TL;DR - A bug allowed you to spam skills on CD automatically. But it got fixed.
Now, for the topic of this thread, I don’t think anyone actually likes to repeatedly click to cast Wind Devils. They are similar to Blade Spirits and Guardians of Empyrion, but also different in the sense that unlike those two, Wind Devils are not permanent and disappear after a set duration.
Not sure why Wind Devils are discriminated against like this, but it has been asked before if they could be made permanent as well and the answer was “no!”, even though the reason didn’t make any sense. But no point in beating that horse anymore.
So… what if they could be made into a toggle skill that automatically spawns Wind Devils?
Since they have a cooldown, no need to worry about non-stop auto spamming of the skill or anything.
The only thing that will change is that the players will have one less button to click, since everything else will work just as same as it does now. So, no real disadvantage while adding a decent amount of QoL.
As a compromise: increase the recharge time to 8 or 12 seconds. The one Wind Devil has a chance to spawn a clone until the Summon Limit has been reached. Clones share their life time with the original. If you recast Wind Devil all entities are disbanded.
Not sure if there is the tech in place to support this, however this would retain the active skill aspect, but reduce the recast frequency.
If you don’t want to make them permanent, pls increase their duration. Casting them outside of Cyclone set, is a pretty bad feeling.
Seeing Blade spirits being strong last patch and Guardians on current one while being permanent makes me wonder why Devils don’t get at least some QoL.
What they need to be is faster. You pretty much have every other pet having reasonable movement speed (even the skeleton golem from the Dirge relic i believe runs fast now), but then you have Wind Devils walking around like molasses.
Just cast the wind devil on the desired target. It’s basically a thermite mine.
I was thinking about the skill though and got some ideas how to rework it, though it’s more like a mod thing. I don’t expect any skill to be reworked that late in development hah.
First idea is inspired by blade vortex skill of PoE. Basically you cast a wind devil, but it’s planted on your character. It will move with you etc. You can summon more of them like now to get additional damage. Position and speed of wind devil is bound to player that way so it’s easy to control it. Stacking it still makes sense and you still have to keep casting it. The downside is casters that prefer fighting at distance will suffer from that. Also the skill would look cool with sets like Cyclone and skills like EoR. It would be kinda like Tempest proc.
Second idea is increasing their speed, but by a lot. They are wind devils so I assume it’s a creature that possessed wind or something like that. Wind devil could be sime type of an annoying imp creature that jumps around and move like it’s on steroids. Super quick movement in random locations to play tricks on the enemies. It’s rapid movement and being unpredictable would mean it’s won’t apply rr reliably though and damage would be more random, though that fits lightning damage.
I don’t expect those ideas to be even considered for the game, but they sound cool!
Oh, the eternal discussion once again! We all know there won’t be huge mechanical changes at this point, although they removed the spec that allows converted physical damage bypass armor so once can only hope
Wind Devil is probably my least favourite skill. The ‘‘re-casting’’ it is not the issue, since after some point you get used to cast everything but the issue is you need to lead them to your target by using pet-attack and they are fucking slow! They can stack good amount of damage by Maelstrom node however; if devs decide to increase their duration/cooldown; increase their speed and nerf the damage to compensate it I guess no one would disagree.
Or, another idea is; to free us leading them to our target; you can add more AoE to Raging Tempest so enemies can get the debuff even though Winds are not that close.
i mean i hard modded them to be permanent because i got tired of that BS, reduced amount by 1 for “balancing sake”
the now “how fast can we patch a QoL effect out” auto cast was a nice middle thing - tho it had other nice uses too
wind devils are just bad in so many areas, it’s one of those “oof” things were it feels so wrong Crate digs in their heels when so many players for so long have asked for improvement to their function…
I think making WD permanent would require way too much rebalancing and tinkering to get it right, and many of the items revolving around WDs would need reworking cause duration/CD on permapets is useless and increasing the max number on perma pets vs temporary pets is like an entirely different thing. This late in development when they’re looking to put things to bed, making such a big overhaul to a skill that may require another two to three patches to properly balance seems unlikely (I know, I know, phys conversion overhaul happened). Dunno about you guys but I’d like to see 9.2 go live this fall at least (since this summer, as previously advertised, has kinda come and gone). I’m not saying WDs being permanent is a bad idea, but it probably would have had to happen when Blade Spirits and GoE received these changes. It’s probably too late now.
But sticking with it having duration but building on the Hurricane idea, it could be a fixed spot cast spell as Maska suggests. Remove the movement, reduce duration by half, increase AoE to cover like 1/8th to 1/6th of the screen. No more issues with it not moving fast enough cause it doesn’t move, no more issues with pet attack targetting cause it covers a larger area and is aimed on cast, no need to rework all WD item modifiers cause those all still work the same way. It gains predictability, consistency and, admittedly, more potential AoE damage output at the cost of single target (since you’d have fewer up at a time due to lower duration). Not personally in the know on how many builds use WDs as a single target solution. Like Totems, you’d have to manoeuvre around them to keep enemies in range (let’s call it a new Shaman theme if you will), but at least these could be targeted at a spot far away which Totems can’t.
things were it feels so wrong Crate digs in their heels when so many players for so long have asked for improvement to their function…