Hi all,

I've been playing the game for a while now but have never used the forums. Today I'd like to talk and ask about psi waves, and felt like this is the best place to elucidate my opinion and receive feedback. In particular, I felt like psi waves are unnecessarily complex and punishing, and make mentalism a skill I found extra trouble enjoying.
Please note that this is coming from a player no-where near endgame, and is more focused on early/mid-game (e.g. dailies) aspects of the game. In addition, I've tried to get into mentalism several times but have always failed. As such, there may be aspects of psi-waves and mentalism which I have not considered or are wrongly opinionated, and I'd appreciate feedback.

Psi waves are a set of skills which, once initiated, provide buffs or health/armor/power regenerations for 60s. They share a common cooldown of 20s, so ideally one can stack up 3 waves simultaneously, potentially of the same wave (e.g. 3 healing waves). My issue with psi waves is simply that why they'd stack 3 times instead of, say, 2 times (i.e. with a shared cooldown of 30s, after rebalancing). Below I'll try to argue why the 3 stacks make the skills unnecessarily complex.

There are two advantages of the current system (over 30s shared cooldown) that I can think of:
Pros 1) With a 20s shared cooldown, each psi wave can have an effect of 0%, 33%(ABB), 50%(ABAB), 66%(AAB) or 100%(AAA) of their full potential (considering every combination in a 60s window). With a 30s shared cooldown, each psi wave can have an effect of 0%, 50%(AB), 100%(AA) of the full potential. Is the freedom to have 33% and 66% effect (instead of just doing 50%) really significant? This is a clear no to me, but feel free to argue otherwise.

Pros 2) Allowing 3 stacks means that one can have 3 distinct waves simultaneously. However, I would imagine any optimal playstyles will only want at most 2 simultaneous waves, considering how mods work and the fact that particular skills will always be better in a given scenario (gk/dailies etc). Again, I haven't experienced the end game such as gk, nor have I got that deep into mentalism, so this opinion could be wrong.



On the other hand, there are several things in psi waves that felt unsatisfying to use (and I have to imagine I can't be alone in this):
Cons 1) Needing to cast the spell 3 times (per minute or cycle) is unnecessarily annoying and punishing (and it's much more than the fact that casting 3 spells instead of 2 takes an extra second). From a new player perspective, if one forgets to cast the wave on time, they are punished much more heavily than when the shared cooldown is 30s. In particular, with a 30s shared cooldown, casting the 2nd wave between 30 and 60s means a total efficiency between 100% and 50% (linearly). This could potentially be much lower with the current system, if the new player delays both the 2nd and 3rd wave. Now, an argument could be made that the game should not be balanced around errors. However, this is an issue even for the ideal player. Even when playing optimally, the player can still be stunned and feared. In addition, psi waves are hardly a priority that the player might often need to delay it for other spells (e.g. to heal or kill). The current system, since we have to cast waves thrice per minute, also has a (33%) larger window for such issues for delays to take place.
If nothing else, I feel like only having to stack twice will make the skill feel much less clunky.


Cons 2) Related to Pros 1, the 50% effect scenario of the system actually creates windows of 33%(BAB) and 66%(ABA). This is an unnecessary complexity that may create spots of vulnerability. For instance, the heal wave are half as effective in half of the windows which might lead to potential deaths. Similarly, having only one adrenaline wave instead of two might mean that the group is not able to kill an orge in time before their rage attack, leading to massive stuns, broken bones, and potentially deaths. Now, don't get me wrong - waves are mere supplements with small effects and heal waves should only be marginal heals that round off the corners of actual healing spells. Still, my point is that this is an unnecessary complex aspect of psi waves that is only more harm than good (however slightly).

Cons 3) Related to Pros 2, the current system which allows 3 waves might not be the best way to implement it. If the playstyle is to cast the 3 waves sequentially, then it's a very passive/unchallenging gameplay - Do we really want the difficulty in mentalism to be about casting 3 spells on time in a minute? On the other hand, If the playstyle is to choose and adapt the compositions of waves depending on the situation, then the current implementation is sub-optimal as well, considering that each time you cast a different wave it'll only be 33% of its maximum effect, and it'd take a full minute to reach maximum effect. Instead, below are some proposed alternatives that may allow change in directions of the waves to be more rapid and potent per step.



Here are some alternative implementations of psi waves I was pondering.
Alt 1: As I've spammed way too many times, change the cooldown from 20s to 30s, so that the psi waves are stacked twice instead of 3 times (and rebalance skills to be ~150% stronger). This is the simplest change that I feel like will streamline the mentalism gameplay experience (i.e. from tiling patterns to alternating patterns), without changing the current direction, focus, and philosophy of psi waves and mentalism as a whole.

Alt 2: Similar to alt 1 but be such that casting a psi wave leads to a 60s cooldown to that wave, and 30s shared cooldown to others. This further simplifies the psi waves, but may allow a new direction of them as 'Here's a bunch of things psi waves/mentalism can do, pick two.' (and the devs can introduce many more psi waves, potentially niche/fun ones, if not specialized ones (e.g. extra damage, but only for some damage types)). Disabling double casting of each wave might also allow a larger design space for this purpose (i.e. don't have to worry about everyone just spamming the best wave, now they have to choose the best two (that may do different things)). Furthermore, it might allow suboptimal/conditional waves to be tuned up, and promote a 'have multiple waves in the bar but choose and adapt depending on the situation' kinda playstyle (if this is what the devs want, that is). Of course, along this line there might be an issue of mentalism being able do everything (e.g. https://forum.projectgorgon.com/show...-class-Options, not that I 100% agree with their point or want such discussions here...), so there are details to polish.

Alt 3: No longer have shared cooldowns (but each with a 60s cooldown). Instead, inflict tradeoff when casting a psi wave while other psi waves are on (maybe self damage, maybe make each on-going waves weaker/shorter, etc). This might however promote passive gameplay if the tradeoffs are too weak. On the other hand, if we allow the player to turn off ongoing psi waves (to avoid trade-offs), or if the game only allows 2 waves and automatically turn off the oldest one when a 3rd is cast. it might allow a playstyle of 'choose and adapt depending on the situation', though perhaps with similar issues as Alt 2.

Ultimately, there are numerous ways to implement this. But I'd like to urge the devs to take a step back and consider what they want out of psi waves (passive playstyle? choose and adapt? something else) and mentalism in general (what proportion of the gameplay is psi waves related), then the best implementation might be immediately obvious. In contrast, the direction of the current mentalism skill might be too vague and loose in terms of what they bring/ how they stand out, which hurts the implementation.


Thank you for reading. Again, I am no-where near end-game and am also not too experienced with mentalism. So perhaps my opinions were based on wrong groundsPraise Oranges and there may be advantages of the current psi-waves implementation I didn't realize. In such case, feel free to refute my points. I also introduced a bunch of alternative implementations that may work (and may work for other support skills, say bard). However, I haven't thought about it that carefully so they might have implicit issues with them as well.

tldr: The current implementation of psi waves are unnecessarily annoying, complex, and punishing (Cons 1&2). Any advantages of the current system (Pros 1&2) seem minimal and pointless, and the implementation does not fully enable such advantages (Cons 3). Some alternative implementations proposed that will hopefully provide insights...