On the 3/6 patch, many of the charged abilities that didn’t natively (as in, without buying an item that grants charges) have multiple charges or AP upgrades that gave more were given native charges in some capacity. Because of this, the abilities that do NOT have native charges (this includes abilities with AP upgrades to grant them) seem more out of place. These abilities are:
-Magician’s Vexing Bolt
-Lash’s Grapple
-Venator’s Consecrating Grenade* (5 AP upgrade allows charges, but does not grant them)
-Holliday’s Bounce Pad*
*-It is worth noting that Holliday and Venator naturally have 2 charged abilities, with Venator’s 2nd charged ability being unlocked through AP upgrades. For Holliday, Powder Keg has native charge gain in its AP upgrades, so she has more incentive than the other characters on that list to get Extra Charge (EC) or Rapid Recharge (RR). They also both scale with spirit–another point I will touch upon later.
Venator is a bit of a special case because of his Consecrating Grenade dealing gun damage, which will be touched upon later.
Because of this, there are 4 (3ish, since I don’t really count Holliday for the reasons stated above, but for the sake of the post I will say 4) abilities that are balanced around a charge system that they do not benefit from until certain items are bought.
This creates a pressure to buy those EC/RR–this in itself is fine. However, when compounded with the fact that the listed abilities do not gain charges through AP upgrades, there comes a secondary pressure to keep EC/RR for the remainder of the game or you halve/third the abilities effectiveness from losing those charges.
To me, this feels really bad. I equate this to the phenomenon in DotA where it was required in all but name to buy Boots of Travel on Tinker, lest your hero be/feel useless. They amended this by giving him a global teleport that worked nearly identically to Boots of Travel as a part of his Rearm. This also opened up design space, as it allowed the nerf for Rearm to no longer refresh items without making Tinker unusable.
Lastly, spirit scaling; the charged abilities for both Lash and Venator** do not have any spirit scaling. A good chunk of the benefit that other heroes get from buying EC/RR–the spirit power that only applies to charged abilities–goes wasted on these heroes.
**-For Venator, the lack of spirit scaling is somewhat mitigated by Recharging Rush triggering itself if you hit Consecrating Grenade due to the fact that it deals gun damage. Additionally, the upgrade that turns it into a charged ability also grants another bonus in the form of more healing reduction, which is already a good incentive to take it.
The focus of this post is Lash's Grapple, since of the listed abilities, it arguably benefits the least from EC/RR. To this end, I offer suggestions to remove the awkwardness of being a charged ability with no native charges or spirit scaling. I got sort of crazy with them as I went on, so I've organized them by ascending weirdness. I'm mostly serious here though.
SUGGESTIONS:
A: 6 Ideas to address native charge issue in order of increasing wackiness:
A1. Just give him a native 2nd charge
A2. Add +1 charge to his T2
A3. Lower the cooldown on the base skill (maybe somewhere in the range of 23-17), add +1 charge to his T1
A4. Add air control to the base ability, buff the T2 gun damage and move it to T3, shuffle the components of cast range/cooldown/+1 charge among the T1 and T2 upgrades
A5. Remove charges–ability is now recastable for 5 seconds after initial cast (like Sanguine Retreat), AP upgrades allow for more recasts
A6. Rework Grapple; it now works like Spiderman -OR- Loader from RoR2
B: 6 Ideas to address lack of spirit scaling in order of increasing wackiness:
B1. Add spirit scaling to his T2 grapple so that the gun damage he gains scales with spirit
B2. Rework T2 upgrade to increase outgoing damage by X% for Y seconds after cast
B2a. Either variable could scale with spirit, but probably not both
B2b. Buff COULD refresh and stack, so someone could use all their movement tools to maximize their damage; would create another layer of balancing
B3. Remove the extra cast range and move that to native spirit scaling (x0.13 or something close to this)
B4. Add an increase in stamina regeneration that scales with spirit, either natively or to an upgrade; would not stack
B4a. This may beget a rework of the stamina gain in the T3 upgrade
B5. T3 stamina gain is nerfed to 0.75 and scales with spirit, but becomes stamina STEAL if grappling to enemy heroes, giving incentive to prioritize enemy heroes as grapple targets
B5a. This would mean that you do not gain any stamina if grappling to non-enemy heroes
B5b. Could also be stamina regeneration steal, as proposed in B4; still locked behind T3
B6. Launch velocity now scales with spirit; T3 reworked from “On cast: +1 stamina, +60% air control” to “On cast: +60% air control, -60% air friction”
Suggestions from A and B can be mixed and matched to create a better feeling ability (such as A2 and B3).
I plan to make further posts regarding charged abilities and other awkward-feeling interactions, but as a Lash player, this one particularly bothered me. If you can think of any more of these awkward interactions, let me know and I'll look into it.
-Magician’s Vexing Bolt
-Lash’s Grapple
-Venator’s Consecrating Grenade* (5 AP upgrade allows charges, but does not grant them)
-Holliday’s Bounce Pad*
*-It is worth noting that Holliday and Venator naturally have 2 charged abilities, with Venator’s 2nd charged ability being unlocked through AP upgrades. For Holliday, Powder Keg has native charge gain in its AP upgrades, so she has more incentive than the other characters on that list to get Extra Charge (EC) or Rapid Recharge (RR). They also both scale with spirit–another point I will touch upon later.
Venator is a bit of a special case because of his Consecrating Grenade dealing gun damage, which will be touched upon later.
Because of this, there are 4 (3ish, since I don’t really count Holliday for the reasons stated above, but for the sake of the post I will say 4) abilities that are balanced around a charge system that they do not benefit from until certain items are bought.
This creates a pressure to buy those EC/RR–this in itself is fine. However, when compounded with the fact that the listed abilities do not gain charges through AP upgrades, there comes a secondary pressure to keep EC/RR for the remainder of the game or you halve/third the abilities effectiveness from losing those charges.
To me, this feels really bad. I equate this to the phenomenon in DotA where it was required in all but name to buy Boots of Travel on Tinker, lest your hero be/feel useless. They amended this by giving him a global teleport that worked nearly identically to Boots of Travel as a part of his Rearm. This also opened up design space, as it allowed the nerf for Rearm to no longer refresh items without making Tinker unusable.
Lastly, spirit scaling; the charged abilities for both Lash and Venator** do not have any spirit scaling. A good chunk of the benefit that other heroes get from buying EC/RR–the spirit power that only applies to charged abilities–goes wasted on these heroes.
**-For Venator, the lack of spirit scaling is somewhat mitigated by Recharging Rush triggering itself if you hit Consecrating Grenade due to the fact that it deals gun damage. Additionally, the upgrade that turns it into a charged ability also grants another bonus in the form of more healing reduction, which is already a good incentive to take it.
The focus of this post is Lash's Grapple, since of the listed abilities, it arguably benefits the least from EC/RR. To this end, I offer suggestions to remove the awkwardness of being a charged ability with no native charges or spirit scaling. I got sort of crazy with them as I went on, so I've organized them by ascending weirdness. I'm mostly serious here though.
SUGGESTIONS:
A: 6 Ideas to address native charge issue in order of increasing wackiness:
A1. Just give him a native 2nd charge
A2. Add +1 charge to his T2
A3. Lower the cooldown on the base skill (maybe somewhere in the range of 23-17), add +1 charge to his T1
A4. Add air control to the base ability, buff the T2 gun damage and move it to T3, shuffle the components of cast range/cooldown/+1 charge among the T1 and T2 upgrades
A5. Remove charges–ability is now recastable for 5 seconds after initial cast (like Sanguine Retreat), AP upgrades allow for more recasts
A6. Rework Grapple; it now works like Spiderman -OR- Loader from RoR2
B: 6 Ideas to address lack of spirit scaling in order of increasing wackiness:
B1. Add spirit scaling to his T2 grapple so that the gun damage he gains scales with spirit
B2. Rework T2 upgrade to increase outgoing damage by X% for Y seconds after cast
B2a. Either variable could scale with spirit, but probably not both
B2b. Buff COULD refresh and stack, so someone could use all their movement tools to maximize their damage; would create another layer of balancing
B3. Remove the extra cast range and move that to native spirit scaling (x0.13 or something close to this)
B4. Add an increase in stamina regeneration that scales with spirit, either natively or to an upgrade; would not stack
B4a. This may beget a rework of the stamina gain in the T3 upgrade
B5. T3 stamina gain is nerfed to 0.75 and scales with spirit, but becomes stamina STEAL if grappling to enemy heroes, giving incentive to prioritize enemy heroes as grapple targets
B5a. This would mean that you do not gain any stamina if grappling to non-enemy heroes
B5b. Could also be stamina regeneration steal, as proposed in B4; still locked behind T3
B6. Launch velocity now scales with spirit; T3 reworked from “On cast: +1 stamina, +60% air control” to “On cast: +60% air control, -60% air friction”
Suggestions from A and B can be mixed and matched to create a better feeling ability (such as A2 and B3).
I plan to make further posts regarding charged abilities and other awkward-feeling interactions, but as a Lash player, this one particularly bothered me. If you can think of any more of these awkward interactions, let me know and I'll look into it.
