Willow's CD update has caused no one to use this skill anymore

[zhangsheng]

I really don't understand. Does Willow's flame not require a cost. A killing beehive only has 6 bees, and a small spider hive only has 3 spiders. How long do I need to brush to keep Willow's flames going. No one knows how to use the ultimate move of consuming as many as 5 ashes and CDs, and besides, Vero's ultimate move can't even kill a clockwork creature when it reaches full output.

Compared to Maxwell, all of Maxwell's skills do not require CDs and are almost cost free. If you want to add a CD to Vero's flames, please also add a CD to Maxwell's skills.

To be honest, Willow's Flame can only weaken some damage, and adding a CD will make this skill completely useless.

[xhyom]

I didn't feel any change with this cooldown, it was never a very good skill in most cases, much less for spamming, some people were probably very impressed with the visual effects and thought that with this she would be killing the final boss standing still, because I simply don't understand why there is so much discussion about this ability to the point of being nerfed, combustion is much better in many scenarios. The only place I found lunar flames useful was against Fuelweaver to clean up those little fleas he summons, maybe against the triple mini bosses from the shadow rift while Bernie distracts them.

[Yuuko]

The CD is a horrible decision, especially for shadow fire.  If you can't spam it, there is no point to cast it.

[somethin]

Honestly. Lunar flame I can get, since it's basically a nuke towards hordes and deal pretty decent damage on it's own if you land all the hits, but shadow flames are just magic missiles that couldn't even home properly so you're not dealing even the max damage it can do per cast. I suggest leave lunar flame as is (maaaybe reduce cd to 15 if you're fealing generous) and shadow to 3 seconds, or make ember cost way cheaper (2-3 per cast) and retain the cooldown. I prefer the former, but it's up to Klei.

[Mysterious box]

14 minutes ago, somethin said:

Honestly. Lunar flame I can get, since it's basically a nuke towards hordes and deal pretty decent damage on it's own if you land all the hits, but shadow flames are just magic missiles that couldn't even home properly so you're not dealing even the max damage it can do per cast. I suggest leave lunar flame as is (maaaybe reduce cd to 15 if you're fealing generous) and shadow to 3 seconds, or make ember cost way cheaper (2-3 per cast) and retain the cooldown. I prefer the former, but it's up to Klei.

Even Lunar flames don't really make sense with a cd at the end of the day combust will simply replace it vs hordes and doesn't take as much aiming from the player.

[zhangsheng]

17 minutes ago, somethin said:

Honestly. Lunar flame I can get, since it's basically a nuke towards hordes and deal pretty decent damage on it's own if you land all the hits, but shadow flames are just magic missiles that couldn't even home properly so you're not dealing even the max damage it can do per cast. I suggest leave lunar flame as is (maaaybe reduce cd to 15 if you're fealing generous) and shadow to 3 seconds, or make ember cost way cheaper (2-3 per cast) and retain the cooldown. I prefer the former, but it's up to Klei.

Would you spend five ashes to kill creatures like spiders? You should know that the full output of Moon Fire is only 750 and it also reduces movement speed. You cannot use weapons to output, and the damage cannot even kill creatures with 900 health. It also adds such a long CD. Moreover, for creatures like Shadow Monsters, it is impossible for Moon Fire to fully damage them at once. It is unreasonable to only consider DPS without considering usage costs.

[somethin]

1 minute ago, zhangsheng said:

Would you spend five ashes to kill creatures like spiders? You should know that the full output of Moon Fire is only 750 and it also reduces movement speed. You cannot use weapons to output, and the damage cannot even kill creatures with 900 health. It also adds such a long CD. Moreover, for creatures like Shadow Monsters, it is impossible for Moon Fire to fully damage them at once. It is unreasonable to only consider DPS without considering usage costs.

No, I would not use them on spiders. That's what combustion are for. I would, however, use them on monkeys, both cave ones and ones on moon quay or grouped up mid hp mobs to heavily damage them. I did suggest to reduce their cd to 15, since the cast itself is ~6 seconds so you have a down time of 8 seconds.

[Soul7k]

honestly forget the cooldown. cap the embers at like 40 and make it cost 8 instead of the what 5 it costs rn? even if it does a lot of damage lets be real a boss isnt going to just sit there and let you torch it for free. even then in its current iteration doesn't it also melt your teammates

[Arcwell]

2 minutes ago, Soul7k said:

honestly forget the cooldown. cap the embers at like 40 and make it cost 15 instead of the what 5 it costs rn? even if it does a lot of damage lets be real a boss isnt going to just sit there and let you torch it for free. even then in its current iteration doesn't it also melt your teammates

That would be even less reasonable than it currently is.

You would be able to at most use it twice per fight and only if you burn 30 things to death beforehand. All for a total of just 1,500 damage.

[Soul7k]

9 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

That would be even less reasonable than it currently is.

You would be able to at most use it twice per fight and only if you burn 30 things to death beforehand. All for a total of just 1,500 damage.

your right maybe 2 uses back to back is underwhelming even tho its only almost half a bosses hp, but maybe 4 uses would be more reasonable

[Yuuko]

20 minutes ago, Soul7k said:

honestly forget the cooldown. cap the embers at like 40 and make it cost 15 instead of the what 5 it costs rn? even if it does a lot of damage lets be real a boss isnt going to just sit there and let you torch it for free. even then in its current iteration doesn't it also melt your teammates

I like the idea of capping her at 40 ember b/c this gives us a true measure of power to balance from.  Considering Willow with 400 embers is how we got to this mess.  With 40 embers you can cast the spell 8 times.  That is enough that you can use it when its needed but not enough to be your only weapon.  5 embers doesn't seem like a lot when you can have 400 of them, but if you only have 40 this is a sizable chunk.  8 uses RAW is about 12000 damage?  Plus you have to make the decisions about how you spend your embers.  Dropping a fireball for light / warmth, casting burning frenzy or combustion all draws away from this finite mana pool.

ppl might say "well she'll just carry a stack of mobs," but unlike Wortox, Willow is not very good at carrying stacks of small monsters.  Things like butterflys don't give ember, and things like bee take a while to kill.  Also combustion only ignites things aggro on you so even if you dropped a stack of bees, you'd have to aggro and corrall them mid-fight if that is how you're going to break the 40 ember cap...

And really, cd??  Is this league of legends?  imo with a 20 second CD this spell better be doing like 5x its current damage b/c it would NEED to be impactful for how little you're able to use it.  And also wtf with Maxwell are we going to put cd on his trap and summons too?

[Frashaw27]

7 minutes ago, Soul7k said:

almost half a bosses hp, but maybe 4 uses would be more reasonable

1500 damage is not hovering around half, that's barely a 20th of most bosses it's worth a damn on using them on.

[somethin]

12 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

And really, cd??  Is this league of legends? 

Funny you mention that. Willow is literally Annie from league.
Both are pyromaniacs
Both use fire to fight
Have a big teddy bear that joins in fights.
It's actually hilarious lol

[Arcwell]

10 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

I like the idea of capping her at 40 ember
..
8 uses RAW is about 12000 damage?

Each lunar flame cast deals 750 damage total so it'd be 6,000 dmg for 8 casts.

I'm not opposed to a cap of 40 if it means getting rid of the cd, but I'd ask the Willow mains first.

[Ameslarii]

2 hours ago, zhangsheng said:

Eu realmente não entendo. A chama de Willow não requer custo. Uma colmeia assassina tem apenas 6 abelhas, e uma colméia de aranha pequena tem apenas 3 aranhas. Quanto tempo preciso escovar para manter as chamas de Willow acesas. Ninguém sabe como usar o movimento final de consumir até 5 cinzas e CDs e, além disso, o movimento final de Vero não consegue nem matar uma criatura mecânica quando ela atinge a produção máxima.

Em comparação com Maxwell, todas as habilidades de Maxwell não requerem CDs e são quase gratuitas. Se você quiser adicionar um CD às chamas de Vero, adicione também um CD às habilidades de Maxwell.

Para ser honesto, Willow’s Flame só pode enfraquecer alguns danos, e adicionar um CD tornará essa habilidade completamente inútil.

20s cooldown for a skill that:
- Fuelweaver can cancel it with three different attacks
- its range of use you would deal more damage with a dark sword if comparing DPS
- against bosses you will be hit and if you spam it you will die as they do not suffer stunlock
- in people's minds is strong against hordes in a game there it has Abigail , Maxwell and Woodie  making this function 10 times better without suffering any penalty

I had posted this on Hotfix but the moderators just didn't approve me lol

[flamboyant wolf]

2 hours ago, zhangsheng said:

If you want to add a CD to Vero's flames, please also add a CD to Maxwell's skills.

 

I'll probably be met with torches and pitchforks, but imho, having a cooldown on shadow prison would go a long way in making Maxwell more... reasonable. 

With everything else he has going on, does he really need the ability to cage some boss indefinitely? Like, you still could use this spell to get out some duelists during a fight, or to stop some mobs chasing you, or just stop a boss enemy for a moment, but you wouldn't be able to keep the boss in place forever. 

[Yuuko]

13 minutes ago, somethin said:

Funny you mention that. Willow is literally Annie from league.
Both are pyromaniacs
Both use fire to fight
Have a big teddy bear that joins in fights.
It's actually hilarious lol

That was actually my introduction to DS.  I like little girl characters, especially ones that like to start fires.  I rebuffed League of Legends at first but when I was shown Annie I started playing.  When DS came out I was also shown it and put it on the side (I play few games, but I play them intensely.)  Then someone who knew me was like "Oh but there is this girl who starts fires when she is insane."  Needless to say I was hooked.

Willow was the only reason I started playing DS, and was my main character.  I added Wes to the roster of favs after I unlocked him in adventure mode.  Willow was my main character all the way until Wanda came out.  Her age mechanic, and watch shenanigans were really fun and Willow was tragically left behind in the refresh power ramping...

Getting a Willow tree has my interest for playing her up a lot - enough that I reinstalled League after years of not playing it b/c playing Annie was a close proxy lol.  But in League every move has a cd.  If I'm going to have to juggle cd's I might as well stay in League where everyone is...

10 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

Each lunar flame cast deals 750 damage total so it'd be 6,000 dmg for 8 casts.

I'm not opposed to a cap of 40 if it means getting rid of the cd, but I'd ask the Willow mains first.

Yeah tbh - probably cap at 40 and drop the cost then.  The problem with un-capped embers is that we're confronted with meme videos of Willow with 400 embers....  its unrealistic but the memes will win out.  This is why they put in a cd - if we cap the spell with a cd then it doesn't matter if Willow has 400 embers b/c it will take her 3 in game days to burn all of that...  but I hate balancing around such an edge case b/c really, who is going to actually run around with 10 stacks of embers?  Also this really kills the ability for Willow to use her abilities and have moments to feel powerful b/c the spell gated by 20 seconds, or even 10 seconds is just unwieldy.

I feel it must be capped to set a realistic limit to her power, but balancing around 400 ember Willow is the problem.

At 40 ember we have a much more reasonable limit to her power we can balance around that covers actual real-world use cases, not c_give clickbait vids and whatifs...

At 40 embers the costs may currently be too high.  We could drop every spell 1 ember.  This puts lunar and shadow at 4 embers instead, giving her 10 casts from a full stack.  If she wants to spam 7500 damage to "lul look at OP wilLoW" she can, and it will obviously not be OP - but then I'm not gated by the spells cd when I'm blasting hound waves or woven shadows.

[zhangsheng]

2 hours ago, Reecitz said:

I really don't want a cap, but if there HAS to be one, then I have some compromises in mind:

A) The stack amount for embers could increase from 40, maybe 100 at most?

B) Ember variants could be introduced, specifically lunar embers that drop from burning lunar-aligned mobs and shadow embers that drop from shadow-aligned mobs, and they are used to cast their respective affinity spells

C) Both?

There is no need to reduce the upper limit at all, just weaken the skill damage. For example, Moon Fire can reduce normal damage to 15 and plane damage to 20. Shadow Fire reduces normal damage to 40 and plane damage to 45. This is already a significant weakening.

[zhangsheng]

It's just a suggestion to reduce damage, the specific amount can still be discussed. Reducing damage is at least better than increasing cooldown and limit limits.

[zhangsheng]

Aren't we still discussing it now? As I mentioned, the DPS for reducing Moon Fire to this damage level is still higher than that of Shadow Blade Station Stake.

[rrhappyrr]

I think the damage is too high and you can lower the damage, but increasing the cooldown makes the skill less fun

[zhangsheng]

2 minutes ago, rrhappyrr said:

I think the damage is too high and you can lower the damage, but increasing the cooldown makes the skill less fun

Yes, just slightly reduce the damage, increasing cooldown will disrupt gameplay.

[Captain_Rage]

Oh, I am going to use the skills even if they have a cooldown. Or maybe because they have a cooldown. Don't lie. Nobody is forcing you to play Willow.

[zhangsheng]

4 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

Oh, I am going to use the skills even if they have a cooldown. Or maybe because they have a cooldown. Don't lie. Nobody is forcing you to play Willow.

That's true, I shouldn't bring everyone along because I don't know anyone who likes to be abused and doesn't like strong characters and prefers weak characters.

I have been playing this character since willow was released by DS. I am not convinced to see other characters getting stronger one by one, while willow has been unpopular for so many years and finally has a chance to strengthen, yet still needs to be weakened. There are many imbalanced characters, why can't willow be strong, let alone not particularly strong.

No one really forces me to play, but I've been playing it for so many years, and I like this character and I don't want to give up on it. It's just that simple.

[Captain_Rage]

Well, we are on the same boat on this one, except I believe that characters should not be become too strong in general. Many characters are out of line already and it would be a shame if that happened to Willow also. All things considered Willow is the most fun survivor to play, if you ask me.