Palpable hate on Lightning Warp totems

"

CanHasPants escreveu:

There used to be a lot of talk about how OP dual totems were, that you could melt packs with relative impunity, and that totems needed to be much more fragile so they couldn't tank for you as well. The support got hit way too hard in terms of both survivability and damage output, whereas I believe the entire appeal of totemancing is that it allows a more laid back, less engaged style of play. That it would have been okay for them to be beefy so long as their damage didn't compete as easily and they put more pressure on other build constraints (like shifting the mana cost to a reservation while the totem is alive).

Well, at least they are taking a step in the right direction by giving spell totem a diminishing damage penalty, 30% less will be much easier to swallow so we may see more totemists. Three totems would bring our dps output on par with selfcasting.

They probably did it because of monster AI rework, they are supposed to find the player character a much more appetizing snack than totems or minions now, so the playstyle is a bit less laid-back than before.

There are so many problems that are much bigger than just a slight overall damage buff will solve though. I mean, I agree that making enemies a bit smarter about bypassing minions is a good change in general, and its nice to see AI tweaks, but meanwhile the AI on totems themselves is buggy and leads to them completely malfunctioning, and its been that way forever.

If GGG really thought that 0% duration lightning warps should be removed because they didn't like it as a popular mobility skill, thats going to destroy damage builds based around it, so throwing some love their way to compensate might be in order, but besides that, its still a bugged skill, and all mobility skills in the whole game suffer because of the targeting method used

"

raics escreveu:

There is a way to correct this, one I was meaning to suggest for a time. As it is now, movement skills are affected by attack speed, or in case of lightning warp, duration. Duration passives can mess up with lightning warp and attack speed is already valuable enough without this (besides, switching to Brightbeak for frogging around is kinda lame).

One solution to this would be to make movement skill execution speed unaffected by anything besides movement speed increases and also another multiplicative mod on a new, specialized support gem 'faster movement'.

isn't LW duration already based off of run speed ?

yeah the duration of the skill is set to the time it would take you to walk that distance (affected by movement speed modifiers), then the duration is affected by % duration modifiers
with a 100% reduced or 100% less duration build, your movement speed thus factors out
the total time of a lightning warp on repeated cast can be given as something like this:

casting speed (1.0 base, affected by % cast speed)
+
movement duration (distance to target divided by your movement speed, affected by % movement speed and % duration)
+
artificial delay added for latency purposes (0.1s for players, but not added for totems- this has no purpose when lockstep is on)
+
animation time for lightning warp to dissipate before next can be cast (~0.3 or so seconds, I'm not entirely sure. Theres no way to scale or remove this)


theres a big difference between spamming a skill with 200% FCR and -100% duration so that it would cast 3 times a second, hitting 6 times a second (both ends of the warp), with 3 totems for 18 hits per seconds- versus having all these additional delays thrown in so that instead it takes ~1.5s for a single lightning warp to execute, and whoops the totem only lasts 2 seconds and takes 1 second to cast, and might not cast at all if an enemy was standing next to a wall

"

clan_iraq escreveu:

yeah the duration of the skill is set to the time it would take you to walk that distance (affected by movement speed modifiers), then the duration is affected by % duration modifiers
with a 100% reduced or 100% less duration build, your movement speed thus factors out
the total time of a lightning warp on repeated cast can be given as something like this:

casting speed (1.0 base, affected by % cast speed)
+
movement duration (distance to target divided by your movement speed, affected by % movement speed and % duration)
+
artificial delay added for latency purposes (0.1s for players, but not added for totems- this has no purpose when lockstep is on)
+
animation time for lightning warp to dissipate before next can be cast (~0.3 or so seconds, I'm not entirely sure. Theres no way to scale or remove this)


theres a big difference between spamming a skill with 200% FCR and -100% duration so that it would cast 3 times a second, hitting 6 times a second (both ends of the warp), with 3 totems for 18 hits per seconds- versus having all these additional delays thrown in so that instead it takes ~1.5s for a single lightning warp to execute, and whoops the totem only lasts 2 seconds and takes 1 second to cast, and might not cast at all if an enemy was standing next to a wall

and how many totems nodes are you factoring in here?

"

banezilla escreveu:

and how many totems nodes are you factoring in here?

Without seeing a finalized CB skill tree, its hard to figure out whats possible
But on the current tree, there are only two nodes that increase totem duration, a 25% node on the far bottom left, and a 15% node in the middle below scion. From a scion start and taking ancestral totem, it takes 10 additional skill points to get the 25% node, 7 additional skill points to get the 15% node. Without either node, currently, a 100% duration spell totem will actually have 0 duration, so its absolutely necessary to invest in one of them. Though with the long base duration of totems, getting 25% of 26 seconds is manageable enough. Its just a bunch of wasted skill points since the totem nodes are so very, very far out of the way, so vitally required, yet all the other totem support on the tree is awful, worse than scaling the corresponding element or whatever tree.

If I could get my hands on some vaal'd gems or have someone else with the right gear do it or lend them the parts I have, I'd be interested to see what happens when you cast a 0.00 duration spell totem (mines only 94% before I finish vaaling and going from level 19->20 gems). I don't know what would happen. But that won't be possible in the awakening, not even with a warped timepiece, since 100% reduced duration wouldn't be possible. Someone should try it before this patch goes live, for science. Could easily do it with aforementioned timepiece

When I see something like this where maybe GGG decided that 0% duration LW was too good for mobility, it seems like a prime opportunity for adding some kind of notable or unique or jewel that would allow dps builds based around the mobility skill to still be viable, while prohibiting it for player movement. Or even a funny tradeoff like "Movement skills have 100% less duration. -50% movement speed" so your character walks at a crawl, it would make it more a niche thing and less an obligatory slot in.

"

banezilla escreveu:

isn't LW duration already based off of run speed ?

It is, I want all movement skills affected by just that and 'faster movement' support. It would allow the OP to increase totem duration without messing up LW, among other things. One of those 'other things' could be reworking Bronn's Lithe to have a sizable bonus to movement skill execution speed instead of movement skill level, might make someone use it for something other than skin transfer.

"

raics escreveu:

"

banezilla escreveu:

isn't LW duration already based off of run speed ?

It is, I want all movement skills affected by just that and 'faster movement' support. It would allow the OP to increase totem duration without messing up LW, among other things. One of those 'other things' could be reworking Bronn's Lithe to have a sizable bonus to movement skill execution speed instead of movement skill level, might make someone use it for something other than skin transfer.

k was just confused on the way you talked about all movement skills being tied into attk speed.

so what you want is taking the duration tag off of LW and calling it something else that only has to do with movement speed. i would really like that idea

"

clan_iraq escreveu:

"

banezilla escreveu:

and how many totems nodes are you factoring in here?

Without seeing a finalized CB skill tree, its hard to figure out whats possible

ya that's kind of what i was hinting at.

I don't imagine there will be any big duration nodes hidden away. The totem clusters are dreadful in general and it doesn't seem they'll be getting remade, so many specialized builds have no point in taking the nodes for their specialty since general elemental or spell damage builds are better and the life / reduction nodes don't actually accomplish anything but are still priced at the same rate a player gets them