The easiest way to buff Specialists - free Heart of the -whatever-

Make "Heart of the -whatever-" free to cast, and not require any item to use. There's no reason a specialist should have to use CP for this skill that can theoretically result in no Goods, and requiring an item to use it makes it annoying.

Make it require the item if someone wants to use it and isn't a specialist.

Yeah I was getting ready to document a "useful" specialist rotation... and while doing so I had a heart of the XXXX with ZERO @#$%#$% procs. At which point I pretty much threw specialist down the toilet and cursed the developer who thought this was a good idea.

It should require an item, be available once a rotation and ensure at least one proc.

The heart skills are the worst. They cost CP and an item and only last a short time. There's so much room for improvement in them it's ridiculous.

Another option is to remove the CP cost, 45 CP is a huge gamble for a chance at a small gain.

My issues with specialization:

1. Honestly I don't think the heart abilities take into consideration that SE lowered the frequency of good/excellent procs on the higher tier synths.
2. Why would I want to use heart ability on culinarian? I get it on per se a 2 star offhand but a single food item? No thanks.
3. The lowered procs wreck it's utility on anything useful to craft. Delineations should be a bonus not a requirement.

I don't think they factored the lower proc rate either. It feels like the built the system with the normalized proc rate... and then reduced it and didn't recheck specialization rotations.

As I see it, the low proc rate of Goods and Excelents at high levels was specifically SE's method for encouraging specialization. The idea was that low procs would make it troublesome for players to craft stuff at high levels unless they specialized, in which case they could use Heart of the XXXX to cancel out the proc rate penalty. It's no guarantee, of course; even low-level synths sometimes go the entire synth without a single Good or Excellent, after all.

The problem is that Heart of the XXXX is just too darned expensive for its duration. 45 CP is a huge investment, and even if it DOES provide a couple of Goods you may well need to spend them on Tricks of the Trade just to have enough CP leftover to properly finish the synth. It can provide, at the very most, four Goods, and if you're going to be spending two of them to recover CP, that depends on an awful lot of good fortune... Of course, those Goods could also be advancing your Whistle stacks for you, which I'm sure was also partly the point, but that's a whole other can of RNG weirdness.

The fix for specialization is just to remove it from the game altogether.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Waeksyn

The fix for specialization is just to remove it from the game altogether.

---

Or you know, make it so specialist get specialist-only recipes instead of making it only mildly useful for people that can't be bothered to level all the jobs.

There are plenty of other things they need to do as well, like never making battle potions 1-per-craft ever again, replace Whistle While You Work, etc. This just seemed like an especially-glaring oversight, considering how annoying it is to even use, and being subject to RNG.

Honestly, at 45 CP there's no reason to use it. Adding an item requirement just makes it extra-useless.