Bonechilling Cry is currently the only skill in the game with native %RR that has a cooldown (unless we count OFF I guess). Demo can spam Thermite Mines as they move forward. Word of Pain wherever, whenever. Night’s Chill? Always up. And Berserker…6 second cooldown. 10 meter radius. If you’re melee, you hit everything in close proximity. Anything at a longer than mid distance doesn’t get any RR for the entirety of the fight, cause you end up killing it the hard way before those 6 seconds elapse. And casters and shooters are just screwed. You want to play at range but your RR doesn’t reach far enough. Any enemies that flood in after the initial application are RR-free. It’s even worse if you’re using Mark of Blood’s Deceit and Bonechilling Cry is also your damage reduction. It’s a worse Horn of Gandarr cause it has a 1.5 s longer cooldown for some reason. In boss fights, doesn’t really matter unless you absolutely have to stand at max distance to fight them. But SR is all about moving forward to new areas. CR keeps pumping in wave after wave of new enemies. And your RR source is constantly letting you down.
I don’t think this should be the case. I can see no objective balancing reason why Berserker needs to have the worst RR QoL in the game. Wereraven’s whole shtick is kinda difficult sustain but the ability to fight at long range. And Bonechilling Cry says “actually, no, facetank or lose your damage”. That’s not mentioning the DA debuff that you keep missing out on.
So firstly, I’d like to ask for the cooldown to either be removed or massively reduced. Like cut in half at the very least. If we are to keep moving forward to new areas in SR and Ascendant, our RR needs to come with us. Secondly, I think its AoE should be larger. Sets like Fates Unwound want you to gunner it up at a distance and give you %RR incentives to use Bonechilling Cry, and then you end up investing 12 points into the skill just to have it still not reach nearly far enough and be overall bad at supporting your playstyle, for no discernible reason.
Feels like if you want to be optimal, everything becomes piano before you even get to your damage skills. Keep up your Rallying Cry/WoR/PBurst/BoD, apply your DR skill, apply your 1-2 on tree RRs. Running Symbol of Solael? Apply that too. Now you can use your damage skills. And let’s not forget your 1-4 mobility skills.
SO MUCH if this button mashing would be alleviated by a single change: make BoD-like skills always on, and then just give them an activatable heal on top. Unless you want the heal, don’t need the button. Better yet if they become auto-activatable at a certain % health like the new (horrendously weak IMO) potion modifier.
Not sure Bonechilling Cry necessarily needs the aura treatment, cause auras generally lack the range in exchange for the convenience. Which would again leave the caster/gunner playstyles a bit uncomfy. I’d rather it had tiny or no CD and the range of War Cry.
If cooldown were completely removed, wouldn’t the Skill Modifiers like Mark of Blood’s Deceit become too powerful?
In my opinion, the best balance would be to grants “Charges" at levels 6 and 12.
(and ofcourse, range must be increase)
I don’t think so, that literally affects two items in the whole game (Mark of Blood’s Deceit and Lucius’ Wraith-Arm), no danger there of breaking the game. If Mark becomes too omnipresent as a result, the DR can always be nerfed. I’d rather have a fully functional RR for all builds and a bit less DR for a few specific ones than what we have now.
Maybe it can be a consideration if/when berserker gets the full “nerf it 6-12 times” treatment that inquisitor got. Currently having to think a bit for your RR is a small price to pay for the overly dense power of berserker.
One item that would definitely be affected by a no-cooldown BC is Sylvarria’s Root
This cdr mod would become obsolete. I got a pierce build using this, I’m constantly critting so the cd is resetting pretty much instantly. It’s extremely nice to be able to use BC whenever I want. Would love to see this built into the Berserker mastery directly, I think Battlesurge would make sense, that way any zerker can make use of it, not just certain build types.
Personally, I think this obsession with constantly moving, constantly dealing damage, and making everything into auras / passive application makes the game worse than what a cooldown on Bonechilling Cry accomplishes, but that is just my opinion.
Not that I think current Bonechilling Cry is super-peachy. It definitely needs either a CD reduction or having Battle Surge reduce the CD on Crit or something similar in that vein. But Berserker is already one of the strongest classes as it is, and making it a straight CoF clone would just make Occultist completely obsolete as a mastery. What stats does the Occultist have that Berserker doesn’t already do much better?
And then Cold Snap exists and is like “Yo, go jump on people’s face my guy”…
Well, that’s the nature of the game.
The design of the game is to plow through everything as fast as possible.
With also design being heavily focused on RR being the end-all-be-all of gameplay, with how important it is to deal damage.
Thus you get this situation where you quickly run between enemies, then you have to debuff them with your RR skills, then wipe them out with your damage skills, then move on.
With RR skills themselves not feeling relevant outside of their ability to allow you to deal damage (I.e. It’s not like most RR skills are actually relevant damage skills that you’re comboing together with other skills. No it’s just a 0 damage debuff that is “You now deal damage”)
As such, it’s common for people to want this busy-work of using a skill that allows you to play the game before every single combat encounter to be relegated to passive auras so you just jump right in and actually start fighting.
This is also true for some other skills, like War Cry and Ill Omen being used just for their damage reduction debuff, skills like ABB and BH being used exclusively for the Lethal Assault/Soul Harvest buffs, various skills you only utilise as a means to proc a devotion skill (Like some crappy component skill)
None of these feel good to actually use because their function is to provide a passive effect. Thus people don’t want to have to actively use these skills and instead want to actively use their skills that are providing direct benefits.
Which is the entire purpose of auras and passive skills vs active skills in the first place. Passive skills are for applying the passive effects and active skills are for applying active effects.
If I were the GD developper, for some skills (not only the debuffing ones) I would set the skill cooldown to 0 at lvl 1 and it would get progressively higher, when invested more points…
Illustrative example:
Lvl 1/12: 2m target area ; -5% cold res ; 0 sec cooldown
Lvl 12/12: 14m target area ; -30% cold res ; 6 sec cooldown
Lvl 22/12: 20m target area ; -40% cold res ; 10 sec cooldown
So the player wouldn’t “overinvest” points, because of the cooldown, or they would have to aim for cooldown reducing item (modifier) …
The nature of the game is to beat the biggest baddie there is, whether that’s a superboss, or an instance that’s meant to fully challenge your skills. What you are describing is speedrunning, which is a separate entity entirely. You can beat Grim Dawn without being fully optimized; but speedrunning by its nature requires everything to be optimized.
As such, it’s common for people to want this busy-work of using a skill that allows you to play the game before every single combat encounter to be relegated to passive auras so you just jump right in and actually start fighting.
This is also true for some other skills, like War Cry and Ill Omen being used just for their damage reduction debuff, skills like ABB and BH being used exclusively for the Lethal Assault/Soul Harvest buffs, various skills you only utilise as a means to proc a devotion skill (Like some crappy component skill)
None of these feel good to actually use because their function is to provide a passive effect. Thus people don’t want to have to actively use these skills and instead want to actively use their skills that are providing direct benefits.
At least buffing / debuffing skills like Ill Omen or ABB have a secondary effect of being able to proc devotion skills (I do share your sentiment that the devotion system is very much outdated and needs a spruce up to feel exciting to use again).
How long does it take to press the debuff button? A fifth of a second? It’s not like you need to use debuff skills on white mobs that you can OHKO anyway. But those 1/5th of a second adding up is irrelevant in the long run… unless you’re chasing some sort of timer. The timer is what’s causing these feelings of angst, not the game itself.
One more thing on the topic of piano. If the heal skills don’t end up turning into auras with a passive “on % health” proc (which would be the ideal option and remove SO much busywork), IIRC PoE lets you bind similar “zero animation” skills to your LMB. The reason that would be handy in GD is ranged/caster characters will often end up having “Move To” on their LMB cause putting a ranged attack there is awkward. The way it works in PoE is, when you press LMB with a heal/buff/shout skill on it, it will use the skill but then continue to operate as Move To. It would give caster builds one fewer button in their bar, though granted, it would essentially become a passive on CD heal rather than a heal you get to use only when needed.
Not true. You don’t have to be aiming for the fastest times in order for it to be by far the safest way to play ANY character to get all of your debuffs up ASAP in every encounter. There is no better way to improve your survivability than to obliterate everything on the screen as fast as possible, before it gets to deal damage, before it gets to apply debuffs, before its dangerous abilities come off the initial first use cooldown. That goes especially for many of the new FoA enemies, who turn into bullet hells/shotguns/orbital artillery pieces the moment they get to do anything. Not having your primary or sometimes only RR skill (currently playing Chaos Veilwalker) be usable in a forward-moving environment because of small range AND long cooldown means having to tank a crapton of unnecessary damage on a squishy caster build, while also losing DR since I have Mark of Blood’s Deceit. It’s not just about player convenience, it’s about a build even feeling capable of playing the same game others can. Less RR = less damage = less sustain. Fewer enemies dead = more damage taken. No DR = even more damage taken. A triple whammy. Suddenly a build feels super shaky, all because for some reason, this one single RR skill is centered on you and has a cooldown where others have none. Meanwhile in Inquisitor/Occultist land, the whole screen is res-shredded in the first .2 seconds of the encounter, every time, guaranteed. No limitation for casters/shooters, no limitation of game mode, no limitation of progress speed.
Another thing worth highlighting. Bonechilling Cry has the third longest cooldown of any on-tree debuff/offensive skill in the entire game. The only skills worse off than it are War Cry and Devastation. A properly built Devastation build will be casting Devastation more often than a Berserker will be using Bonechilling Cry. A Devastation will always be dropping in the area you’re fighting. Half the enemies you fight in any given encounter in the Crucible will not be affected by Bonechilling Cry. And unlike War Cry, Bonechilling Cry doesn’t hit the whole screen and doesn’t have several items fixing the CD.
A majority of the game is getting loot drops from enemies. Be it experience, iron bits, components or random drops (Or progressing towards Nemesis/Dread spawns).
Thus, by nature, the more enemies you kill, the more rewards you get. Hence, kill many things quickly.
Hard content is a minor part of the game and even then, much of it is still pushed towards kill things quickly (SR for example)
A fifth of a second, per debuff button. On each encounter where its relevant. (Plus repeatedly every 5-8 seconds on stronger things because GD is allergic to durations)
PLUS another keybind that you have to use and manage.
Even as a casual player not chasing any timers or hard content, it’s just plain annoying.
Again, even if you are able to use something like Ill Omen as a vector for devotion procs, it still feels bad to actually use (And then if it’s a devotion proc skill, then it can be relevant for trash packs too if the proc is one of the damage ones…)
I would see it more like transmuters on healing skills will turn them into passive aura with healing disabled. Two healing skill mastery combos would beocme instantly playable… And you would have the option of using them as heals or as auras as one would prefer. Only Blood of Dreeg does not have a transmuter. But that is fine as is. If the other three got changed. Problem is solved with healing skills.
Those transmuters are useless anyway now. Two make dual wield on masteries that have another skill for it and the third gives useless bonus to two handed.
This change would be a massive QoL and would leave people with options. Options we now do not have.
