Thread: Culling and restructuring skills to make room for 5.0 abilities

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

To clarify: I meant only to state that if we went through another stage of job-appendage-severing skill culls, I'd rather lose Overheat than Wildfire. This is not because I feel like Wildfire can be better worked off or improved than Overheat; quite the opposite. I find Wildfire something very nearly complete in itself that would work well with a mechanic that Overheat seems to have been slated to fill (i.e. some secondary, synergetic mechanic), but has failed to manage quite "right" in its current implementation. With the current implementation out of the way, we might see a less awkward synergetic mechanic that allows for less bottlenecked and more broadly nuanced gameplay.

If you've some ideas for how Overheat might be redone, I'd love to hear them. My own ideas have sounded nice conceptually at first, but have been difficult to envision the practical effects of.

(For instance, I've considered making Gun Heat increase both damage and attack power, increase granularly at both flat amounts and a portion of missing Heat, and for Heat to diminish continuously. Hot Shot would simply be a massive Heat generator to jump-start rotation or fill pivotal areas. Gauss Barrel would be toggleable to chamber your Heat, allowing for greater control and for heat->damage expenditure on abilities. I'd still probably need additional Turret stuff to really fill out the gameplay, but I like the idea of timing fluid & dynamic peaks and troughs of burst damage, if I could just figure out the technicals required.)

I REALLY like your Gun Heat idea. In that case, if you accidentally overheated your weapon too much, you'd still have to deal with those seconds of "overheated" phase? It would be like a gamble of trying to stay... like 90-99% for most damage output? I like that! The skill floor would be a "safe" play, staying at 80-90 heat... the skill ceiling would be players that properly can juggle 90-99 heat.

If you had... say, something big coming off cooldown (Like Wildfire), then you'd purposely lower your heat levels with Cooldown, just enough for it to detonate at the 90-99% (saying, like, the detonation itself wouldn't add heat). It would create some interesting calculations on how much to reduce your heat not to overheat by using your dps cooldowns.

As for Wildfire, If the heat mechanic worked like you suggested, then I wouldn't see it as an issue anymore, especially if the horrible clipping issue of rapid fire would be dealt with. I'd just advocate, then, for a better visual effect to it.

Also, Flamethrower need to be looked upon and really brought as a major dps cooldown instead of the gimmick that it is right now.

On top of that I really like your idea of Gauss Barrel something to control better your heat. Not quite sure on how that would work mechanically, but at least it's a concept that would take GB off the limbo of an ability that it's currently at.