Urn of Saint Viktor Feedback

[Za Shaloc.3908]

I would like to start a thread regarding Urn of Saint Viktor because it is probably one of the worst received skills I have ever seen based on the feedback in the Rev subforum. I am in what seems to be the minority, in that I actually see a ton of potential in the skill and would really like for it be polished rather than scrapped/reworked. Despite its flaws, I still found a lot of success with the skill. Not going to lie, it did get me killed a couple times too, but that will be outlined later. 

 

First, I would argue that it feels bad for people largely because of how the Alliance legend and legend-flipping mechanic function. As a DPS, having to rotate urn into your rotation in order to get back to Spear is not only dangerous, but also requires a large cast time and a significant amount of energy. 

 

Second, the urn feels particularly punishing because of both the ~1.7s ICD and the 1s cast time to slam it. You can't just simply pulse it. You have to wait nearly 2 seconds and then risk a whole second cast time.

 

Third, the health threshold bonuses are not that great and feel unrewarding due to the inherent risks of the skill combined with the above reasons. 

 

Now, what abouts its benefits? The damage reduction bonus felt difficult to profit from due to reason #2, but the healing it pumps out is extremely good. The fact that the activation is instant is a huge deal, as you can very easily layer it with other heals, as well as cast it mid-dodge. There is an absolute ton of potential burst healing with this. When executed successfully, it felt really nice. But, IMO its beta iteration dug too far into the drawbacks.

 

So...some suggestions:

- Lower its upkeep to 8. 
- Change the 0% incoming healing to 0% incoming healing from allies only. The urn shouldn't heal you, but make it so you can still use your other healing skills and profit from it.
- Increase its radius to 300. 
- Remove the Slam flipover skill. There isn't much payoff and it makes the skill feel like a total liability to use. 

- Reduce the ICD from toggling it off by 1s to normalize it with other upkeep skills. All core legends have around a .7s ICD and all facets have no ICD; meanwhile Slam Urn has around a ~1.7s ICD. Without alacrity and quickness, you are forced to eat 3 ticks of damage if you are simply trying to pulse it, which is significant as you are also negating any healing.

- If the skill feels like it lacks identity, make it grant an additional slam-like effect if dodging while the urn is active. Give it some extra healing, some barrier, or some boons to have it function somewhat like Embrace the Darkness. Currently the dodge mechanic and Alliance legend feel like they were randomly smushed together; there is not much complexity added. It would be nice to have the special dodges feel like they were better integrated together.

 

 

What are your thoughts on the skill? What do you think could improve it?

[Infusion.7149]

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- Change the 0% incoming healing to 0% incoming healing from allies only. The urn shouldn't heal you, but make it so you can still use your other healing skills and profit from it.

Exactly this.
Maybe cast time should be taken off from dropping and put on activation.

[LucianTheAngelic.7054]

I like your other suggestions but I don’t like the suggestion to just outright remove the slam effect. If you’re solo the urn is fairly useless if the slam is removed, which would make Urn by far the most useless of all revenant utilities when by yourself in open world/wvw/pvp (yes, even worse than Razorclaw). 

They ought to just add another boon or two per level to the slam.  I’d like to see it give all or most of the major defensive boons so I would add Swiftness or Vigor, Resolution, and Aegis to the different levels, respectively. 

With all of the drawbacks that the skill has I think the above option to add a few more boons to the slam make that portion of the skill  far more appealing and actually useful.  Currently the slam just isn’t great because it doesn’t offer enough.  I also wouldn’t mind seeing Aegis being added slightly to Viktor in general, as I think it would make sense thematically and I’m surprised they didn’t go that route with him already 

Edited September 29, 2021 by LucianTheAngelic.7054

[ScottBroChill.3254]

It's a good skill if you build for healing power and play a support/tank build but it just doesn't fit with the rest of everything and is completely useless and detrimental to survival if you're building for damage. So you either have to spend energy to flip it or cast it to flip it, but you can't double tap it quick making it very annoying when you're running a damage build. Basically just an annoying obstacle if you're build doesn't revolve around it. 

[Infusion.7149]

Is it a truly good skill if you build for healing power though? The heal scaling is 0.22.
So let's say you build full harrier's that's ~1250 heal power without traits or food meaning <1K heal per second for 10 energy/second.

Soulcleave summit before nerf with the average attack speed weapon of 0.5 second per attack was 386+0.2*healing power with no cap (so around 1200/second if people just autoattack) and after a nerf and healing power change it is 578+0.5*healing power officially with 1 second interval (1200/second as well with harrier's). However, soulcleave summit's tooltip isn't right and if you have healing power it scales by ~ 0.75*healing power. Notice Soulcleave summit also has an upkeep of 6 energy per second not 10. Mind you Soulcleave summit doesn't make you potentially die.

The movement speed isn't particularly noteworthy as on herald you'd match it with about 5 stacks of upkeep with swiftness and Rising Momentum ; superspeed is faster as well.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Infusion.7149

[MatyrGustav.6210]

The least id want is to have a way to Drop the urn right away without it damaging you. The drop effect needs to also benefit the caster for solo purposes. Trying to use the urn just to get to flip Spear of Archemorus is silly while playing solo. 

 

It also needs stability, you can die if you get knocked down while its out lol

[Za Shaloc.3908]

9 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Exactly this.
Maybe cast time should be taken off from dropping and put on activation.

 

I was thinking that could work too, but at the same time, it makes sense for Slam Urn to require a cast time as it grants bonus effects. To me that is a fair trade-off, in theory. It functions like a pseudo-Facet so I think it is correct for the Slam to have a cast time. 

 

7 hours ago, LucianTheAngelic.7054 said:

I like your other suggestions but I don’t like the suggestion to just outright remove the slam effect. If you’re solo the urn is fairly useless if the slam is removed, which would make Urn by far the most useless of all revenant utilities when by yourself in open world/wvw/pvp (yes, even worse than Razorclaw). 

They ought to just add another boon or two per level to the slam.  I’d like to see it give all or most of the major defensive boons so I would add Swiftness or Vigor, Resolution, and Aegis to the different levels, respectively. 

With all of the drawbacks that the skill has I think the above option to add a few more boons to the slam make that portion of the skill  far more appealing and actually useful.  Currently the slam just isn’t great because it doesn’t offer enough.  I also wouldn’t mind seeing Aegis being added slightly to Viktor in general, as I think it would make sense thematically and I’m surprised they didn’t go that route with him already 

 

Yeah, I think the Slam Urn functionality is really neat on paper. However, I think from a practical approach, it is a bit more complicated. Personally, I love that the skill has risks to using it, and I would like for that to remain as it is a balance philosophy that the game does not practice enough. I think it would be nice to have the  bonus effect granted while dodging with Urn active instead of the Slam functionality, as that would be a nice halfway point between Slam and a more practical approach--as well as a way of integrating the enhanced dodges into the kit to make it a bit more complex. You are rewarded for making a combo, but not put at total risk to behind focused/CC'd while in competitive modes if you decide to activate it. 

I was thinking Aegis could be a nice addition for the kit as well. IMO, Battle Dance would be a nice fit for it; AoE aegis would make the skill *much* stronger as it is currently rather weak/clunky.

 

5 hours ago, ScottBroChill.3254 said:

It's a good skill if you build for healing power and play a support/tank build but it just doesn't fit with the rest of everything and is completely useless and detrimental to survival if you're building for damage. So you either have to spend energy to flip it or cast it to flip it, but you can't double tap it quick making it very annoying when you're running a damage build. Basically just an annoying obstacle if you're build doesn't revolve around it. 

 

I think it fits just fine with Saint Viktor, the problem is that you are forced to take both legends. Just like Urn feels useless on DPS builds in most scenarios, Spear of Archemorus feels useless on pure healing builds that have no DPS investment. I don't think this is a matter of the skills being bad, but moreso a matter of how the alliance swapping works for Vindicator in its current form. Would prefer that they polish up how the alliance swapping works rather than try to spread Urn into too many directions.

 

[Za Shaloc.3908]

6 minutes ago, MatyrGustav.6210 said:

The least id want is to have a way to Drop the urn right away without it damaging you. The drop effect needs to also benefit the caster for solo purposes. Trying to use the urn just to get to flip Spear of Archemorus is silly while playing solo. 

 

It also needs stability, you can die if you get knocked down while its out lol

 

I believe the Slam Urn effect does affect the caster? No way to test it now but I thought I remember tracking my combat log for this purpose specifically.

 

I was thinking that adding a single stack of stability to Slam Urn would be a potential solution too, but at the same time I'm not the biggest fan of the idea simply because it feels like a bit of a copout approach to the whole mechanic. Similar to how I feel with a skill like Glyph of Stars for Druid getting stab; it feels like the skill would be getting success/ease handed to it too directly, if that makes any sense.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Za Shaloc.3908

[Dadnir.5038]

There is just to much drawbacks to a skill whose heal is bound to be nerfed to the ground in competitive modes:

1. Prohibitive energy cost
2. Cast time
3. Health cost

It would be better to get over it before release and shave a few things from this skill.

[draxynnic.3719]

My personal thoughts:

 

First, make the urn drop as an instant activation skill. Could potentially still have a 1s delay as it falls, but like GW1 urns, make it able to be dropped at any time.

 

Second, I think it'd be interesting if the urn auto-drops if you reach health 0 while channeling the urn, preventing you from dying from the urn, and potentially saving you if the a hit that downs you is small enough that it doesn't cut through the healing.

 

Another possibility, given how the urn operated in GW1, would be modifying it to grant barrier.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

The issue I have with the skill is it has "Raid crowd design" written all over it, where it was made for only that specific crowd in mind. This wouldn't be awful skill design for any other class as they can choose their actives, but Revenant cannot, therefore the skill sucks. Great idea. Wrong class. 

 

 

[draxynnic.3719]

6 hours ago, Master Ketsu.4569 said:

The issue I have with the skill is it has "Raid crowd design" written all over it, where it was made for only that specific crowd in mind. This wouldn't be awful skill design for any other class as they can choose their actives, but Revenant cannot, therefore the skill sucks. Great idea. Wrong class. 

 

 

Even on rev, it could work, just don't use it if it's not suitable for the situation. Problem is that with the flipover you end up with an actually useful skill gated behind it.

 

Unless it's an intentional balancing factor that you need to gamble with the urn to recharge the spear throw.

[Jthug.9506]

I would really like so see some cc on the alliance, maybe the urn could be both an offensive and defensive skill to make it more worth the pain? I agree that it should be instant cast, and I like the idea of having it be auto cast at zero health too. I think it might be neat if it was an aoe daze while channeled and an aoe stun when dropped, or maybe the cc component could get more potent depending on how low your health is when it's droped?

[MatyrGustav.6210]

11 hours ago, Za Shaloc.3908 said:

 

I believe the Slam Urn effect does affect the caster? No way to test it now but I thought I remember tracking my combat log for this purpose specifically.

 

I was thinking that adding a single stack of stability to Slam Urn would be a potential solution too, but at the same time I'm not the biggest fan of the idea simply because it feels like a bit of a copout approach to the whole mechanic. Similar to how I feel with a skill like Glyph of Stars for Druid getting stab; it feels like the skill would be getting success/ease handed to it too directly, if that makes any sense.

 

Oh yes the urn does effect the caster, but if you try and slam the urn right away, you will still have less health than when you started. Because of this the urn has no purpose using when playing solo, so trying to flip the elite skill to the spear without F2 negatively affects you.

 

If we were able to slam the urn right away without receiving any health damage would be nice. Then, the small amount of health it would provide would be ok to use while solo play

Edited September 30, 2021 by MatyrGustav.6210

[Infusion.7149]

I don't think anyone is using it just for the spear which is underwhelming. If you really wanted spear you can fire off F2 instead of wasting energy on Urn.

[RabbitUp.8294]

Currently it feels like they started with a heal skill, but added self-damage to balance it, then added damage reduction to balance the self damage. To the point that the skill moved away from what it was meant to be. 

I kinda think they should go all the way and make it a channel, so you can't do other actions while "carrying" the urn. With the -10 upkeep cost, you don't want to use other skills anyway, or it will run out in 2 seconds. Reduce the health cost, move the damage reduction, and the missing health scaling gimmick, and have the urn drop be an AoE barrier + regen.

[Infusion.7149]

Vindicator was supposed to be the power DPS spec though right? If you put a urn with channeling on it means you just make it a full on support whenever you use urn (10 energy upkeep still allows you to autoattack for ~16K DPS in PVE full booned). If it were barrier for example it would be capped at 50% of anyone's health. That would be analogous  to a shield on herald, you can't attack while shielding.

If the urn is to be remotely successful it needs to allow you to heal yourself even if other people can't. Then at least you can use the weak alliance heal (because you need to be in alliance to use urn in the first place) which requires hitting targets to have a worthwhile heal on Archemorus side. Mind you the alliance heal has 1.25s cast time on Archemorus side and Saint Victor side alike and has the 714+0.22* healing power scaling.

Even beyond that if you look lore-wise at GW1:
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Urn_of_Saint_Viktor
 

Quote

the Urn powers itself whenever the holder takes damage, charging up the Urn of Saint Viktor effect.

I don't know why it isn't just a flat damage reduction that accumulates until you drop it for a barrier+ protection/resolution effect based off channel time and energy spent. We already have barrier on Breakrazor's Bastion so it would be no different except for costing energy resources and time.

A health cost makes it feel like it belongs on a necromancer.

edit: even beyond that , the skill description is rather ridiculous right now
 

Quote

Become the Urn of Saint Viktor , taking continuous damage while healing nearby allies. You take reduced damage while in this state, but you cannot be healed.

It could be much more streamlined if it was something akin to the Archemorus skill

Quote

Call upon the spirit of Archemorus to hurl his spear at your foe, dealing significant damage.

i.e. Call upon the Urn of Saint Viktor, charging up a powerful barrier that grants defensive boons to allies. Reaches full charge immediately if damage is taken below 75/50% health.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Infusion.7149