What We're Working On

Minor feedback for steel skills, Can we start att max shards when entering a new area, saves a click.

Hype!

I have been enjoying splitting steel but it would be nice if call of steel felt less clunky to use. I run the gem to cut the time but I feel like that shouldn't have to be a thing in the first place and it is innate.

Shattering steel doesn't feel like it provides enough to be worth it compared to splitting. Lancing steel felt super weak and takes up 4 shards making you call too often. Perhaps the focus on this one could be made into a more single target solution for the steel abilities.

"

Quin69 wrote:

Steel Skills Balancing

Steel skills force you to use a melee weapon but use projectile attacks, making it almost impossible to scale well into the endgame compared to other similar skills (reason: because you cannot benefit from warcrys or half of the nodes on the tree because they are labeled with "Melee" or "Bow")

My feedback would be that GGG could make steel skills function with warcrys OR straight up buff them in order for them to do similar damage to other similar abilities.

OH and maximum of 12 Steel Shards for lancing steel feels AWFUL - maybe a way to increase max ammo???

love you guys, keep up the good work!

- Quon62

Actual GOD GAMER feedback. Listen to this guy!

(warcrys LOL)

"

Mendatt wrote:

I've been playing hexblast, and I want to say first that it's fantastic. It's definitely in my top few favorite skills. However, there are a few ways it can be kind of awkward. It's really bad at dealing with totems, since they're still immune to curses, for some reason, but that's not a huge issue; it's mostly a problem in combination with the fact that it's very difficult to deliberately target particular enemies in crowds. This is fine most of the time, but if there's a totem in there and you hit it by accident, it doesn't trigger the AoE, which can be pretty dangerous. Similar things can happen when a crowd of monsters you've hexed mixes with a crowd of monsters you haven't, although that's more easily manageable, since you can just hex them again. Mostly I just think totems should be hexable. The fact that they aren't doesn't seem to make the gameplay meaningfully more challenging or anything, it's just kind of obnoxious.

The other issue is that it's incredibly non-obvious how to use it optimally. Not only is there no visual indicator for doom, but as far as I can tell there's absolutely no mention in game of what the base maximum doom is. As a result, there's no real way to tell how long you should wait after hexing an enemy to hexblast it, unless you go online, find what as far as I can tell is the single developer post mentioning the base maximum doom, do the math, and then count the second-and-a-bit while you play. The skill's gameplay experience would be massively improved if enemies gained a visual effect when they had a hex with max doom on them.

+1. Pretty much this. Hexblast is fun but way too cludgy at times.

Increased the dmg effectiveness on Blazing Salvo please.
Pyroclast is similar but has 80% while Salvo has 40% :/ Pyro gets additional proj on chaining it, blazing has no such mechanic. Feels like a really fun skill to play as miner but pales in comparison

Hey, new skill feeback here. I started steel skills, I was planning to focus on splitting steel, but I tried all of them. My character is now only using lancing steel at level 90. I've used dual wield early on and swapped to 2h axes near maps.

Barring damage numbers, all of the steel skills look and feel great, I'm glad poe has guns in the form of steel skills now. Splitting is a bit low on damage, and shattering doesn't have enough coverage for my taste.
My biggest issue is with call of steel; you can't easily tell at a glance how many shards you've got. I played a lot of warcry slams last league and it was easy to tell how many exerts I had left by looking at a number in the bottom of the screen. Call of steel's number is listed as a buff which changes places whenever you gain or lose buffs, so I'm never looking in the same place between one encounter to the next. I'd love a counter on Call of steel's icon, just like warcries, or possibly an icon floating above my character like a curse, but 3 swords that split into 4 shards each as you consume them.

Another minor complaint with call of steel steel is that against single targets, it doesn't generate enough shards to fully refill my shard counter when I attack immediately after. This might be by design but it's annoying, even if I get used to it. As a champion with master of metal, it gets me 11 shards, which is so close to the 12 I want for lancing steel's 3 consecutive attack combo. Having to wait that extra half second is a minor annoyance. Maybe more shards against unique enemies?

Another 'new' skill that I had a minor issue with was marks. I've been using sniper's mark and it feels awkward to place down since the targeting is so precise. I expected it to work like a brand, where you place it on the ground and it attaches to the closest enemy, without the detaching mechanic. I was going to use it with arcanist brand but it made it slower and swap targets when enemies were close.

I also recently started a stormbind character who's using Sigil of power. This one is not really a 'play feel' change, but I was hoping before the gem reveal that Sigil's mana cost increase would either be a more multiplier or a flat increase to benefit Stormbind the most. I would imagine the latter to not make archmage benefit too much, and letting Indigon have a share of the fun too.

Sorry for the long post, I tried to put in as many details as I could

Shattering steel got nerfed silently for nothing...like it has no real clear speed because of its poor range and you removed 2 of the 5 projectiles.
I thought about getting the alternate quality gem listed in your preview which effects give 2 additional projectiles, but live its sadly only one.
Such a bummer, really

I have been playing with spellslinger and blazing salvo/fireball/firestorm combinations since league start.

Spellslinger:

Early game changes make it a horrible levelling experience. CD and reservation changing constantly makes it really hard to maintain (esp. from a new player perspective, i am trying to make a guide for this and its ultra hard without making a gem setup for every breakpoint).

For lategame, i believe cooldown recovery nerfs are justified (it was a bit too easy), but along with reserve nerfs u are basically deleting the skill.

if u want ppl to invest into spellslinger more, it must do something.
SS was not used in endgame other than VD-Necro, and VD necro had a lot of other stuff going on.

Now VD is still playable.. but its really hard to justify using Spellslinger on anything else. There are just better options.

Blazing Salvo:

Late game performance is decent, it can benefit from a bit more base dmg numbers. (rn, it does less dmg than fireball even if u can hit with 6 projectiles.. and much worse for clearing)

early game is unplayable until 6 projectiles form gem levels

Firestorm:

Useful at low levels, new animation is nice too. yet still has that horrible startup time and clunkiness so i doubt it will be used even it had 50% more dmg.

Give curses Doom Gain on non-selfcast. Like at a 50% reduced rate or something. It would open up many more playstyles. You did it with Blade Blast, no reason not to.

Also you need key developers to put information together? Do you even communicate inhouse? Anyone taking notes? No one? Like you obviously have the information that you are working on the harbour, even though not how (just put a waypoint in the middle and get rid of the stupid marker clicking), yet nobody took note of what improvements are planned?