Hi everyone! New player here, love the game so far! Let’s get right into it.
I typically love to play support roles in games; healing buffing and so forth, and I picked Occultist and Inquisitor for the healing, buffs and debuffs they offered. I’ve reached level 24 now and I dumped a lot of points into Inquisitor because I wanted to reach what sounded like a great ability, Inquisitor’s Seal. On paper the description made it sound right up my alley, but in action the usefulness has been really limited due to its tiny size. I understand that by putting a lot of points into it it’ll raise the Damage Absorption to a point where standing in one place would be semi-viable, but convincing my teammates to stand in the circle and facetank two dozen enemies and a boss is damn near impossible. I place the seal, and no one even tries to use it; I place it on an ally, and he almost immediately leaves once a) there are no enemies within melee range or b) there are too many enemies in melee range. The cooldown is too long to actively chase them around with it, too.
So, my suggestion for how to fix this would be to make a transmuter skill that reduces the summon limit of Inquisitor Seal to 1 and raises its energy cost to about 2.5x, but raises its radius to something closer to 10 meters. This would have Inquisitor Seal create an area that’s useful but that my allies could still move around in to some degree. I do realize that abilities don’t usually have more than one transmuter, but I don’t really feel that the current transmuter is really any kind of thought-provoking trade-off. The cast speed reduction is incredibly negligible for a 25% projectile negation. I feel like the ability could just take that -15% cast speed as its base cast speed, get 2% projectile deflection per level and call it a day.
Alternatively, I don’t think lowering the recharge time for the skill could hurt - the maximum number of seals down is 3 regardless of it you can cast 1 per 5 seconds or 1 per second, it would just make it easier to reposition and chase teammates around with it.
Inquisitor’s Seal is very, VERY powerful skill. Especially if you bring it to ultimate levels. Because it proves to be really powerful only when scaled beyond normal 12 levels (ultimate 22 level particulary). Flat absorb offers a huge tankiness boost. Tiny size is a very natural downside, otherwise it would be totaly OP and unfair.
In early game, there is no need to stand in the seal all the time. You can do it VS bosses, and trash mobs get melted anyways.
In late game, however, things are different. If you build for facetanking, you’ll be nearly-invincible while standing in Seal. So anyone who wouldnt stand in it, either has non-facetanking build, either is dumb, and you cant really help it.
Hi and welcome! Interesting suggestion about the mutator increasing range. As stated above, the skill itself is very powerful, flat absorption is probably the strongest single stat in the game and the skill has massive amount of it.
If there was a transmuter for range it would have to come with reduction to the skill bonuses, similarly to how attack transmuters that reduce cooldown to zero also reduce the dmg drastically. Triple size and half the cooldown together with double absorb, dmg and +%dmg reduction seems like a fair exchange.
The only problem is this kind of change would be aimed specifically at multiplayer which is not this game’s primary focus. Good thing is at higher levels you wont have trouble buffing your teammates, in fact, you will be the most loved party member. The game is infinitely harder in endgame.
I agree with BOG - Inquisitor Seal is a powerful, defensive ability.
While there’s not much you can do about it now, there are items further down the line that either reduce the cooldown on it, increase the duration or summon limit like these that might interest you:
Guess it didn’t help that I haven’t done enough research into the game yet - I had no idea that abilities could be leveled over their apparent maximum. The items that Evil_Baka linked to look amazing; the cooldown reduction would be exactly what I need. I also took the time to read up a bit more on the game’s mechanics and realize now exactly how good absorption is ( flat reduction applied after all %'s is amazing ). I guess in the interim I’ll focus more on healing and debuffing, and work on the seal once we’re later in the game. =)
Agreed it’s a very strong skill (I recall it getting nerfed in the past, probably multiple times, due to it’s strength; can’t remember if the size of it was changed though or not) but rather small.
I do think it’d be nice if it sightly grew in size at higher levels the way Sigil of Consumption does, nothing even dramatic like 10m but beyond 3.8 to perhaps 5m.
On a tankier build I honestly don’t mind it’s current size too much, but with spell casting Mage Hunter and DW Ranged Vindicator it can be annoying (or sometimes I find myself thinking I’m on the edge of it but realize I’m slightly off and don’t have the icon above my health bar.)
I haven’t tried it in multiplayer, but I can definitely see the desire for larger radius there.