CA4 Feedback

[narrow wagon]

CA4 - Feedback

First off, playing GDR while wearing GDR merch is a cool feeling. 😎

Secondly, I had a blast this playtest, but boy am I glad that it's over. Having the playtest last a week and holding contests for topping the leaderboards by the end of it, incentivized a level of no-lifing that I, in hindsight, should not have been okay with. I took sanity breaks here and there, but the grind still took its toll. I'm not gonna ask you guys to stop doing this, but I'm definitely gonna stop participating. I'd prefer if they were 'first to' type contests like the questline finish contests traditionally have been. First to 50 pvp/boss kills or 5000 ai kills sounds reasonable. I recognize that that gives a bit of an edge to EU players, but you can simply make the quota high enough to not be feasible in one day to mitigate this.
There's also the option of 'Fastest boss kill+extraction' now that there's a map that allows boss speedruns. (It's surprisingly fun to try and optimize. My pb so far is a 6:23)

With that out of the way, let me get into this playtest's essay (fair warning: my sanity hasn't fully returned yet, so I may ramble here and there):

Character Creation

• I found no way to rotate the character I was creating. (can't really see what hair your character will have from the front)
• Eye colour settings are partially inverted: right eye colour changes left eye and vice versa. right milky eye changes right eye and vice versa.
• Since your character's look is predominantly decided by the gear you wear, this feature is mostly for people who value what their characters look like under all that armour. I personally don't care much, but it's nice that it exists. That said, I would personally love to see a return of Wolcen's armour customization features, since those were, and still are in my honest opinion, industry leading. Imagine finding a super rare armour colour you were missing and clenching your buttcheeks all the way to extraction from the anxiety of getting killed before getting it out. One can dream...
• NO RAGRET

Social Features

Emotes are fun. I'm a pretty sweaty player, so I tend to kill people first and ask questions later, but the few encounters I've had where I used them, they gave me (and hopefully the person on the other end) a good laugh.

New Sanctuary

• Sanctuary is a vessel that holds user interfaces. It could be a png and I'd be okay with it. I'm clearly not the target audience for this sort of thing. The ambience is nice though, I guess.
• The expanded progression of building it felt fun to do, but still only lasted a handful of matches at most.
• I think the functionality of The Workshop should be available from the start of the game, because of how important it is to the core gameplay experience. It felt kind of annoying to be stuck with abilities that I didn't want to use until I built a building. It didn't take long to build, but I prioritized it because I know what it does. I suspect that it has been a source of frustration for many newer players during this playtest.

Onboarding

• I'm too familiar with the game to be the target audience for this, so I can't really speak to what it did or did not teach me.
• The new tutorial is nice, and serves as a convenient place to test mechanics out without the risk of losing gear (unless it bugs out and puts you back in sanctuary naked 🥲)
• It's also far more balanced that the tutorial no longer takes place in Midgard. Since the tutorial is a singleplayer experience, You used to be able to kill Fenrir and clear the map uncontested. I did this last time around and it gave me access to Loki's Cave and reliable legendaries from the get go, circumventing close to the entire intended progression. The Pit fixes all of that.

Helheim

• Mob density in this map seems decidedly lower than Midgard. This gives early game focused builds an edge, which is an interesting way to balance the strengths and weaknesses that builds have. This does mean that the fact that the maps currently rotate daily, causes some builds to be weak for an entire day, but that is a problem the release version of the game obviously won't have. Since my preferred build comes online a little further into the game, I felt significantly weaker in this map than I'm used to. I couldn't help but like the map a bit less because of this, but that is purely subjective. That said, I do feel like the mob density is a bit too low currently.
• The way the boss is unlocked is an interesting change from Midgard. The fact that players have more agency over when the boss becomes available, means that he can be killed much earlier into a match if you rush his seals. Rushing the seals is not without risk, however, as doing so hampers your xp gain a lot. I like that dynamic and I died to my hubris quite a few times.
• The boss itself looks really imposing and I loved the dynamic zoom on the camera when entering and leaving the arena. Makes you really appreciate the scale of the fight. Unfortunately, the boss ended up being a bit of a pushover (if you run circles around him, he can't hit you), but I've been told that only half the fight is currently in the game, so I'll withhold judgement for now.

• Then the Unworthy... These are a mixed bag for me. The enemies are thematically very compelling, but their theme ends up hurting their gameplay. Whenever you kill an Unworthy, the game randomly decides whether half of the enemy will keep crawling towards you. The game seemingly takes three business days to make this decision however. (the same goes for the experience you gain for killing them. Bombers are especially egregious in this regard and award their experience after a good 5~10 or so seconds) I eventually started leaving a trail of disemboweled shambling corpses in my wake, because waiting for their respawn slowed my xp gain down. I don't think that's the intention, but either way, it doesn't feel fun to do. If the Unworthy respawn mechanic (and xp reward) happened immediately upon death, they would feel significantly more fun to fight for me.
• The Unworthy also have a lot more ranged enemies than the other factions, making them disproportionally hard to herd together because they don't chase you as much. This slows xp gain even more, though it hurts some builds more than others. The other factions don't have these problems, so the sections on the map where the Unworthy don't spawn end up being much more convenient for xp farming. I found myself thinking "damn, I have to fight these things again" when spawning on the 'wrong' side of the map. I even started looking forward to Midgard because I wouldn't have to deal with them there. That can't be the goal, right? Again, their theme is cool, but I hope that that theme can be implemented in a way that doesn't hurt their gameplay as much.
• Moving on, the dungeons in Helheim felt fairly empty and unrewarding, compared to those in Midgard. I found myself avoiding Forgotten Sanctuary and Flesh Cleft entirely and only entering the other two if I spawned nearby.
• To end this section on a positive note; The map itself looks really good and has a lot of variety in its landscapes and environments.

Weapon Balance

• There is currently a 'rock paper scissors' balance between Warhammer, Melee Javelin and Axe & Seax. This balance exists because Javelin has the easiest time countering Axe & Seax's burst combo, but can't deal with the CC output of Warhammer. In other words, Warhammer kills Javelin, Javelin kills Axe & Seax and Axe & Seax kills Warhammer. That said, Axe & Seax burst combo is confirmed bugged, so this balance is going away, making Warhammer king again. Melee javelin might still win against it early, due to frontloaded power and lack of level scaling, but this is going away too.
• Staff, Ranged Javelin and Longsword don't seem very competitive in PvP, though staff continues to be very strong in PvE. Staff PvE felt weaker on Helheim than on Midgard because its dot spreading mechanic doesn't behave properly against the Unworthy.

Armour Balance

-# Beware, math incoming.
I think crit in general (but especially Myopic Bulkiness) is very undertuned. Let's do a case study to explain why.
We can calculate the dps multiplier from crit stats using the following formula: DPS_multiplier=1+crit_chance*crit_multiplier*0.0001
Myopic bulkiness gives 20% flat crit chance, at the cost of 50% vision range. Speccing fully into crit by using two pieces of berserkr, two pieces of Viking and Axe and Seax can get you to about 55% crit chance with frenzy up and about 35% crit multiplier. This gets you to an effective dps multiplier of 1+55*35*0.0001=1.1925 (19.25%). Removing Myopic Bulkiness from the equation would decrease this to 1+35*35*0.0001=1.1225 (12.25%). (1.1925/1.1225=1.062 so you're giving up half your vision for a whopping 6.2% damage)
Warhammer fares a bit better, but not by much. It gets to 38.5% crit chance and 48.5% crit multiplier when Berserk is down and 88.5% crit chance and 48.5% crit multiplier when Berserk is up. This gets you to an effective dps multiplier of 1+38.5*48.5*0.0001=1.1867 (18.67%) without Berserk and 1+88.5*48.5*0.0001=1.4292 (42.92%) with Berserk. Removing Myopic Bulkiness from the equation in this case would decrease the dps multpliers to 1+18.5*48.5*0.0001=1.0897 (8,97%) and 1+68.5*48.5*0.0001=1.3322 (33.22%) respectively. (1.1867/1.0897=1.0890 and 1.4292/1.3322=1.0728 so here you're giving up half your vision for 8.9% or 7.3% damage respectively)

Now, this isn't the full story, because Wolfchain gets crit damage and berserkr gets armor pen. You also still have a weapon that is giving you stats. I'll save you the math this time. The dps increase from crit while wearing full wolfchain is ~10% for Axe & Seax and ~3% or ~33% for Warhammer, depending on whether Berserk is up. Taking Axe & Seax as an example, this means that wearing full crit gear actually only gets you ~8.5% more dps (this shoots back up to ~32% when you factor in armor pen against the average opponent) at the cost of taking ~51% more damage from enemies AND losing half of your vision.
Doing 32% more dps isn't worth taking 51% more dps and it certainly isn't worth giving up half your vision for.
The cherry on top is that Wolfchain still loses out in survivability when compared to Druid, due to its set bonus and passive regen. 2 pieces of Wolfchain and 2 pieces of Druid is probably the tankiest combination in the game. Boot abilities can change this somewhat, but definitely not in Berserkr's favour.
A stat such as resistance naturally scales your eHP multiplicatively. (Going from 0% to 50% resistance doubles your eHP. Going from 50% to 75% doubles it again, even though you just gained half as much resistance as before) A stat such as crit can only compete with this if its numbers allow it to. They currently don't. For reference, you'd need 100% more damage dealt to compete with 50% less damage taken as (1+1)*(1-0.5)=1. This means that you could double every single crit stat currently in the game and defence stacking would still be better. Let that sink in. Edit: I made a slight logical error here. It's not quite that bad, but crit is still pretty terrible currently.
All things considered, armour balance is in a bit of a weird state. Crit is numerically so weak that it feels cosmetic and armour penetration, while deceptively powerful, still isn't strong enough to compete with defence.

In conclusion, there are multiple viable options, but none of them prioritize offensive bonuses as they scale much less effectively than defensive ones, and/or are penalized disproportionally. This makes defence stacking the only real choice you have, causing everyone to be better off as a tank. I don't think that's a healthy state for the game to be in.
(I realised after writing all of this, that I didn't take leech into account at all. It exists on Berserkr passively and on Viking as a conditional set bonus. This does make the sets more appealing, but still not for their offensive bonuses)

New Abilities

• Axe and Seax:
  • Pestilent Blade is my new favourite ability in the game. It is really effective if you build around it. It is designed such that it rewards finding synergies with it, which I love. That said, the only ability that really rewards its use in PvP is Thundering Bolt, which is sadly not intended. Without Thundering Bolt, the best ways to apply it are with Winds of Njördr, which you can easily avoid taking more than ~3 ticks of damage from and with basic attacks. Using the latter, you still get out-DPSed by Javelin Thrust, which, as opposed to Pestilent Blade, can be used indefinitely.
  • Hook and Rend could be used to keep enemy players from running away, but Winds of Njördr is too good at mobbing to give up.
  • Shadowstep gives Axe and Seax a reliable engage tool, which it was previously lacking. You can also do dope stuff like throwing Winds of Njördr over impassible terrain for vision and then Shadowstepping to whatever is on the other side. (really cool for optimizing dungeon clear routes or for catching players with more freely usable movement skills like Blink) It felt really good to use it in these ways especially. The many ways exploit The Best Defence are hard to give up though.
    Overall, these new abilities easily double, if not triple the skill ceiling of Axe and Seax. This, both from a theorycrafting as well as from a gameplay perspective. Very enjoyable.

• Javelin and Shield:
  • Javelin Thrust presents a new way to play the weapon. It currently doesn't scale with levels and has a lot of frontloaded power to balance that out. This means that using this skill causes you to be stronger than everyone else at level 1, scaling down as levels go up. while this is an interesting tradeoff, running into javelin & shield players early currently doesn't leave you with an aweful lot of counterplay opportunities.
  • Jomsviking is weird. I expected it to summon a couple of ai-controlled goons to help me out for a couple of seconds. instead it's kind of like a wide pulsing knockback ability. really countersynergistic with Javelin Thrust as it pushes enemies outside of melee range. Probably decent for ranged.
  • Spartan Kick is mechanically very interesting, but numerically undertuned. knocking people into walls to stun them allows for a really cool gameplay dynamic where you try to position yourself for a stun and the enemy has to respect that and position accordingly. (Kinda like Poppy or Vayne in League of Legends) Currently, the stun is simply too short to make the ability worth it. Especially while it competes with Hunker.
    While I didn't play with Javelin and Shield much, I enjoyed that it has a lot more versatility now. That said, its kit lacks synergy and most ability slots have a clear winner.

• Staff:
  • Blink is an amazing ability that sits in the same slot as the weakest ability in Staff's kit, making it a no-brainer to pick up. it fixes the one weakness Staff used to have, which is mobility. If it weren't for Staff's other issues, this would be a really nasty ability to try and deal with for other players.
  • Sever the Earth's aoe is too thin to use the ability for anything other than area denial. Not worth the loss of Plague Torrent currently.
  • Bile Sac has potential, but it's currently tough to get your money's worth out of it. Pestilent Eruption is mechanically a lot simpler to use and does similar damage.
    This weapon was a favourite of mine in previous playtests, and it still speedclears insanely well. (probably better than before, due to Blink) I didn't use it in PvP, but every Staff user I played against was an easy kill.

• Warhammer (haven't actually played it this playtest, so I'm going off of ability descriptions):
  • Earthfling is the only ability in this slot that doesn't move the player, opting to move enemies to them instead. It's nice that it offers an alternative for people who don't want movement skills in their kit, but the utility lost in the process isn't worth it, generally speaking.
  • Echo Blast is pretty cool, but it does less damage than Shattering Strike and it slows instead of stunning. From the description, it seems weaker in almost every single way.
  • Seismic Barrage does more damage and has less cooldown than Hammer Swing and provides a second stun. Hammer Swing still has a massive aoe and sets up Shattering Strike perfectly, though. I'd say Hammer Swing still wins, but Seismic Barrage looks pretty decent.
    Like I said, I haven't played with Warhammer this playtest, so take my feedback with a grain of salt. The new abilities seem like more flavours of the same stuff the weapon already had. The only exception is Earthfling, but giving up a movement skill for it is never gonna be worth it. The Warhammer users I ran into all used the old abilities, so make of that what you will.

• Longsword:
  • Blinding Swing adds an entirely new mechanic to the game with quite cool implications. When a player gets hit by this ability, their vision range becomes so low that you could take your armour off in front of them and they wouldn't even notice the loot dropping. Its damage also scales quite aggressively with levels. Additionally it's got a small aoe, making it somewhat useful in PvE as well.
  • Brutal Strikes is probably next to impossible to hit against players, due to its long duration and massive startup lag, but the damage you get in return is pretty stellar.
  • Blood Spiral is almost good. I really wish it stopped on your cursor instead of spinning past it. The skill is exclusively useful as a gap closer without this functionality.
    Longsword doesn't have options to choose from yet, but the abilities it has are decently interesting. Blinding swing in particular is gonna generate a lot of funny clips of people juking each other.

• Boots:
  • Windwalker Dash was the defensive ability I was initially most excited about trying. Especially in conjunction with The Best Defence. Unfortunately, its cooldown is currently over twice as long as it should be, it doesn't scale with level and The Best Defence doesn't reduced its cooldown. (I'll touch on this sentiment towards the end of my feedback too, but I really hate it when games don't allow powerful interactions, simply because they would be powerful. If you introduce new stuff into the game, balance that stuff around the fact that it can be interacted with, rather than disallowing the powerful interactions entirely)
  • Bearskin might be the most powerful defensive ability in the game. A max level Bearskin, 2 pieces of Wolfchain, 2 pieces of Valkyrie and a resistance potion can take you to somewhere in the neighbourhood of ~80% damage resistance. On top of this, it has a 15 second cooldown and a 10 second duration, making it trivial to keep up 100% of the time with The Best Defence. Insane.
  • Baldr's Grace has the potential to be quite useful, but its short duration and long cooldown hold it back from being a competitive choice. I'm not sure if it can be used in response to being CCed, but that would make it better.

Mount

• I mostly played Axe and Seax which bugged the movement speed of the mount out, so I used the mount a lot less than I otherwise would have. It does mitigate the impact of weak spawns a lot, which I like. (I would still prefer if weak spawns were made stronger)
• The impact it has on the process of chasing a player down is something that might need to be looked at. I'm not sure how to feel about it exactly, but it can be quite oppressive.

Crafting

• I have seen no legendary crafting recipes during my (rather significant) playtime. Now that could be bad luck because stochastic variables and all that, but I'm going to assume that they were removed from the game. This makes crafting effectively worthless at high levels of play. Especially because there are reliable sources for legendary weapons and artifacts (bosses) and legendary pieces of most armour sets (Loki's Cave for Wolfchain, Nidavellheim Mines for Berserkr, etc) As such, I didn't engage with crafting at all during the playtest. (other than for quests, or to test the new buildings out) I recognize that those reliable sources are going to be less reliable in the future as they are currently bugged, but extracting legendaries should nonetheless be quite trivial for good players, leaving them with no use case for the crafting system. Giving recipes a 75% chance of outputting a lower rarity item exacerbates this even more. 25% sounds like more than enough to me. I calculated the total cost for the build I was running in CA3, and it would've taken me ~3 matches to farm up the materials for 1 set. Legendary recipes should probably be more expensive than they were back then, but removing them entirely was too heavy-handed.
• Splitting the buildings up makes processing materials way less of a hassle than it used to be. The crucible can still run into the queue limit by just processing base materials though, so the problem isn't completely gone. (you almost never run into a queue limit now, so I don't really understand why they still exist) The caveat is that navigating the UI to get all your materials processed has become a bit of a nightmare as a result. I understand wanting to split the buildings from a sanctuary progression standpoint, but merging the crafting UI for each building into a single one would be better.

None of the QoL improvements I suggested in my last round of feedback seem to have made it in. I'll repost them here for clarity:

• Please show base resource cost in addition to processed resource cost on recipes and allow players to queue components automatically by queueing the final item. (Factorio also has crafting recipes with timers and this is the way it works there. It feels way better) As an example, a pair of Wolfchain Greaves used to cost 1 bone infused runestone, 4 leather cord, 7 roll of trimmed leather and 2 light binding. This is shown when you hover the recipe. The base resource cost for this was 6 bone, 2 stone, 30 leather hide and 8 salvaged linen cloth. This is currently not shown when you hover the recipe. What I'm proposing is to not only show this base resource cost when hovering the recipe, but also allow players to queue the required 'sub'-recipes in addition to the final recipe just by clicking the final recipe. (provided they have the base resources required, of course) This would mean that queueing Wolfchain Greaves with none of the required processed resources but all of the required base resources would automatically queue:
  • 2 bone slices
  • 2 bone rings
  • 1 carving block
  • 1 ornate horn
  • 1 runestone
  • 1 bone infused runestone
  • 4 leather scrap
  • 4 leather cord
  • 7 roll of trimmed leather
  • 4 linen yarn
  • 4 rope
  • 4 leather scrap
  • 4 leather cord
  • 2 light binding
  • 1 wolfchain greaves
    Note that this would necessitate that items in the crafting results window are directly usable without being transferred to the stash or inventory first. This would honestly be an improvement in and of itself. It was very annoying to have to transfer my leather scrap from the crafting results to the stash/inventory to craft leather cord every single time.

• make recipes that are already unlocked clearly visible as such during the match (so that you can ignore them)
• A bit off-topic but speaking of ignoring items... Any plans for loot filters? Probably not super necessary for most people, but towards the latter half of the playtest, I found myself groaning every time I had to sift through a bunch of items I didn't care about to get to the items I did. Something as rudimentary as hiding a certain type or rarity of items would already go a long way (Titan Quest 1 is a good example of a simple but effective implementation. Last Epoch goes a bit further. You could certainly go the Poe route as well, but I think that's super over the top for the scope of loot in the game)

Perks

• Their descriptions lack numeric values, and some stats are not explained enough to make it obvious what they do.
• Them not being respeccable is bad, but I've been told that the intent is to have them be respeccable in the future.
• The perks themselves can be quite impactful, which I like. I'd like it more if they synergised mechanically with gear a bit more. (increased healing is an example of a perk that already does this, but it's unfortunately the only example)

Miscellaneous

• I suspect login rewards were added specifically for playtests in order to drip feed us certain items like the longsword, but I'll address them just in case they weren't. Login rewards are a so called 'dark pattern'. I should want to login to your game because I want to play it, not because you've psychologically manipulated me. They're tame for now, so I might be overreacting, but I wanted to call this out before it became a more prominent feature.
• I love the leaderboards as an addition and I get a lot of motivation from the competitions hosted during these playtests. (Please don't make me grind bosses like a day job for a week-long playtest again though) That said, the stats they currently use to rank people incentivize some pretty rough behaviour (killing people half your level in full white gear to see a number go up feels bad for both parties) and are impacted a lot by queue times and matchmaking. As an example; killing the boss and extracting took me about 7~8 minutes on average in Helheim. My queue times were about 3~5 minutes, so on average, I was spending 11.5 minutes per boss kill, over a third of which was queue time. If someone else's queue times were lower, that'd give them a serious competitive advantage. The PvP leaderboards are even worse in this regard, because longer queue times also mean less people in the match. (I'm not saying that's why I didn't get 1st in either of these btw. I lost fair and square. I just think these are things that should be looked at, to keep future competitions fair. Good luck competing for PvP in NA for example.)
• 50% longer dodge cooldown is very hard to get used to. I also feel like I could animation cancel into a dodge roll before, but don't feel like I'm able to anymore. <- I wrote this down early into the playtest. I have since gotten used to it and it's not a big deal to me anymore. I've heard the sentiment that it feels less than optimal echoed by others though, so I figured I'd leave it in.

A personal note

-# This is gonna get a bit rant-ish and part of it is just me venting frustration, but I do think it is important for me to mention.

I've had a ton of fun this playtest, but it seems like a lot of the things that I've enjoyed have been confirmed unintentional by the developers:

• I enjoyed utilizing game knowledge to farm legendaries more efficiently (some dungeons give deterministic rewards from their armour stands). This turned out to be unintended.
  -# I really like it when games reward players for their game knowledge. Deterministic loot is a good example of this. I understand that walking into a dungeon, knowing you'll walk out with a piece of legendary Druid gear is probably too deterministic, but please leave a decent level of determinism in, as it rewards players for learning more about the game.
• I enjoyed leaving traps for other players by leaving chests or dungeons unopened, so that I could see on the map when someone else opened them.
  -# This gave me a lot of intel on the movements of other players on the map. It made hunting players a very enjoyable process of setup and payoff. I would take my farming route across a large part of the map, making sure to leave unopened chests everywhere and include extraction obelisks in my rotation. I could then track players' movements essentially in real time as they went from chest to chest eventually ending up at an obelisk which I could also see being activated on the overlay. Now to my knowledge, this one isn't explicitly stated as being unintentional, But I kind of get the feeling that it is. feel free to ignore this bulletpoint if this is an intended mechanic. I obviously feel that it should be if it isn't.

• I enjoy playing burst assassins which, reading between the lines a bit, seems to be a playstyle that is considered unhealthy for the game.
  -# This is a position I understand, but disagree with. I'm sure I sound like a broken record, repeating the word counterplay at this point, but I genuinely believe that builds with high levels of burst damage can be balanced in a game with stakes as high as this. To provide some anecdotal evidence; the most exciting moment of this playtest for me was when I tried to assassinate Runezin and I failed because he Hunkered my Pestilent Blade Thundering Bolt combo. This is the clearest example of burst being balanced by counterplay that I can think of. Warhammer can also stun you out of using it. Removing burst combos from the game, means that moments like that can't happen anymore and that saddens me. Adding on to this; Tarkov has similar stakes to GDR and you can easily get one-tapped with a headshot in that game, so the time to kill vs high stakes argument is sort of flawed to begin with. I do understand the sentiment, though. When you die and lose your gear in a game like this, it needs to feel like it was your own fault. Getting bursted can feel like there was nothing you could do. The best way to deal with this is, once again, by introducing counterplay opportunities; not by removing said burst from the game. If full burst combos are a no-go, maybe instead of 100 to 0, they can be 100 to 50 or something to that effect. In that case though, more disengage tools and lower cooldowns are necessary to balance that out. If I don't kill someone with my burst, I currently have no tools to prevent myself from getting slowly clobbered to death while waiting for my cooldowns to recharge. (Drengr boots come to mind, but the bugged cooldown on those made me not want to try them) This playtest was the first time where multiple weapons felt more complex than 'hit the enemy until one of you falls over.' Please keep going in that direction.

• I enjoyed playing with Myopic Bulkiness and Axe & Seax because their effects multiplied together, which turned out to be a bug and was fixed early on. (Myopic Bulkiness is now almost purely detrimental as a result)
• I enjoyed playing a Thundering Bolt Pestilence Stacker because their effects synergized very well, which turned out to be unintended.
  -# It is in the nature of game development that players are going to try to break your game. It is natural to try and fix things whenever this happens. It is in the nature of ARPGs however, to allow players to break your game, because that is a core part of what makes them so fun to play. Finding synergies between game mechanics and utilizing those synergies to 'outscale' the game is what makes theorycrafting such an enjoyable part of ARPGs. (To me, this is the primary reason for playing them) If weapon skills only synergize with other weapon skills, that dumbs down gear choices significantly. Nothing kills my excitement like thinking "OH, what if I combine these things together? That sounds really strong hehe" only for the game to tell me "Nothing happens because that's not allowed." I recognize that that is difficult to balance in the context of PvP, but that's kind of what you signed up for when you decided to combine a genre known for its rich theorycrafting with a genre known for its high stakes PvP combat. As a sidenote, the primary reason that this combo is so broken right now, is because Thundering Bolt hits more frequently than it's supposed to. I know this, because I can use Pestilent Blade to count ability hits on enemies. (Kind of like how Golden Rule is used for the same purpose in Poe) You'd expect it to hit 9 times with the initial shotgun and an additional 1~9 times depending on how many projectiles loop back around. Currently, a good hit on a player can easily get upwards of 20 stacks. If you fix that behaviour on Thundering Bolt, you won't need to prevent Pestilent Blade from interacting with it.