Design flaw: ‘On kill’ effects create a zero sum competition between teammates, meaning that the better one teammate does the worse the other teammates do. This feels bad and forces you into a murder race with the teammates. It also has the unfortunate effect of exacerbating any imbalances between classes and loadouts.
Many strong buffs depend on getting the killing blow on a certain target (marked), or certain type of target (elite/speciaist), or with a type of attack (melee/ranged/critical/weakspot/warp). When one of your teammates is consistently killing those targets you end up feeling weak and frustrated. What is worse is that because they’re getting those killing blows, they’re getting their own ‘on kill’ buffs which makes them stronger and thus more likely to continue getting the killing blows and continue starving you of your buffs.
This situation is even worse when the ‘on kill’ effect is not a buff, but the base toughness replenishment on melee kill. If a teammate is killing every enemy you are about to swing at in melee they can starve you of toughness and effectively be the main cause of your death.
Suggestions:
Change all ‘on kill’ triggers to ‘on contribution to kill’, where contribution is defined as ‘did at least x% of damage to a target that dies’.
Change the base ‘on melee kill’ toughness regen to ‘on enemy death in melee range’.
This creates a new and perhaps more frustrating issue where we now have to gauge whether or not our contribution is enough. It not being a binary “did you get the kill credit or not” would be nice, however. I think this is a complicated issue without a simple solution.
It would require a nerf to the gains because then it crosses into, “other people can trigger this for you.” That’s an entirely new issue that can very easily snowball in a team of 4.
Sounds kind of broken on the tin. These things would need to be heavily nerfed to compensate for the fact that anyone can trigger them for you.
I think “on kill” talents are mostly fine. The more you left-click the more you’ll just get them naturally. I personally don’t play to keep maximum uptime on any buffs I pick or choose, just that they exist and will help me more often than not due to my playstyle.
We’re sort of seeing this going into play on Arbites where the baseline doesn’t require you to maximize uptime on so many buffs just to feel competent, for better or worse.
Some buffs are really easy to maximize and others aren’t. I don’t feel like I’m struggling with Execution Order at all, for example, but if I’m more conscious about my stacks, then I go, “Oh yeah, I should be getting those.”
Other stuff can just be instantly gained and kept by mulching hordes.
Granted, I only play on Auric, so hitting 30 stacks of Keeping Protocol is relatively easy. I imagine it’s a lot more tedious with significantly lower spawn density.
I think other things like Psyker’s Disrupt Destiny would need to be brought up to that point where we don’t have to min-max uptime on something that could probably also be permanent stacks, just that they need to be adjusted as a result of them being permanent. It should also more frequently highlight enemies in the same way Execution Order does.
I really focused on Arbites just not having any issues with it and will say that none of those effects are fun on OG operatives. Losing ExStance because everyone’s killing your targets is always extremely frustrating. Psyker has to really upkeep Disrupt Destiny to feel like it’s ever worth taking over Warp Charges.
I imagine x would be fairly small, 10% or something. So it still requires players to be actively engaging relevant targets, but removes the all or nothing race to be the one getting the killing blow.
It would have to really depend on what the On Kill is giving, I think.
For Vet’s ExStance I think as long as you damaged the target (contributed) you should get the credit to upkeep it.
For anything that replenishes Toughness on Elite/Specialist kill that’s going into a lot of unseen issues like I said, where it can snowball badly with 4 players mulching groups of Elites/Specialists and you never going below 100% Toughness.
The gains would have to be crazy nerfed or they have to add an internal cooldown to prevent spam.
I’m not sure I worded this clearly. I mean only the base class toughness replenished on melee kill would change to melee proximity. Other ‘on melee kill’ talent triggers would require the contribution x%.
Yeah, it would absolutely require some numbers to be rebalanced, as it would result in a lot more buffs being triggered than are currently. I’m mostly trying to point out a fundamental design flaw that is shifting a cooperative game into a competitive one with undesirable consequences.
The idea that the whole team would snowball and do better the better they do I think is actually desirable in a cooperative game. Everyone wins or everyone loses kinda feels.