Temporary HP/Stagger talents and their main issue

[Esawo]

Following my previous post, I want to touch on the THP/Stagger talent rows. This is something I’ve always thought about ever since 1.3 and felt needed to be said but never took the opportunity to do so. The fact that Huntsman was given a talent for THP from range reminded me of the issue, so I’m finally posting about it.
As it was and is right now, you can only choose up to two different THP talents and healshare in one row for all careers. I would really like to know what was the decision behind this (please, devs, if you read this, answer it), because it’s absurd and needs to be fixed. Yes, I see this as an issue - a game design issue.

The main problem is that they seem to be completely arbitrary and that, for some careers, their synergy is very poor with a lot of weapons or - and that’s even worse - with “meta” weapons. Let me explain: while I’m sure the devs would like to see the meta weapons get indirectly nerfed by that, it also hurts the career itself and make some other careers way better than others because of their synergy with the meta. For instance, the THP on ult talent for Pyro covers her lack of THP generation but BW doesn’t have any of that and still has very shitty THP choices as it is right now, which is further emphasized by the fact that Sienna, in general, is a ranged career and isn’t big on THP generation (which is fine considering how THP from range was broken before 1.3). This makes Pyro and UC preferred choices over Battle Wizard, even now that her talents have been changed for the better. Her niche has to stay, but THP is no niche at all and needs to be leveled out accross all careers very badly.

Here’s my suggestion: make the first row of talents, the THP/Healshare row, a special row. It should be a 5-talent row like that, for instance. Of course, as stagger talents are standardized accross all characters, they should benefit from that rework.

I think this makes total sense as I am seeing a will to encourage variety in playstyles, a will to make THP more accessible because of how important it actually is and that the Big Balance Beta that resulted in the 1.3 update proved to us that you guys wanted to make melee great again. This also means that once that change is done the THP on headshots talent for Huntsman should be removed because it’s really just bandages for how horrible the THP generation on Huntsman is (something a lot of have been complaining about).

Cheers, I hope this actually makes it to the game because this part of the talents is a design issue that I and many other feel very strongly about. It’s seriously ruining a part of career balance, as proved by what careers people tend to cater to.
I don’t care that it involves some UI changes, I don’t care if it doesn’t get to us that fast, what matters is that it happens in the not-too-far future and that it happens. At the very least, give us an answer on the matter if it’s a no and tell us why. We’d like to see a yes if it’s yes though!

[Osrali]

This is a pretty reasonable idea, overall. Flexibility is good, and the temp/stagger mechanics are too ingrained into the game’s systems to arbitrarily place a couple on each career. Certainly while most weapons are available on every version of a character.

I’d pushed during the beta periods last month for Fatshark to not feel committed to the ‘three talents in a row’ design philosophy. You can just look at current talent lineups to see they were stretching to meet these goals, and i’d have preferred a couple of choices per row that actually meant something over bounty hunter getting a bunch of random garbage. It’s easy to imagine them increasing or reducing certain rows as necessary, and being able to incorporate your idea without much fuss.

Alternatively, they just slap the most appropriate THP/stagger effect onto all of the weapons and free up the talent tree for actual decisions to make - but that’s just me. It’d probably just get confusing for people(as if it isn’t already).

[souI23]

You right. tHP now are trash and its talents are badly thought. Both because now we don’t gain enough white health to “resist” one only hit, both because their bad synergy with careers. For example Huntsman has tHP on kill (but he normally kills elites with ranged weapons and anyway he hasn’t weapons like 1h axe, axe and falchion, etc etc) and tHP on stagger (talent that imho works well only on tank career).

[Naugdil]

I’ve just posted it in the other topic:

“IMHO they should just merge THP on cleave and kill and base it on damage dealt and everybody would be happy. It would work with high cleave weapons and with single target weapons, with hordes, elites and bosses, and nobody would be mad about dealing high dmg to a tough target just to have that kill stolen by a teammate. Just leave THP on stagger for low dmg weapons. Head/crit works on some careers (not BH) but it would also be redundant (crits and headshots mean more dmg). So everybody could have the same choice: THP on stagger, THP on damage or healshare.”

[Yzneftamz]

Maybe a bit of history of the game will help understanding the reasoning. Before a certain point in the game (Big Balance update) there were only two THP Talents in existence: On Kill and On Crit. The former was a lot stronger and only a couple of Careers had any chance of getting use out of the crits. Even on them, it was more reliable to use On Kill. The third option was even more worthless (actual heal on Boss kill). This lead to practically everyone running the first option, and thus there was very little difference between characters and Careers for that aspect. Players wanted more variance, and that was provided in the form you see now. It did take quite a lot of tweaking to get it anywhere near balanced, though, and now the balance got shot again.

I’m not claiming the current system is perfect, but if everyone could choose between everything it would again take out the variance of Careers and thus bring back a lot of the old complaints. Yes, I think some Careers could use options outside what they have now. Yes, I think ranged careers (not only Huntsman) could benefit for THP on Ranged- kind of Talents. But the system is in its current form because of player demand.