I had a really decent build for a melee focused Veteran with VoC before this major update, now? Now I’m basically sacrificing way more than I did previously to make it work comfortably in Auric Damnation. Hell, I had a number of builds which worked, sure, I wasn’t the most powerful thing running around Tertium, but it worked, it felt good, I was happy.
Now? Now I’m not so sure.
They’d be better off just reverting the changes, these keystones are utter garbage especially since they’ve just been tacked down at the bottom of the talent tree. Not to say no effort has been put into this, but. It just comes across of, “We don’t know what we want to do, how do we make this healthy for the game?”, I’m surprised they didn’t get more community feedback first, but well, here we are.
Sure having some of the more powerful nodes moved to the top is nice, but then they’ve mostly been nerfed as well as with everything being rearranged so you can’t build in a certain manner. It’s actually more restrictive than it used to be, but that’s mostly going to come down to the fact they’ve shifted major nodes around and with some that are more necessary are deeper in the tree and the more niche nodes that would fit only certain builds are now force-buys tax nodes, it is definitely a major nerf to Vet.
Hell even my current build is likely to just flatout ignore the keystones, because they will force me to overspecialise and I’ll be honest, they don’t really seem worth the investment. I’d be losing out on more important stuff to allow me to survive and contribute to the team.
I don’t see why Veteran has been consistently altered, it’s clear they do not know what they want the Veteran to be, I won’t be surprised if they do another rework after this one is poorly received. Infact, I’m positive most people weren’t asking for this, what Veteran needed was nodes consolidated and their choices to matter more, I don’t feel like I have choice right now, infact, I’m more than likely going to build in a really linear way, ALMOST like how we had BEFORE the talent trees were introduced, way to go.
You’re going to see more cookie-cutter builds just to eek out the most from these trees now.
Plus the keystones themselves, we’ve got one decent one, another that is just ‘Why’ and then one that is just unnecessary cause you’ll already be strong enough on the ranged damage part anyway, so why bother?
Like who the hell is going to use “Focus Target!”, it’s counter-productive, mostly due to the fact if you’re playing fast and hard, you’re going to be pinging every special, yes, but that means the majority of the time you’re only going to apply a 4% damage bonus since you’ll be pinging far too often than the stack refresh, seriously 4%. What the zog is 4% going to do? It’s about as good as that Fireteam Aura, which used to be 3%, but is now 5%? Wow, really big, much power, so funny. Pray to FartShart to hit a breakpoint people.
So do they expect Veterans with said Keystone to not be cooperative and selfishly horde their stacks via not pinging? Seems like it! Since that’s the only way to get any value out of that keystone, if you wait 10s every time when the game has multiple bigguns coming at you. The only time you’d even get the full stacks off, is between waves, so really, it’s ass. Oh and if you apply the ping onto a target you don’t need to? Cool, waste of stacks right there.
“Weapons Specialist” is okay. Can’t really fault it. Just… Why the zog is it at the bottom like the rest of the keystones?
“Marksman’s Focus” just seems like you’d be overinvesting, in all honesty but at the same time has this weird punishment mechanic tied to it unlike the other Keystones and just seems rather unnecessary. Why have a stack degradation condition tied to it, if you can prevent it from just playing like every other Veteran? Seems very over-designed for the sake of it.
I give it a 4 out of 10, Veterans now have to sweat harder.
