Most If Not All Damage Skills Become A Waste As Game Goes On Due To Lack Of Scaling

[motorfirebox]

If there's going to be a way to consistently deal %hp damage to enemies, it has to be locked behind other requirements somehow. Maybe the %hp portion of an ability's damage only applies if your energy is maxed when you use the ability. Maybe it only applies when the target has a certain proc on them (e.g. Ember's WoF does %hp on enemies that are currently on fire), and it consumes the proc. Maybe you have to have your power strength maximized to get the %hp effect (thereby sacrificing efficiency).

 

To make things interesting, maybe each power has different requirements to qualify for %hp. Ember's WoF just requires the enemies affected be on fire, while Ash's Blade Storm only does %hp at max energy. And maybe powers with a lot of utility, like Rhino's Stomp, simply never qualify for %hp damage.

Edited October 17, 2014 by motorfirebox

[--Q--uaint]

This ties back to the root problem of infinite scaling. As usual, it's the source of most of our woes.

 

Go try a damage skill out on some normal enemies, in a fixed-spawn mission. Anywhere in the solar system, and even in low-leveled voids, they're really not that bad. However once you move out of that, you start to have problems. And since we've all become accustomed to infinite stuff, and we've been given a very powerful (too powerful?) set of tools to deal with those scaled-up enemies, I'm sure you can see the problem there.

 

One way to go about fixing this would be to have percentage based skills. For example, right now slash dash does 500 damage at max rank. However, it it did 500 damage plus 20% of the enemy's health, it would stay useful for a much longer time. 

 

I'd prefer if we fixed it at the source and capped enemy scaling. That's an issue for another thread though.

100% this.

 

If there's going to be a way to consistently deal %hp damage to enemies, it has to be locked behind other requirements somehow. Maybe the %hp portion of an ability's damage only applies if your energy is maxed when you use the ability. Maybe it only applies when the target has a certain proc on them (e.g. Ember's WoF does %hp on enemies that are currently on fire), and it consumes the proc. Maybe you have to have your power strength maximized to get the %hp effect (thereby sacrificing efficiency).

 

To make things interesting, maybe each power has different requirements to qualify for %hp. Ember's WoF just requires the enemies affected be on fire, while Ash's Blade Storm only does %hp at max energy. And maybe powers with a lot of utility, like Rhino's Stomp, simply never qualify for %hp damage.

 

That does sound interesting, but please note that Well of Life + Energy Vampire with minimized duration does only %hp damage, and can kill at a decent pace while CCing - yet it's just not used very much because it doesn't affect more than one target at a time and the casting times eat a lot of your ability to act.

 

Shield Polarize also does percentage-based damage, and note how it is the meta against any enemy type with shields.

 

 

I think it's important to make sure it's not too hard to get the %damage if it's to be locked behind requirements at all, and also to give them enough %hp damage to make it worth meeting those requirements.

Frankly, I'm okay with abilities being the meta, so too much %-based power is not an issue for me :P (Well, there's probably a point that would be too much even for me, but I doubt it would ever go there.)