While I find the IRE to be quite fun to use, Integrated Refraction Emitter relying on grenade charges really takes away from the fun. Instead, I feel it should rely on capacitance to activate, which relive the strain on a hard to find resource in games.
Suggested change 3 charges(refiled by grenade boxes) → 1 charge (costs 50-75% of 1 capacitance charge to be activated, 5 second cooldown after use)
Same goes for the flamer skull, it just does far too little to be worth a blitz charge - and it’d be more interesting juggling whether you use your abilities or blitzes.
Oddly, they did this for noospheric command but nothing else. It’d make perfect sense for refraction emitter.
This is my only disappointment with the Skitarii class - every Blitz ability is a consumable. It is especially weird when ordering a servo skull around.
Or just give it a recharge. It doesn’t even block trapper nets so you can’t really cheese that much with it.
As for the servo skull, different ones should have separate charges, aka flamethrower and medicae.
Medicae servo skull ant free allies from nets when we are out of charges btw
We could also have it taunt range shooter in attacking it if it needs to use up a grenade. It does nothing right now, if you’re targeted by melee, but your allies are getting shot.
yeah, something that only affects you and doesnt help your team should never cost grenade charges, which take away from your team’s resources. Like, you are protecting yourself, by taking something like a boom grenade or rocket launcher from your team that could have helped EVERYONE
The ability is not broken at all, so it makes sense to actually make it rechargable.
If they aren’t going to switch it over to capacitance, then it should be buffed, frankly. Perhaps allow it to block melee attacks and nets. Maybe even Poxburster explosions.
I have been thinking - instead of straight up capcitance charge, it should act like ACD, you activate it and its active until you deactivate it. costs capacitance per second. 10% per second or something.
Allow me to rephrase what you’re asking for here:
“I should be completely immune to ranged damage for the entire mission and stun every enemy in my general vicinity every 6 seconds.”
This is an insane idea and should never, ever happen.
IRE could maybe work as “max 2 charges, you regenerate 1 charge every 90s” or something to that effect. Or if you really must tie it to capacitance, you could keep the requirement for grenade pickups and consuming blitz charges, but the duration is based around draining capacitance, but even this is probably too strong.
Turning off the more dangerous half of the game functionally infinitely is not a valid suggestion at all, though.
As I said, make it so it drains capacitance. So you cant recharge at all while its active, this fixes the problem. It has a cost associated with it now. in those 12 seconds you have no way of recharging capacitance, which can cripple you in some scenarios. Might even be too steep of a price.
You’re just asking for IRE to work the same way as ACD, and uptime is not really a consideration or concern for any halfway competent player. It is, in fact, exactly why I’m saying this won’t work. A decent player just spits out so much capacitance just by being in combat that it’s just not a realistic concern; either the drain is reasonable and you can just regen all you need in the downtime where there’s minimal ranged threats, or the drain is unreasonable and people will still cry about it being useless because they run out of shield halfway through the gunner line. If IRE is just tied to capacitance drain, you get functionally permanent immunity to ranged damage as long as you pay even the slightest bit of attention to your capacitance management. That is not healthy for the game and should absolutely not be a thing.
The “cooldown to regen charges” works because it puts an absolute upper limit on the uptime you can achieve in any given period, and the “still uses blitz charges but drains capacitance for extra duration” also works because while you can get a lot more value out of any given use of it, using it is hard committing a finite resource, which means you need to make decisions and think about your play. But even then, both of these have their own issues where they are arguably too strong; hard to say for sure either way without playtesting though.
There are changes to Skitarii blitzes that I think are probably reasonable, such as increasing the arc grenade’s chain arc to 360* and maybe adding a short range burst of electrocute effect when it explodes so it’s more consistent with its damage, or giving the shield fewer charges but a timed regen, but “just make the shield work off of capacitance” is absolutely not one of them.
Might as well not tie it to charges and instead, just put a straight 90 seconds cool down between uses. For it to act as a second ability.
I’m broadly fine with that, tbh. It’s functionally a ranged-only Castigator’s Stance in that case. The cooldown would have to be the right number (90s feels in the ballpark, but can’t say with certainty), but conceptually it works fine.