This is a clear example of excessive power creep and damage outliers, with or without Venting Shriek. Perilous Combustion triggering itself is also another hilarious example that humans don’t understand exponential growth. A competent inferno staff user melts it all, whatever we are talking about trash mobs or rotten armour elite waves. Soulblaze is allowed to stack too easily and from too many triggers.
Yes I get it, enemy density in Havoc is one reason why those setups are so successful, and yes I understand we can still fail runs in Havoc, but this is just bizarre how Fatshark seemingly doesn’t see this as being an issue, and frankly part of the reason why Havoc difficulty modifiers have to get more silly with every season.
Maybe introduction of “infinite” cleave weapons with no damage falloff, and multiple sources of quick damage multiplication, isn’t such a great idea?
Because both the devs and the respective tester group is terribly afraid of nerfs. So nothing ever happens. Some might argue on the outside that the game needs a balance pass, to get some brownie points, but on the inside they’re all just power fantasying™. Which is why the people argueing for balance changes and nerfs get filtered out very quickly, so nothing changes and the creep goes on.
All of this is just hearsay of course. I’m sure some testers will swoop in and claim the opposite as usual.
Because reworking something „that just works” based on some design principles from VT2 flamers is not something to be tackled easily. That’s my very best guess anyway.
I would want Voidblast and Inferno, and Flamer to abide by rules of limited cleave, but I just don’t think the payoff of this is worth dev time, since it’s not a significant problem anywhere outside of Havoc.
I’m not sure if VT2 flame staff is a good equivalent. Soulblaze mechanics doesn’t exist in VT2, and stacking of SB is one of major issues here. It’s too easy to reach max stacks and stay there.
The closest is Chaos Wastes where anyone with Myrmidia’s Wildfire can clear the screen by setting a single enemy on fire. But that’s limited exclusively to Chaos Wastes.
SB stacking has been an issue for long time. Gone are the times when SB was a bit of joke, as enemy numbers are far higher. Instead of some downwards adjustments, we have seen an INSANE buff, which allows Perilous Combustion kill to trigger another PC. I mean, are they trolling us now? Is this an accidental change / bug? I mean surely no one serious would go and say “lets buff PC”.
I also can’t imagine anyoen would actually make this change intentionally, but Fatshark works in mysterious ways. My guess is some dev saw in the code that soulblaze was specifically excepted from triggering PC to prevent this. The dev who saw that may not have been the dev who made it that way, and/or forgot why it’s that way, and/or didn’t realize what the function was even involved in, then added soulblaze to it. Another bug fixed!
It’s considered mid at best in vanilla difficulties, since there is no rending equivalent and hordes can be a big source of THP sustain for many builds.
In balance mods designed for modded difficulties it still gets nerfed for scaling too well into that kind of density and mob HP.
Overall it is a vastly more balanced weapon due to having ACTUAL target restrictions for what it’s effective against.
I’m aware. I’m merely talkig about the remaining ones. Fatshark will never nerf Perilous as it would cause 99% of Psykers to have a hissy fit.
I initially thought that they buffed every other build in an effort to make it less dominant to possibly lessen the blow when Soulblaze is nerfed, but know I realize that I was wrong. They’re simply buffing everything up to make it ”viable”.
Yeah, I think this is a big part of why Inferno is so silly with many of supportive effects, be it SB stacking past the 14-stack limit of Inferno or 60% rending (Penetrating Flame blessing and Penetration of the Soul skill).
If I were to come up with a solution to it, I would move the majority of the damage Inferno deals to direct stream, and reduce its SB stacks greatly - basically trace back to how Flamestorm staff works in VT2, since:
This would make the DoT snowball slower to pop-off, but still make trash melee units perish relatively quickly,
Maintaining the damage would require constant input from the player, rather than the DoT doing the heavy lifting; at least to a certain point,
Wouldn’t make the Rending and Perilous/Shriek interactions irrelevant; but even those could be nerfed/get an upper SB stack limit of say, 16, and both Voidblast and Inferno would stay relevant.