[2021] Solution for many cells, and some lanterns.

Original Post — Direct link

There are a lot of cells, and some lantern ability that are just worthless, and i think i see the problem why there are so many.

First let's check the 2 play style you can possibly have in the game.

Trials. Short hunt on time limit against a single extremely powerful behemoth.
Escalation, and hunting grounds. Long hunts against lots of behemoths, and limited resources.

The first demands a HUGE DPS. So anything that aren't focusing on giving attack speed or damage is worthless. If there were a lantern, that for 10 seconds grants +100% attack damage at the cost of reducing your health to 1, then it would be the ultimate meta. Since you expected to dodge every sh*t, and just rush kill the behemoth.

For trials i think it's alright to work like this. I wouldn't change it, nor the build they require. However i would make change for the Escalation, and hunting grounds to make a lot of currently worthless stuff useful. The problem lies with a single cell.

Iceborne. I learned about this cell long after defeating the Shrowd, and thus used a lot other solutions for sustain. Pangar lantern, skarn passive on repeaters, life-steal potion, pillar, grenade. But all of these are pale comparsion to this cell. This cell pretty much solve ALL your sustain problems for health forever. There is no time limit, no special skill, no cooldown, no consumable. You just equip it, and if you are good enough, or got enough damage and don't get onehit, then you can lifesteal back everything. Even worse that it gives perfect synergy with DPS. The more damage you deal the faster you get your health back.

If you were forbidden to use Iceborne, then suddenly a lot of consumables, lanterns, and cell would gain use. Not getting hit in a 2 hour fighting is next to impossible even the best players, but when 2 behemoth comes at once, then it can be literally IMPOSSIBLE to avoid being hit with any weapon except chain blades. Simply, because 2 behemoth can attack in a frequency that you cannot possibly dodge both. Except with chainblades of course. Which means that you need sustain.

So for starter i would remove, or alter Iceborne. I would either erase the life-steal part, or make it dependent on something. Maybe make it switch out the healing tonic to life-steal tonic that last for a time, or give temporary life steal after healing tonic used, or make it give life steal when health drops below a certain percent, and have a large cooldown on it, or maybe give that life steal on low health for a time once a behemoth.

After a trial run without, or nerfed Iceborne we could actually check the stuff used on the hunting grounds, and buff/alter more stuff accordingly. Well. Maybe change certain obviously truly sh*t cells, and lantern abilities.

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almost 3 years ago - /u/Proteus505 - Direct link

Originally posted by Scarbrine69

Are they gonna buff lanterns for this? The hold abilities aren't all that useful with the exception of pangar which relies on being spammed for it to be effective. There's also cells like conduit and cascade which depend on the hold ability. All of this is coming in the distant future right?

We have to do a big rebalance of lantern abilities because they are going on a longer cool down in the future and you likely won’t increase charge rate from damage unless you equip specific cells. We are currently testing a 45 sec cool down but nothing is set in stone.

This might be seen as a nerf to lanterns but we are introducing subclasses which will add a lot of power into the game because subclasses come with a very powerful passive and active ability that doesn’t take any perk economy. So we likely need to take a bit of power of out cells and lanterns so that we don’t make everything trivial. We are also introducing harder heroic content next season so we have tons of stuff changing and we have our work cut out for us on the balance front. We hope to get a bunch of public testing on this stuff before it goes out.

almost 3 years ago - /u/Proteus505 - Direct link

Originally posted by Scarbrine69

Are they gonna buff lanterns for this? The hold abilities aren't all that useful with the exception of pangar which relies on being spammed for it to be effective. There's also cells like conduit and cascade which depend on the hold ability. All of this is coming in the distant future right?

And yes we have to take a look at some of the cells that revolve around using your lantern hold often, like Cascade, and make sure they remain effective.

almost 3 years ago - /u/Proteus505 - Direct link

Originally posted by MrHorris

The longer the cooldown of an ability the less that ability actually affects your gameplay. I don't care about the power level changing with increased cooldowns, I care that a tool used to (potentially) create a more varied moment-to-moment gameplay is being taken away.

Big flashy effects like the legendary abilities are kinda cool, but they don't change how we play.

To me this sounds like a further simplification of the core combat loop when one of the greatest problems with Dauntless's gameplay has always been how stale it got. I deeply hope that increased cooldowns on any form of anything is rethought. I have had a years long addition to the Koshai Lantern because it has an active and significant effect on my playstyle, it doesn't matter if there is a number-go-up, taking away a tool I use to deepen combat will directly decrease my fun.

Again, this isn't about numbers, it isn't about balance, increased cooldowns are a reduction to the potential variation of gameplay strategies. If we are only allowed to do a unique thing every 30-45 seconds than the overall gameplay isn't all that unique.

Our goal is definitely to increase the complexity of core combat and give players more tools to solve problems (along with increasing the variety and complexity of encounters). So I agree that simply reducing the cooldown on lanterns might seem to go against this goal, but this is only being done to give subclasses more room. We're currently prototyping a number of subclasses, and most of them have very short ability cooldowns, like 2 - 3 seconds for one, 15 seconds for others, and 2 minutes for others (when they are much more powerful and impactful). And these subclass abilities will be way more impactful than the lanterns are. One of our subclasses (the one with the super short cooldown) happens to be heavily inspired by the Koshai lantern ability :)

And I think there is a trade-off when it comes to an ability's cooldown. The shorter a cooldown, the more you can integrate that ability into your moment to moment, but since it can be done very often, for balance reasons it has to be less "powerful" of an ability. In contrast, if a lantern ability has a 1 minute cooldown (or longer), we can make it much more powerful.

almost 3 years ago - /u/CreatureTech-PHX - Direct link

Originally posted by Mannex29

THIS. Please be transparent and open with your upcoming major changes. Every update recently has pushed more and more players away and the main reason is because you make "improvements" to things that either don't need them or the "improvements" end up being worse than the original design.

Before you dump massive amounts of resources into this project have an open discussion with us. From what I've read so far it isn't sounding very promising.

The issue here is that if we communicate it now, but end up pivoting due to lessons learned during early development, we'd need to adjust our messaging.

This can lead to players feeling confused and let down. We're being more cautious with our new Roadmap and only communicating when we're sure of the final form of a feature.

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