Concerns Regarding the New Trigger Condition for Insatiable Hunger

Lykeion · August 3

First of all, I support adding additional trigger conditions for Insatiable Hunger. As part of the Werewolf system, IH popping up so frequently can indeed be quite annoying. My concern is with one of the new trigger conditions: only allowing IH to be used in combat when the player's ultimate is below 200.

I previously wrote a dynamic IH Blocker addon to address the issue of IH appearing too often. My first approach was actually the same: allowing IH to appear only when the player's ultimate was below a certain threshold. However, during actual gameplay, I found this condition to be very clunky. In some longer encounters, the problems it caused far outweighed the benefits of blocking IH.

The most obvious example is the final boss of Lucent Citadel. During this fight, players have to spend long periods moving or waiting (such as during the necro bridge phase), stuck in combat without enough active fight to generate enough Fury to trigger Rampage and prevent ultimate cost. This can eventually cause players to be unable to maintain werewolf form.

Additionally, this condition prevents Werewolves from participating in ulti pulls. An ulti pull is a strategy used by prog groups in trials to build ultimate before a fight, ensuring everyone starts the encounter in the best possible state. Restricting IH to only when ultimate is below 200 means that Werewolves can gain only a small amount of ultimate during an ulti pull, forcing them to enter the actual fight with a higher risk of dropping out of Werewolf form early.

For these reasons, I hope the developers can refine the new IH trigger conditions into a more flexible system that can better accommodate different scenarios.

Additionally, if this is useful as a reference for the devs, the rule I currently use in my Insatiable Hunger Blocker addon is: when the player has not dealt direct damage for 2 seconds, temporarily allow IH to be used while in combat. I believe this rule has worked very well in practice and handles different situations much more flexibly.

Edit: I adjusted my feedback to better align with the new rules on the PTS. Thanks for Kazajhan's reminder

Kazajhan · August 3

You focused on the condition where ult is less that 200, but why do you think the others are ok? Help me understand.

Say i'm trying to use IH during combat...it's not going to be likely because the new rules prohibit IH during combat (just proved this in PvE overland trash mob content on the PTS) if health > 66%.

If we're talking trial content, and there are good healers in the group, it's not likely that during combat, the werewolf will be below 66% health for any amount of time. I believe if I'm reading the new restrictions, that will affect ulti pulls as well.

Kazajhan · August 3

I'm also mildly concerned that I won't be able to use IH if there are other synergies around, which happens a lot in trial combat.

Lykeion · August 3

Kazajhan wrote: »

You focused on the condition where ult is less that 200, but why do you think the others are ok? Help me understand.

Say i'm trying to use IH during combat...it's not going to be likely because the new rules prohibit IH during combat (just proved this in PvE overland trash mob content on the PTS) if health > 66%.

If we're talking trial content, and there are good healers in the group, it's not likely that during combat, the werewolf will be below 66% health for any amount of time. I believe if I'm reading the new restrictions, that will affect ulti pulls as well.

If my concern wasn't expressed clearly enough, I think the examples I mentioned above can better illustrate what I see as the issue with IH on the PTS: being stuck in combat, combined with being unable to use IH above 200 ult, can cause ww to run into sustain issues during some longer encounters, and in some cases even force them out of ww form.

This is a result of restricting IH to only be usable below 200 ult while in combat. However, I think your point is also a good addition: this shouldn't just be treated as a request to modify or remove the 200 ult requirement alone. The dynamic conditions for IH usage as a whole need to be reconsidered, so that players can avoid being frequently interrupted by IH while still being able to use the skill when they actually need it.

Erickson9610 · August 3

We should be allowed to use Insatiable Hunger while in combat to get ourselves to 500 Ultimate, regardless of what our Health and Ultimate values currently are.

acanca · August 3

Please Zos, just assign the synergy a lower priority than other synergies, i dont care if its the synergy at the bottom that only shows up when no other synergy is available.

Please, just dont make it so we are physically unable to use the synergy. There are lots of situations you can find yourself with a good opportunity to use insatiable hunger but be unable to do so because you are stuck in combat and then wont be able to sustain the form.

There is no reason as to why we should be barred from using the synergy

Kyzeragon · August 3

I agree with everything Lykeion said from a PvE group content perspective, having run nearly every trial on HM as a werewolf since the U50 werewolf changes, with a few trifectas. I also wrote my own addon because of accidentally activating Insatiable Hunger too often. It requires holding another key to "unlock" IH for use, to ensure all activations of it are deliberate, because I prefer having full control over it.

Taking a step back, I believe the problem that we'd like solved is that Insatiable Hunger shows up too often, getting in the way of other synergies. Even if it's not in the way of another synergy, accidental activations of IH disrupt gameplay, or the popup simply might be annoying to people. These issues apply to PvE group content and not really solo werewolf, because group content is where we actually have other synergies, while solo the only other one is Feeding Frenzy.

The PTS changes to the priority of the synergy should already handle the first issue. I don't know what the solution is to the second, but I think having it blocked, especially with no customizability, is way too heavy-handed. If I had to choose, I'd choose to... well, have the choice. I'll take accidental activations over not being able to top off when I need to.

Putting the PTS conditions here for reference:

Put 3 unique stipulations on the synergy in addition to their regular stipulations (looking at a consumable corpse, etc)
The caster is at or below 66% Health
OR the caster is at or below 200 Ultimate
OR the caster is out of combat

We can ignore caster being below 66% health for group PvE purposes, because we have healers. None of our scenarios would fall under that bucket.

200 ult is okay as a threshold if you look at it from the perspective of "I need to have at least 200 ult." However, in practice, corpses aren't available at all times, or even most times, during boss encounters. We need to be able to "stock up" on ultimate when we can, in order to sustain through phases where we cannot reliably generate ult, and I think having these Insatiable Hunger restrictions too rigidly denies these natural fluctuations.

I would argue that having IH is actually more important in combat, because in combat is when your ultimate is draining. Being able to use it outside of combat serves to top off ultimate before an encounter, which is great, but that only lasts so long.

Yes, we can still sustain werewolf form fine if we have group ultgen, use Rampage on cooldown, trigger natural ultgen, etc., but that's on the premise that things are going perfectly. When in a prog group where people are dying, bad conditions cause it to fall apart quickly. We have to spend time resurrecting, which is time spent not casting skills to generate Fury, which in turn reduces werewolf transformation sustain by reducing Rampage uptime. Not to mention, if things are going really wrong, we might have to resurrect many group members in a row, meaning core-combat-ability-ultgen falls off too (yeah, that's a little L2P, to get a light attack in before you start the next rez, but still).

Also please don't deny me having a dead group member as a snack

Lykeion · August 4

Kyzeragon wrote: »

The PTS changes to the priority of the synergy should already handle the first issue. I don't know what the solution is to the second, but I think having it blocked, especially with no customizability, is way too heavy-handed. If I had to choose, I'd choose to... well, have the choice. I'll take accidental activations over not being able to top off when I need to.

I completely agree. Considering that some legacy console players are still unable to use addons, I support adding QoL improvements for IH directly into the base game. However, these improvements should not come at the cost of restricting actions that were previously viable.