Do we need cooldowns, spirit, ammunition, charges, rage, glory, fuel, infusions, combo, and energy?

Its the side-effect of GGG wanting you to play with a combo of skills instead of one button builds. If you can get all effects at all times in every skill, then everyone will just go back to playing one button builds.

A lot of the extra resource bar mechanics only exist because of how GGG handled damage over time in this game.

No DoTs stack anymore and magnitude is based on the damage of the hit so skills like Hammer of the Gods with bleed were fundamentally broken, hence glory was added so you'd have to at least briefly pretend to fight a boss before super nuking it.

Ignite was too easy to proc on one big hit with any fire damage so flammability had to be added, but then Incinerate didn't make sense as a skill so it needed a rework to stack its ignites without being a horribly overpowered DoT multiplier.

Some of these "extra resource bar" mechanics are fun and good (ammo, rage, cooldowns) but adding more and more as a Band-Aid to some core issues with damage interactions in the game is unhealthy and increasingly contrived.

The real fix here is to handle damage over time, and more generally address the problems that initially brought about the design of the extra resource mechanics. This would be a difficult thing to change at this point and it feels like the game has taken on some irrecoverable technical debt. Hopefully at least going forward GGG doesn't plan to add any further new resource bars the next time skills have a cracked interaction.

I'm out if I ever see a "Land Fertility" bar with all these plant skills.

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MEITTI#3999 wrote:

Its the side-effect of GGG wanting you to play with a combo of skills instead of one button builds. If you can get all effects at all times in every skill, then everyone will just go back to playing one button builds.

The issue is, large combo based gameplay does not work well at all with ARPG style games in general. 2 or 3 skills comboing can work, but when you need 5 or 6 skills to make the combo work as intended it is to much. Let us look at the werewolf skills for proof of this. As near as I can tell, the way they want the combo to go at end game is Lunar Blessing to open, followed by a Pounce to mark the biggest target in the pack. This is then followed by 2-3 Lunar assaults to build freeze, at which point you use Arctic Howl to buff your attacks and then basic attack the frozen mobs to generate ice shards. You finish it off with a cross slash to blow up the shards. This is literally 6 skills to use, all while packs are zerging you down. 2 of the skills require multiple hits to actually get the effects off, so you are in fact having to hit upwards of 10 times just to get one combo rotation off. If your build is at all decent, you are never completing the full combo because the enemy will DIE before you hit 10 attacks, or they will stun you and kill you first.

Lets take a look at plant druid by comparison. Cast entangle followed by thunderstorm. Damage done. Thunderstorm can be automated with cast on crit, so you literally are only pressing one button and getting the full effect of the combo. Clears whole screens, with a fraction of the effort.

Yea the suffering belongs to Crossbow players. Don't try steal our honour please. +Reloading -Bolt sack!!! +Ton of investments.

So far I'm okay with all others listed, but infusions are truly bad, as they slow the gameplay in two annoying ways:

1) wait for them to spawn

2) go pick them up when they do

This makes infusion reliant builds unnecessary tedious.