Specific Rift Gear Alignment Skills

[Koomin]

Can the alignment skills that require specific gear be updated to be more broad (and also not have any more non-broad ones added in future trees)?  For example, instead of needing specifically the shadow scythe for Wortox's shadow alignment, just require wearing shadow rift gear or at minimum a shadow rift melee weapon?  This was already done for Wormwood's "lunar guardian II" skill, which reads "summon vines to join the fray while attacking with Bright shade melee weapons".

It is not great to unlock the skill and think "ok from now on I have to use specifically the void cowl and the shadow reaper otherwise I'm extraordinarily weaker".  Part of the fun of this game is to mess around with different weapons and armor, and figure out the best setup for each situation.  If your head gear and hand gear are locked in, then you have a single slot open, which is sad.

On top of that, if any new gear is released you can't even really use the fun new stuff without massively nerfing yourself.  You just wander around forever using the exact same gear no matter what.

There is also not really any balancing reason that I can think of to not do this since it would still be rift gated, it's actually only functionality is preventing trying out other combinations.

[Echsrick]

speakin of the shadow reaper and wortox, can the reaper alsol not call wortox a mortal and instead have unique lines for him? i mean if wortox specializes in the reaper spesificaly then i realy think that sould be changed

[arubaro]

While i could agree i think in the cases this was done is because really fitting. BS sword giving plant powers to WW because BS are plants or the reaper to harvests souls for wortox... (tho i dont think the lunar perks makes sense), is a scythe which is used by the death to reap souls so wont make sense for wortox to use an axe or whatever new shadow weapons

What they could do is, in these scenarios,  add another generic shadow/moon perk before so have something else to chose 

[Y0sH]

I think completely not locking them behind rift weapons/armors would be best. For example if you have a hambat and are shadow aligned when you soul hop your next melee attack hits twice consuming your echo or if lunar aligned after soul hoping your next incoming damage is negated consuming the echo. To balance this only have it able to proc once regardless of the 2nd echo skill. Then for maybe keep the post rift gear specific requirements the same?

[Koomin]

7 minutes ago, Y0sH said:

I think completely not locking them behind rift weapons/armors would be best. For example if you have a hambat and are shadow aligned when you soul hop your next melee attack hits twice consuming your echo or if lunar aligned after soul hoping your next incoming damage is negated consuming the echo. To balance this only have it able to proc once regardless of the 2nd echo skill. Then for maybe keep the post rift gear specific requirements the same?

While I do think it is weird that some special characters get to use their alignment bonuses pre-rifts and some seem way too strong, this seems like it would be a bit too unbalanced to get a bone armor equivalent at the start of the game, and I'd enjoy Wortox a lot less if he became unbalanced.

[Y0sH]

2 minutes ago, Koomin said:

While I do think it is weird that some special characters get to use their alignment bonuses pre-rifts and some seem way too strong, this seems like it would be a bit too unbalanced to get a bone armor equivalent at the start of the game, and I'd enjoy Wortox a lot less if he became unbalanced.

True, it would be pretty strong if it was changed in this way but personally I'd overlook the lock if they brought back the knabsack planar damage options and full 20hp naughty solo healing.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

8 hours ago, Echsrick said:

speakin of the shadow reaper and wortox, can the reaper alsol not call wortox a mortal and instead have unique lines for him? i mean if wortox specializes in the reaper spesificaly then i realy think that sould be changed

Oh my god you're so right about this. Woodie gets TWO axes who are in love with him, but Wortox got nothing. But I guess Woodie's change is independent of his skill selection while Wortox's is not, but I'm sure this is doable and it's a great idea for some fun.

 

7 hours ago, arubaro said:

What they could do is, in these scenarios,  add another generic shadow/moon perk before so have something else to chose 

I think this is the approach I'd prefer as well. It doesn't have to be anything huge, but I know that a lot of people don't really consider skill changing as part of their natural progression route, and it would be nice if these two alignment skills did something else. I don't really see any pattern between who gets alignment skills that they can access pre-rifts and who gets locked out of them entirely until post-rifts. Multiple functionalities to the alignment skills with just partial dependencies would still provide character progression, so I don't think it detracts from that aspect in a meaningful way.