Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
I honestly hope its "Essences", if any, are as much debuff as buff, so that not having them is a perfectly fine option (due to content not being inflated around their overwhelming buffs). That said, they should also be bonus actions, not requiring any items.

...Heck, most common active skills, too, likely should be item-less (non- or infinitely consumable), just with a shared time-recharged resource cost akin to MP. Anything actually finitely consumable should be impactful but low-count bonus actions or items looted from mobs/events and removed upon leaving instance.



Which made them, on the whole... just bloat steps, imho. You had some choices (with clear best choices, but let's go with it), sure, but the base state was never an option, meaning you had to have and use an item just to reach normalcy (or else deal as little as 56% throughput). Leave the un-modified state a competitive choice, drop the item bloat, and we'd be better off for it.
I don’t find them to be bloat at all. The game was balanced around a simple expectation of actions like aetherweaver, if you want to delete aetherweaver then bake its damage into the calculations I guess I’d be fine with that but the rest of the actions were fun ways to spice up the combat and do more damage if you knew what you were doing

The overwhelming desire of people (not you I know you aren’t really like that) to have the opinion of “I want max performance with minimal effort” is a blight on this game, if you wanted to chain load font of magic on deep profane while a DNC cure 2 refreshed you on fiendhunter you should have the option

The HP bloat was people who wouldn’t even bring aetherweaver