Dear all,
This is a post to provoke thoughtful discussion about damage over time, whether considered avoidable or not and with or without specific triggers. This applies to any damage over time node buff or character ability/debuff, but in my examples, I focus on various degeneration buffs/abilities (whether triggered to cause, triggered to remove or prevent, or no trigger at all and just unavoidable). However, this does also apply to general DoT bleed/poison/incinerate/etc. debuffs as well.
Here are the problems in my mind:
1) There is damage that is either unavoidable (Starburst, Degeneration, etc.) that you can do nothing to avoid
2) There is damage that is potentially avoidable, but conditions have to be met for you to avoid it, such as:
- Brute Force: Need to hit the enemy within 6 seconds of the last hit
- Bane: Need to hit the enemy initially and after 10 seconds elapse (as well as not get hit)
- Explosive Personality: A newer buff I've seen where the enemy gets stacks of Armor Up if they block shots which then, over a stack of 5, explode and remove 25% of attacker's health. Basically, don't hit the enemy's block.
- VOID (as a character-specific example) with his Intimidating Presence debuffs. You need to reach a combo level of 10 to purify them.
3) Enemies often play very defensively when DoT debuffs exist and block or evade a great deal.
4) The established method of block-breaking (heavy attack), I personally feel, is not adequate to reliably work and leaves you too vulnerable in a very difficult fight. In my experience, the vast majority of times I've tried to do a heavy attack when an opponent is blocking, they counter very quickly and interrupt in anything over medium difficulty level. To me, there is no reliable way, currently to penetrate a block in that case. You are very lucky if you are able to land a heavy while the opponent is blocking unless you know that they are very likely to continue blocking and not interrupt you (i.e. Mordo during power gain, though that is not DoT...that's just another case of a block one would try to penetrate with a heavy attack). In most cases, when the opponent is playing defensively, and you have a DoT debuff that is affecting you significantly (Act 5, for example), you are likely to die to the DoT or you will die trying to penetrate their block with a heavy and being interrupted.
NEW ABILITY (for all champs) Discussion: Could we possibly consider another way to break their block? Do you feel this would be useful? In other games, which may or may not have Damage over Time, there usually is an option such as Grab and maybe a Throw or something. I love using Super Smash Bros as an example, just because it's a ton of fun, though the format of fighting is a bit different. That game actually represents two potential options:
1) A block that decays over time (you can only reliably block a certain number of shots before your block is broken)
2) You can grab the opponent and then either:
- hit the enemy a limited number of times before they shake loose (and they don't do much damage) OR
- throw the enemy
Something like this is useful to possibly be able to:
- Counter DoT that you need a trigger to remove
- Try to penetrate a block to kill an enemy before you die from the DoT (or do as much damage as possible)
My ultimate question is: Do you feel that something like this (and feel free to suggest something different) would help the game? What are your thoughts?
Please avoid any trolling or belittling comments.
Kind regards,
Tiemilios
