Suggestion: Make activated defensive buffs auto-cast/reactive

One of the biggest gripes I have with playing melee is having to take time-out to cast defensive buffs - it's unwanted micromanagement and breaks the flow of the game.

What I'm referring to of course is having to press the button enduring cry every 10 seconds, watching the timer to check its not run out, trying to get in range of some monsters to keep it up, buff falls off, having to wait to build it up all over again or even having to put multiple enduring cries on my bar... or casting molten shell every 8 secs, etc.

My suggestion is to have a toggle option to make these skills auto-cast, so for example, you get in range of some monsters, it auto-casts enduring cry for you. You take a hit and it auto-casts molten shell etc.


Oh, but ranged benefit from this equally?? No problem. Make it such that whenever you use a melee skill, it gives you a buff that reduces the cast time of your next enduring cry / molten shell by 100% (or some significant amount). Problem solved.

This has another effect that with the enduring cry toggled on, melee characters turn into unofficial taunt-totems for all your group members, heck, it might even make them feel like they're doing something useful for the all the LA rangers committing genocide around them.

+1 to this

but

"

you get in range of some monsters, it auto-casts enduring cry for you. You take a hit and it auto-casts molten shell etc.

can be quite hard to implement, so the auto-cast option should be more simple and straightforward:
"do you want to activate auto-casting for the skill bound to the 'W' key?" - yes.
"select the auto-casting timer for this skill" - 5 seconds.

"

johnKeys wrote:

+1 to this

but

"

you get in range of some monsters, it auto-casts enduring cry for you. You take a hit and it auto-casts molten shell etc.

can be quite hard to implement, so the auto-cast option should be more simple and straightforward:
"do you want to activate auto-casting for the skill bound to the 'W' key?" - yes.
"select the auto-casting timer for this skill" - 5 seconds.

Well, enduring cry already has a 4 second cooldown, so that kind of works - it's not spammable. With molten shell however, there's no reaosn to want to cast it unless the buff is completely worn out, just have it auto-cast when the buff runs out, or when you take a melee hit or something similar.

god.. just thinking about this makes me realise just how much more 'fun' these defensive buffs 'could' be.

I obviously don't know how GGG implemented the whole player skills mechanic, Zeekin - but judging from the way other games do it, an educated guess would be that casting ("action-when-pressed") is a function of key rather than skill.

this is why I wrote "skill bound to 'W' key" instead of "Enduring Cry".

although it is possible to create event-based auto-casting like you suggested - and that would be the optimal case - the game typically doesn't "know" nor "care" what skills you use and where.

therefore, "cast the skill I put on 'W' key every X seconds" is more direct and easier to implement, than "cast Enduring Cry each time I go near a pack of mobs", which you can't really tell a computer this way and expect it to "understand".

Actually, you can, johnkeys. They already implemented a mechanic to reduce loot when the character is too far away from a mob (someone with a dual spork totem did an analysis some weeks back).
So all you'd need was a check: If player close and skill x inactive - cast skill else do nothing

I dunno if this would be a good thing to implement. I mean, part of the skill, if you want to call it that, of the game is to keep alert and remember to drink potions, actively cast spells etc.
Of course you might say that you do that anyway and it would make the game just more fluent - but ultimately it does make it easier. I use my totems both as a damage dealer and as a scout, so I move forward a bit, cast totems, curse enemies. Now, with a mechanic that would allow me to autocast whenever I'm close enough to a mob, I would never out of carelessness run into a mob (or when fleeing from one mob and not taking heed not to run into unexplored territory).

But depending on how they implement the feature, it has potential to be good, I think.

I think the easier solution is to add (support)gem that works while you keep attacking. Theres already frenzy for frenzy charges and power charge on crit for power charges. Why can't we have some love for melee if they are willing to sacrifice one support gem slot to get endurance charges?

The worst part is, when you use these "casted" defensive buffs as melee, your cast sometimes gets interrupted. True melee know what I am talking about, one of the many issues with melee, but one not often mentioned. Try to combine these defensive buffs, with curses or more, forget it. By the time you are done casting, you have to restart the cycle, leaving no room to attack. If you could only rely on less buffs...

There needs to be a new enduring cry skill gem that runs like arctic armour with mana (or life) degen and that generates stuff on MELEE PHYSICAL hits (haven't seen 1 pure melee elemental, they all do some bits of phys dmg).

Other stuff people don't consider with melee is the damage off-set. On first notice we all see that we get in melee range, thus we receive that damage too. No it is far worst, because we have to get close to enemies, melee tend to agro more mobs and thus also get more ranged damage and less crowd control (as in kill them on the edge of your screen). Than of course there is the whole damage cycle, when getting to the enemy group, before you attack. That is 3 kinds of more damage, than just being in melee range.

This auto-cast needs to be melee only, reducing the run up cycle we have w.r.t. ranged. Ranged would lose time on dmg while doing these casts <- sounds balanced.

"

Ozgwald wrote:

The worst part is, when you use these "casted" defensive buffs as melee, your cast sometimes gets interrupted. True melee know what I am talking about, one of the many issues with melee, but one not often mentioned. Try to combine these defensive buffs, with curses or more, forget it. By the time you are done casting, you have to restart the cycle, leaving no room to attack. If you could only rely on less buffs...

There needs to be a new enduring cry skill gem that runs like arctic armour with mana (or life) degen and that generates stuff on MELEE PHYSICAL hits (haven't seen 1 pure melee elemental, they all do some bits of phys dmg).

Other stuff people don't consider with melee is the damage off-set. On first notice we all see that we get in melee range, thus we receive that damage too. No it is far worst, because we have to get close to enemies, melee tend to agro more mobs and thus also get more ranged damage and less crowd control (as in kill them on the edge of your screen). Than of course there is the whole damage cycle, when getting to the enemy group, before you attack. That is 3 kinds of more damage, than just being in melee range.

This auto-cast needs to be melee only, reducing the run up cycle we have w.r.t. ranged. Ranged would lose time on dmg while doing these casts <- sounds balanced.

hm endurance cry on melee hit would be beyond amazing, maybe one charge generated per 5 hits or something... that would be sick

I'd love a "chance to cast when struck" and "chance to cast on critical hit" support gem. Wishful mechanics would be that they could still be casted normally and would still only be cast when there's enough mana to do so, but not have a cast time or animation. If possible, disable recasting if the buff it gives you is still on duration.

It would mostly be for quality of life and general upping of game pace, not exactly a buff, but would definitely make playing melee less finnicky.

Really this is a topic about Enduring Cry. It's easy to make generalizations about why that skill is annoying, but really this is just 1 skill. Generalizations are premature.

Enduring Cry was not conceived as a whole- the disadvantages of the skill mutually compound each other to make it particularly annoying.

It is designed to be cast >1 time to get Endurance Charges maxed, and the charges only last 10 seconds before you have to engage another mob. Casting multiple times to get the full effect is purely tedious. The only reason it's there is because that's the way GGG happened to implement the level-up growth, so they had to make it meaningful. The 10 second duration means the spell has to be cast a lot. Since it does nothing other than provide the buff, it feels like wasted time. The combination of multiple casts, short duration, and no side-effect are a death sentence.

Possible solutions:
1) Enduring Cry grants 1 Endurance charge per enemy. For leveling up the spell radius increases (instead of the rate at which Endurance charges are gained). This makes it so Enduring Cry does not need to be maintained between fights because you only have to cast it once to get the full effect (usually). Raise mana cost so that the spell is not always cast at the beginning of every fight.
OR
2) Enduring Cry increases the duration of Endurance Charges created by it (say, 30 seconds at max level). This makes it so Enduring Cry does not need to be recast so often to keep the effect up.
OR
3) Have Enduring Cry do some effect that directly harms the mobs in some way. I don't have anything concrete to offer on this. The purpose is to make it not feel like wasted time when Enduring Cry is cast.