Exit Photo Forge Cooldown

Can we get the 5s cooldown on exiting photon forge switched to entering photo forge instead? It's actually really obnoxious being trapped in photon forge when you can't exit because of this obscure cooldown.

That's part of the balance though. There's a risk going into forge and that risk is self explosion. If you could exit forge immediately after going into there would be absolutely no risk at all.

@Arimas.3492 said:That's part of the balance though. There's a risk going into forge and that risk is self explosion. If you could exit forge immediately after going into there would be absolutely no risk at all.

This.

There have been times when I've had to let my team mates know over voice, "Crapcrapcrap, I just went into Forge at 140 heat. I'm about to lose half of my health. Cover me!", because of screwing it up. And I love that I'm penalised for being a twat and getting too tunnel-visioned.

and why should there be risk? nothing else in the game is as risky. we aren't getting huge dps, control, or almost any support for taking risk. just slightly better dps. that's not how other transforms work. other transforms make you scary, because they had to be buffed so much to see any use to counter their long cds. it's never going to be worth risking or sacrificing 1/3 or 1/2 of your hp to enter pf.

@insanemaniac.2456 said:and why should there be risk? nothing else in the game is as risky. we aren't getting huge dps, control, or almost any support for taking risk. just slightly better dps. that's not how other transforms work. other transforms make you scary, because they had to be buffed so much to see any use to counter their long cds. it's never going to be worth risking or sacrificing 1/3 or 1/2 of your hp to enter pf.

Partially because its better gameplay. Not everything needs to be spoonfeeding. Forge offers strong skills, good dps burst and good passives. You put everything on CD, swap to forge, build heat, leave or blow up, blow CDs. Its much more interesting, in pve you're rarely punished for greed except with this. In pvp its a limitation.

other engi builds and other classes don't ever punish themselves. why is it ok for you to be punished by you? your enemies are there to punish you.

I don't see it as punishment. It's simply a class flavor. You can also use it to your advantage if you don't know how to "not blow up" buy using Photonic Blasting Module. I'd rather have this cooldown than go back to the tool kit swap games bs.

play any other non ele class as a dps. holosmith playstyle with no kits is very similar to them. most well played builds have you swapping weapons constantly. holosmith has you swapping weapons constantly and then being stuck with what your on for a time, but leaving pf isnt a choice. you leave it or you get wrecked. or with pbm, you leave it and take enemies down with you and hope you dont get wrecked, and then have a cd before you can get back in.

and since ive played engi for 5 years, kit rotations come naturally to me. fuck i can switch any kit combo to any position and play it naturally in <15 mins. playing holo with kits is a janky mashup of any other generic dps class + engi. and its janky partly because the potential to hurt yourself is there, through no action by your enemies. that is stupid. the other part thats janky is mashing up a generalization of the games other dps classes with the mercurial improvisation of kit engi.

and it doesnt even do enough dps to justify itself. you shouldnt be flipping into pf and pushing 4 and then autoing. on a dps class. thats stupid. you have 3 other skills. they shouldnt be situational. you shouldnt want to avoid pushing those buttons because they shorten your time in pf. thats stupid.

@insanemaniac.2456 said:play any other non ele class as a dps. holosmith playstyle with no kits is very similar to them. most well played builds have you swapping weapons constantly. holosmith has you swapping weapons constantly and then being stuck with what your on for a time, but leaving pf isnt a choice. you leave it or you get wrecked. or with pbm, you leave it and take enemies down with you and hope you dont get wrecked, and then have a cd before you can get back in.

and since ive played engi for 5 years, kit rotations come naturally to me. kitten i can switch any kit combo to any position and play it naturally in <15 mins. playing holo with kits is a janky mashup of any other generic dps class + engi. and its janky partly because the potential to hurt yourself is there, through no action by your enemies. that is stupid. the other part thats janky is mashing up a generalization of the games other dps classes with the mercurial improvisation of kit engi.

and it doesnt even do enough dps to justify itself. you shouldnt be flipping into pf and pushing 4 and then autoing. on a dps class. thats stupid. you have 3 other skills. they shouldnt be situational. you shouldnt want to avoid pushing those buttons because they shorten your time in pf. thats stupid.

It's an elite specialisation. It's supposed to change how you play without losing the flavour of your profession. Heat is a mechanic that could only really make sense on Engineer and it's a very fun limiter mechanic to work with, but the heat mechanic has to result in different gameplay to standard resource mechanics (a resource bar going the other way doesn't impact gameplay). Letting us go into kits, while stuck in the Forge, would remove the risk of the Photon Forge as we could easily ignore forge attacks when it would be unfavourable.

There is certainly an argument that photon forge doesn't do enough damage to justify the cost in its current state, but changing the skill balance to reward high DPS for clicking 2, 3, 4 and 5 instead of 1, 1, 1 and 1 isn't necessarily better for the design either. 2 is for mobility, 3 is for damage amplification (and is needed to maximise damage when outside of raids), 4 is for condi spiking and 5 is for CC (with a guaranteed crit for some reason). 1 being the spammy bread and butter DPS skill is in line with the skill balance of death shroud, Lich Form and Celestial Avatar Form. This works well as a rule too, because it's hard to get a feel for the effectiveness of different skills while in a temporary transformation.

"But if spamming 1 is good because it's the same as other transforms, doesn't that make Photon Forge the same as them?"

No, we suffer the soft limits of heat instead of hard limits of Astral Force and Life Force.Photon Forge gives us the option to overuse it, but the price for doing so is painful. If there was no lock on the forge, you could leave at 99 every time without fail. The only times you would detonate would be for bad mechanical skill, lag spikes or deciding to use holographic shockwave at >75% heat (because the heat gain and individual impact from other skills is far too low to justify overheating for one use). With the lock, we add the decision to enter forge at high heat to that list, players can commit to overheating as an actual decision rather than a mechanical error. With the lock, the cost of a forge entry at high heat can also be shifted from self damage to the loss of your weapon for 6 seconds. Losing your other weapons for 6 seconds in general is a hefty cost and makes for interesting engineer gameplay.

The current costs of Photon Forge are fine, we have not played it long enough to know how it should be fine tuned. The question really is whether the rewards are worthwhile, which is something that can be tested and proven via evidence.

@HotHit.6783 said:

No, we suffer the soft limits of heat instead of hard limits of Astral Force and Life Force.Photon Forge gives us the option to overuse it, but the price for doing so is painful.

That is wrong. We get kicked out of PF like any other class when the limit is reached.

Losing your other weapons for 6 seconds in general is a hefty cost and makes for interesting engineer gameplay.

No it does the opposite. I limits you massively in the way you can connect skills. What made engi an interesting to play class was the huge amount of skills that could be potentially accessible at any time in any order and the variation this brought. Now we are just another meele class with weaponswap.

@Kusumura.8642 said:

@Arimas.3492 said:That's part of the balance though. There's a risk going into forge and that risk is self explosion. If you could exit forge immediately after going into there would be absolutely no risk at all.

I think the notion of being punished AT ALL for utilizing my elite specialization skills is a horrible design.

Huge risk to few DPS increase... Some times i kill myself :anguished:Looks like Holosmith isn't done yet. Some skills needs scales with heat mecanic, this includes the holoforge skills itself.