@Actual thread

It still does mean something-- especially compared to violent heart attack, which does next to nothing. Making enemies drop them is still fairly useful.

@Midnight

I think that right now the orb drops are fine, because you can't just stack them and save them. If they were made into pickups, it would basically be like nerfing all of the bosses and harder parts of levels, and buffing the easier ones up to match. The orbs in their current state are nice because they force me to use them and don't really lower the difficulty of the game by much-- sure, they make it easier. But they aren't reliable drops at all, meaning that if I do a level hundreds of times, I'm bound to sometimes get them and sometimes not. This means that I must still learn to play the game well in order to succeed as close to 100% of the time as possible.

I wouldn't mind having things like shadow espresso in the game, but they should be like the current pickups- unreliably rare, so as to not make every run easy and dependent on them.

WHAT? You're suggesting that a seraphynx skill other than the basic heart attack should actually be USEFUL? THAT WOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED!

Ok, so you can use the aura to walk over spikes and water the mask easier. Big deal. That's all I've ever seen it used for, since it lasts less than 5 seconds and blocks less damage than an omega shell would.

Can we have a battle sprite skill patching update sometime soon please? Stuff like violent heart attack and haunted haze (and the invincitinks on the seraphynx ray) are completely broken. I'd be fine with things taking ages to program if they actually worked.

Nerf Acheron and buff Sudaruska while you're at it.

Not even Pepperridge Farm remembers because defence has always been a kind of meh stat unless you use Flame Barrier+Poison, anyway.

@ fehzor

because why am i gonna map buttons on my controller for skills i'm not going to use when i can just not use those skills and have free buttons to assign to things later on

it's a pretty silly premise to say "you should use them anyway even if they are useless"

You're misinterpreting what he's saying. From his standpoint, you were a keyboard user (I am guessing) and you just weren't using them for no good reason.

However, if you play on a game pad...yes there does need to be something fixed there. There should be some system that minimizes the buttons needed yet allows you to chose what attack to use.

I guess playing on a controller is a valid excuse not to use them at all if you're trying to really go with the classic feel of it all... the lack of buttons is still kind of a silly argument. That's like saying "Why put the brake in my car when I can just doughnut around in parking lots and save space???" No matter which way you look at it you're on the worse end. But no matter, play the game however you feel-- as long as I don't have to drive with you/within 10 miles of you.

I guess if I played on a controller, I'd just put the spammable skill in question in one of the slots and leave the rest of the skills unbound. That way, I could just spam the heart attack button, or grant myself the random damage boosts from maskeraith.

@ flowchart: that'd be nice, except for the fact that you have to hold the modifier button while also pressing the button bound to the action you're trying to perform, which doesn't necessarily work well with thumbsticks mapped to movement, the shoulder buttons mapped for attack/defense and cycling through weapons. at this point you give up movement or you give up survivability for... what, less guaranteed survivability? yeah no thanks i'll just use the one-off items as opposed to lackluster pet skills.

@ autofire: that's fine n dandy but at the end of the day, we're still using the logic of "why not use them even if they are pointless" to try and argue a point, regardless of medium in which you choose to play. if a skill has one, arguably "niche" use in most cases, there is more to be had from a discussion than just "don't knock it 'til you try it", and it doesn't have much to do with the concept of buttons.

fact of the matter is, i still have five face buttons on my controller to use for these skills, but there's absolutely no motivation to do so. none. there's not even motivation to level multiple pets in order to discover the insane levels of mediocrity each one has. if you have one pet, you basically have them all but with different animations for the same non-essential result. so why am i going to waste three of five buttons mapping them to skills i'm not going to use despite how often i still do pve, when i can just not use them and get the job done just as simply and just as efficiently? i guess the point i'm making is, why are we attempting to validate a pointless feature with current game mechanics when we can just add in game mechanics that validate a pointless feature? eyo, turned a subject about pet skills into a subject about lack of updates (which actually wasn't the intent), but hopefully you get my point.

@ poomph: i accept gel drops for the same pledge.

@ fehzor: that's nice and all, but to be completely blunt? the very limited utility behind pet skills and your opinion are neck and neck for first on things i don't really care about in this thread. but don't worry about the driving bit - thankfully for both of us, the highway doesn't make a detour through the kitchen.

@ petater: with the exception of some places in UFSC and two random iterations of clockwork hallways, there's not much in the way of benefit that the shield grants for speedrunning that playing smart won't also do.

My thing was finding out that you couldn't actually protect even two people from crossing a single set of spikes. I know its technically possible, but to this day I've never successfully done it with myself and another outside of testing. The challenge of timing in game has always, always broken it.

As someone who was impressed with the amount of shield time you used to be able to get, I did think while it was happening that it was excessive. So I accepted the time nerf when it happened as inevitable. Disappointed with the damage protection though.

@Aura-is-useless guys: Valk Aura lets you bomb like crazy for those seconds - and run around not worrying about spikes. Totally awesome.