I’ve just started my second try at an Apostate build using the Storm Box of Elgoloth as my right mouse click attack and I am finding that functionally it is the worst skill I’ve ever tried to use in that manner.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that the skill is bad. It seems pretty solid comparatively, though I am only just starting out. My issue is with how the game applies it and some seemingly counterintuitive oddities about it.
For example, while it seems to have no obvious projectile and is instantly in ‘effect’ once cast (that is, it appears instantly on the target once cast), it oddly obeys the similar rules to line of sight projectile attacks. For example, if I select a creature to cast it on and at the moment I do so, another creature passes between my avatar and the target, that creature instead gets hit and forms the center of the Box’s effect radius.
Given that the higher end of play with this skill is highly strategic, in that as players we would tend to cherry-pick prime targets to ‘hold’ the charge in the midst of lower ranked monsters for maximum effect, this issue seems like a significant stumbling block in the later value of the skill.
Another problem is that occasionally I simply can’t fire the skill, seemingly because my character doesn’t have line of sight for that skill, though I can still use a projectile weapon on my left mouse click to hit the same target, from the same position.
I might not have noticed this issue if I wasn’t so low level that the mobs, in this case, a zombie archetype, are so slow moving and relatively inactive that I could stand immobile and alternate testing both Storm Box and standard pistol attack. I came across an inert grouping of zombies and tried to fire off Storm four times in a row at a particular well-centered target, but couldn’t.
After the first attempt, though I knew storm box couldn’t still be on cooldown from my previous use, I visually checked it was clear and tried three more times without anything happening. I figured it was a line of sight issue, but I was out in the open in the bushland area just outside of Devil’s Crossing, slightly past the first quest dungeon and I couldn’t really see anything between my target and I, so I tried shooting it, and got a bullet hit without a problem. Then I tried Storm again and still nothing, so I moved slightly to one side and tried, and Storm finally triggered.
Update - I had another example of the issue with not being able to cast Storm Box for no discernible reason. Fighting one of the larger ‘mosquito’ creatures. It could shoot me with its single dart projectile traveling it a straight line, but I couldn’t trigger storm box on it. The only thing between it and I was a campfire, which was directly along the line of sight path. In the previous example I gave, with the zombie, line of sight seemed clear, though there was a small shrub that was slightly to one side of the direct line of fire. In this new example, I sat for several minutes trying to trigger Storm Box on the mosquito while it consistently fired and hit me along the same sight line. I also tried to trigger Storm Box on several mosquitoes hovering unalerted behind the first one, and couldn’t with them either.
The last thing is just a quality of life change, but I am sure that this is still a glitch with how Storm Box works. On any character I have, if they have a usable skill that I can break groupings of furniture, boxes, and barrels with easily, I use that to save manually positioning and doing each one separately. Storm Box doesn’t work for that, but that makes sense given that its generative cause for its damage is psychic energy transmuted into lightning as per its description and inanimate objects don’t have any psyche to do that too, but then why does it use energy when you click on a box using the power.
