Vaal skills can't be used on boss fights? Why?

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Draegnarrr escribió:

i've always thought vaal skills should gain souls over time, i don't know what they have against this they really aren't that broken since they gutted lightning trap. Plus anything that buffs the slower speed builds is a good thing in my book.

Zillion-DPS non-vaal skills would still be the superior option.

I always thought it would be neat if they made it so you get souls for vaal skills by using the non-vaal version. Casting fireball adds souls to vaal fireball for example. Not sure how that would work for vaal auras tho.

Yeah... Vaal Skills are strange. I love Vaal Cyclone as a gimmick, Vaal Summon Skeletons can be useful. Vaal Spark was a good one as well... nowadays I hardly use them, though.

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suszterpatt escribió:

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Draegnarrr escribió:

i've always thought vaal skills should gain souls over time, i don't know what they have against this they really aren't that broken since they gutted lightning trap. Plus anything that buffs the slower speed builds is a good thing in my book.

Zillion-DPS non-vaal skills would still be the superior option.

thats my point really, like vaal ground slam could be a regular ability and people would still use BF/MS over it everytime (if you ignore the guaranteed stun)

Oh, I love that little preparation room before Izaro. Gets rid of all souls and temporary minions. Because stuff like Dominating Blow wasn't crap enough already.

GGG does not want vaal skills to act as pseudo clear skills and not as boss killers so they really have no place in the game other than everyone and their mother popping increased duration + vaal haste on their builds.

vaal skills is one of those things that are a nightmare to balance, make them anygood and they can be easily abused, at this point they should rework them as trheshold suports

off the top of my head


vaal fireball suport

condition:
every 10/18/25 fireball cast

effect:
cast proyectiles in a ring
+5 proyectiles
after 1 sec Projectiles will home to the closest enemy
50% increased Area of Effect


vaal RF suport

condition: receive 500% of max health (life+ES) as self burn damage from RF

effect:
deals fire damage to nearby enemies equal to 129-139% of maximum life and energy shield (removed the leaves you in 1 hp part)


vaal dicipline support

condition: when ES drops below 30%

effect:
for 3 secs energy Shield Recharge is not delayed by Damage (no longer affects allys)
mana multiplier: 250-200%
cooldown of 20 secs



soul generating items could be reworked to reduce threshold requirements

When they showed the stats for skill usage in Beastiary seeing all the Vaal skills at the bottom had me thinking about what I would change.

I see two ways to go about it. The obvious change would to simply make them stronger at what they each individually do.

But I prefer to look at another way of changing them. When you look at their mediocre performance with respect to their restrictions, the restrictions make no sense.

Specifically, having them not work with Triggered supports seems silly.

In fact, if it was up to me, I would try making all Vaal skills ONLY work when triggered (Cast on, Cast when, etc...)

It would be interesting to be able to pick your Vaal skill and have it in the links with your Cast When Damage Taken and know that it will be triggering on a regular basis.

And get rid of the penalties to soul collection that runs in parallel with the set resist debuffs.

Let them trigger every 30 seconds or whatever it would end up being and then balance their effectiveness around that frequency.

It would make them far more interesting to use and play around with all the different Vaal skill options.

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Keyen escribió:

If you realllllllly want vaal skills during these fight, you can get them with Pathfinder (or scion pathfinder) + flesh and spirit + worm jar :D

I don't think Writhing Jar provides Vaal Souls, much like Vaal Breach doesn't.

They are thematically interesting/cool, but both the charge up and the skills themselves need work to be usable.

I think they mentioned something about being aware of how crap they were when they hit us with the usage stats a bit ago, so thats a good indication they would be interested in improving them.

1) Charge-up based on killing (not usable in clutch fights): there are a lot of things that work similarly in-game already, on kill effects are just a lot more geared towards map clearing than boss killing. If that's what the focus of the skills are, to help with map clearing, so be it... take that idea into the mechanics of the skills to make them generally good at that and don't worry about the boss part.

Optionally: If you wanna make them able/capable in the big bad situations, I'd suggest making them work off of corpses instead of kills, this has synergy with corpse generation skills. You could do this with a counter of "nearby corpses". The negative would be I think most generation sources have a low cap they can make, also it would be a buzzkill for other uses of corpses (not to mention vaal detonate interaction being wonky). I would actually make the skills work in 2 ways alternating instead. First when they aren't charged up, make them "absorb corpses" on use until they fill. Then second, once full they cast. This would make you able to prep the skill ahead of time or during a fight as long as you took time to feed it, and allow you to use corpses for other purposes as well as long as you don't bother feeding them to the vaal skill. On vaal detonate you'd be able to feed it and prep corpses then trigger it all with corpse creation skills (although, pretty awkward time wise, you have to balance around both the initial assumption that you would start a boss fight with it ready to hammer down, and are you going to take the time to get it ready again or just use a main skill to finish off the encounter... most likely it would only make sense as a way to front load for a tough fight).

2) Time Investment (setup), skill power, and what content is the goal of its use: So the next part would be to take a look at what the skills do and how effective that is for the content you are using it on. If you wanna keep them as on kill type effects, then you already know they are geared towards map clearing, make all of them them geared towards doing that effectively (less restrictive on support gems would probably do this). If you swap it over to a corpse based effect it opens it up to be usable in more scenarios, then it opens up to have some of the skills focused towards crowd killing and some more towards big bads.