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Let's talk Shock (and Burnout)
Tetchta
The Innocent
We're getting close to our third month now with the new Shock/Burnout mechanics. The details are outlined in Announce 3311 "Combat Changes," but the basic idea is this:
- Shock removes your ability to recover your celerity. You get this affliction when you dip below 25% health. The way Celerity works, as per AUDIT, is you get so many rooms per second you can move. So if you have 5ps celerity, you can move 5 rooms in one second, then have to wait until the second rolls over for that 5 room pool to be replenished. The CELERITY skill halves this recovery time. So if you get damaged below 25% health in one room, you get the shock affliction, and that means you can move however many rooms are currently in your "celerity pool." If that's 5, and you have all 5 rooms filled, you can run 5 away before you'll be halted until the affliction cools down. The affliction lasts for 20 seconds.
- Burnout is a bit simpler to understand, it just increases your cooldowns by 20% while you have the affliction (which also lasts for 20 seconds after you get reduced to below 25% mana). The only real caveat here is that it can likely make some cooldowns dramatically longer, like turning a 10min cooldown into a 12 minute one.
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At its best it's irritating, and feels like all it really managed to do was make bashing worse across the board. I'll admit, though, I'm kinda curious about the proposed changes to deal with it. If they ended up pivoting shock so it actually made bashing better than it was before, I could get behind that.
But that 0 Celerity Regen really does suck. I feel like maybe it'd be better if they tweaked it so you have highly reduced celerity instead, or you regenerate at 1/2 the speed or something.
I don't mind some places being super tough or basically requiring a group to bash it, it makes it interesting. It does make extra-squish classes extra brutal to bash in for run of the mill places. Looking at you, Scio. Glass Cannon is way worse when everyone is a hammer throwing Koopa Troopa. Just gonna stand over here and shatter all over myself.
Edit: Also, @Wjoltyr I'm glad you mentioned the areas requiring a group to bash. My specific gripe about Shock comes mainly with the introduction of the Oblivion's Portent instance, where the end battle essentially requires players to move and do the mechanics otherwise they will wipe the party or get themselves killed. Shock seems just exceptionally punishing not only because the Avatar hits incredibly hard, and combined with some of the mechanics like Lament, Voidmark, etc, it seems like just one more thing tossed in there to make it unnecessarily difficult. For Portent, I would love to see the difficulty lowered and the cost of rewards higher, because that instance is so integral in the current storyline that Aetolia is experiencing. I'm not a fan of it being, in my opinion, still a bit too overtuned for your average, non-whale to participate without being fully carried.
Tell me how I'm doing!
> It does make extra-squish classes extra brutal to bash in for run of the mill places. Looking at you, Scio. Glass Cannon is way worse when everyone is a hammer throwing Koopa Troopa.
I've got quite a few artifacts, some might even call me a whale, and as a Shifter this change has caused a lot of issues even for me. Where some classes have been able to tank a number of aggros, I've had to set things up to skip rooms with more than one aggro. Sometimes the system moves a bit too slow, causing aggros to follow into the next room after I skip it, and at that point I'm basically dead. It should be noted that I have run with pretty much constant hazelnuts, whites and caramels to up my chances of survival on top of artifacts and still have this issue with shock.
If they didn't mean for it to have an impact (or at least not as much of one as it does) on pve they ought to have planned better for the Hunting skill they mentioned when this was brought up. Especially now after all this time and people mentioning the problems with it.
That it impacts newbies/lowbies is even worse. Pve should not be made more difficult for lower levels, since that is when one might be testing where one's class fits in according to the (somewhat outdated) Areas list.
In my experience from doing the stream, and going to the townhalls, it does seem like the Pools have the sentiment of 'PVE power creep' existing and being a thing they're aware of. I can understand that sentiment to an extent, but this does not seem to be a great way to go about fixing it, as has been stated repeatedly.
But I would just as soon/maybe sooner have the recovery time be 1/2 instead of 0. And that's likely the easier fix.
Surely after 3 months, there'd be something more than, "We might have stuff interact with it soon. We like it now tho, lol." - Yeah, I'm annoyed.
As a PVE affliction, I agree with all of what was stated above. And in addition, it severely inhibits exploration. It's not only mobs that deplete your health. Want to do quests or explore in Bloodloch's sewers? Tough titties, you can't just run in and run out now. One bad flare of lava fumes and that's it George, you're done. You want to take a speed tour through Albedi areas? Good luck, kid. I've never used an autobasher on any char, so I can't really speak to how shock inhibits that, but it's *awful* for even people who walk through manually and take time and care with their targets. And my newbie alt? Forget it, shock destroys her because her celerity is so low that follow-aggros catch right up and finish the job.
My thoughts:
-If the goal of shock is to keep people from running and resetting in combat, I still see that happening, because what they're generally running from are aff stacks
-Shock hasn't made it any easier to pin down a PVP opponent - in group combat, you just move to the next target anyway, you can't split up and chase people down, even if they're stuck only a few rooms away. In duels, the emphasis is rarely on pure health damage,
-Pure health damage IS the focus in bashing, though - namely, the mobs damaging you. Or the environment doing so.
and most importantly
>> Any change that disproportionately punishes low-level, new, or unartifacted characters is not one that I agree with or support. <<