Escalating Resilience, Spirit Edition

[Ambix]

I really like the format of the post by cjflaherty4 for Spirit Snatch, so I am shamelessly stealing their format.

Some preamble, skip if you only care for the item.

I think that many of us can agree - spirit damage feels pretty bad to try to defend against. If you've got a dominant hero on the other team who's building for gun damage you can simply buy metal skin and/or return fire and largely be okay. We will see how the metal skin change from the 11/21 patch changes this, but since the effects of that change are yet to be realized by the wider community, let's consider metal skin the de facto BiS "anti gun hero" item.

I see people calling for a "Spirit Metal Skin" but I don't think that's the way to go. Not only is it boring / derivative from a design standpoint, I don't think that a Spirit Metal Skin would be functionally different from an Ethereal Shift that allows you to move, and not being able to take actions during E Shift is an important element of keeping the item balanced.

Heroes that do damage with Spirit primarily do so with abilities, which have cooldowns and potential to miss just like guns do. I know Power Slash feels bad to play against - I am operating under the assumption that abilities like Power Slash will be tuned eventually to feel less unfair. I don't think pressing one button to negate potentially multi-minute cooldowns would not facilitate interactive gameplay, especially if the item is good enough that entire teams buy it, effectively killing Spirit as a damage type.

I think a better solution would be to combat the damage amp given by items / abilities by increasing spirit resist based on the number of instances of spirit damage you take.

I don't know the damage system intricately enough to know exactly how the math of Escalating Exposure(EE) maths out, but from a surface-level, layman's perspective, you can potentially get +80% outgoing spirit damage and -12% spirit resist on any number of targets. Let's say the average engagement lasts 30 seconds and the average time you are actually able to stack EE is more like 7 seconds. That's approximately a 40% damage amp for your damage on the target, and 12% more spirit damage taken from everyone on your team. This more than negates Improved Spirit Armor entirely. Of course, there are many other sources of Spirit Resist, but none of those items are as effective for the purpose of reducing incoming Spirit Damage as a passive stat. At most, these items have 1/3rd the value of Improved Spirit Armor in addition to their other effects and not all heroes are going to be able to fit all of these items in their builds.


I think a rough draft of the item would look like this:

Resilient Soul:

• Vitality Item
• Costs 6,200 Souls

Stats:

• 7% Spirit Resist
• 10% Movement Slow Resist
• +150 Bonus Health

Passive:

• Taking Spirit Damage applies stacking Spirit Resist that reduces your Spirit Damage taken.
• +2% Spirit Resist per stack
• 15 Max Stacks
• 6s Duration
• 0.5s Max Frequency
• Once you reach 15 Stacks, their Duration doubles but does not refresh. Active Roots or Disarms are removed. Your movement speed is increased by 2 m/s, and you cannot be Rooted or Disarmed. Once these stacks expire, you may not gain stacks for 45s (unchanged by cooldown reduction). The stack cooldown does not apply if the stacks expire before reaching 15 stacks.

 

[Rosgath]

While your concept is nice, it suffers from a fatal flaw:

Gun damage comes out in much smaller increments than Spirit damage typically does.

While there are things that do frequent small increments of damage (like Pocket's Ult, Tesla Rounds, Wraith's Full-Auto etc), Spirit damage much more often comes out in large bursts (think Bebop bombs, or Geist's bomb effect).

My suggestion would be to invert the effect. Have it start off at, say 15 stacks with 2.2% (33% total) Spirt Resist per stack. and the stacks are gradually removed each time you take Spirit damage. Make sure the stacks only fall off, say, once per .2 seconds and once they are all removed, it applies the extra effect of removing Roots, Disarms and I would include Silences but remove the bonus move speed. Once all the stacks are removed, you have a Cooldown of when they will all come back (though they gradually regenerate if they aren't all removed at once, not dissimilar to how Shielding works) Besides, If you're getting hammered that hard, you're likely left with little other options than to fight back.

Suddenly you have a really good tool to help you initiate or come back from getting focus fired.

 

[eepyMissile]

I think an interesting compromise that would make the item useable in both situations although I do think burst defense and burn defense should be looked at separately would be having thresholds of damage that would award stacks.

Burst damage could award multiple stacks in that situation.

 

[Ambix]

While your concept is nice, it suffers from a fatal flaw:

Gun damage comes out in much smaller increments than Spirit damage typically does.

While there are things that do frequent small increments of damage (like Pocket's Ult, Tesla Rounds, Wraith's Full-Auto etc), Spirit damage much more often comes out in large bursts (think Bebop bombs, or Geist's bomb effect).

My suggestion would be to invert the effect. Have it start off at, say 15 stacks with 2.2% (33% total) Spirt Resist per stack. and the stacks are gradually removed each time you take Spirit damage. Make sure the stacks only fall off, say, once per .2 seconds and once they are all removed, it applies the extra effect of removing Roots, Disarms and I would include Silences but remove the bonus move speed. Once all the stacks are removed, you have a Cooldown of when they will all come back (though they gradually regenerate if they aren't all removed at once, not dissimilar to how Shielding works) Besides, If you're getting hammered that hard, you're likely left with little other options than to fight back.

Suddenly you have a really good tool to help you initiate or come back from getting focus fired.

I love this idea! You're right, Spirit tends to be a lot more bursty. When I was thinking of this, I was envisioning using Torment Pulse, Kudzu, Geist bomb aftereffect, or other rapid-fire effects that are used to stack EE as quickly as possible.

I didn't include Silences in the debuff removal as I felt that the item would be overloaded if it did that. The intention of the item is to give you a "Clash, then counter" kind of play. You (hopefully) survive the initial engage and gain some stacks, and once the item procs you're capable of chasing down whoever just used all of their cooldowns trying to kill you. I think your idea of higher initial resist and having the stacks removed is a more practical approach, as taking multiple ticks of high spirit damage will leave you low and less able to accomplish or commit to the counter I intended to occur.

 

[gibnewitems]

Spirit resist needs to be lower and less accessible since they are gated by cooldowns. This does way too much for a basic passive item, while also being incredibly boring for a 6200 cost item.