[Oyster.]

The vines certainly chase you like a hungry dog but they don't really deal damage while chasing you unless you stop. Is what ive noticed

[Touc]

and a speed decrease of summons across the board is already planned (just not implemented yet)

it's been live for days (@ mandrakes / vine summons)

Has it? Then I think you need to decrease the speed of summons again. I never noticed any difference at all.

Even if the summons were walking-speed, they would still be good just out of virtue of being obstacles that the summoner can't trip over.

This shouldn't be hard to imagine for people who have fought in Osrona's arena before (those damn lampposts) or the central tournament arena - think of an RPB box that's got a few props in it that you get dead-stopped on if you accidentally step near them, requiring you to carefully extricate yourself to avoid being stuck. Then imagine that your enemy can just walk over them without penalty while you get stuck on them.

RPBs are all about movement (unless you're fighting an autohit build). If your movement is interrupted and becomes telegraphed, you're dead. Vines and mandrakes disrupt that movement and disrupt that flow. It's part of why Ent summons were extremely good. They should be passable for enemies, but do damage for passing over them instead, so you have to make the conscious choice of either going around or pushing through the hedge to attack the summoner.

[Shilukk]

Hello! I am making this thread because personally me (and probably a lot of other people) dislike sustain, I remember the criticism it faced during the launch itself as it was really OP early game, and even now it's kind of... Unfun to fight against, at least by my opinion and those I have heard from.

So! Why don't we talk about sustain and think of ways it can be improved? As always, please be civil to one another. We're here to improve the game!

I'll begin with my reasoning why right now, Sustain spells, and builds are unfun.

Sustain spells are by design, made to prolong and stall the battle, obviously that's the intended way to play sustain... The issue comes when you have several sustain spells, all of which heal you up, and a possible aura that gives you passive healing. (or conditional healing, like with blood orb/bond of blood). Which makes the battle drag on longer than it needs to be, couple that up with high DR and some people legit can't get you below 40-50% HP.

Where as Burst, Melee, Kite, all have variety of counterplay to them, Sustain on other hand has only so little, all of which are bad options, it's related to status called curse.

Distort is a mana-ripple esque type spell, a slowly moving spell which hits for low damage and curses the enemy. Hard to hit unless you can slow down your enemy and aim, OR come up close which is very unorthodox play for an illusion-based build.

Curse, is an occult spell (so that means you have to app/mentor occult first to get it- which isn't that hard, but regardless)... Which is an auto-hit for small damage plus some curse duration.

Acid Spray, which is a wave-burst type spell that doesn't even SAY that it curses in it's tooltip. Regardless, still, short duration to be any useful. But acceptable damage for short CD. It's drawbacks being that it's hard to hit without stun.

Lastly, to my knowledge Soul Drain inflicts rot which is likely some type of curse, and although it is a good spell- it's a  signature/hidden... here's also a curse gem, but it requires to gacha 3000c, and spend a gem slot instead of putting a war cry or any other generally good gem, so you spend a gem slot on a situational one. All methods of curse are either ineffective due to their short duration. Or are locked behind literally one of the three trees, or require a 3000c gamble to get....

so i assume this is why u came back temp'd today

[Nailman]

as a sustain player in this current build
it's not fun to play either
just so you know
im waiting for the day i can rebirth and grab a different build

[Grit]

as a sustain player in this current build
it's not fun to play either
just so you know
im waiting for the day i can rebirth and grab a different build

this shit is so boring

[Horos]

Vines seem to be too fast.
Anyway, I don’t really know if this idea is good or not but what about
Effects like Poison/Bleed reducing healing too? I don’t think it’s any specific spell
that require nerfing but perhaps the way it works.

[Mouse]

i think a lot of people's issues with sustain comes from, as it has always been, being able to stack multiple instances of DR and healing on the same bar to become untouchable. with vines still being the hounds of charon even after the nerf, it's not hard for someone to use spells to keep opponents off of them, of which there are MANY examples, while using chip damage and big heals to protect themselves. there's a reason we see so many nature users right now, because it has the best of both worlds, even after a few nerfs.

vines and mandrakes (the latter to a lesser extent) quite literally never get off of you and do chip damage. nature wave doesn't have insane ticks anymore but still does solid damage. ingrain rooting you doesn't matter if you use it correctly in like 90% of scenarios. you punish engage VERY HARD by planting a garden and using spores when people come onto you alongside deadly bloom.

and that's just in nature. when you add holy (massive dr and decent offense) or wellspring (decent heals and a shield, admittedly not as great as other options atm) it goes from "ok i'll just use curse or hit them hard before they set up" to "oh god they just shielded through my burst combo, now they're sitting under deadly blooms while mandrakes and vines tear me apart, the battlefield has so much shit doing chip damage to me its unavoidable its basically nature volcano, and they're also healing underneath yggdrasil and ingrain"

don't get me started on the absolute fucking MANIACS who spend stat points on mana instead of agi

the problem with sustain is that with the tools given, they can effectively handwave most of the damage sent their way and heal what you're able to do while chipping you down alongside. then if they REALLY want, some armed or unarmed spells are cheap, or fuck, they could go into a third tree w/ what they have left to get actual damage spells and be violent that way

i dont think its any particular build in general, i think its mostly that with the addition of new spells to the game, it's powercrept in a way that nobody really expected it too. it isn't mandrakes or vines or ygg or anything else that makes sustain so powerful, it's a combination of a lot of things all at once that would require a large scale fundamental change in order to """fix""" it, imo.

that said people are only just now breaching 200 rpl, so maybe it'll change and become different when people have access to full builds, jammer spellstones, etc etc

[Sigwald]

okay but can we talk about air

[Shilukk]

actual reply time


In my time in CoE I've fought exactly one sustain build. Enna, in E3. I'm sure she was a pretty wack build, but I was almost rpl 210 with two uniques and one hidden (which was glorious inferno, by the way); so not exactly slouching. My build was entirely a DPS rush build stacking ap% between explosion, plasma dr, and armed. I existed to vibe check health bars if you weren't metaphys. My entire bar was meant to melt HP as fast as possible.
I couldn't get her below 80%.
And we all know sustain fights aren't exactly timely either. A solid minute or two of dumping my entire dps rush bar into her to just watch it heal back about 70% when I was on CD.

Looking at E4, my experience is the Solomon vs Gestalt fight. And it looks like it's the same deal. Both of them are barely moving their healthbars, the final 5% lasts a solid thirty seconds, and I don't want to know how long the fight was before that. Gestalt sits on a literally invisible amount of HP for a good dozen seconds or so, but he never dies because of verb shakes from both parties and whatever heals he has.
I don't know what the mechanics are here. IDK how sustain works. IDK the spells even. But I see two problems here. The first one is that sustain vs sustain is just as bad as it was last time, it seems. The amount of sustainability drags fights on for so long and what is usually a 5 second encounter of flashing health final five turned into a thirty second spitting contest as hp whittled away slower than my 96 y/o great grandmother walked down the hall. I passed through the tension of the final five into the realization that flashing health is more of a suggestion than a warning, and kind of just squinted at my screen until one of them fell over. Can you imagine watching that for the ENTIRE fight? I heard rumours of the Silvia vs Skeleton fight in E3.

- Sustain vs sustain drags on. It takes too long. Nerf the potency of the heals?? Limit the number of sustain type spells???? IDK how to balance this kind of system. Technically there's nothing wrong with this? For the people involved.

The second is that fighting sustain still isn't fun. I WAS a hyper-aggressive dps rush build. And I gave established characters a bit of a run for their money when I unloaded plasma strike dr psmash into pyro-tesla-fatal and slapped 30% off their bar in ten seconds. But if I fought an established SUSTAIN build, there was no point in trying. I COULD unload my entire bar into them, and it WOULDN'T matter because they designed their bar to heal it back.

- Sustain generally isn't fun to fight. RPL and unique gaps skyrocket when the advantaged user is sustain. You can outplay a higher RPL build with better shit. But you can't out-dps a higher RPL potent sustain build. Whether or not there's a solution (adopt a hyper-aggressive playstyle (which some builds might not even support)) people have been yelling about it for as long as I've been playing the game and it is not a loud minority at this point.


in conclusion, nerf mud. thank u

[Folian]

Looking at E4, my experience is the Solomon vs Gestalt fight. 

re: the Gestalt vs. Solomon fight(s)

Those rounds were actually pretty quick despite us both being sustain (both being Nephilim helped that) and I don't think they went further then a couple of minutes. The end of the fights was neither of us having homings off cooldown and being yoked out of our god damn minds trying not to get hit. Both of us having true counter and both of us trying to bait the other out is why these periods often took so long, and I think almost every round victory I took was a result of countering Solomon's true counter for the final hit.

Despite what some people have to say about sustain, those fights were probably some of the most fun I've had verbing (Bog being an intensely good opponent helped alot). Some people are gonna have preferences for what builds they do and do not enjoy playing, though I think Gestalt's build had a limit of Wellspring aura + Aquatic Flow for actual sustain, the rest was all damage/Neph racials..

Enna's build was cancer though. God, nerf crystal I beg you. Life Steal is one of the most broken stats in this game. People wonder why Vampires were so OP at their peak (the answer was alpha vamp aura.)

EDIT: Personally, as someone who played the ultimate vibe check build of pure fire-armed on Johannes that 100-0'd people in about 5 seconds flat, I prefer the drawn out fights way more.