I’ve been reading a lot of the posts here, which alerted me to issues I had not yet noticed on my own and lead me to doing more testing and a lot more thinking. I’m hoping I’m making the better choice by making a new post instead of continuing to edit my own.
In a perfect world, by my perspective anyways, the support gyros would be converted into visual representations for effects pulsing off the Engineer. This would eliminate issues with response time, pathing, getting overly punished by cleave, and general longevity. It would make the gyros reliable, which is much easier to balance on the Scrapper side of things as well.
Also in a perfect world (my perspective):
Superspeed would be reworked so that it stacks in duration and provides a bigger speed boost than Swiftness even when out of combat.
Combo finishers would prioritize the user’s own fields regardless of when the field was placed. The former would make the traits related to Superspeed more reliable and useful and the latter would make the benefits of Rocket Charge easier to control.
Whirl Finishers would aim at nearby enemies/allies instead of shoot off uselessly in random directions.
Of course, this is not a perfect world, Heart of Thorns is releasing too early, and quick-fixes are far more likely to be implemented in time. Maybe Irenio can get some bigger changes implemented some time after launch, but I get the feeling the company is resistant to any mechanical changes that could in any way be described as “significant,” which means we’re probably going to get stuck with the quick-fixes either permanently or for a long time. As such, I’ll try to make suggestions on how to make Scrapper feel good without requiring anything too major.
Here’s a few gyro improvements that should be easy to test without needing a large playerbase do so:
- The gyros need at least +25% base movement speed, to make them harder to leave behind. Blast Gyro can be made an exception.
- The gyros need to have large enough AoEs to compensate for their sluggish response time while the Scrapper is on the move.
- The gyros need to have enough health/armor to survive one or two cleaves from a Reaper with Berserker stats. I’m assuming gyro’s armor and health do not scale to the Scrapper’s, and they need to be able to survive at least a short time despite their complete inability to avoid AoE and cleave damage. This goes especially for the Bulwark gyro. When it takes AoE/cleaving damage, it isn’t actually doing its job. Gravedigger seems like a good reference point to me to keep gyros from being invalidated in any particular gamemode.
- Seeing as how the Shredder Gyro itself is only particularly useful on a condi build (Scrapper and Engineer in general have plenty of sources of Vulnerability, making plopping this on a Lightning field redundant), I think it should be given some bleeding. Lacerations make sense, and it would be very difficult to choose the current Shredder Gyro over core condition skills even if whirl finishers weren’t bad. Speaking of, changing this thing to a projectile finisher would be an option for allowing it to be placed at a much safer distance at the cost of the Scrapper not benefiting directly from the field.
- Sneak Gyro needs to be able to build up 10 seconds of Stealth in 5 seconds to compete with Shadow Refuge for PvE content, and even then Sneak Gyro is a far more significant liability than Shadow Refuge when used mid-run in PvE. Waiting any longer before a run feels really bad. All it takes is 3 seconds of stealth applied each second, and Shadow Refuge will remain competitive thanks to its greater versatility. You can drop the duration of Sneak Gyro to compensate.
I might make another post later with ideas on how the traits could be made to function and feel better, but I think this is a long enough read for now.