Skill Combos and Balance

I have been thinking about how balance could be addressed and what might be wrong with a lot of the skills in the game. I have come to a few conclusions:

- Combos and Map Clearing:
I think the biggest issue with how you guys are trying to implement combo and setup/payoff skills is that the resources to accomplish what you would want to do are either too hard to get (charges), too risky to get (parry), or require you to spend too much time/push too many buttons doing the combos.

In patch 0.2, I had a blast. It's where I got the plurality of my playtime in the game. Why? Because warrior actually had a very fun 'combo' build. It was essentially leap slam to close distance, earthquake (covered the whole screen) to stun a ton of enemies, and boneshatter to blow them all up. I can't do that anymore because you guys nerfed the AOE into the ground, which I feel is a giant mistake. It wasn't good against bosses, and had a weakness (anything tanky or stun resistant/immune). I used perfect strike for bossing, and the nerfs/balancing to that skill definitely moved it in the wrong direction. Nobody is going to use that skill for map clear. It isn't designed for it and I would recommend reverting the changes.

Combos can definitely exist and they can be fun, but the setup needs to be fast, widespread and efficient for map clear. It can't be slow or rely on enemies (parry). That kind of combo stuff only works for bosses which brings me to my next point.

- Map Clearing vs Bosses:
I think map mobs and bosses are essentially the same thing (a health pool the player has to deplete). If you look at it that way, blowing up screens of enemies really isn't a big deal. It should be the goal of an optimized build, and you can have combos for it, they will just look different compared to the bossing combos (mass application of something vs one powerful application). Trying to slow down map clear in an absolute sense is a bad idea. I don't think slow, methodical gameplay works there, at least not for an isometric ARPG. It does work for bosses though.

Essentially, you should play into the weapon set system you currently have. One set should be for map clear, and the other for bossing. One should be built for simple 2 or 3 button combos that blow up screens of weaker enemies, and the other should have combos that can punch through the hardest enemies.

- Skills
A lot of skills are, unfortunately, quite lame or pointless, and more keep joining their ranks.
I already mentioned a few like earthquake (now single-target, but too weak), boneshatter (completely worthless as there is no skill in the game that can apply mass stun effectively, and it isn't good against single targets), and perfect strike (I really like this skill, but treating it as anything other than a single target ability is going to make it feel really bad because it is too slow for clear, and now too weak to do meaningful damage to bosses).

The spells in this game are atrocious to say the least, they are either visually and mechanically unimpressive, or they do no damage. I would recommend taking a look at some other games and the spells they have (Wizard of Legend is a good example).

I was going to list some skills that weren't so great, but I would be here all day if I did that. Instead, the biggest issues with skills seem to stem from a lack of purpose (single target/clear), a lack of consistency (reliant upon glory, charges, and/or probability), or simply don't do anything.

The worst offenders here are:
- Hammer of the Gods (glory is the problem)
- Spear of Solaris (same as HotG)
- Tornado Shot (RNG and doesn't really do anything)
- Whirling Strike (No AOE scaling and does barely more than look cool)
- Twister (RNG)
- Snipe (reliant upon charges, and doubling on deadeye is now inconsistent??? I would recommend toning damage down before making things less consistent in all cases)
- Disengage/Escape Shot and on and on.

There are only one or two good skills per class currently and I'm sure you can work out what they are based on usage rates. The rest aren't used primarily for the reasons stated above.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope this helps :)