One thing i disliked in most games of the genre were the temporary buffs that had to be refreshed every now and then, especially when the buff bar is tiny and filled with many other buffs during combat - making it difficult to keep track of them.
The toggled skills in grim dawn (and titan quest, if i’m not mistaken) were an excellent way to fix this issue since it serves the same purpose of giving you a permanent buff without the hassle of having to refresh them. Then i made a nightbalde and… suffice to say i’m not a fan of pneumatic burst, blood of dreeg and word of renewal. Those buffs are too powerful to be ignored, (especially when it comes to OA and resistances) and the hassle of refreshing the buffs every ~25 seconds while playing through the campaign makes me avoid playing characters with their respective masteries.
If the intent is for those buffs to be active 100% of the time while the skill also has an on-use healing effect, the buff’s duration could simply be increased to make them more comfortable to use. 90 or 120 seconds would go a long way, but i wouldn’t mind it if they were increased by something silly like 5 or 10 minutes…
Edit: to explain my point more thoroughly: there are plenty of times throughout the game when you don’t need to heal as often as the buffs run off (30 seconds) and losing resistances, OA, DA and movespeed is rather annoying while leveling, for instance. The problem with those buffs is NOT that i have to press 1 extra button every 30 seconds, otherwise i wouldn’t be playing an action game to begin with it; the problem is that the buff bar is so small and cluttered with other buffs that it makes it a hassle to keep track of the timing when i should refresh my movespeed/resitance/OA buffs.
this could be addressed by either redesigning the buff bar or increasing the buff durations so the people wouldn’t have to watch them as constantly while not doing difficult content, thus improving the QOL for builds that use those skills. (the latter is a much easier solution and pointing out that the former can be done with mods does not make the original suggestion any less relevant since there were many other features from mods incorporated into the game)
the obvious reason why the longer duration of the buffs wouldn’t “simplify” the challenging content or “remove variety from build diversity” is the fact that in that difficult content you’ll be using the skills for healing more often than every 30 seconds, meaning the buff will never fall off outside of short intermissions.
I’ve watched plenty of build showcase videos of people doing SR and crucible and their buffs from PB WOR and BOD didn’t fall off a single time during combat (the only times when i saw them disappear were due to enemies dispelling them)
if anyone’s willing to link me similar videos where the buffs DO fall off for significant periods of time (20% or more) and the players intentionally decide not to refresh them in order to preserve the healing, i’ll gladly recognize my error of judgement. but if the overwhelming majority of times the buffs end up having permanent uptime during combat due to players using the heal more often than the 30s duration, i fail to see how extending the baseline duration of the buffs would be anything less than a QOL change to make up for the unreadable buff bar while doing content that doesn’t require constant healing (such as playing through the campaign)
Some people, however, do enjoy managing skills such as this and playing “piano” builds (I do for example). It’s more a different-strokes-for-different-folks kinda thing.
