Right now the words to describe skill builds is horrible , not viable , dissappointing . Right at the get go the developers are against skills builds and automation meaning less work and damage from skills and more work for the player to do, having to aim turret and seeker needs to be manually aimed etc. I understand they want more player input but manually aiming stuff vs i rather shoot the enemy, i would pick the latter and then when players found out having fun with skill builds using extreme radius and spamming heals which is NOT gamebreaking and require the player to actually still play the game the developers destroy it.
Honestly able to continue spamming heals on a control point 4 may not guarantee a win. Spamming a oxidiser or firetstarter although helps but does not guarantee a win too, bear in mind your damage from gun is weak and have very low survivalbility which means you can and will get 1 shotted by an npc using a shotgun 30 meters away ( exaggeration ) but being 1 shotted is a real possibilityhaving little to no armor as all resources are poured into skill power and cooldowns.
What is wrong with skill builds? They do little gun dps and have very low survivalbility , 1 shotting mobs with a cooldown is not ok but 1 shotting gunplay is totally fine?
To the people actually saying skill are fine now , they
1) do not play with skills and is gunplay dps person
2) have no idea what they are talking about
3) do not want skill builds to be viable
4) trying to be funny and like to generally disagree
Skills are what makes this game unique else its just another normal game, when you fight a hunter without any skills what is the hunter? a normal useless npc, what makes hunter fearful is their cool skills which what the division agent is. Why do the developers destroy something further that is already broken instead of fixing it. Nerfing skill power requirements then nerfing skill mods after, you might as well not nerf it at all since they are equal in the endl if that is what the developers thinks.
I love how players who spent hours farming for skill power gear and high skill power requirement mods were punished harshly for it.
Chem launcher got nerfed so bad its no longer viable outside of healing. Drone and firefly are killed instantly during any meaningful mission.
So its back to the same basic boring skill combos.
Yeah this is propably connected to pvp community TD1 suggestion/decision. They hate to be killed by skills etc. So pvp players (mostly from fps) they not understand rpg pvp mechanics (from mmorpgs games for example). As always fps players want to more fps mechanics this is the reason why on youtube most guides is about "best dps build" etc. There are still people in the "Battlefield" who say that being killed by a tank, a helicopter is unfair, but the battlefield had a lot of time to teach people from fps that life is unfair. Most of these people have been playing recently and comes from fps games such as COD or CS. They expect the same mechanics as they know.
We need some more crowd control options for group play. In 4 man squads the enemies charge you very agressively and there are not many ways to stop them. The fire turret is nice, but it is somewhat limited to choke points. Thats why i think the radius nerf was a big loss for us skill players. I don't want to obliterate every mob with skills, Its just nice to have something to control them while we shoot, since skill based players dont have that many damage attributes that focus on weapons.Originally Posted by Ubi-RealDude Go to original post
I also feel like the foam launcher needs to have a way longer effect duration. It seems like the 3 seconds it holds mobs is not enough. Maybe 5 or 7 seconds would be better.
People were using the oxidizer launcher with mods like 7+ ammo and + 150% radius. I understand that is somewhat overpowered since the clouds stack damage. Maybe removing the damage stack would be more balanced.
There are also very few people using the explosive hive. Some changes to that would be interesting.
The buff to pulse is quite nice and welcome.
I hope these can help the team. Thanks for the effort and listening to us!
For group play I can get away with a skill build, specifically a chem launcher oxidizer or flame build. The reason it kind of works is because my oxidizer, that does pathetic damage, will force mobs out of cover. Then, my functional team mates can blast them down. I have 7 charges on said chem launcher so if I can stack them I can still melt something. Here in lies the issue. You cats decided to take my 160% radius and nerf it to 24%. That is the biggest one I've seen so far at 497 gear score. So, stacking it on a mob is only going to happen when the AI breaks and the mob just stands there. When the mobs are acting normally they just roll once and they are clear of it.Originally Posted by Ubi-RealDude Go to original post
To activate my mediocre mods I still have to stack nothing but skill power gear. There is no use three pieces to hit the cap and use three other pieces to boost my gunplay. It is still one or the other which, from what you guys have said, was the idea of changing the skill power scaling. Didn't work. It is the same thing as it was on april 4th just with mods that are nerfed into oblivion.
You guys have killed skill builds. Want proof? Go to youtube. Search "skill build division 2". Look at the dates on the videos. There has not been one released since the changes. Meanwhile there are like 4000 new LMG, SMG, AR builds to watch. No one is running them because they don't work. They are not viable. The thing that pisses people like me off that play these builds is they were fine on the 4th. They were fun. They were in no way overpowered. My friends that run traditional red builds still put out way more damage than I did. Difference was I could spread pressure and make the AI work. Now, I just irritate them a bit, run out of skills to use, then do bb gun level damage with my weapons.
This change has no silver lining. It didn't help gun builds activate skills. It didn't fix people taking advantage of skill mods. It didn't do anything good for anyone. You just moved numbers around and killed any chance of a yellow build being viable.
Maybe there are 50-70% radius mods out there. Maybe there are +40-60% damage mods out there. Maybe. Until we find them skill builds are laying in a shallow grave next to the hunters around the washington monument. The question is, was that what you guys wanted? If it is just tell us so we stop fighting to make it work. I love your game and I'm an adult, I can handle it. Just be honest with us. "this is a gun game, use the guns, the skills are for support, now stop posting about this." Something like that, we can handle it.
If that isn't the case and you guys want yellow builds to be a thing the only suggestion I have found that makes sense and I agree with is make skill mods scale with skill power. It is so simple it is silly. Let a gun build with 400 skill power have their 7% cool down reduction or 5% healing. Let my 5000 skill power build boost that to 35% cool down and 30% healing. This isn't rocket science.![]()
Overall skill build are terrible right now. Long cooldowns unless you heavily spec into skill haste, and no survivability. The nerf to chem launcher was un needed. They are useless in group play due to thier weak skills. Solo its even worse since your main offensive capabilities are waek. Buff buff buff. Go crazy, rework them.
As someone whom ran countless dailys with random teams, while using a chem launcher/revival hive build, I agree 99% with polluxslaves.Originally Posted by Ubi-RealDude Go to original post
Even with the Oxidizer with increased ammo count & radius, it's powerful effect is brought down as we get new difficulties & world tiers. Having left the skill mod stats as is, as World Tier 5 & Heroic difficulty released would've been just fine. However stripping skill mods down to such a degree while expanding on the challenging nature of the game, seems impractical. I don't understand why some "lower skill power required/with lower effect" versions of already existing skill mods weren't simply added, rather than this generalized nerf that makes pretty much all skills pointless with the new difficulties. Otherwise the game at this point would have "low end skill mods" that pretty much any player could use to beef up their skills a little, while the true skill build players could still run their setups as they had spent so much time building on.
The only thing I disagree with polluxslaves about is the Riot Foam duration time. One of my techniques with my skill build prior to this update, was all 6 pieces of my gear had the talent that increased skill duration time by 20%. My ensnare time with the Riot Foam was a little over 6 full seconds with that, so improving it's default ensare time isn't really necessary since there's already a way to lengthen it.
End-Game/World Tiers, even running a focused skill build, wouldn't get you through most of the the hardest of activities solo before this update. Now that a new level of difficulty & World Tier are out, it's not like skill builds would've retained their effectiveness if they hadn't gotten hammered. It more than balances out with the newer challenging content that's added.
From another thread;
Skill builds are completely sh1t in this game, there is no way they can even slightly complete with guns. This is just a run and gun game now. Remember seekers, turrets, sticky bomb? Could clear content arguably as fast as guns in PVE. The skills in this game are just awful, even with lots of talents like skilled, destructive x2, empowered, hard-hitting, spoke, rooted, and having an AR for health damage, seekers take about half a bar off the reds, and don't even scratch purple or yellows. The turret, doing like 8k damage and with ai that's terrible, it always picks enemies behind cover, so you have to micro-manage the targeting.
I'm aware my build isn't min-maxed, but it's that far off. I also noted I never saw any logo's for my various talents, i.e. spike. I might be being blind though.
Like I say, I'm not meaning to moan, overall the game is pretty decent, but they need to do something promptly because the player base is dieing off quite quickly, skill builds are what make D2 a bit different, but they are just terrible.