Rakhali's Calvary stripping defenses without doom, intended?

[crazywolfpusher]

After using Grave Spirit with the new augment, Rakhali's Calvary keep the ability to strip defenses on enemies without them being tagged by doom.

 

Bugs aside, and after some thoughts I think the augment is very well balanced. 

Pros:

- We get the ability to apply Doom without using Doom, I guess this alleviate a bit the spammy ability playstyle of Dagath. It's very intensive on Shield Gating setups. Potentially being able to replace Doom with a helminth.

- Higher uptimes of Immortality by reducing it's cooldowns with kills.

Cons:

- Take a mod slot in exchange of nothing.  If you weren't dying with Dagath, this augment feels unnecessary.

- Lower uptime of the Crit damage buff. The augment only gives the buff for 10 seconds at base with a 25 seconds cooldown. So if you weren't dying, again, the augment is actually worse.

- Require very high enemy density to get kills > playing alone

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 21 by crazywolfpusher

[SenorClipClop]

It really does flip the entire ability and how it plays. I've only played around with Spectral Spirit a bit, but here's my initial takeaway.

No augment: Passive buff for crit damage and orb drops, one get-out-of-death-free card, pick up all the dropped orbs while invincible to heal back up, repeat. Set and forget at the start of a mission.

With augment: Active buff for crit and orbs and Doom, kill enemies after to get it ready again. Pop this ability when you're low health, heal back up with the drops from enemies you slew while invincible.

[ChaqueXR]

I think the augment is underwhelming because of the forced cooldown after it's done.

I get it's to balance the ability itself on its own and that you can reduce the cooldown by 1 second per kill with the augment.

However, it's not very good to use because your critical damage buff is gone under cooldown, and hence your critical damage is not buffed, making it harder to kill enemies, and longer to recharge the ability.

I thought I would like it but the cooldown just turns me off, I might as well keep it always on and apply doom with Doom ability while having other means to survive.

I can suggest having less punishment with the cooldown or a buff to the cooldown, off the top of my head I can think of either:

A. Allow the cooldown reduction value to be modifiable by ability strength or duration.

B. Using the augment allows for a shorter cooldown, can be a fixed value or depending on your own ability duration.

Otherwise, I feel I do not like using it.

[Ms_Demeanor]

I think the Rakhali's Cavalry issue is unrelated - it does it whether you have the augment equipped or not in the current build as far as I tested because I was curious about that as well and did some digging. The augment is not meant to apply Doom outside of Spectral Form, which I would be okay with if its application IN Spectral Form from all weapons didn't make it impossible to get on-kill stacks for Galvanized mods and Merciless/Deadhead arcanes as soon as you out-level the point where you flat up one-shot the enemy anyway making Doom pointless to have in the first place.

I'm not really sure what the intention with the augment is, to be fair. I *thought* it was to allow duration modding to extend the invuln period, use that to set up a nice nuke, set off the nuke when the invuln wore off and drop the cooldown for reapplying. Powerful, but risky; and trading the old passive playstyle for a new active one. The issue is that there is no point doing that if you can't keep weapons stacked to get the nuke off when you need to. And if it *wasn't* intended to use Duration modding to extend the invuln that far then the trade-off is equally not worth it. A 30s invuln with 8s downtime is decent: a 15s invuln time with 15s downtime just isn't worth the hassle.

Edited June 19 by Ms_Demeanor

[KlutzMeister]

I feel they are trying to make this ability do too many things as both a damage mitigater and a damage buff, and then over correcting when balancing.

 

originally, the loss of damage seemed like a punishment for pushing yourself so close to death, but if you were careful you could keep the damage up

now, the ability does more , but only 1/3 to 1/2 the time (depending on mods), and if you can get enough kills to get that up to a more reasonable 80-90% up time, you didn't even need the ability in the first place, so its either overkill or leaves you when you need it most

 

my best guesses on how to fix it:

remove the cooldown and invulnerability and make her tankier

or increase the invulnerability duration 50-100% and allow the kills during invulnerability time to cut down on the cooldown duration

 

and while we're at it maybe remove the tunnel vision inducing screen edge smoke and maybe make wyrd scythes a channel ability to add options for incarnon weapons that need those and to shift her more away from a caster and towards a weapons platform