Oh, you have a thread on aether ray here, awesome.
There was time when the ray was considered OP, somewhere in early B27? With videos of people killing Alkamos in under 3s “before mirror expires” as a metric and others calling for nerfs. This is how I believe this skill should be, massive damage at a very high price, killing bosses in mere seconds.
Because if it fails to deliver that, you will notice that it is strictly single target, has turning speed, pins you in one place when you’d better run away already to not get instagibbed - since you invested it all into mana regen, and have next to no hp or armor or anything. All the heavy drawbacks, totally incompatible with poor skill performance.
The ray needs a good boost in damage to be revived as a skill. That will make any other changes to the skill mechanics like people constantly propose unnecessary. It does not matter if it comes as weapon damage or flat damage. Crit in disintegration won’t help now as crit is officially dead in Grim Dawn.
Mechanically the beam go quite far but for fast moving monsters that hits hard you still need to stay in place to cast it
No AOE at all to it, althoug it has a modifier. Even Devastation does better.
Here’s what you can do to counter that and make the skill fun to use.
Make it pierce, but with a shorter range. And wider, especially near the character. You would still have to aim, and Callidor’s Tempest would still be a bit better mechanically for packs of monsters but AAR would be in generally ‘‘funnier’’ to use and better than CT for single target.
Make the modifier adding some sort of defence, not too crazy. Might be armor And/or health regen while channeling, or even DA. Not quite sure about this one, but it’s considering the chanelling/stationnary aspect of ARR… I can Kite with CT for exemple.
All in all I srongly beleive the mix of the single target and the stationnary/channeling feature on top of having a modifier isn’t what I call fun.
Also, such change would make the skills A LOT more fun to use while leveling!
I’m one of those not sane people that actually enjoyed leveling with the skill… The ray completely melts thing early game when thing don’t have many hit points… It is late game when the HP’s go up that AAR slows down due to the lack of scaling… The warden on Normal/Veteran is a joke with AAR…
I think people are getting lost in the weeds on AAR deficiencies versus the OP’s original argument that requiring an off-hand makes no sense and needlessly restricts the skills when it isn’t warranted. Can anyone make a reasonable argument WHY the requirement is there? Its not an animation issue since the beam always gets drawn coming out of the hand. Its not a lore issue since other similar skills (PRM, PhB, etc) don’t have the same requirement. Its not a balance issue since the skills don’t have WD% so using a 2H won’t break the skill. My only guess is that they didn’t want players using a shield with the builds…but why? You’re making the choice to give up damage/energy regen for a bit of defensive stats. I don’t see anything game breaking there versus other caster skills that allow you to hold a shield.
Crit is dead because current multipliers do not let it be a build defining mechanic anymore. Perhaps with stormcallers pact or high multipliers in few skills its worth investing into, but even then is somewhere at the minimum of what you would consider worth the effort.
Talking about the ray, I think it even had %weapon damage on it that people request now at some point. It had its main damage lowered, crit damage in desintegration lowered, and finally became like it is now following the general crit nerf in release version. Similar to what happened with soldier overall and cadence in particular. When it occured that crit was the only thing it really had
Hmmm… sounds like Crate doesn’t want any mechanism to be build defining. Much like the recent resist reduction nerf… Still helps, but you don’t need to make a build around it… (unless it is a bleed build… )
I actually thing that is a good thing…promote diversity in builds… Thanks for the history lesson.
I’m assuming that the skills require a focus moreso for lore reasons rather than for balance. Both of these skills are supposed to require an enormous amount of mental energy to cast so requiring a focus makes thematic sense. I don’t think it would be gamebreaking to remove the focus requirement so I have no strong feelings either way, but I’m just guessing the choice was for lore purposes.
Its not clear to me that other casted skills don’t require as much “mental focus”. My guess is, at least for AAR, it used to have a WD% and they didn’t want players using 2H’ers with it and maybe they didn’t want non-casters picking up Arcanist and using Devastation as a cooldown with non-caster builds. Both of those now seem completely unnecessary and the requirement should be removed.
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