Intuitive Link

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Wendyhutzpah wrote:

When intuitive link uses blade vortex the blades appear around the caster of the link.
But when using voltaxic burst it drops them on the ground.

Is this difference intentional?
and if so why?

+1 on this. It's counter intuitive with how other skills work and it is a waste of an interesting synergy.

I have been experimenting with Intuitive Link for solo play by linking to minions, beyond just providing utility as summoners. The whole discussion about the HoAg build is here. Here I'd like to highlight a couple issues with Intuitive Link that prevents the skill from breaking from the rather unfortunate and underused niche of summoner QoL.


1. Lackluster damage potential

Let us compare the damage potential at maximum proc rate for various triggering skills, regardless of the ease of attaining the max rate:

Cast when Damage Taken (CwDT): 0.25s cooldown; 25% less damage penalty; building around requires: self-damage (e.g. Wardloop/recoup)
Cast while Channelling (CwC): 0.35s cooldown; 30% less damage and 1 link penalty; building around requires: channelled skill and mobility (e.g. Cyclone)
Cast on Critical Strike (CoC): 0.15s cooldown; 10% less damage and 1 link penalty; building around requires: attack-based skill, attack speed and critical strike cap
Spellslinger: 0.42s cooldown; 30% less damage but with 186% wand added damage (at level 22); building around requires: attack speed and mana reservation
Intuitive Link: 0.5s cooldown; 37% less damage penalty (at level 22); building around requires: minion hits

With longer cooldown, harsher damage penalty, Intuitive Link is in every way worse than CwDT (in fact CwDT deals 238% more damage than Intuitive Link). Even its ability to trigger multiple linked spells at once with separate cooldowns is overshadowed by CwDT. On top of that, the requirements of having sufficient number of minions that are speedy and tanky enough go in an orthogonal direction from scaling player spell power unless limited to a very specific set of minion-scaling skills, while CwDT builds, mostly Wardloop/recoup at the time of this feedback, at least provide good defensive recovery and is arguably easier to achieve using a set of unique items.

I don’t see any harm removing its damage penalty altogether, or even providing a damage bonus to incentivize minion-spell hybrids, making it a unique trigger skill with longer cooldown but harder hits (reducing cooldown is less attractive as per LaGueuze's feedback as it will yet require additional minion speed scaling to work, further diverting investments). This could open up new possibilities with more attractive damage scaling, while its current utility-providing niche is totally unaffected.


2. Link spell targeting

While Intuitive Link promises a low-maintenance way to trigger spells unlike CwC or CoC that require constant player action, its trigger rate is made unreliable with its targeting. Casting Link spells have rather low range, and target recognition is too easily blocked by obstacles.

While the Links do prioritize unlinked minions, it doesn’t prioritize targets with shortest remaining Link duration if all targets are linked, so that it is impossible to reliably refresh the uptime of all links, and very often you end up missing a minion or two despite recasting every 8-9 seconds (just before expiry), simply because the Link just seeks out nearest targets.

It will greatly improve sustenance of Link spells if there is another layer of target priority for lowest remaining link uptime, so that recasts can reliably refresh duration of expiring links.

In addition, as a quality of life, it will be very useful if in the buff icons each link duration is separately displayed (currently it's only showing the longest duration as a buff), such that not only will we know how many minions are currently linked, but also the remaining durations for each link, so that we can identify expiring links more... intuitively ;)

Please consider making minions from unwavering crusade un-linkable. or for that matter any minion that has a duration should not be able to be linked too. in no context would any normal non exploitive build (cast on death) want to link themselves to a ticking time bomb that has a 100% chance of you dying. I have a wonky build that I like to play that involves using intuitive link connected to a 2 golems to proc eye of winter which feeds my HoAG virulence stacks semi automatically with me only having to reactivate the links every 10 ish seconds. Ive decided to try the new guardian ascendancy this league for my typical herald of agony build but the unwavering crusade minions make this "build tech" absolutely heinous and randomly gets you killed. so ive went back to my arcanist brand setup to generate stacks.

I played Intuitive Link as a Saboteur experimenting with a variety of cold dot moves. Ultimately by playing Cold Dot I thought that I could provide supplemental damage using Vortex and I tried out a variety of moves to be spammed by the Saboteurs bots. The biggest issue was finding a decent minion to proc the effects, I settled on using Spectres and focused on the Hyrri archers then I moved on to a heist minion that had fast attack speed ( I believe it was from underbelly it used explosive arrow). If I had experimented longer on the starting base I would definitely look for a minion that has long range attacking capabilities.

One move that really stood out in this build for good and bad reasons was Glacial Cascade. Using range units allowed the perfect distance for the best coverage, but minion's are fickle. I tried to outfit an Animated Guardian to be the fastest attacker and using some CD reduction to try to spam the spells but the damage just felt low and inconsistent because it relied on the minion actually attacking.

If I were to try this kind of build again I would probably not go cold dot because intuitive link with it just feels like cold dot with extra steps and no real versatility.

I think the move has 2 big issues ,outside of the death gimmick(and the unique not just preventing death outright not just xp penalty removed like comon that disables so much versatility i.e. golems and with the build constraints as is it effectively nerfs fun for no reason), one is that the mana cost is so huge. Mana regen is in a bad state and to use intuitive link to full capacity you need to have a sizable mana pool, any rampup via CDR just amplifies this problem and adds a restraint on damage and survivability.

The second issue is that due to the death gimmick, you have to choose a minion with some major constraints. 1- The minion needs to be aggressive (easy to solve) 2- The minion needs to attack easily without getting stuck (requires lots of experimentation and sometimes not possible) 3- The minion needs to attack frequently 4- The minion needs life% because if it dies you die 5- This leads to partial minion investment 6- Constraints your main build because now you're slightly minion oriented defensively but have no defenses yourself. The solutions I think of for this is to either make intuitive link 1s- provide movement speed to linked targets or just to minions, 2s- make minions aggressive when linked 3s- Remove the death gimmick completely 4s- give minions some phasing buff while linked 5s- give melee minions additional range.

I know that the solutions are potentially arrived with different PoV's but if the linked target while attached to minions issue could be improved in QoL this move would absolutely be seeing more usage, but please remove the death gimmick and redesign the ring to provide links increased effect or something that would make it more sought after for Intuitive link.

Here is my feedback:

Build Concept
A Necromancer focussed on Intuitive Link with Summon Reaper to trigger spells that either self buff the reaper or deal damage.

Issue 1 - Targeting is near impossible during gameplay
Linking Intuitive Link to a specific minion requires the player to move his mouse over the minion's 3D Model on screen and press the corresponding button.
With this targeting mechanic it is impossible to select a specific minion, e.g. the Reaper, in the mass of minions that run around the screen.
Accidentally linking to the Reaper's "food" minions or linking to weaker unwanted minions leads to instant player deaths and breaking the entire build concept.

As a player i want the option to configure / filter to which target Intuitive Link links to. As an example for my Summon Reaper build i want Intuitive Link to only to relink to the Reaper minion to prevent deaths caused by UI issues.

A good suggestion to solve targeting issues for Link Skills via hovering over the BUFF icons has been made here:
QoL- Allow Link spells to target Minions using the thumbnails at top of screen


Issue 2 - Lack of scalability
The high DPS penalty resulting from high CDR (0.5 seconds) combined with '38% Less Damage' feels too harsh.

As a player i want to feel a more impactful feedback from skills that have been triggered by Intuitive Link. An example could be to either reduce the CDR or adjust the Less Damage value to follow the line of other trigger spells.