Amazon feedback (mostly posivite except for Parry/Disengage, suggestions inside)

tldr: https://imgur.com/a/7KBMS4h

Design

Thank you for making our og d2 javazon dream come true again. It shows that you guys were there in its prime glory and, in my mind, you nailed it in restoring that glory with the Amazon. The spears, thematically fitting skills, the fitting parrying mechanic, the best skill (lightning spear), the nimbleness of combat, the clear step up in skill combos. Kamil's perfect soundtrack to go with it and the voice acting is great too. All in all this is how I imagine an amazon to be, amazingly well done! Thank you again.

Skill combos

Things like Twisters empowering from Whirlwinds and them both empowering from ailments is an absolute banger. Similar to the bleed combos. This is a clear step up of skill design and the more of these cross-skill interractions we have the better. It really widely opens up the possibilities in combat and it's actually a really strong example of combo system working in player's favor and being desirable. I also wanna acknowledge the importance of both vertical and horizontal combo scaling where vertical means the skill empowering itself to stronger stages (Whirling Slash for example) and horizontal means a skill empowers other skills (like the Whirlwind empowering Twister). It's also important that a skill feels good to use by itself and not being gated by the combos, Whirling Slash again being the good example. It doesn't do much damage but at least it's swift, applies blind, creates/empowers Whirlwind etc., it has its purpose. Another example is Glacial Lance that just straight up feels good to use. I felt this combo-e quality with most of the Spear skills.

Frenzy charge interactions

I love how Frenzy charges empower the skills into much stronger versions. I also like that this not the case for every skill and I like the design choice of skills empowerable - no accidental frenzy consumes by util skills. Finally, I liked that skills felt generally ok to use (maybe a tinybit weak) even without frenzies - which, again, is important.

However, you do want to get the frenzies and that leads me to the functional flaw of this character, the parry mechanic.

Parry and Disengage (this one needs improvements)

I really like the idea of Parry and it being put to Bucklers, the counterpart to regular shields with Raise shield. I used the Parry from start and was hellbent on using it even in later stages of campaign. The functional problem of it needs a bit of a deep dive but, here are 2 immediate points:

1) Disengage is single target, making it very hard to actually harvest the Parry debuff on any monster pack with more than 3 monsters

2) Parry is way too dangerous to attempt on any monster pack with more than 3 monsters


Parry, deep dive

We need to face the "melee truth" here. Which is that generally any pack of 5+ monsters from level 5 onward will kill you in under 2 seconds if you stand near them, regardless of the type of defense. And that includes their attack swing time. This is true in poe1 and even more so in poe2.

We deal with this either by

a) damaging the monsters asap, mini-stunning them, buying us more time to damage them more and kill them before they attack
b) avoiding melee range altogether to perform a) from a different angle or distance

Now because the Parry is an active skill we need to hold down a button for, it doesn't provide nearly enough protection for us to warrant going melee range and give up our a) attack.

Furthermore, when we hold down Parry towards a pack we actually need to wait for the front mobs' attack swing, buying more time for other mobs to surround us, making us go "all in".

Furthermore still, lot of mobs don't end up using skills that could even be parried, making the Parry attempt go to waste. This happens a lot. Again, allowing other mobs to swarm you in the meantime.

You could technically do it in a safer way by running around and finding a smaller pack to perform it on but it feels kinda dumb to do that.

You could argue that we need to be picking carefully which pack to parry and which not, which is kinda true but in reality there's just not enough time for that.

--
So, after the whole campaign, my statistics of successfully Parrying a pack went about like this:

40% Successful parry, applying the Parry debuff on 1-2 mobs and preventing the damage from them (that I volunteered to risk taking in the first place)
30% Mobs didn't end up attacking or used ability that couldn't be parried
25% Parry missed, I got heavily damaged
5% Parry missed, I died

Now this was only the first part, now you gotta "harvest" that Parry debuff to receive Frenzy charge (or other effects). The first notable skill that does that is the Disengage.

Disengage

So, continuing from the previous scenario - if I got the 40% Successful parry I now need to do a single target poke attack on that specific mob that was tagged. The best case scenario is when it's 1 or 2 of the front mobs of the pack. Then they're the nearest and it's about 50% chance that you don't missclick another monster of the pack, putting Disengage on cd and also likely jumping to the side instead of to the back -> not disengaging at all, causing you to die or be heavily damaged. Worse still, if the tagged mob is somewhere in the middle of the pack, your odds of you hitting it with Disengage are even lower.

This whole merry-go-round is fun and games under like level 10, but becomes deadly very quickly once the mob count ramps up because how inconsistent it is to parry and disengage safely.

There's the Retort tier 2 support which allows you to harvest the parry debuff with any other skill, not just Disengage. I used it with Whirling Slash and it was a bit of an improvement but the Parry itself was still very inconsistent and dangerous.

This, together with the bad Parry odds to start with, is the clear reason why everybody goes away from Parry asap.

By the end, I wouldn't even be able to tell you how many times I died by deciding to "let's parry this pack here". And I'm not like a boomer with aiming issues. I play FPS and have a very good wireless mouse.

And because Frenzy charges are such a big part of this class and the Parry being pretty much the only inteded way of getting frenzies, it makes the problem even more painful.

Suggestions

With your permission, I'd like to suggest these fixes:

Band aid fix 1: Make Disengage do AoE damage with decent area, making it reliable to collect the Parry debuff.

Band aid fix 2: Widen the Parry angle by a lot, hell make it even 180 degrees. The stun buildup is enough cost for it, and you having to risk melee range, and you effectivelly self-stunning yourself for 1-2 seconds when waiting the mobs to attack you.

However the underlying issue will still remain - asking us to stop attacking to perform a Parry so that we block an attack that we could have avoided if we didn't stop attacking in the first place.

We should really be attacking and parrying at the same time.

Which is how I came to this idea:

Alternative idea - Trigger Parry

Change the "Grants Parry skill" on Bucklers to something like "X% of this shield's block chance is converted to % chance to Trigger Parry".

So a 30% chance to block Buckler would turn into 15% chance to block + 15% chance to trigger Parry, or from 30% block to only 15% Trigger Parry.

The Trigger Parry would be blocking some attacks for you and tagging enemies along as you fight normally. Allowing you to then harvest the tags as a Frenzy charge or other effects just like now. This would really smooth-out the awkwardness that the Parry currently presents while still allowing and benefitting the ranged/melee hybrid playstyle.

It would also still be a linkable skill, allowing customization. Parry cd or recovery stats could be introduced.

It would also underline the Buckler being the less defensive but more offensive type of shield.




Thank you for reading and for this one incredible game.