Terraforming the environment to suit your comp doesn't feel nearly as powerful as it did in D:OS1, which is disappointing as that is one of the finer high points of that game.
The biggest reason is the armor system; especially when the clear solution to killing someone is by physical damage, it literally doesn't matter that they're walking over fire and burning magic armor that's literally not going to get depleted fully anyways. Combining magic/physical armor, as many have suggested, would be a great solution to that.
On top of that, necrofire is way too dominating. Since poison and oil inevitably become fire anyways, in D:OS1 it had a natural cycle of then extinguishing the fire with water, and then working with your steam cloud and/or water puddles. But now, necrofire just spreads and corrupts the majority of the landscape. A great example is the oil rig fight; this is probably the most surface-centric fight in the game and yet there's a huge chance you're just going to be vs necroface the whole match. There's going to be little to no changing it; even if you're wasting AP and Source blessing that fire (which really isn't worth it) it's just going to come back.
Which, another note. Bless is way too trivial. It costs AP (albeit just 1), a memory slot, and source. This is way too much for what it costs, especially with it's inconsistent size and how easily it gets negated in fights vs Voidwoken. The majority of environmental spells deal dmg, don't cost source, and have utility that makes it practical to use them as beyond the "You can now extinguish necrofire" tool. There's actually a lot of really neat bless combinations (for example blessed smoke clouds grant invisibility) but like when are you actually going to have a smoke cloud that isn't already screwed by a curse that also doesn't have fire around it (meaning you immediately break invisibility) where getting stealth there is such the tactical thing to do that you're going to bless it and then walk your guy over there? You're NEVER going to do that, if stealth was that important you would just have the upgrade itself or just use a potion.
If we could have some sort of aoe spell that blessed surfaces (hopefully create blessed environmental surfaces, like a holy fire or blessed water spell etc) it would make the game far better. As it is, trying to maintain the environment for a tactical advantage is such a ridiculous AP and Source Point investment that you're left wondering why you're not just chain lightning or arrow storm and be done with the fight.
Another example: Ice. In D:OS1, a lot of the times it made sense to create a ice surface between you and melee attackers to buy yourself time and capitalize on distance. But now, like even if you do that, even if you actually cast winter storm between you and your target rather than actually on him, that thing is going to get melted so fast by some random fireball, some random exploding voidwoken, or better yet just get trivialized by someone who pheonix dives into your face. It's get countered so easily when all the meanwhile you could just be dealing damage.
Even when implemented well, when the environmental changing is completely paying off in your favor, it's almost always better to still just keep mashing attack. Example, and I think this is one of the better uses of a surface, in the fight vs Isbeil you can burn the starting surface and then making it Holy Fire. You can then bring the enemies down into the pit. You heal off the fire and they take damage because they're all undead. Yet even if you do all that (while risking the huge obvious flaw of them using a cursed grenade or something, which is a fair enough risk of it of course) you would just be doing more damage the whole time if you outright attacked. there's zero reason to be horsing around like that.
I would like the game re-balanced so that strategies that involved manipulating the surface were more effective and were more often the 'right idea' to be doing in a particular situation. Right now it's that feature that puts annoying fire all over the map and isn't really worth bothering with.
Last edited by MrPillow; 12/10/17 06:37 AM.
