Briar Caltrops

Does anyone else think this Race Item is a bit unbalanced at the moment, it is currently the only thing that can consistently wreck an entire race if you take more than one tick. I personally think the frequency at which it occurs should be reduced to that of Hero Tonic and/or Meteor, or the potency should be reduced to that of Bacchus Water when you account for all the Stamina lost to being Lathered while Frenzied.

What makes Briar Caltrops especially frustrating is the lack of counters. Unless you have a Stamina Tablet or Sprint Shoes on hand your screwed. To this point perhaps reducing the cast time on Choco Silence so that with quick enough reflexes you can silence the Caltrop before it finishes cast could serve as an additional counter.

Sorry if this's been brought up before, a quick search didn't show anything threads, but I may have missed one.

It's about racing strat. Do you see 2 Briar are next?, don't go to pick the chest, because is a big chance you and your followed enemy get briar and drain your stamina.

If you are leading the race and see one briar and noone is behind you, don't pick the chest and let one pursuer get the briar and drains others pursuers

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rappa

It's about racing strat. Do you see 2 Briar are next?, don't go to pick the chest, because is a big chance you and your followed enemy get briar and drain your stamina.

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Only so much strat is in involved when you can't even put on the brakes to get out of the rather large AoE it has. The only choice outside abilities (Dash etc) is to sprint, which is the same choice the one with the briar has (which is used constantly together); and as for picking a side - forget it, they'll loosely follow you either way you go and lag takes care of the rest. They either need to tighten the range it hits or give the ability to slow down, not just release sprint. Slowing down could even give a little stam defense perhaps.

Either the frequency of the briar should be lessened or have the item be a one hit thing instead of "constantly sap your stamina if you're in it". I had some occasions where both players and the AI used theirs on me at the same time and I pretty much lost the race before it even hit the climax. Not even Mario Kart is that cruel.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rappa

It's about racing strat. Do you see 2 Briar are next?, don't go to pick the chest, because is a big chance you and your followed enemy get briar and drain your stamina.

If you are leading the race and see one briar and noone is behind you, don't pick the chest and let one pursuer get the briar and drains others pursuers

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Yes this would be a decent strat, if it was actually possible to control wether you get the chest or not.
I can do titan EX and not get hit by anything because I dont lag a lot in instanced dungeons/trials
But I will miss 75% of the chests because my chocobo needs 5-10 seconds to move to the next lane/jump
I can't control if I pick up a chest or not. So if SE is gonna keep up with the lag they need to remove stuff like that because it's impossible to use that strat right now

The caltrops are ok past the first chest...but it's that first chest in a race that can really wreck everyones day :P If you don't have the ability to shut the other chocobos up(sorry,forget the name) and one or two briars are coming up,you either need to be in first place to avoid it or slow to a crawl to not be hit by them,and as we all know,being too far behind at just the first chest 9 times out of ten means you aren't winning the race,unless you get extremely lucky.