[Snake]

You shouldn't ignore the fact that all necessary to 'break' a multiple-direction skill is 3 voidgates around you. That's 3x the damage. And all cardinals end up being 8x. Limiting the amount of Voidgates will probably just reduce their range of effect, but not the damage, which seems to be the problem here.

So I think, if you're capping the voidgates, it should probably be 2~4 of them maximum? Or have the gates get a static 50% chance of failure of spawning, thus making the user waste 3M? Or maybe the cap only applies if you have Void Refraction passive equipped? The pastabilities are huge.

[Fern]

Here's a few ideas, then:

A) Voidgate cap is equal to your rank in the skill
B) Having Void Refraction makes your max Voidgates be equal to the Voidgate skill's rank
C) Condition A, but having Void Refraction cuts the number of maximum Voidgates you can have in half.

[Lolzytripd]

Or what if void gates had a 75% failure chance within 1 tile of each other, 50% within 2, and 25% within 3.

They would explode dealing damage to allies and enemies if it fails, consuming the new gate and the gate that triggered the failure.

[Autumn]

Not really intending to sound harsh or immediately rejecting but I don't think a void gate cap is going to solve the underlying problem of multiple projectile attacks that scale for the intended use of hitting one person with only one of them, I cannot agree with that change even one bit unless its accompanying any changes made to fleeing spectres and black bolt to prevent what's already been brought up.

All I think limiting voidgates does is that it prevents a void assassin from running a setup orientated build and also limits what they can do wholly (Thus punishing builds that didn't even make abusive use of these), the problem is not how many voidgates can be put out once its literally that Fleeing Spectres/Hellspike is not intended at all to deal the damage it does with only a few voidgates being out.

Hell, in the gif Kameron posted, there was only 6 void gates there, that should be telling enough of the issue at hand.

Not even to mention a cap on voidgates doesn't even chop one of other main problems brought up in this thread, black bolt.

[Kameron8]

Upkeeping enough Voidgates to make 1 projectile attacks a serious, one-shot-kill level threat is fairly hard to do. Once you've gone beyond ~8 gates, you're not going to be able to feasibly maintain your setup before they start to disappear from duration. Tile destruction, while not overly common, completely decimates the small formations that allow optimized projectile spam.

Because of all that, I think it's not overly necessary to implement a gate cap -- there's already a soft cap because of their duration. Nor does any RNG failure rate seem like solution anybody would want to deal with. The only things that need to be addressed, in my opinion, are:

1. Black bolt's lack of a cooldown (The infinite gate setup time button)
2. Multi-hit projectiles with gates (Specters, Acid Flower, Forked Shinken, and, arguably most importantly, Fray projectiles)

[Trexmaster]

You shouldn't ignore the fact that all necessary to 'break' a multiple-direction skill is 3 voidgates around you. That's 3x the damage. And all cardinals end up being 8x. Limiting the amount of Voidgates will probably just reduce their range of effect, but not the damage, which seems to be the problem here.

So I think, if you're capping the voidgates, it should probably be 2~4 of them maximum? Or have the gates get a static 50% chance of failure of spawning, thus making the user waste 3M? Or maybe the cap only applies if you have Void Refraction passive equipped? The pastabilities are huge.

We shouldn't hinge the balance of Void Refraction based on its interaction with one of the best multi-projectile skills in the game to use with it. Sure, Fleeing Spectres doesn't take much to get going, but to my knowledge only two other skills in the game exist that fire several projectiles not intended to hit the same target (Riagri, Forked Shinken. Twin shot maybe, but I'm unsure if that's actually a projectile or not).

I'll also add that creating a failure chance for Voidgate would absolutely destroy any viability the skill has if it's an innate, unavoidable 50/50 of the skill actually working. Who would ever gamble on doing anything with their turn with so little to gain as spawning a Voidgate, at their current strength? From a mechanical standpoint, it'd make the skill worthless unless its effects justified such poor odds of working at all, like having the gates be permanent or grossly amplifying the damage of Detogate, and putting stuff like that on a coin toss would not bode well for balance.

Here's a few ideas, then:

A) Voidgate cap is equal to your rank in the skill
B) Having Void Refraction makes your max Voidgates be equal to the Voidgate skill's rank
C) Condition A, but having Void Refraction cuts the number of maximum Voidgates you can have in half.

If Voidgate must have a cap, I would say either A or C are the most reasonable approaches.

But I don't think capping it off is that necessary or would even fix the actual problem with Void Refraction currently.

I'll demonstrate.

[img][/img]

The tiles marked with V are Voidgates, and the tile marked with X is where the person casting Fleeing Spectres is assumed to be.

The numbers indicate how many times you will get hit by a Fleeing Spectres projectile if you were standing on that tile.

To put it simply, the number of times you will be hit by Fleeing Spectres can be found using this equation.

Code:

x = Voidgates that had projectiles sent into them.
y = Voidgates victim is in line with.
z = Projectiles sent through voidgates.
i = Projectiles in line with the target originating from the original cast.
a = Projectiles hit by.

All of these variables assume the victim is within the range of the projectile from the voidgate/source in question.

a = y*z+i-x

As to just how many Fleeing Spectres can ever possibly hit one person...

Where the absolute maximum of Z is 8 with Fleeing Spectres, the absolute maximum of X is shared with z (8), the absolute maximum of i is 1 (potentially 2 in the fringe case of Eclair Lacroix), and the absolute maximum of Y is 39 (which is virtually impossible due to Voidgates duration, and requires a projectile with at least 10 range, and only Forked Shinken reaches this number whilst only spawning up to 3 projectiles. Fleeing Spectres maximum for Y is 28.).

The most projectiles you can ever be hit by is 28*8+0-0 = 224 projectiles, for a whopping 15,680% Dark/Wind ATK + 22,400% SWA damage.

Considering this requires creating 36 Voidgates (8 purely to send Spectres through, 28 to be in line with the victim), this is far from feasible if not impossible currently, as one player would take 18 rounds to make all of them, this is merely the absolute hypothetical limit if one could spawn the most possible voidgates to benefit from using.

Using the same equation, we can find how many times people may be hit by single-projectile skills. Let's take something simple like Gentle Torrent for instance, and assume they had as many voidgates (3) as my prior example for FS had, and the victim is in line with all voidgates.

A = 3*1+0-1

A = 2.

So for popping down 3 Voidgates, with a one projectile skill, you then hit the victim with two. Each additional voidgate added will add another, of course, but each voidgate is an investment that you could've otherwise spent to hit the victim with that projectile instead or done literally anything else.

Now if we assume the VA is dedicated, and drops as many Voidgates as it takes most setups to prepare combos that instantly kill most players (about 15-18m), they'll get about 5 voidgates in that timeframe, then the ability to send a projectile through and nothing else. Or 4 voidgates, and the ability to reposition the victim then fire a projectile.

As for how efficient this actually is...

There's no need to do complex math, in the latter case, after 12m investment, they'd spend 3-4m to hit the enemy with 3 projectiles, if they banked on having their victim in position already, after 15m investment, they'd get 4 projectiles instead.

Taking one of the most powerful projectiles in the game, Eclair Lacroix, you'd get either 600% SWA (+ 300% if in AoE range) or 800% SWA (+400% if in AoE range). With your average SWA (in this case, 150), that's about 900 + 450 to 1,200 + 600 damage in total before resistances. Thus they'd be paying either 16m for 1,350 damage or 19m for 1,800 damage, or about 84 damage per momentum/94 damage per momentum. For reference a raw Eclair Lacroix with the same SWA would be 300 + 150, 450 for 4m or 112 damage per momentum. So unless they lacked anything with a DpM of 84+ otherwise they'd be better off not using Void Refraction at all.

Ultimately, multiplying something like Eclair Lacroix in terms of single projectile attacks is what still makes Void Refraction worth using, and keeps it fairly on par with other sources of immense damage like Charge Mind'd Invocations, while having equally if not more stringent positioning requirements to pull off. Whereas multi-projectile skills completely blow them out of the water with exponential gains per projectile above 1.

This is of course not taking into consideration the plethora of projectiles that would have cascading effects should they be multiplied, such as tile-making projectiles(Blazing/Freezing Shinken, Miu, Libregrande, Bright Bishop, Slithering Earth, Ice Spear?, Blazing/Freezing Roundtrip?), exploding projectiles (Kadouha, Eclair Lacroix, Fir, Nitrogen Drop?), and support projectiles (Gentle Torrent, Asura Fist, Needle) that may benefit from producing many at once beyond striking an enemy directly in line with the producing voidgate.

The consequences of tiles are self-explanatory, though exploding projectiles make the formula for maximum projectile hits more complicated, as you then have to take into account the end destination of each projectile sent through a voidgate then the explosion radius of said projectile to determine how many times a target is being hit. Then support projectiles can heavily vary, though with what we currently have this is either extra Schwarz Sturm, more stacks of Needle, or debuff purging.


Now as for the proposed changes...

Limit the number of Voidgates one player is able to make.

The issue with this, is that as stated this does not fix the actual problem at all. It would additionally require coding to check how many active Voidgates one player has or prevent Fray's interaction with non-owned voidgates, as currently Fraying a Voidgate converts it into being one you control for the purpose of Void Refraction, thus potentially bypassing the limit.

With fewer Voidgates, multi-projectile skills would be among the only skills desirable to use with Void Refraction. Unless some kind of buff to them accompanied limiting them, this would only hurt builds that did NOT utilize multiple projectiles for Void Refraction.

The lower the limit goes the shorter the list of things people would ever use with it gets, until it's down to being used solely for movement , Fray, Detogate, or Fleeing Spectres. Or just movement/fray/detogate if it's down to 1. Or nothing if it's at 0, because then you can't use it, silly.

Create a randomized chance of failure for Voidgate.

This alone does not fix the problem at all. It just means people would stray away from Voidgate entirely unless it were buffed so significantly as to be worth the chance of failure, and that's not a rabbit hole I wish to go down.

As to what I'd suggest?

For one, specifically remove functionality of Void Refraction with Fleeing Spectres. It is an obvious outlier in that it generates 8 projectiles at full SWA, which are never intended to hit the same target.

A simpler solution for projectiles that AREN'T Fleeing Spectres would be to have projectiles that are refracted deal 50% less damage, or something like that. This would not affect projectiles that serve purposes other than raw damage, but it would mitigate the more obvious abuse of sending in high damage projectiles many, many times for absurd damage.

Accounting for all types of projectiles with one simple clause is virtually impossible without setting a hard limit on gates, and even then that simply restricts what projectiles people will use with it to what's most potent if it sees use at all.

I honestly think that if Fleeing Spectres is taken into account one way or another, and the damage of projectiles made by Void Refraction is reduced, that would solve the major issue with it. If FS is ignored and only damage is reduced, we're just going to have people spamming nothing but FS again because half of several times more health than anyone can have is still more health than anyone can have.

NOW. Onto the other issue posed by this thread that's been mostly glossed over, Black Bolt.

Give Black Bolt a cooldown of 3, problem solved. This would allow faster victims to be free of the statuses inflicted for at least a little bit, and be far less oppressive in terms of mass repositioning.

TL;DR:

Upkeeping enough Voidgates to make 1 projectile attacks a serious, one-shot-kill level threat is fairly hard to do. Once you've gone beyond ~8 gates, you're not going to be able to feasibly maintain your setup before they start to disappear from duration. Tile destruction, while not overly common, completely decimates the small formations that allow optimized projectile spam.

Because of all that, I think it's not overly necessary to implement a gate cap -- there's already a soft cap because of their duration. Nor does any RNG failure rate seem like solution anybody would want to deal with. The only things that need to be addressed, in my opinion, are:

1. Black bolt's lack of a cooldown (The infinite gate setup time button)
2. Multi-hit projectiles with gates (Specters, Acid Flower, Forked Shinken, and, arguably most importantly, Fray projectiles)

[Chaos]

1. Give Black Bolt a 3 Round Cooldown at the very least.
2. Make Voidgates only spit out one projectile per instance via Void Refraction, and no more than that.

That's the cleanest solution I can see to this issue, beyond just throwing Fleeing Spectres and whatever can compare to it into the 'Don't refract this' pile.

[Senna]

That's actually a fair and simple solution, lol.