Allright, time for some sweet, salty and spicy feedback on the upcoming changes as requested. Engineer: The updates to the Explosives traitline are very welcome and will certainly make Power Holosmith a lot more viable in PvE endgame. For Power Holosmith both Enhanced Capacity Storage Unit (ECST) and Photonic Blasting Module (PBM) will be viable damage traits with ECST providing more damage overall coupled with Sword as a mainhand weapon (the rotation can be seen
). This rotation ideally requires players to enter Photon Forge at specific heat values (around ~90 Heat) and exit just before they would overheat (since overheating is a major DPS loss with ECST) by using Corona Burst and immediately disengaging Photon Forge afterwards. Outside of Photon Forge player starts losing heat (cooling) and can wait until ~90 Heat to enter Photon Forge again. My concern is that this heat management outside of Photon Forge can become annoying to deal with. Unlike PBM, you cannot preheat to specific values at the start of an encounter because of immediate cooling (only possible in very coordinated groups that can time the start of an encounter). On fights with a lot of downtime between attacking and doing other stuff perfect heat management is considerably harder to achieve. Not impossible, but hard and sometimes annoying because you cannot control everything that is going on around you. So what I am proposing can be considered as a QoL update: ECST (PvE): Increases maximum heat capacity. While above 100% heat, periodically gain might. Some skills and traits gain additional heat tiers. Engaging Photon Forge while cooling will no longer cause the player to enter Photon Forge but will immediately end cooling. Engaging Photon Forge a second time allows the player to enter Photon Forge as usual.This way the players can fixate the amount of heat they want before entering the Photon Forge while using ECST. Ranger: The changes to the Skirmishing traitline are welcome. Power Soulbeasts will now most likely use this traitline over Marksmanship which was a pretty bland traitline (only taken because of 20% damage modifiers). My concern here is the Twice as Vicious (TaV) change. The additive modifier is being changed from 5% to 10%. The overall design of the trait means that you have to use CC skills as part of your rotation in PvE endgame and I don't find this particularly good design. CC skills should be used reactively and buffing Twice as Vicious will make things worse. Anyhow, for Power Soulbeast the change can be accepted since this spec already has to use CC skills as part of their rotation and can maintain a very high TaV uptime without any problems. For Condi Soulbeast, maintaining a 10% modifier is certainly very attractive, but how to do it? There really is a small amount of CC skills for this spec and these are mostly on high cooldown (>20-25 seconds). With the trait as it is, the only way to solve this problem would be the introduction of some form of new CC in my eyes. This can be done in many ways obviously, but I'd propose a change to off-hand Dagger skill Crippling Talon: Crippling Talon (PvE): Throw a dagger to bleed and cripple your foe. If your foe is already crippled, daze them instead (1/2 second daze).Since Crippling Talon is an ammunition skill with a recharge 12 seconds (without Alacrity), this update would make it possible for Condi Soulbeasts to maintain a high TaV uptime by carefully using this skill in 10 seconds intervals. These are two things that caught my eye while I was reading the patch notes. I hope this feedback can help the Systems Team in some way.