[2019] Reworking Companions' Activatable Abilities as Instant Casts

In Patch 0.7 we implemented activatable abilities for the Primalist’s Companions. Since then, we’ve been monitoring your feedback on these skills - both of the skills in a vacuum, and how they affect the way you play alongside your Primalist’s furry friends.

That the summoning skills are replaced with new abilities while the summoned minions are available has been very warmly received. You’ve told us that these abilities having a cast time for your character rather than the minions themselves can feel clunky - making it feel less like you fight with your pets, and more like you and they take turns. You’ve also told us that sometimes it feels like these skills need to be used a touch too often.

In our next patch we will be updating the activatable skill for every companion with this feedback in mind. Today we’re providing a preview of each skill in its current form, with the changes listed in bullet points underneath. Please keep in mind that further changes may be made internally as we continue to playtest their current iteration.
 

Summon Wolf

  Howl
 
40 mana
10 second cooldown
 
Your wolves howl to embolden themselves and allies around them, granting them frenzy and 50% increased damage for 3 seconds.

• Howl is now an instant cast.
• Howl’s Increased Damage changed from +10% to +50%.
• Howl now also grants Frenzy (+20% attack speed, +20% cast speed).
• Howl’s area of effect has been increased by 96%.
• Howl no longer stacks.
• Howl’s duration has been reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds.
• Howl’s cooldown has been increased from 4 seconds to 10 seconds.
• Howl’s mana cost has been increased from 18 to 40.

Summon Bear

  Bear Roar
 
40 mana
12 second cooldown
 
Releases a mighty roar, taunting enemies around it and healing it for 50 health for each enemy taunted.

• Bear Roar is now an instant cast.
• Bear Roar now Taunts enemies instead of Fearing them.
• Bear Roar now heals the bear for each affected enemy.
• Bear Roar’s area of effect has been increased by 125%.
• Bear Roar’s cooldown has been increased from 6 seconds to 12 seconds.
• Bear Roar’s mana cost has been increased from 18 to 40.

Summon Sabertooth

  Flurry Swipes
 
36 mana
10 second cooldown
 
Releases three swipes in rapid succession.

• Flurry Swipes is now an instant cast.
• Flurry Swipes’s base damage increased by 400%.
• Flurry Swipe’s area of effect has been increased by 125%.
• Flurry Swipe’s added damage scaling has been reduced by 50%.
• Flurry Swipes’s cooldown has been increased from 6 seconds to 10 seconds.
• Flurry Swipe’s mana cost has been increased from 18 to 36.
• Bug fix: Flurry Swipes was previously only capable of hitting an individual enemy a maximum of two times. It can now hit the same enemy three times.

Summon Scorpion

  Venom Nova
 
45 mana
10 second cooldown
 
Releases a burst of venom that inflicts all enemies around the scorpion with a long lasting poison, and releases a spiral of projectiles that inflict a weaker poison on hit.

• Venom Nova is now an instant cast.
• Venom Nova now also releases a spiral of poisoning projectiles.
• Venom Nova’s burst’s increased poison effectiveness increased from +25% to +100%.
• Venom Nova’s cooldown has been increased from 6 seconds to 10 seconds.
• Venom Nova’s mana cost has been increased from 18 to 45.

Summon Spriggan

  Rejuvenating Wind
 
36 mana
12 second cooldown
 
Restores 150 health and 15 mana to the spriggan and all nearby allies over 2 seconds.

• Rejuvenating Wind is now an instant cast.
• Rejuvenating Wind’s restored health increased from 90 to 150.
• Rejuvenating Wind now also restores 15 mana.
• Rejuvenating Wind’s cooldown has been increased from 6 seconds to 12 seconds.
• Rejuvenating Wind’s mana cost has been increased from 18 to 36.

Interested in Companions? Why not stop by another one of our threads and post a couple of suggestions for Summon Scorpion’s skill tree nodes? You might see your ideas in-game!

Hrm, I’m not sure I agree.

Certainly, if we were talking about a fight in World of Warcraft where two tanks in a 25 man raid were switching the boss’s attention between the two of them as they gained stacks of a debuff - yeah, this design would be ill-suited to that, and it’d likely need replacing entirely.

ARPGs usually revolve around engaging many enemies in a relatively short period of time, and we’re trying to avoid downtime caused by a non-player tank having relatively low health, and that discouraging the person playing from moving onto the next group. The iteration of Bear Roar we are playtesting is designed to allow you to effectively ‘reset’ your bear’s health when engaging a group of enemies so that you aren’t waiting around while it gradually recovers life. That’s not to say that this iteration is perfect and couldn’t be improved, but so far in our testing it does feel right to us. We’ll likely release it in a patch as-is or close to it, and if we get feedback that the design isn’t what people want, we can examine potential changes.
 

That Mana management is more involved than in some other ARPGs is a deliberate design decision, which is intended to result in either greater investment being required to be able to regularly use a high Mana cost skill, to allow similar investment to get an initially lower cost Mana skill to a higher power level and thus help them remain competitive (which isn’t always the case in ARPGs), or to encourage players to use more active skills fairly regularly, rather than resorting to the One Button Wonder™ builds you sometimes see in ARPGs.

If the Spriggan’s restoration of Mana scaled with other sources of Mana recovery, that would almost certainly come with the trade-off of it being less powerful by default, so that for the average build it’d work out around the same - and for those not investing into greater Mana recovery, it would end up less powerful. Would you still want us to make such a change?

I’m not sure how likely it is their AI will be meaningfully improved prior to the implementation of multiplayer. While I think having a few different settings for their AI would be a good addition, it would be contending with multiplayer for the time of specific team members.

I’ll raise the issue in a meeting next week, but unfortunately it’ll likely be a while before something changes. But I could be wrong - I’ll try to remember to follow up here after doing so.

Hi there!

Have you recently been guiding members of the community?

Balance is a funny thing. Different skills will have different power levels perceived as being appropriate for them, but sometimes that power level can be more effectively delivered than others. For example - you could have a very powerful, but very niche option. You often see examples of this in card games, where cards are deliberately designed as counters.

The longer the duration, the less powerful the effect will be. At six seconds long you’re going to run into cases where 30-50% of the duration occurs while you run to the next group of enemies, and in addition to not being very effective, that just doesn’t feel good. Additionally, the longer duration can result in a “I’ll just press it at the start of the fight!” mentality.

We’d be much happier seeing people fighting a rare Immortal Eye which is preparing to detonate and deciding to tactically use a short duration, high power damage boost skill than see people using the skill as a ‘fire and forget’ button that doesn’t change how they play.

There’s nothing to say that three seconds is an ideal duration, and that two seconds would be too brief, and four seconds would be overly long. But in general we wanted the activatable skills to feel more immediately impactful, and curtailing Howl’s duration helped achieve that.