A discussion of psi waves in mentalism

[INXS]

I would prefer if waves stay as they are i find them easy to use and makes them a unique trait when you using Mentalism skill.

[Sunchaser]

I would prefer if waves stay as they are i find them easy to use and makes them a unique trait when you using Mentalism skill.

I'm not sure I see your reasons for keeping waves as they are. Even if the decision is to keep its current design philosophy, I'd argue that there are still ways to streamline the abilities. I honestly do not see any benefits of stacking/pre-ramping the waves, in the current way psi-waves are being used.

As I stated in the initial post, and I felt like Citan alluded to, the waves as they stand are currently between several different themes (bard-like interleaving, background toggle-and-forget etc), which hurts the skill moreso than benefits it. Of course I'm not too experienced in mentalism, and would love to hear any opinions of its advantage/ why people like the skill as it is.

[Celler]

As said before I mainly only use them in grp play, so if one person is casting one and another person another I feel they should both be allowed.

I don't mind all sharing the same cooldown, but I imagine a low lvl or player lacking some of the other abilities may find it annoying.

I do feel ment could perhaps use another attack abilty, or move one from Mu to normal acquire.
It is possible for many early ment starter to have little to no knowledge of the 4 abilities on MU and ment is pretty lacklustre without those options. You could go to lvl 26 with only 2 offensive options.
Also of course you'd perhaps be heavily wave focused which would lead to the annoyance.

[ErDrick]

My only beef with the skill is clicking the button every 20 seconds especially in 2 hour dungeon runs.

Why not just have it be a toggle but everything else remain exactly the same, mods just trigger "every 20 seconds while xx wave is active", "increases in power once every 20 seconds up to 3 times". They can even auto-drain the power cost every time they auto-refresh, that would be fine.

Every skill that isn't offensive in nature or a clutch defense suffers from the same thing really, there is little reason for temporary buffs that have the same duration as their recast to not just activate continuously once used. All damage shields, druid veins, necro heart/spleen, even bard songs (as some examples, there are definitely others)... all just taking cool abilities that might define a skill and making them annoying for no real reason.

Heck you could even put it as a game option checkbox for "auto refresh buffs" and let people choose. Or add another skill that auto-refreshes which is learned at the same time as the base skill, then you can just hotbar the option you prefer.

[Golliathe]

Mentalism is physically draining to try and play at max skill with lots of weaving. Other skills have some pretty long buffs.... BC has an hour buff and priest has a 15 minute buff. But one inherent problem with remembering to cast 1-2-3 is that sometimes you need the active effect from skill 1 even though skill 3 should be next in the rotation.

My only beef with the skill is clicking the button every 20 seconds especially in 2 hour dungeon runs.

Idea 1: What if..... you changed mentalism waves so that the passive wave buff lasted 5 or 10 minutes. People would still spam them regularly for power drain for the active effect for things like instant +100 health or armor restoration. This could be a function of how high you have leveled the skill... 2 minutes base with +1 minute duration every 20 levels. Add in the little bit of code you have on BC so that if someone tries to buff as mentalism and then gearswap macros into something else the mentalism wave fades instantly.

Idea 2: What if there was no linked cooldown (each skill had a 20 second cooldown) so that you could just go buff/buff/buff if you wanted. This would make the buffing WAY less tedious. This would put mentalism way closer to being on par with some other healing options. How would any other support class play if every healing spell they owned was on a shared 20 second linked cooldown?

Idea 3: What if we had a new lvl 80 skill for mentalism that activated all available waves at once? Maybe this is an epic skill (thinking about guildwars style play here where you can only have one epic skill on your bar) with a pretty hefty power cost that mind end up being relatively cheap if you mod it correctly as the skill would have every effect active from all of your waves.

Maybe this skill is a function of level? For example what if we added new abilities that were fixed combinations of waves? This would increase the council cost of mentalism but make it more user friendly. Maybe at level 20 you unlock a new wave that would activate your highest tier health and armor waves at the same time. At level 40 you unlock a new wave that activates your health armor and power waves. At level 60 you unlock a new wave that activates your health armor power and adrenaline waves at the same time. Maybe at level 80 you get a cost reduction so it costs the same as using a single wave (previously maybe this skill cost double). Finally at level 100 you would unlock the ability to have an hour long buff with a leashed area effect: anyone who moves within your mentalism buff radius keeps the buff until they walk out of that radius. In other words this would give mentalism a solo play 1 hour buff for wave effects (which would be lost instantly upon changing classes just like BC).


Note: Ideas 1 & 2 could be implemented together.

[Sokar]

The most brain-dead simple way to "fix" the waves is to just make them last 20s, the same as the reset time, and have them be 3x as effective, so just using it once gets you the full potency for 20s. After 20s if you want to press a different one, you can. (There would probably be Power cost or potency changes as a result, but they'd stay roughly the same power.) What do you think of that idea?

This would excatly solve the real problem why some people dislike the wave mechanism. The problem is not to press a button every 20sec. The problem is, you have to press a button every 20sec no matter what is going on to have competitive effects compared to other skill sets.

Big pull? Fine everything works like intended and my waves do the job (it was worth the work of pressing the skill multiple times)
Small pull? Ok if I would had only pressed it once it would also had been enough (it was not worth the work of pressing the skill multiple times)
No pull at all, we are moving? same as a small pull
other things: same as a small pull

As you can see, there are much more situations where it was not worth all the work to press the button every 20 sec. Why constantly stressing around with the waves where other healing skill sets simply just press 1 heal if it's needed. If you don't pressing the waves every 20 secs even out of fight, you don't have the full potential of the skill when you need it. And you need the full potential of the skill to be just on pair with other healing skill sets.

Thats why many like the idea of a toggle. It would solve the problem perfectly without changing much. As you said you would like to keep the toggles to the bard songs and have an other mechanism for the Mentalism skill set you still have it. The real difference why ever considering Mentalism over some other healing skills are 2 points:

1) you have the boni on the fly (rushing through a dungeon/area and still have the heal etc.) For this point e.a. Druid and Bard is totaly crap because both are stationary support skill sets. But to be fair it's mostly in low lvl areas/dungeon - you can't just rush GK
2) Mentalism is the only skill set that grants the hole grp a power reg on the fly. For stationary pulls like in GK Druid is much better at providing power, as he can also provide heal and armor reg at the same time where as mentalisn have to decide wich to provide. Also buff this wave no matter what adjusting to mentalism you choose, the new power costs reach a point where you really struggle to figh longer than 30 sec's.


Also consider we have only 6 skill slots. Filling it with 3-4 waves to have a choice wich is needed the most ist just crippeling the hole skill set down. 1 -2 waves should be sloted at max to still have other skill options to use. Maybe you can thing of redesigning the waves in a way like:

a) defense wave (provide small amount of health, armor, and power)
b) offensive wave (provide a flat damage and % damage)
c) elemental wave (providing huge elemental resis, flat and %)
d) utility wave (provide stun, knockback, snare resis and a small movement speed buff)
e) destructive wave (aoe direct dmg aura)

To prevent the situation you want to slot all the waves you can change the mods on the items that they buff one aura and debuff an other one (inner mental fight between: defense vs offense and utility support vs direct destruction). So you can choose the mods according to the playstyle you want to do.

Do NOT change mentalism into a channeling skill set. You would destroy the real benefit of it to use the waves on the fly (while moving).

When thinking of balance the effects of the waves, just choose a time frame (e.a. 60 sec) and compare all the healing, power reg, dmg etc. that can be done with mentalism compared to other support skill sets.

[Darkian]

I've been thinking about this also. (Mentalism is coming up in the rotation for skill revisions.) The original goal of the waves was to let players pull off EQ1-bard-style buff interleaving. But I'm not sure that's ever going to be worth the hassle.

Originally gear was the big limiter here, it was just too hard to gear for multiple waves. But now that most treasure effects apply to multiple waves at once, it's relatively easy to gear up for a two-Wave setup. Even so, when I playtest Mentalism these days I always end up just using one Wave over and over, because it's too hard to keep track of which one to interleave each time.

So ... yeah, maybe it's time for that design to go.

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So why not just make them toggles? We could conceivably do that now (with a few days of coding) : just press the Wave you want, and you get that one at max potency forever. Switch to a different Wave and you get the new one at max potency but the old one ends.

One problem here is the Power cost (and action cost): if you only have to use it one time, out of combat, who cares about the cost? The ability doesn't need to be thought about at all. And we partially balance gear based on things like power cost, casting time, and reset time... so most of the treasure effects would get weaker as a result. In many cases, too weak to be useful.

Since so much of the mentalist's power comes from the waves, I think there NEEDS to be some interactive element, for balance purposes. It can't just be a toggle. I'm just not sure what that should look like.

I recently tested out an idea where you toggle which wave you want, and then every 20 seconds it just "casts it for you", still charging you the usual Power cost. But it's really confusing and clunky. (You still have to wait 60 seconds before that system gets up to full power, switching Waves doesn't do anything until the next 20s time is up, and most importantly, suddenly having your character stop and cast a buff during a tricky fight is ... not always okay.)

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I could definitely change the reset time from 20s to 30s. I just don't know if that'd be enough to change peoples' minds if they thought 20s was annoying.

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So anyway, more thoughts are welcome!

The most brain-dead simple way to "fix" the waves is to just make them last 20s, the same as the reset time, and have them be 3x as effective, so just using it once gets you the full potency for 20s. After 20s if you want to press a different one, you can. (There would probably be Power cost or potency changes as a result, but they'd stay roughly the same power.) What do you think of that idea?

Mentalism has always been kind of meh in my book, every time I try the skill it feels like the regen doesn't do enough by itself to mean anything, the only thing that even makes it worth using is the 'on-use' mods for the waves, so ultimately there's only a few ways to fix it without ruining the identity of the skill-set.

1.) Create a custom system for Mentalism that lets them select 3 buffs to run at any one time, you can make them 20 seconds, or 30 seconds, doesn't really matter, but basically you can pick A, B, C or D wave, in any 3 way pattern. AAA, AAB, AAC, ect. and this will auto cast the skills in the order you have selected, or even all three at once would be preferable. This would be balanced by the power cost (at least until you get mods to reduce that) and take away the annoying aspect of having to micro manage the buffs.

2.) If you 100% want to keep the annoying micro management, shorten the buff like some others have said, to run the same duration of the cool-down, and increase the effect so that you use them as you need them in reaction to the moment.

3.) A combination of both of the above would be my preferred, shorten the buff timers to 30 seconds, but also shorten the cool-downs to 10 seconds, condense the healing down to match the lowered timers so you get more alpha healing/armor/power, and then let us select 3 of these to run at a time, this would require a re-balancing of Mentalism mods so that it doesn't become crazy at healing, but lets it be more useful at actually recovering the party when it needs it.

4.) Combine the wave skills into smaller groups, so Armor/Health into one wave, and Power/Adrenaline into a second wave, and then set these buffs to 30 second with higher alpha per second with a 25 second cooldown (to give you time to refresh the buff after the 25 second procs) this would reduce the annoyance of managing 4 skills/3 buffs, while also increasing the effectiveness of mentalists in groups.

Mentalism has a really unique way of healing that I think is really cool, but just needs a little TLC to make it more fun and enjoyable to use.

[Wark]

I've played mentalism for a few days now, and I see what the OP means.
A 20 second cooldown makes it into a real chore to maintain 3 waves constantly at the same time, and can cause some pressure for doing so.
It's OK as is, but can be annoying to weave in a wave at the right time in the middle of your combos.
I agree about extending its cooldown to 30 seconds with a 60 second duration, effectively meaning you only need to maintain 2 waves as it is.
To compensate however, I suggest making each wave a little more powerful.

For example, 30 second cooldown, but +6 health every 4 seconds, up from +4 health every 4 seconds.
This will give the same value as maintaining 3 of the same wave, and giving less hassle to the player.

EDIT:
I also like the above poster's suggestion of a 30 second duration, but making it more powerful.
This would make it a little less passive, and less of a chore: instead, choosing the appropriate wave at the appropriate time.