What Is Wrong with STATIC DISCHARGE??!

[NuclearCoffeePot]

Static Discharge is a unique mod for the prova. It is intended to function in such a way that whenever you perform a charge attack enemies near you recieve a shock. It used to be this mod was only really good at blinding you since you could stack up the charges with repeated heavy attacks and it only dealt a flat amount of damage. However I recently noticed the mod had been changed since the last time i saw it, and its description now states it shocks nearby enemies on charge attacks, dealing 80% of weapon damage, and i thought, hey, that seems much better then the old Static Discharge, mabye i'll give it a go for laughs. Only to find that it is a horrible mess.

Spoiler

I first noticed that no matter how much damage i stacked on the weapon i only ever did 1 dmg per second on the shock proc. So upon inspection I learned a few things.

Firstly, and most egregiously the "80%" described on the card, is complete bull and the shock only deals 25% damage. Second it is only 25% of base damage, so it is only effected by Pressure point and not elemental mods. Even with a primed pressure point of course, it was still only a 1 dmg per second shock. So the only thing this mod does is provide a weak stun to enemies in a pitiful 4 meters of your prova. Which could be done anyway, cause the prova has base electricity, so with a little range and enough status chance you electrocute enemies on almost every swing of the weapon. 

I must say its a massive shame that such a cool sounding mod does absolutely nothing in practice, is misleading in its description, and is so flagrantly useless its a marvel it even exists. 

So here is my proposition, along with other mods that do nothing in the game, Static discharge should be changed to at least perform a halfway decent function that can do more then just waste space. The electrocute can't even kill level one enemies by itself. Why do we have mods that do absolutely nothing like this and Reflection, which literally does nothing because it works based on channeling and they somehow missed it when they changed channeling mods over to combo meter, which I will remind everyone was in October of 2019 when Grendel and Kuva Liches were released.

Ultimately DE will have the say in how these mods get changed but here is my suggestion.

First for static discharge- 

Either fix it so the mod ACTUALLY shocks enemies around you for 80% of the Charge attacks Damage or....

Idea1- Whenever the prova damages an enemy a % of the damage is stored and released as a shock that strikes the x # of closest enemies when a charge attack is used

Idea 2-Static discharge increases status chance and causes electric procs dealt by the weapon to arc a significant distance further and deal bonus damage

Idea 3- The prova PASSIVELY shocks nearby enemies each second dealing basically nothing but increasing the range of the shock with combo meter or kills for some melee cc

Second for Reflection- Heres the card if you needed a refresh on what it does 

Spoiler

Simple proposition- Just remove the channeling requirement so a % of damage blocked is reflected by enemies, and to make it so it actually deals damage give it 100%+ of damage taken.

 

Edited June 13, 2020 by NuclearCoffeePot

[XaoGarrent]

From what I understand this is one of those things that wasn't super great to begin with, that got a nerf-outta-nowhere when some Youtuber managed to find a use for it, waaaaaaay back in the primal mists of time. Basically, it's been bad since, and because it's so bad, almost nobody knows or cares about it, and thus it gets ignored by the devs.

DE only really pays attention to whatever has extremely high usage statistics, or experiences a sharp spike in usage (in other words, sees a trend) versus new content. Meaning anything that's been the victim of the nerf hammer tends to fall down the memory hole. The Tonkor ate nerfs and was complete trash for ages, for instance, and only after years of people complaining was it improved.

It's sad, but there's a reason the "nerf or nothing" meme exists here. Outside of big patches where they buff a whole bunch of underperforming stuff at once, weapons and augments normally tend to get balance adjusted in one direction only: Downwards.

Edited June 13, 2020 by XaoGarrent