, and it’s the allegedly “single target” melee builds that have gotten out of hand, making it feel bad in comparison (which is also why PRM and some other AoE spells just got buffed up to the new, pre-FoA baseline). But I don’t see that changing, so here we are.
Strange take maybe, but I think that everything should have a tradeoff.
If a skill with a short range (Like FoI) asks you to stay completely immobile, and only do one thing, then that skill SHOULD be more powerful to balance the risk and inconvenience that comes with it.
There is no real point in that very static gameplay (At least, compared to most builds nowadays) if there is no payoff in the form of very focused DPS.
Also I found this a little bit difficult to parse, but I think you’re saying that I’m incorrectly ignoring the fact that FoI does, in fact, do AoE damage sometimes? So let me address that with reference to my video.
There is actually a part of the video, at 5:16, where I am able to use terrain to line things up and get a the massive AoE destruction that FoI seems to promise in its design, and it’s glorious!
But far more common are situations like these:
@ 1:19, one of two hero mobs is either just out of range or covered by a corner of terrain, hard to tell which
@ 2:04, two big-hitbox hero mobs look like they’re basically right on top of each other, but for some reason I am unable to get them both in the cone simultaneously, while two more run around erratically out of reach
@ 2:24, I am surrounded by Fabius and two hero mobs. I could try to reposition to get more than one in the flames, but (a) Fabius is dangerous and I risk dying if I stop leeching to reposition and (b) I know Fabius doesn’t like to stand still, so it’s likely to be a losing battle of constant repositioning. So I end up burning them down one by one.
@ 4:45, I run into a big pack and start channeling. 4 hero mobs approach from the east, but they very quickly disperse and run around erratically. It’s difficult to keep even one of them in the cone, let alone more than one. I jump to the other hero mob that’s just out of range, hoping I can turn around and get a better cone going. But my movement skill doesn’t take me far enough, and I can’t afford to spend too much time repositioning.
that’s “funnelling”, which wasn’t really what i’m referring to
which matters how?, you can shift your own position 5degrees right so they aren’t object blocked(which is a thing happenign to many builds? - why are we treating as more significant on beams); or you can keep channeling,“as you do” and the mob steps in the line of fire itself
because you’re shooting way far right/more to the right, and “imo” went too deep into the group from the get go, but that’s more of a nitpick
you have 2 options here, which is not unique to beam builds, and i’m unsure of why we’re acting like it is
1 you reposition; this is a thing many builds and many encounters do
2, you turn around or retarget, - which applies to many builds, including melee and ranged that don’t have ex Whirling death type wps/callidor aoe, or can’t kill stuff in just a single whirling death/enough whirling death triggers.
Not every build has 360 aoe like that, and would equally have to either repoisition or retarget “that is what we do in surrounds on non callidor builds”…
as before i’d nitpick simply saying you went in too deep, and didn’t use positional advantage enough. It’s a nitpick since while “technically correct” i do it too/easy to do/we don’t calculate all terrain like that.
But again, where is the specific beam issue here, if anything you have a massive advantage because your aoe reaches deeper; a melee build, trozan, etc “non callidor” build would all have to reposition on that pull because we were in the platform enough to not cause funnelling and having a 360surround happen and easier to happen. “this is bad for many builds causing us to evade/relocate to a more advantageous angle”
Imo the “technical correct response”(which i’m not faulting you or anyone nor myself for not applying “in the moment” ofc) would have been to take a step back on the walkway to cause more funneling to happen there.
You evade/move left and cause trailing to happen, which is fine, good, because it still gives us the aoe advantage for a while/takes benefit of the beam strenght
yes, but, and this is my gripe here with many of the replies.
Beams are being singled out and treated much different, as if they require fundamental and mechanical changes, which is a little “absurd”(lacking the word i want to use)
Easy comparison is interrupts, every build has intterupts
The benefit beam builds have is most interrupts tends to be cast, but beam builds are already 200 cast speed scaled, so they get interrupted “the least” in that sense
Melee/attack speed scaled builds suffer from cast interrupts because of scaling, they have no cast speed, so much so there was a funny debate whether melee/Belgo? should take restless remains in gloves for 10% cast speed over resist/stat comp (for reference MadLee was yes Ceno was no, Maska was un-amused iirc )
Word of Pain interrupt is much less on beams with 200 speed than an infil with 150.
And the above infil still suffers “equally” in amount of casts used, seal, ring of steel, gandar etc - but we’re not considering adding exclusion mechanis to those Attack Speed scaled builds are we?
We not suggesting to give their attacks second effects of free/passive 360 aoe, or make them immune to CC etc?
^CC which btw beams are already more immune to than many other builds, as they ignore fumble and impair/dodge/deflect, so they actually have a disruption benefit over others
I don’t know how long the windup frames are on AAR/DE/FoI, it seems like these days tehy are kinda fine when we’re at 200 speed? but that might be the sole area where they have a potential disruption disadvantage over other builds/skills that dont’ have windup after disrupt.
Other builds still have to re-target, reposition, turn around to hit those 180 behind them, and they still get stunned, trapped, frozen/attacks interrupted by CC and have no attacks/leech for 0.2secs etc
The issue is, for some reason, we find it unreasonable that a beam would have to turn around to hit those 180 behind them, or reposition on a big pull or just general more advantageous direction when many/more enemies come from one side.
I’m turning around on top20 builds too to hit those behind me, i’m repositioning on top20 builds too. What i can’t do on many builds is cause funnelling or trailing, because other skills have shorter or fixed area reach. Melee most obviously held back there, but even stuff like nado which has bic aoe gets caught just in the front/doesn’t reach deep into the lines like foi/arr and needs be more gathered in a circle clump.
**these notes aren’t/also were not meant just for you, but like the general "radical beam fix"notions here (and maybe stuff i’m lumping in from elsewhere?/rakso’s thread )
I just think some of the grievances is a bit much/strangely 1sided/misguidedly applied as if unique to beams, and thus some of the “fixes” more unreasonable/over-exaggerated in terms of necessity.
While then also perhaps dismissing some base stuff as if not applicable anymore
(eg there will be a limit on how much this can be fixed just by simple dmg numbers because screen swipe instant death aoe vs single target dmg being a real thing/consideration Z has to make/and was made in the past too)
i think suppose the easiest way to boil it down is Melee got dmg bumped too much in general, but they still have to do some of the same stuff beams do (turn around/reposition etc).
The difference is, because their dmg numbers is so high, they can kill their targets in 1 direct hit when “recovering”(either from CC or re-targeting)
Beams can’t do that/insta kill, and they cannot be allowed to do that, because unlike melee, they can’t just kill the stuff infront of them, they can kill stuff 7-12metres deep 3-5?meters wide. It would be an instant screen destruction if beams got the same dmg to deal with surrounds or “disrupts” similar to melee
But, imo, this doesn’t mean beams require compensation mechanics in terms of free/passive aoe fields or being allowed CC immunity or auto casting debuffs/support spells/a fix that require fundamental or radical mechanical changes to the core beams, because they are kinda fine(can perhaps bump the dmg a bit but as mentioned does have some innate limits)
we just need to ditch the player imposed/perceived <5min “or else” speed standard atm , let alone allow it to decrease further
What’s being pointed out is just that what you’d expect to be good channeler builds are clunky to play, and take 50% longer to clear SR and crucible than melee builds and (as of the current test patch) AoE caster builds. I’m not asking for any fundamental mechanical changes. Personally, I tend to abide by the maxim that players are OK at identifying problems but terrible at designing solutions, so I prefer to err on the side of presenting evidence there’s an issue and leaving it up to crate to figure out what to do about it, if anything.
I mean, to quote myself:
in re: the many variations of “git gud” in your response to my video clips, I would absolutely love it if a better player could take my build and reliably deliver even a 5-minute SR or crucible clear, thereby showing that the problem is mostly just me. Please, let’s see it! But as of now I have no evidence that’s realistic.
not at all what i’m saying? or even trying to say
you are specifically pointing to X moment and labelling a specific issue “Y”,
i’m saying, neither is “true” in the sense you accidentally did X and Y, not that it was inherent to beam, but player action causing X+Y situation.
(beam is being blamed for something we did, when we could have acted different and entirely circumvented the thing) - while at the same time specifically and emphatically stating i’m not blaming you for doing so since we don’t play analytic like we can watching a vid in posterity.
And “conflicting confusion” at the same time blaming beam for stuff we still do and still have to do on other skills/non callidor builds
and that’s probably also my overall stance; they don’t have to be sub5, because the entire sub5 notion (to me) is just “wrong”/nonsense, if anything perhaps we should nerf the sht out of stuff that is sub5 - it being unrealistic is not as big the issue we want it to be
personally, i run everything slower, some stuff so much so it almost weirdly equals out, so i’ll run a fast top20 in similar 6’ishmins like not top20
I legit forget which it was, Markovian maybe? something which i ran in like 7mins. 7mins which was about the same time i ran your chaos foi in
*That doesn’t mean they are equal/not meaning to imply they are equal.
But when the “demand” is X because perception has shaped it so, maybe at a point player perception/demand has to also give a bit. And then perhaps we wouldn’t nitpick/blame “a” skill for the exact same things that applies to others, eg finding it unacceptable to turn around or reposition etc.
I don’t think that option is on the table, so I’m more concerned with keeping my favorite build from falling too far behind the best builds, to the point where it feels sad to play it.
And I think you’re over-interpreting what I’m saying about the video. If you are saying “You can’t prove there are fundamental problems with FoI based on a single video of suboptimal play,” then, well, agreed. But all I intend is for the video to illustrate examples of the many ways I experience “clunk” with my build, how it often feels like a single-target spell even when I’m trying my best to hit multiple enemies with it, and how both of the preceding slow me down.
I do think it would be possible to produce a video of an SR run where FoI is used “optimally” to melt packs more often, by careful positioning and less charging into the midst of enemies, but I also believe the result would be a slower clear time. If the design intent is that these channeled spells are only for slow and methodical play, so be it. It sounds like you think that would be just fine. But I would be sad.
and my point is in those situations you would not be that differently impacted on other builds, you’d still have to retarget, relocate or turn around.
on a melee build the dude will still be stuck behind a an object out of reach or gunner blocking your attacks etc
on the big surround/pull you’d still have to reposition or risc too much inc dmg with too little 360 aoe clear (non callidor builds ofc)
on the fabius with heroes 180 you’d still have to either priority target, turn around or do a quick relocate to one side to get them to be on the same front, because not all builds, even melee, get that much/strong aoe to kill 2 heroes standing at your back.
and i’m 100% in agreement with that, but as i’m also saying, this is fine, or rather should be fine, at some point we/player perception have to tolerate not everything being equally fast/the same in clear speed.
Yes i’m highly biased because i’m already running everything slower so to me it’s not a 50% speed difference all the time.
I’m also not saying we can’t bump the dmg up a bit, just probably not as much as some think since Z is right when he says it does have aoe, ie we’d nuke an entire screen eventually. And some of the other solutions (imo) is not fitting at all.
But to me, the issues with beams is being over pronounced (ie applying a bigger issue to X situation also present on non beams), and is done so because the perception is everything should be sub5. So if as baseline we can tolerate changing our perception that maybe it’s ok if foi bois clear in little over 6mins instead, the fix and accepted solution is much easier to both land on but also stomach too. (ie wont need freebie aoe, cc immunity, auto cast/non interrupt debuffs etc)
Suppose a better way to say it is. because Foi is running SR in 7mins for us slow pokes/you and me. And the “goal” is set at<5, it seems like a huuuuge gap to cross, thus the fix must be equally huge.
But if players can accept maybe, just maybe 6.15 is fine, and we ignore the 5min shenanigans all together/treat sub 5 as outliers not the accepted norm, then the fix is simpler, simply bump foi dmg by X, and also easier to get across/implement “convince Z about”.
*6.15 arbitrarily pulled from arse, no idea what we should accept as tolerable middleground for non speed players usin non top20builds
Top performers do, the rest do not, that’s literally the discussion here as channeling skills are generally sitting on the outside. How to fix it is surely up to debate (nerf radius on melee, slow down enemy buttsniffing AI, bring back all that CC that people hated to keep enemies more controlled in your radius, somehow find skillpoints to invest in an AoE skill on setups that already require all their skillpoints just to function on single target, up damage potential so crowd is thinned out beforehand, branching/arcing/shotgun effect mods, probably lots of more clever approaches, or maybe nothing at all I spose). It’s noticeable enough that entire skill archetypes are dealing with it, so it seems worth discussion and not just some everything in life isn’t fair dismissal.
not all, which is literally my point blitz, avenger etc all dont’ get 360 aoe, let alone 360 strong enough aoe to deal with these encounters that much different ie still have to turn around/retarget or reposition - “move to stragglers or stuff stuck behind walls”
*different in terms of action, not dmg output
hell even something like RE or Trozan doesn’t have 360 aoe because RE is eaten by however group it’s standing on and in both cases you’ll have to recast behind you (since we dont’ tend to cast it on ourselves)
these are the smaller details that seem to be ignored or “exacerbated” for beams here specifically, that’s the part that annoy me
Even something like NB included melee builds with Whirling dont’ actually get strong enough 360 aoe to just totally ignore encounters and not prioritize targeting or even turn/reposition in gangbangs
Recent PRM buffs changing it to nice performing also doesnt’ change you can’t get away with shooting in a single direction…
It’s as if many people are treating all these encounters as if handled exactly like actual Callidor builds, when in fact they are not…
As few already pointed out, there is a fundamental, mechanical issue with AAR, FoI and ranged passthrough (without radius): AI behavior. And at this point it’s quite evident that this problem cannot be solved with simple solutions.
The way mobs currently switch their paths to the character model in practice looks like they deliberately dodge your line of fire. It’s an insane disadvantage, and it’s so evident when you play SR30-31+
Since fixing AI is off the table, the only improvements there can be are dmg and area.
Right now there is one strong AAR build - Spellbinder Clairvoyant. It can be used as a baseline to balance the entire skill. Iirc it has 40-43k aether tooltip on procs, quite good AoE help from gear and devos, primarily from converted Agrivix relic, and significant non-leech healing help from the weapon and full set. And, of course, other perks of a Binder with cdr.
I recently tried phys AAR and the dmg is dreadful, despite almost 4.5k% dmg on procs: low AoE, armored enemies take eternity to kill.
FoI has bigger issues than AAR. Cone is still too small and still doesn’t work well on enemies at your flanks. There is an interesting study case here for showcasing the skill’s issue: RtA FoI Paladin. It can reach smth like 80k flat per tick and it kills single targets on avg almost as fast as the strongest melee builds. But in playing field it’s so unbelievably bad, it almost feels like you are playing a melee build with only single target WPS and no procs.
At the current state of the game both AAR and FoI deserve much higher baseline dmg than they now have. They of course shouldn’t match best melee output, but they shouldn’t be so much worse as they are now. Because in too many multitarget endgame scenarios they both act the same or even worse than melee builds.
Drain Essence has both single target and aoe deficit, chance to affect bonus targets is not nearly enough.
The best channeling skill to no surprise is EoR, because it hits all enemies around you. It’s not a top tier skill with only a handful of builds that can dish out good dmg while keeping sustain in check.
My suggestions:
— Buff AAR baseline using Clairvoyant Spellbinder as a target (and nerf the set accordingly)
— Increase FoI’s cone size (range and max width) and drop the starting point even further back, buff all baseline node scaling with rank a little bit
— Increase targets for DE scaling with rank, buff node scaling with rank and trade some of Uroboruuk’s flat for defensive bonuses
— Slightly buff dr value on Soulfire, reduce Cyclone bonuses to EoR
skills that were once praised are now spat at for reasons they weren’t even raised an eyebrow of back then. And i can’t help but feel like it’s the powercreeping and constant reducting in clear times/expectations +clear all content setup demands that has led us to where FoI and AAR suddenly doesnt’ have enough AoE, when it used to be ST dmg they lacked. And where casting a screen covering RR that lasts 12seconds is considered interrupting, when you have stuff like mines, omen, corruption etc by comparison “totally fine interrupts” elsewhere or prior 
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