How the focus schools should be changed.

[torint_man]

Here is my opinion on how focus schools should be changed. I think Zenurik's energy overflow should not be nerfed, but Naramon's shadow step should.

Unairu passives: Max rank stone shape: adds 400 armor to base, and increases base armor by 60% (not applied to the 400 armor added), and 25% of armor is applied to shields. Mighty blows: On melee strike, 15% additive, permanent armor reduction. Replace medusa's touch with something new. I'll call it adaptive skin: Reduces proc duration on self by 50%.

Madurai passives: Buff them across the board to something like 60-80% at max. Physical damage types are very overlooked, so their +120% mods see little use. 

Vazarin passives: The instant revive is great. Retaliation is mediocre and scales horribly, so make it at max rank, straight up 50% damage reflection. This would also imply 50% damage reduction, and yes I do want that. Sure, it might be considered borderline OP, but focus should all be borderline OP, as it's the closest we have to endgame. This would not phase out unairu if my previous suggestions are applied, as stone shape would do more for high armor health tank frames. Disciplined approach is meh, so anything short of making the affinity share range infinite for the whole team at max rank would make it bad.

Naramon passives: Let's take on the elephant in the room, shadow step. Focus should be borderline OP, but not so much so it becomes broken, as in it removes an entire aspect of gameplay, and in this case it's the aspect of enemy AI. Keep the 10 second invisibility, just make it have a 3 second cooldown between times of invisibility(and add a timer on the HUD for the invisibility and cooldown). It should be called shadow STEP for a reason, like stepping in and out of the shadows, not monopolizing them. The extra affinity for melee weapons passive is useless the majority of the time, so replace it. The extra crit passive would be better if it was additive and not multiplied by mods, closing the crit gap between blood rush viable weapons and those that are not.

Zenurik passives: Energy overflow, another often called OP or broken thing. However, I consider it only borderline OP, as it helps with but does not remove the aspect of energy management. Doesn't work during channeled abilities, and any excessive spamming still requires efficiency to go with it(Also, EV massively outperforms it). Systemic overdrive is not a true passive(more efficiency for a limited time), as it has a time limit. Either replace it or remove the time limit. If we remove the time limit, it should be a multiplicative reduction, not additive with the efficiency stat, enabling its use with low efficiency builds, and not being too powerful on high-ish efficiency builds. Energy spike(energy orbs you collect restore energy to allies in a tiny range) could be interesting if the range was increased to a reasonable amount, like 20 meters.

Also, if we ever want spending focus points into the active aspect to ever be viable, we need ways to speed up the cooldown in normal gameplay, and for the active abilities to be actually good and compliment the overall theme of their respective schools. 

Madurai active: Make it do finisher damage proportional to the health of the enemies. The cooldown should be decreased with kills.

Naramon active: It should make the enemies take more damage on top of what it already does. Cooldown should be reduced by melee kills, just more so than kills with Madurai.

Unairu active: The atlas breath is okay I guess, but it's objectively worse than zenurik's active, so make it way better at base than what atlas can do. Cooldown should be reduced by the amount of damage you resisted(If you have armor that reduces damage by 80% and take a 1000 damage hit, 800 points of damage go to whatever formula the cooldown reduction has, or in the case of iron skin, all damage goes to the formula).

Vazarin active: It should, at base, heal and provide damage resistance for some amount of time. Against enemies, it should apply some sort of slow effect. Cooldown should be reduced by the regeneration of health and shields of yourself, and being the cause of health and shield regeneration of others.

Zenurik active: It's actually pretty good as is right now. Cooldown should be reduced by energy consumption.

[RagingGrizzly]

All I want is for Madurais active to not deal Blast damage...

Umbra Lance deals an "Unknown" damage type... why can't Madurai? Because it does only blue zeros when I fire into a crowd with certain Eximi in there...

-_-

[o-gibre]

My own thoughts. Nothing like the detailed mega-post up there =P. What I don't like is that it's pretty much useless in short missions. I see 3 ways to make that better:

- Passives ON from the beginning of mission.

- Active usable from the beginning. So that you have to choose if you wait to use it when you need it, or just burn it right away for the passives.

- Cooldown  replaced with a sort of separate energy bar/circle/whatever. (I like this one). Let's say I'm Zenurik, I have x amount of pulses of my active, so if I just want to pop a single pulse for that annoying enemy and then turn it off, the CD doesn't reset completely, just goes down/up/whatever a bit, still activating my passive. In this case, isntead of having to use the full thing, when it's rarely required, or alowed, I can use it more frequently and to a lesser effect( or greater, if you think about it), making it more useful and more "present", instead of being that kinda crappy( although super powerfull) thing I can use once or twice on a mission and doesn't give me a lot of benefit.

Edited July 16, 2016 by o-gibre