Allow Vaal skills to be used without souls

I'm sorry, but Surgeon's flask is the best prefix available. It is the only prefix that allows fairly decent recharge rate of Flasks during fights in which there are no/little adds.

This means, unlike any other prefix, you can actually re-use the flasks you used up in a prolonged fight.

What build benefits from Surgeon above other properties but doesn't deal much damage?
Because if we're talking about prolonged fights without adds, crits aren't happening a lot, and if they're not happening a lot, you're not filling up your surgeon flask that much.

Not all crit builds do that much damage, especially in Hardcore, where defense is more important than going crazy with crit.
Even then, builds that take some crits benefit more from Surgeon's mod than any other mod.

Think about a fast attacking build. At 10% crit rate, and you are doing 5 attacks per second. In 2 seconds, you get 1 charge assuming you attacked one target.

It is far stronger than any of the other prefixes for it to be called "balanced".

Even if Surgeon is unbalanced, it is not the concept itself that is unbalanced, but the other prefixes that aren't balanced with it.
Surgeon as a concept is no different from Life Leech - which gives you more survivability the better you are at dealing damage.

It doesn't suddenly extrapolate towards making a somewhat similar Soul generating mechanic unbalanced.

I am giving ideas for Souls to be generated in a less gimmicky way.
The rate at which you fill up souls can be controlled in various ways, and much less efficient for anything other than killing.

Why should you be able to fill up souls against bosses that have lots of minions, but not against other bosses?
Why must Vaal skills work as trash cleaners rather than truly ultimate skills?

My suggestion doesn't suddenly allow people to spam Vaal Skills.

For situations where Vaal skills clear entire screens and fill themselves up again, nothing changes with my suggestion.
For the other situations, it changes slightly.

I have a grudge with Surgeon's because I like legit, powerful defensive abilities in my ARPGs, something impossible if they are spammable.

Now you say Surgeon's isn't inherently OP because it doesn't have to be strong enough to make those skills spammable. I mean, what are you talking here? 1% chance to flask charge on crit?

There is a world of difference in design issues between 95% crit chance meaning "you always deal buttloads of damage" vs "you always bypass cooldowns for an entire class of activated abilities." The latter is far worse, because it restricts what you can do with flasks as a designer.

Which means: it isn't just about life flasks. Not even close. The LFOH and leech analogies are crap.

You want an analogy? Surgeon's is a lot like Romira's Banquet in Mjolner Discharge builds. That's a fitting analogy.

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Even if Surgeon is unbalanced, it is not the concept itself that is unbalanced, but the other prefixes that aren't balanced with it.

It is unbalanced, because getting decent crit chance is easy. We are talking about 20% crit chance or so.
If you are using a dagger or wand to attack, you don't even need to get anything from the tree to get 20% crit chance.
This makes generating flask charges too easy, especially with the amount of attacks you can do per second.

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My suggestion doesn't suddenly allow people to spam Vaal Skills.

I would like to see another way to charge Vaal skills, but I don't like this idea.
The first idea favors a specific play style, mainly faster hitting. So stuff like Incinerate will get charges really fast, and then, stuff like Minion, Totem builds, Puncture, may not even gain any charges.
As for the other idea about Vaal generation based on monster level and how much damage dealt. It is too specific and either always works or never works.
What I mean is take this scenario. Carnage has no adds, you are fighting him. In the second scenario, once he is down to a specific HP count, you know your Vaal skill is charged. I don't think that is a good thing.

If anything, I would like to see Vaal skills have a cool down. That cool down goes down by 1 second each time a monster is killed. So, you have options when fighting a boss with no adds.
Of course, this means there needs to be some restrictions on having multiple Vaal Skills. Something like a multiplicative timer should be restrictive enough.
So, for example, let's make 2 Vaal Skills with cool downs. Vaal Spark, cool down 100 seconds. Vaal Ice Nova, cool down 80 seconds.
If you equip both, cool down 8000 seconds. If you equip 2 Vaal Sparks and 1 Vaal Ice Nova, cool down 800000 seconds.

Vaal skills cannot be about cooldowns.
They must always start empty.
The whole point of the concept is sacrifice.

You seem to be disagreeing with me without having properly read and/or thought about my suggestion:
1 - In order to kill, you take ~100% life from the monster.
Ultimately, you gain X soul fragments after dealing roughly Y damage, depending a little on the monster and its level.

So please tell me, why do you suddenly consider it "unfair" to give players a fraction of a soul for every X damage you deal?
It's the same freaking thing, except you don't HAVE to kill the enemy, and it can be tuned so that killing the enemy is much better.
So for example if the monster has 1000 HP and killing it gives 1 Soul, taking down 999 HP from it may give just 0.2 Soul.

Essentially, it can be tuned such that killing is still the absolute best way to generate souls, but even without killing - such as during tough bosses with no adds - you can still generate souls at a slower rate.

You are arbitrarily disagreeing for no reason.

2 - Your assessment of my first idea is very narrow-minded.
I proposed a base way to generate soul fragments, and then a series of modifiers - naturally adequate to various playstyles.
So damage over time builds would naturally need to get appropriate modifiers to accomodate their playstyle.
There would simply need to be a default behavior.

3 - Your assessment of my other idea - in that it "either always works or never works" - makes no sense.

What's wrong with knowing you can use a Vaal Skill after taking down X health from a boss?
How is it any different from knowing you can use a Vaal Skill after taking down X adds?
How is it any worse from knowing you can use a Vaal Skill after waiting X seconds (with your cooldown idea)?

Again, you disagree under arbitrary premises.

I'm very happy we have a discussion going here, even if there is a lot of disagreement :P

I've changed my opinion, based on some of the responses. It makes sense to have Vaal skills solely based on sacrifice, as that is their "theme". I quite like the idea of blood sacrifice though, instead of soul sacrifice.

Perhaps white mobs should only give a soul when killed, blues give two, yellows 3, and uniques 4? Or perhaps blues give a soul when taken down past 1/2 hp, yellows for each 1/3 hp lost, uniques 1/4, and all mobs give 1 soul when killed?

Just speculations; these numbers could be tuned based on effective hp or something.

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Vaal skills cannot be about cooldowns.
They must always start empty.
The whole point of the concept is sacrifice.

Having a cooldown does not equate to starting with a usable skill. It should not be hard to make it so that Vaal skills start on cooldown, instead of being usable.
The difference being, Vaal skills advances 1 second every time something is killed, kind of like its current incarnation.

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You seem to be disagreeing with me without having properly read and/or thought about my suggestion:
1 - In order to kill, you take ~100% life from the monster.
Ultimately, you gain X soul fragments after dealing roughly Y damage, depending a little on the monster and its level.

I read both your scenarios and explained why both do not work. I had 2 separate responses. Please reread my response on both scenarios and why it isn't a good idea.
It has nothing to do with fairness, but more on the practicality of your suggestion.

Of course, you are also screwing over Damage over Time players, because of this. Puncture, Poison Arrow, Burn, Searing Bond, Righteous Fire, etc. are getting screwed from this.
As for Minions and Totems, they may also get screwed from your suggestion, since the attack isn't done by you.
Or are you suggesting that you get vaal souls even when your party members does all the attacking while you AFK? Because if you aren't suggestion this, Minion and Totems are not going to be able to generate souls for you.

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3 - Your assessment of my other idea - in that it "either always works or never works" - makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense. Let's say you go to a boss and say you get 1 charge every 10% of the boss' HP dealt. You end up with a flat 10 charges. So either that extra bit is enough to charge your Vaal skill or it isn't. That is the end scenario.
If you go with 1 charge for every 1% of the boss' HP dealt, your Vaal Spark (96 souls to use) charges up when the boss is at 4% health.
On the other end, if you go with a full Vaal Spark ready, and fire it, it will be ready again since a Vaal Spark can more than likely kill a boss (meaning you get 100 charges).

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How is it any worse from knowing you can use a Vaal Skill after waiting X seconds (with your cooldown idea)?

My follow up suggestion, unlike yours, will not allow you to damage race the boss. You need to do actual kiting while you wait.
Your idea makes it so that it allows players to damage race the boss to get another Vaal skill off again.
This is bad with Vaal skills that have lower soul count, like Vaal Discipline, which essentially makes ES players invincible while the timer is on.
To give you some numbers, with Vaal Discipline on, you end up with at least 12,000 ES(it is generally higher than this). You are recovering at 4000 ES per second. boss don't do that much damage that fast.

This is also bad with Vaal skills that do massive damage, like Vaal Spark. This Vaal skill can bring a boss from full HP to zero. 3 link Vaal Spark - Spell Echo - Greater Multiple Projectiles. This lets you shoot 1500 sparks.

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Starxsword wrote:

My follow up suggestion, unlike yours, will not allow you to damage race the boss. You need to do actual kiting while you wait.
Your idea makes it so that it allows players to damage race the boss to get another Vaal skill off again.
This is bad with Vaal skills that have lower soul count, like Vaal Discipline, which essentially makes ES players invincible while the timer is on.
To give you some numbers, with Vaal Discipline on, you end up with at least 12,000 ES(it is generally higher than this). You are recovering at 4000 ES per second. boss don't do that much damage that fast.

This is also bad with Vaal skills that do massive damage, like Vaal Spark. This Vaal skill can bring a boss from full HP to zero. 3 link Vaal Spark - Spell Echo - Greater Multiple Projectiles. This lets you shoot 1500 sparks.

1 - High damage builds already get Souls faster than the rest.
In extreme cases, a single Vaal Skill cast may kill enough enemies to fuel another cast.
2 - You can do all the "bad things" you said as long as there are adds to kill on a boss.
This makes Vaal Skills gimmicks rather than something you can rely on as a core part of your build.
Whether 1 or 2 are problems or not, my suggestion will neither cause it nor make it worse.
Specially because...
3 - I did not say how much % of the boss health would it take to fill up 1 soul.
So trying to say my idea doesn't work based on a hyperbolic assumption over a non-determined variable, doesn't really make for a compelling argument.
4 - I suggested that not only you gain soul fragments by dealing damage, but from getting attacked/cast at as well.
Both rates would obviously be very low, such that during the time that it takes to kill an enemy, the average damage dealt PLUS received should provide AT BEST a single Soul.
5 - To me, Vaal Skills are about sacrifice & blood & soul.
That is why I disagree with the concept of Cooldown.
Cooldown means all you have to do is wait, kite and kite and wait... and you get to use the Vaal Skill.
You should NOT get to use Vaal Skills without actually engaging the enemy.
That's why I suggest you can only build soul fragments by hurting enemies and by getting hurt.

Making Vaal Skills usable/not usable or spammable/not spammable purely based on whether there are adds or not is simply poor design, and my suggestion merely seeks a reasonable inbetween.