Spirit Fox feedback

[Niph]

(Also posted in-game)


To provide some context, I'm a high-level player with access to all skills and features of the game (except: not Druid, not Lycan)


I started playing Spirit Fox as soon as it was introduced. Getting the skill was not hard since I had a few Spirit Stones saved, and I think it won't be hard in the long run, now that the purpose of the stone is known.


After several weeks playing it, it looks like fox is a good animal form, mostly thanks to the free ability to sell to vendors that don't talk to animals.


Another perk could have been the high resistance to cold environments and the +5 sprint speed (with mods). However, it only works far away from mobs, something rarely convenient. So for travelling I stuck to my BC/Psychology set. It only works out of combat, but usually when I pass by mobs they don't have a chance to hit me, and only casters do. Compared to Paradox Trot that instantly slows you down before you have a chance to move far enough they can't hit you. And must be refreshed, which is a problem because when you click an ability in sight range of a mob you are also slowed down instantly, even if it gives in-combat speed!


Skilling up the skill was not a problem, with the usual tricks: Animal Handling and a high-level pet, and later Warden with a maximally-moded Privacy Shield.


Looking at Spirit Fox pairing options, it seems obvious that the main synergies are with Necromancy (the only other skill with Darkness main damage type) or Fire-based skills (since three abilities can be moded to deal Fire damage instead of Darkness). Unfortunately, I don't particularly like Necromancy, and I dislike Fire for its effect on rage. So instead I went for Fox/Animal Handling.


The idea is to take advantage of another good fox tool: abilities that let you evade, stun, knock back and root enemies. The pet has all aggro-reducing powers, while I stay away from the mob that's trying to catch me. Alas, it doesn't work well for a variety of reasons:


One need some room to run for the concept to work.
Casters and other mobs using projectile or with burst attacks can still hit me.
Several Fox attacks are in melee range.
It's hard to keep aggro while the pet hits hard on the target.
The ability to evade and stun only have a chance to work, not 100% of the time.



People interested can take a look at my build (items are what I managed to loot and craft in a few weeks, and the pet is a tiger, it has slashing attacks only):



http://www.numbatsoft.com/misc/Fox-AH-Items.png

http://www.numbatsoft.com/misc/Fox-AH-Abilities.png


Overall, foxseems a nice animal form. It's certainly the one that I kept the longest after maxing it. I look forward to the development of this preview.

[Mikhaila]

I've been running Spiritfox since it first came out. I think it might work well with necro and priest because of the fire/darkness abilities, and will try them. But it's really shining with Unarmed. And I assume it will work great with warden.

As mentioned, Paradox trot is very situational. It drops all the time, so counting on it for either speed, or enviormental protection is VERY iffy. I use it, and have started running routes in gazuk for crystals along ridges and other areas where i can stay away from mobs. It's nice for moving around inside towns. But i see it as a bonus rather than a strength of the skill.

I'm very undecided on the pet. It's just week, and making it work looks like it will take a lot of mods that i can use other places. This is a main theme with spirit fox: Multiple mods to make a skill shine. It forces choices on you because some of them only work a % of the time. Rather than have a stun on spirit bolt, I have two 50% chances (75%?) or 2x 33% chance for an aoe on Soul bite (5/9ths?). So while I feel the skill is strong. I have not room on the skill bar for the Trick Fox and haven't taken any of the mods that beef it up.

Galvanize is nice, but it's only good in groups. It doesn't affect the caster unless i put more mods into it. I think in a priest build it could be great. In a DPS build, i don't want it, not my job.

The Glyph I just have not figured out yet :) Again, could be a good group skill, and maybe in a priest build.

So what do we have that I run? (note: damage approximate, still working on gear.)
-Nip: Standard basic skill. I don't spend mods on it. I click it when i need that combat refresh.

-Soulbite: 1200 points of fire that bypasses armor, great for killing some mobs like treants in the sewers. Two 33% chances it's an aoe so If i get swarmed, it gets used right after barrage.

Spirit Pounce: About 1400 in darkness damage with a knockback, and 400 extra if vulnerable. Great fun. Also an AOE. This skill gets used a lot. It lets you knock a swarm back and give you some space, kicks back mobs with rage attacks so you can root and nuke them, and is just outright fun.

Spirit Bolt: a nice big fire nuke. Mine is doing 2400pts now, with two 50% chances of 55% more base damage, two 50% chances to stun, and a 400pt fire Dot. Fire with benefits.

Dimensional Snare. About 1000 in fire, a root, and 500 in fire dot. Nice CC. Kick them with pounce, root with snare, nuke with spirit bolt. This triple takes out winter trolls and fae bears with ease.

Blur Step: This is the star of the show. Many other things work off of it. It starts with 27% melee evasion for 20 seconds . You can add mods for 14.5% ranged evasion, 14.5% burst evasion, a small heal over time, the aoe on pounce, the aoe on soul bite. Blur step is the first button you hit in combat, because it controls so many things. Many of the mods for Blur Step also add +1 sprint to Paradox trot.

So what am I actually running? A pretty tricking dps monster with a lot of mitigation and evasion. The synergy between UA and SF is the dps, and the 'not get hit'. Multiple stuns, multiple aoe, a root, lots of evasion, lots of mitigation. Lots of fire. The fire mods on fox add a bit to headbutt and barrage.

I haven't played with warden yet, but I'm thinking it will work well for the same reasons. SF keeps you alive, adds dps, lets warden do its job.

Changes I'd like to see in Spirit Fox?
-Changing Trick Fox to a Sidebar Skill. It's fun to have the pet out, but not worth a skill slot and i'm not sure on it's effectiveness. Maybe give it a 10% chance to consume a piece of SF lapis when used.
-Change the Glyph to a sidebar skill. Again, not sure it's worth a skill slot. Give it a cost in SF lapis to compensate.
-Do...something....with Paradox trot. It's a neat idea, cool description...and utterly fails every single time you need it. It drops when you jump to high, drops going by a mob that can't even touch you. Not sure yet what would make it work. Oh, and the speed boost is bugged and runs out halfway through :(

[Celerity]

I reached max level in spirit fox but I'm going to be honest, I felt no real desire to make a build for it.

I think the biggest issue with the skill line is just the lack of choice, with paradox trot and illusive guise being entirely non-combat abilities, it already feels like it has a lot fewer choices than other skills. But I feel like there's issues with some of the other combat skills as well:

Both power glyph and galvanize seem relatively minor, even for group play, you give up a lot of your own power actively to restore the power of your allies. Compared to things like the battle chemistry golem, mentalism power wave or bard which can all do it somewhat passively, it just seems... worse and I don't see any redeeming factor about it to make it better than the others. I also don't think power is too much of an issue for 90% of players. Just good food can cover majority of situations outside of maybe hammer, archery or fire magic in extended group content fights. Solo, I don't think I ever even get into a situation where dig deep + combat refresh + good food isn't enough, even with hammer.

Trick fox takes only 1 hit for you at best before it dies and the damage is very low. I don't see why anyone would use it personally. I understand the point that it can take a rage attack or save you from an attack that might have killed you, but I see this as happening only rarely and not being worth the use of the ability rather than a heal, cc or just more damage.

This means that I feel like everyone will end up using the exact same 6 abilities (nip, soul bite, spirit pounce, dimensional snare, blur step and spirit bolt) and that's if you even want to use the basic attack for fox, since it's quite average and compared to ranged basic attacks like with fire magic, archery, psychology, mentalism, priest etc. or high damage ones like hammer's it just seems worse.

As well as this, it doesn't feel like there's much variety to how you play the skill, since almost every single ability is just damage and nothing else. Spirit bolt can be modded for a chance to stun, dimensional snare roots, and spirit pounce can knockback, but chance for a stun and a 5 second single target root are not significant for actually changing rotations and I actually think knockback is detrimental a lot of the time. Blur step seems a bit like if you took staff's deflective spin or bard's moment of resolve and gave it (almost) 100% uptime. It's a very strong ability, especially modded, but it just seems like a no-brainer since you'll just use it off cooldown every time, which makes it more tedium than anything else, like mentalism waves or warden privacy field.

Personally, I very much enjoy skills with a good mix of cc, heals, buffs and damage, then you can use whichever one is appropriate in the situation and combat is reactive and fun. With pure damage skills it's more of a yes/no boolean question of can you out dps your opponent and kill them before they kill you? The only option is the most optimal damage rotation, which may change slightly on different mobs with different resistances but is otherwise the same each time and gets boring. I had similar issues with fire magic, where the only choice was what order of abilities gives the most damage and then that's all you ever use. For fire magic it's even worse since every ability is the same damage type, so mob resistances don't even change it, but that's getting off topic.

All in all, every part of spirit fox just seems like a worse version of something else. Paradox trot is a nice idea but doesn't work in practice. The power restoration abilities are just worse versions of priest, psychology, bard, battle chemistry or mentalism. 99% of the time dig deep + combat refresh will be enough to get you through the fight. 2 support abilities is also not enough to dedicate a support build to, yet I also see no reason to put them into a dps build either and especially not solo. The pet is just a worse version of giant bat's confusing double, or even the deer pet which is a sidebar ability. The damage of spirit fox is pretty good overall but it's still lower damage than the dedicated dps skills whilst offering fewer cc effects and fewer heals than most of them. Blur step is very strong though and I also like the ease of use of illusive guise which definitely makes it much better than some other animal forms in terms of convenience of daily use.

Sorry that's it's very negative, but I do really like the art design of the fox at least, it looks cute and the colour changing mechanics on the dancing and various abilities looks great. The effect on the imaginary foxes and illusionary guise looks really cool too and I like the spirit stone mechanic for passing the form around as well as the lore behind the form. I enjoyed reading the initial message you get when you enter the form and just the idea of becoming a nature spirit as a player.

[Tinlaar]

After playing with spirit fox for a while, I largely agree with the feedback above. I'm currently thinking of pairing spirit fox with necro, having a healthy combination of fire DoTs and darkness damage, while relying on evasion and zombie taunt to avoid taking damage. Working towards this build (https://www.gorgonexplorer.com/build-planner/1410), though I am not sure which of these mods are stackable and which of these aren't.

A few extra thoughts:
-It feels wrong for spirit fox to be a DPS class, seeing how many of the spirit fox's design is ripped off from Kitsune in Japanese folklore, most stories are centered around manipulation, confusion and subterfuge. The fox fire (Kitsunebi) isn't really used for damage at all. It would make more sense for spirit fox to be similar to psychology, while making fire magic accessible to spirit fox players if Citan still wants to adhere to the modern Nine-Tails depiction where spirit foxes could use fire for offense.
-More dance moves please. Being a LED glow stick is fun and all, but it gets really boring when all the dance moves are just copy-pasted with a different color.
-Paradox Trot isn't bad, but it should not drop whenever there's a deer or something nearby. Make it similar to Hunting Speed where the ability will not suddenly drop unless a mob lands a hit on me. Or maybe enable us to fly with it. Literally every other spirit in the game can fly.
-Galvanize and power glyph require buffs to make them viable. Maybe even throw in more support abilities for good measure.

[Mikhaila]

I've played Spirit Fox for many months now and really love the skill. Also watched other players who stayed with it do very well with certain combos.
-It's a very strong skill with great DPS and some utility.
-As Celerity said in her post, you really only use the one set of skills: Nip, Spirit Pounce, Soulbite, Spiritbolt, dimensional anchor, and blur step. Maybe sub in the pet for Nip if your other basic skill is good. That said, these skills and their mods are very good and work well with several different skills and the flavor really comes from the mix of the two.
-Fox/Unarmed can be a decent tank both mitigation and high evasion. All that fire makes for good taunting.
-Fox/Necro works well together with very nice darkness damage.
-Fox/Priest makes a good support/dps character. Look at autopsy reports if you have a fox in a group. Especially priest, they get in some huge nukes.
-Fox/Warden is my favorite. Large DPS, AOE, flight, evasion, lots of options.

Those six skills are very solid.

Paradox trot just needs to be similar to other skills in that it doesn't drop unless you are hit. As is, it really suffers and just drops too easy.

Galvanize and the sigil just don't get used. They start out bad and take too many mods to be made into an ok skill. And then very situational.

The human illusion isn't a combat skill obviously, but it does add huge utility to the skill and is a winner. One of the things I love about fox.

The other skill I'll mention is Soul Bite. The treasure mods for the AOE are disappointing. Taking both of them barely gets you over it being an aoe half the time. And +7 damage? At level 80? I'd rather see.

It was mentioned that Spirit Fox wasn't quite finished as far as it's treasure effects. I'd echo that odd effects, trickery, etc would be fun.