First thing’s first: No one is going to take Refraction Emitter (which will be referred to as bubble for the rest of this post) if it consumes grenades. Every other blitz in the game that uses grenades benefits the whole team in some capacity, while bubble is completely selfish.
Which is more valuable for the team: Blowing up every elite in the room three times, or being individually immune to ranged damage for 12 seconds 3 times? If I had to choose between the two, I know who I want the grenade to go to every time.
I really want to like bubble, i really really do. It’s super satisfying to use, but I can’t justify the cost of bringing it. Not when there’s Scum or Ogryn who can make much better use of the grenades. Which means that I’ll be harming the team by picking up grenades, or only get three uses of my blitz for the whole map. Both options feel awful.
So! Here’s some suggestions:
Make it cost capacitance AND also have a cooldown (30 sec, 45 sec, 60 sec, however long it needs to be). This way it can’t be spammed.
Alternatively, give it its own resource that behaves somewhat like a battery. When it’s turned on it activates and starts draining the battery, when its turned off the battery slowly charges over time.
Alternatively again, give the bubble hit points. When the bubble’s hitpoint threshold is exceeded it pops in an electric burst. Have the bubble cost capacitance with a cooldown like the first option.
What? Why?
Are you saying you want a PAID DLC class that already can take down bosses in an instant with that damn claw, to gain 12 seconds of complete immunity to all ranged attacks every 30 seconds, at no cost whatsoever?
Are you saying you want a PAID DLC class that already can take down bosses in an instant with that damn claw, to gain 12 seconds of complete immunity to all ranged attacks every 30 seconds, at no cost whatsoever?
Capacitance is a cost, and i’m open to the cooldown being as long as 2-3 minutes. Now that I think about it 30 sec is definitely too short and 60 seconds is probably too short as well. But the reality that no one is going to take it if it works off of grenade charges is also true.
I’m of several minds of how they can address the refraction bubble.
The easiest solution might be to just to fold some of the modifiers into the base blitz talent to make it cheap to spec into and then give it a hilarious number of charges. Like 8-10 uses.
On the other hand, they could go the capacitance route that is such a popular suggestion. And of course it’s popular, players don’t like being constrained by limited resources. (Even if resource management and usage is a significant part of the game play and game skill.) And noospheric command clearly demonstrates how good a capacitance powered blitz can be. There are lots of ways Fatshark could take this concept. I can easily imagine leaving it as is, but just implementing a mild capacitance cost + significant cooldown. But I can also imagine it having no modifier talents and a low cooldown, where the catch is that you gain the effects of the current modifier talents by letting it charge up more (similar to how voltaic emitter works.) Among other sundry mechanics.
And on the gripping hand, I doubt whether either of these routes can really get players to like the blitz. Most of the other defensive blitz options (like smokes, blinders, stunstorm) haven’t been widely enjoyed by players historically. And pretty much all of them, especially the ones that are more widely liked (smite & shock mines) have significant team utility baked in. In comparison the refraction field is purely selfish.
To redress this it might also be beneficial to let players keep their base servo-skull even if they pick the refraction emitter, and possibly the arc grenade too. That way the skitarii always has their hacking/debuffing utility tool available regardless of build choices. Or maybe they should just replace the personal bubble with another team psyker bubble that just happens to use grenades.
If the the problem with Refraction Emitter is that it is too selfish, then maybe it should make shields around the player and teammates in Coherency. Full team coverage and each shield could shoot arcs.
The shield allows you to deal damage in certain situations without much risk. How is that different from a grenade? Does that mean grenades are also selfish?
The only difference here is that the shield also acts as a panic button. And that’s exactly why I personally think it should stay the way it is.
An interesting idea I saw is that (I think) Mister E suggested on one of his streams is that if you take the Bubble you get the effect of reducing incoming damaging hits to 50 maximum (already a node; could remain a node). You’d get this effect even if you don’t have the shield on actively; perhaps the effect goes off IF you use all your charges.
This would give it a very useful passive effect that would allow the Skitarii to be tankier if they want, but they can’t have Noosphere/Medicae skull. It would even change up how you want to build your Skitarii, giving a lot more value to +HP, since every 50 health means one more hit you could tank.
When you shoot or hit enemies, you get a similar effect. And when enemies attack you, they won’t attack your teammates. The shield also electrifies enemies around you. Plus, I’ve often been in situations where I couldn’t pick up a teammate because there were too many ranged enemies surrounding them. The shield comes in handy here, too.
That’s an interesting idea I hadn’t considered. If that were the direction they took then I think it would have to either have an extremely long cool down or work off of grenade charges like it currently does, as a significant amount of the power budget would be spent having the servo skull. It’s not my preferred option, I like the choice of having to sacrifice one for the other, but it would be an improvement over the current state of it for sure. I’m not sure it would be enough for it to be picked over the servo skull talents though.
But you can’t protect yourself all around with the Arc Grenade—that’s what I mean by “surrounded.” A teammate is on the ground; place your group of Reapers in front of him, another 3 or 4 Gunners to the left and a bunch of small ranged enemies scattered around. In that situation, I’d rather have the shield than the Arc Grenade. Like I said, this Blitz also acts as a panic button in certain situations and can even help in close combat. So it’s pretty versatile.
And the Medicae Servo Skull can only do that one thing, so its use is very limited.
It completely negates ranged damage. I have no idea how that could feel bad, unless you want to use it all the time—which would make ranged units completely irrelevant. After all, it’s a Blitz and not an ability.
To take the medicae Servo skull you have to take the servo skull upgrade, so you get the medicae Servo skull on top of keeping the upgraded servo skull. So what it provides isn’t limited to just picking downed people up due to the prerequisite node.
If you’re surrounded by gunners like that and out in the open I would suggest the chain of events that lead to that situation could have been avoided, but in that narrow use case I agree that it would be the most useful thing. But it won’t help you at all if they’re surrounded by melee elites. Both the medicae Servo skull and arc grenade will solve that problem.
I should make it clear that I’m referring to this from a level 35+ havoc perspective, in which case you almost always want grenades going to Ogryns or Scum.
You have to ask which is going to be better for the team: making yourself invulnerable to ranged damage for 12 seconds, or screen wiping elites for the same resource cost? Personally I’m going to give the grenades to the Ogryn or Scum every time because they’ll get significantly more mileage out of it. Which also means in its current state I only would only get three, maybe six uses of the shield for the entire havoc run, which can sometimes take up to an hour to complete.
Okay, I’ve only been on Auric so far and I’m playing nothing but pubs, since none of my friends like the Tides, hence my situational thinking.
But I still stand by my opinion. It would be cool if something could still be changed, like the passive damage cap. But a cooldown would be a bit much. And if all the other members got a shield too, it would surpass the psyker shield—except for the tenacity regeneration.
I think we can agree that we don’t quite agree on this topic.^^
I’ve used IRE for a while and it’s not a bad blitz, but the uptime is abysmal because of the general rarity of grenade pickups. I really like it, especially because the tradeoff of total ranged immunity for a servo-skull. It lets you really punish gunlines.
My suggestion is to add a “regains 1 blitz charge every 120 (or whatever) seconds” as a conditional buff to that blitz only. Similar to how a keystone for Arbites lets them attain blitz regen without the dog.
It would solve the power gap between Servo-skull being the all-around top pick and Arc Grenade being meh but a more consistent choice than IRE.
Like make it one of the satellite nodes? Yeah I could get behind that. Requires more investment but makes it less sucky to take.
The one issue I see with it is if you had 3 charges you could dump all three for 36 seconds of ranged invulnerability, which is too long to be completely ranged immune. So they would probably have to reduce it to one or two charges.
You are forgetting the opportunity costs. The skull shreds and can outperform the dog increasing your overall damage by 10-30%. If you spec into it you get on top utility and clutch revives. Now you are giving up all that + the grenades that could have better served team mates like hive scum.
Now look what arbites gives you to give up on the dog.
Medicae skull does the same thing but better with more charges and you get the enhanced servo skull at the same time.
By “bruiser” do you mean Reapers? The big guys with the machine guns, right? Not the flak armored non-elite melee guys that are actually called bruisers? If you’re going to try to knowledge check someone you should probably get your terminology straight first.
& shock mines) have significant team utility baked in. In comparison the refraction field is purely selfish.