Vet Keystones post Patch 15.2

[alsozara]

Great write up. I’ll start by dumping my last lot of rambly thoughts from the other thread.

@alsozara

So to be clear it’s not about having all the stacks all the time. I love Inexorable on Zealot despite the stack count yo yoing up and down continuously. The difference here is I don’t need to swap off my melee weapon to keep building the buff. I’m building it by moving around and dodging which are all things I’m going to already be doing, and I’m pretty much guaranteed to start each new encounter with high stacks initially. Refilling your ranged clip is nice on paper but outside of plasma I tend to find I’d rather have the reload speed on elite kill talent because it’s up more reliably whether I’m in an encounter that has me swapping a lot or one where I’m just blasting with my gun non stop for a bit. The guaranteed ranged crit is again nice on paper but extremely gun dependent for impact. I’ll reiterate I really like Kant shotty that just doesn’t get much in practice from any of those bonuses. Again the toughness gain node is nice in theory but if I’m low on toughness and under pressure quickly weapon swapping for a toughness burst just feels a bit unnatural to me.

And definitely the least nice feeling part of it all (again to ME in case I haven’t made that clear enough yet) is +dodge range and speed switching on and off during encounters. If I were to ask for a change here it would be just to make the dodge range and speed a passive effect while melee is out while everything else can keep working as it does now. Would that be objectionable to you? Alternatively a duration increase for the melee buffs to 15 seconds would go a pretty long way and not be out of line with other keystones.

Regarding left keystone I think I would like it a lot more if spending more than 5 seconds in melee didn’t usually mean dumping most of my stacks. Maybe if melee weak point kills at least paused stack decay for 3 seconds I could vibe with it better. Honestly I’d love for melee weak point kills to actually add one stack along with pausing decay but I’d understand anyone who thinks that would leave to too easy full uptime. I do really like your idea of changing it to a timer regardless of whether or not you’re moving so you’re still fiending for regular ranged headshots for upkeep but how much you move around while doing so doesn’t play into it.