Whatever happened to increasing buff durations?

Stx · August 2022

So one of the only positive changes I was looking forward to in update 35 was the increased buff durations to a lot of skills that would be considered essential such as major resolve skills, or major brutality/savagry skills.

I was always of the opinion that the DoT changes were very bad, the light attack changes were bad, but the buff duration increases would be good, because re-casting buffs often feels like a wasted global, its tedious, and it doesn't effect group pve rotations much at all. Increasing buff durations also helps newer players survive in pvp and solo pve.

I know I am probably missing some, but here is a list of abilities that I personally use in builds, that I really had hoped would have an increase to either 45 seconds or 1 minute, like other skills were updated to have:

Armor skills:
Ice Fortress (Currently 30 seconds)
Volatile Armor (Currently 20 seconds)
Mirage (Currently 20 seconds)
Necro Armor (Currently 20 seconds)
Channeled Focus (Currently 25 seconds)

Offensive buffs:
Netch (Currently 25 seconds)
Rally (Currently 20 seconds)
Molten Armanents (Currently 30 seconds)
Critical Surge (Currently 33 seconds)

Offensive debuffs:
Ele drain (Currently 23 seconds)

Resource Buffs:
Siphoning/Leeching attacks (Currently 20 seconds)
Netch (25 secs)
Channeled Focus (25 secs)

So my first thought is, maybe these abilities didn't have their timers increased due to the secondary effects being too strong. A 45 second armor/resource restore buff might be too good? In that case, i would suggest increasing the cost of the ability to match the increased duration. I would rather spend more resources up front to cast a buff than have to re-cast that buff more often, because those global cooldowns don't feel fun, and they take away from dealing damage.

Also, you can always increase the duration of the buffs without increasing the duration of the secondary effect. For example, Volatile Armor could grant major resolve for 1 minute, but still only cast a 20 second dot initially.

Is there any plan to follow through with increasing the duration of these buffs? I think the positives far outweigh the negatives for changes like this.

MashmalloMan · August 2022

Yeah.. this was the one thing I was excited for in the preview and they for some reason.. just... forgot and focussed on completely overhauling combat.

Wasn't the objective to reduce buff management and the time we spend looking at our bars? Self buff skills feel like they're on arbitrary timers, especially the Armor and Weapon/Spell Damage ones. They're not fun to reapply every 20-30s. It really serves no purpose because they're easy enough to manage, but a chore when you add them to 5 other skills you're also managing.

Imo, the bar should be 60s across the board minimum, not as a duration morph increase like Igneous Weapons that does nothing else special..

Lotus Blossum and Channeled Acceleration are great examples at 60s. They can make stronger effects for the lesser duration morphs like Green Lotus and Race Against Time at 20s.

Then you have skills that feel like you should of never had to do an initial cast to begin with like Bound Armaments, Mercilous Resolve and Relentless Focus. I can't tell you how many times I'll go through an entire 40s duration of Bound Armaments and never fire off the 4 daggers because I'm waiting for the right moment that never comes since combat is not a dummy parse, it's filled with refreshing your buffs, going offensive, then defensive, etc.

These seem like the largest barrier for entry for newer players that don't like managing timers. You can make skills like Molten Armaments 20 minutes and I still wouldn't find an issue with it to be honest.

I love your idea about the first 20-30s doing the special effect, then the remaining time up to 60s just gives the basic buff.

Aardappelboom · August 2022

I agree, I was looking forward to this and I thought I saw something about this in the original post but I too was dissapointed when I didn't find anything about this in the patch notes.

@ZOS_GinaBruno was this just forgotten or something we can expect to happen in a future update maybe something for the FAQ?

DrSlaughtr · August 2022

I can't get on the pts at the moment to look. If this is the case it, I'm pretty bummed. It was my favorite feature of the update.

Mr_Stach · August 2022

MashmalloMan wrote: »

Yeah.. this was the one thing I was excited for in the preview and they for some reason.. just... forgot and focussed on completely overhauling combat.

Wasn't the objective to reduce buff management and the time we spend looking at our bars? Self buff skills feel like they're on arbitrary timers, especially the Armor and Weapon/Spell Damage ones. They're not fun to reapply every 20-30s. It really serves no purpose because they're easy enough to manage, but a chore when you add them to 5 other skills you're also managing.

Imo, the bar should be 60s across the board minimum, not as a duration morph increase like Igneous Weapons that does nothing else special..

Lotus Blossum and Channeled Acceleration are great examples at 60s. They can make stronger effects for the lesser duration morphs like Green Lotus and Race Against Time at 20s.

Then you have skills that feel like you should of never had to do an initial cast to begin with like Bound Armaments, Mercilous Resolve and Relentless Focus. I can't tell you how many times I'll go through an entire 40s duration of Bound Armaments and never fire off the 4 daggers because I'm waiting for the right moment that never comes since combat is not a dummy parse, it's filled with refreshing your buffs, going offensive, then defensive, etc.

These seem like the largest barrier for entry for newer players that don't like managing timers. You can make skills like Molten Armaments 20 minutes and I still wouldn't find an issue with it to be honest.

I love your idea about the first 20-30s doing the special effect, then the remaining time up to 60s just gives the basic buff.

I gotta say Lotus Blossom is great, just not needing to worry about reapplying it for 60s is nice.

Stx · August 2022

Mr_Stach wrote: »

MashmalloMan wrote: »

Yeah.. this was the one thing I was excited for in the preview and they for some reason.. just... forgot and focussed on completely overhauling combat.

Wasn't the objective to reduce buff management and the time we spend looking at our bars? Self buff skills feel like they're on arbitrary timers, especially the Armor and Weapon/Spell Damage ones. They're not fun to reapply every 20-30s. It really serves no purpose because they're easy enough to manage, but a chore when you add them to 5 other skills you're also managing.

Imo, the bar should be 60s across the board minimum, not as a duration morph increase like Igneous Weapons that does nothing else special..

Lotus Blossum and Channeled Acceleration are great examples at 60s. They can make stronger effects for the lesser duration morphs like Green Lotus and Race Against Time at 20s.

Then you have skills that feel like you should of never had to do an initial cast to begin with like Bound Armaments, Mercilous Resolve and Relentless Focus. I can't tell you how many times I'll go through an entire 40s duration of Bound Armaments and never fire off the 4 daggers because I'm waiting for the right moment that never comes since combat is not a dummy parse, it's filled with refreshing your buffs, going offensive, then defensive, etc.

These seem like the largest barrier for entry for newer players that don't like managing timers. You can make skills like Molten Armaments 20 minutes and I still wouldn't find an issue with it to be honest.

I love your idea about the first 20-30s doing the special effect, then the remaining time up to 60s just gives the basic buff.

I gotta say Lotus Blossom is great, just not needing to worry about reapplying it for 60s is nice.

Yes, i wish all buffs got the lotus treatment, very nice playing with this ability now!

ThirdEye_PULSE · August 2022

Agreed. The only thing in entire patch notes that makes sense and would make gameplay more fun. Scrap everything else, give us longer buff duration. Boom. 95% of community would be happy.

MashmalloMan · August 2022

ninjagank wrote: »

I can't get on the pts at the moment to look. If this is the case it, I'm pretty bummed. It was my favorite feature of the update.

As far as I'm aware, the only skill to get this treatment is Race Against Time VS Channeled Acceleration.

Accelerate:
Increased the base cost of this ability and its morphs to 4050, up from 3780.

Increased the duration of Minor Force granted to 20 seconds, up from 12. Note this will cause Channeled Accelerate's Minor Force to triple to 60 seconds now as well, instead of tripling to 36.
Race Against Time (morph): Increased the duration of the snare and immobilization immunity to 4 seconds, up from 2.

Note: You also have the option between Barbed Trap (melee) vs Lightweight Beast Trap (range) now. They're both competitive DPS wise and last the same duration at 20s. Barbed gives more damage from status effects which probably gives about 1-2% more dps, Lightweight reduces in cost.

Trap Beast:
Increased the duration of this ability and its morphs to 20 seconds, up from 15 for the trap and 10 for the triggered effects.

Reduced the damage per tick by 25%.
Barbed Trap (morph): This morph now decuples (x10) the chance of applying the Hemorrhaging status effect, rather than increasing the duration. This means the initial hit will have a 50% chance of applying it, rather than a 5%, and the Damage over Time will have a 30% chance per tick instead of 3%.

danthemann5 · August 2022

There's no reason I can think of for why buffs need to only last 20 seconds. I'm sure someone can make a case for it, and that's fine. If they wanted people to not have to focus on their buff timers, make the self buffs 2 minutes. Or 5 minutes. Or 30 minutes. That would definitely lower the floor...or raise the floor...or whatever it is that makes things easier to manage.

DrSlaughtr · August 2022

danthemann5 wrote: »

There's no reason I can think of for why buffs need to only last 20 seconds. I'm sure someone can make a case for it, and that's fine. If they wanted people to not have to focus on their buff timers, make the self buffs 2 minutes. Or 5 minutes. Or 30 minutes. That would definitely lower the floor...or raise the floor...or whatever it is that makes things easier to manage.

Imo the game originally was a lot less forgiving. There were a lot of mechanics in vanilla that required more dedication to mastering than the game today.

MashmalloMan · August 2022

ninjagank wrote: »

danthemann5 wrote: »

There's no reason I can think of for why buffs need to only last 20 seconds. I'm sure someone can make a case for it, and that's fine. If they wanted people to not have to focus on their buff timers, make the self buffs 2 minutes. Or 5 minutes. Or 30 minutes. That would definitely lower the floor...or raise the floor...or whatever it is that makes things easier to manage.

Imo the game originally was a lot less forgiving. There were a lot of mechanics in vanilla that required more dedication to mastering than the game today.

Yeah, I think they realized over time that most of their playerbase wasn't completing the end game content they were making which is not really their intention. You don't make money by selling content people can't play.

There is hard mode, achievements and leaderboards for a reason.

Nothing worse than the launch rotations that were based on 8s from Wall of Elements which esentially meant you couldn't even get through the 10 skill slots you had before you needed to refresh. It's what largely made our skill bars packed with more passive buffing skills like Inner Light, Bound Aegis or Camo Hunter.

xaraan · August 2022

Honestly, the best way they could have raised the floor would have been just making skills that are primarily buffs last 60 seconds. It's not that bad recasting one or two ground dots that last 10 seconds as you go through your rotation, but having to also slip in a couple buff casts just slows down the dps of players relying on those. And it wouldn't effect end game raiders much as they just drink pots on cooldown, so it would only help players that are lower on the totem pole.

It also wouldn't hurt pvp much. Usually its the newer players that have the hardest time managing buffs anyway, so it would again, be mostly helpful to them; and just an added convenience for vet pvpers.