19 réponses à ce sujet

[aisyla]

This purple effect is making weird tingling sound. It gives me headache.
I don't know what it is or does, and I hate it, I want it gone. Can anyone tell me how?

 

 

[Alireza888]

It's because you have stacks of elusive! You can get them by using Toxic Cloud with the new upgrade and it makes enemies lose the track of you and your companions!

[aisyla]

It's because you have stacks of elusive! You can get them by using Toxic Cloud with the new upgrade and it makes enemies lose the track of you and your companions!

Thank you!! How can I make it gone? 

[andyhutch]

Get hit.  

 

Really.  Not aware of any other method.

[Evamitchelle]

Get hit.  

 

Really.  Not aware of any other method.

 

This. Also toggle the other upgrade for Toxic Cloud if you don't want it to come back. 

[MilesUpShore]

Oooor, you could use a respec amulet and just get rid of the point and use it somewhere else if you don't like the other upgrade. 

[PapaCharlie9]

I got a dumb question: what exactly does a stack of Elusive do? Is it like Stealth or like Easy to Miss? Or something else?

[Arvaarad]

I got a dumb question: what exactly does a stack of Elusive do? Is it like Stealth or like Easy to Miss? Or something else?

I believe one stack of Elusive negates one hit. So it would be good against giants, less good against Sha-Brytol.

[PapaCharlie9]

I believe one stack of Elusive negates one hit. So it would be good against giants, less good against Sha-Brytol.

Wow! Who needs barrier or guard if you can stack Elusive? Rub Dirt On It makes more sense to me now ...

[Arvaarad]

Wow! Who needs barrier or guard if you can stack Elusive? Rub Dirt On It makes more sense to me now ...

 

I think it has a stack limit, and it's granted by relatively few abilities (Lost in the Mist is the only one I can recall at the moment, it may just be that one ability).

 

Still, I can picture a Tempest or Artificer playing with cooldowns to maintain it, if they built around that.

[MilesUpShore]

Izzy in the MP is all about the Elusive stacks. She has three empty slots of them and can't get to more than four with passives, I believe. Might be the same for the SP Elusive? 

[Mlady]

That thing gave me a headache! I had to go into a few battles and get hit before it faded. It actually carried over to Skyhold and that was getting really annoying really fast!

[Disco Overlord]

I believe the max for Single Player is 3 stacks.

It's incredibly overpowered since the stacks never go away: you can sit in toxic cloud and have 3 stacks at the beginning of every fight, which then you can fight in a toxic cloud and keep your stacks up.

 

This coupled with horn of valor's guard upgrade and a good barrier makes the game way too easy for my taste, so I guess the irritating constant buzzing sound makes you think twice about abusing it haha.

[AnUnculturedLittlePotato]

I believe the max for Single Player is 3 stacks.

It's incredibly overpowered since the stacks never go away: you can sit in toxic cloud and have 3 stacks at the beginning of every fight, which then you can fight in a toxic cloud and keep your stacks up.

 

This coupled with horn of valor's guard upgrade and a good barrier makes the game way too easy for my taste, so I guess the irritating constant buzzing sound makes you think twice about abusing it haha.

Making something OP AND obscenely annoying is really the best balancing I've seen EA do.

[Arvaarad]

I believe the max for Single Player is 3 stacks.
It's incredibly overpowered since the stacks never go away: you can sit in toxic cloud and have 3 stacks at the beginning of every fight, which then you can fight in a toxic cloud and keep your stacks up.

This coupled with horn of valor's guard upgrade and a good barrier makes the game way too easy for my taste, so I guess the irritating constant buzzing sound makes you think twice about abusing it haha.

It would really depend on enemy attack speed, wouldn't it? A multi-hitting shadow or arcane horror would tear through 3 stacks immediately. It only helps against slow, heavy hitters.

But slow, heavy hitters were always weak against rogues, due to rogues' movement abilities. This doesn't give them a tool they didn't already have.

[Disco Overlord]

Agreed, but toxic cloud stacks affect everyone in your party.  At its worst it's just another easy to stack, permanent(!), buffer and can be lifesaving at times when a squishy mage in between barriers gets hit by a stray arrow.  Stack it with guard from horn of valor and barriers, it just makes it so you can play even sloppier most of the time which destroys whatever's left of the strategy in the combat.

[Arvaarad]

Agreed, but toxic cloud stacks affect everyone in your party. At its worst it's just another easy to stack, permanent(!), buffer and can be lifesaving at times when a squishy mage in between barriers gets hit by a stray arrow. Stack it with guard from horn of valor and barriers, it just makes it so you can play even sloppier most of the time which destroys whatever's left of the strategy in the combat.

Pre-Trespasser, playing defensively was exceedingly weak. Giving defensive play a few buffs isn't going to make it awesome, at most it might maybe become "not awful".

To get Elusive and the Horn of Valor guard upgrade requires giving up quite a lot of damage. First you have to spend points up to those skills, then you have to reject their damage-buffing upgrades (in the case of Horn of Valor, it's a very very good upgrade you're giving up) to take the defensive ones instead.

While a party with the defensive upgrades is busy cosplaying turtles, a higher-damage team has already killed the enemies. And since enemies often spam barrier/guard, especially with Walk Softly on, a higher-damage team kills them much faster than a lower-damage team.*

Dead enemies don't land any hits, so it's as if the higher-damage team has infinite Elusive stacks.



*Here's what I mean by "much faster". Spoilered for wall o' math:

Spoiler

As a rough example, say party A does 100 dps, and party B does 50 dps. On an enemy with 1000 health and no barrier or guard, party A takes 10s to kill them, while party B takes 20s, twice as long. But now imagine the enemy can add 200 guard on a cooldown of 5s.

Party A takes the enemy to 500 hp in the first 5s, then the guard brings them back up to 700. Another 5s and they're down to 200, then guard brings them to 400. Four seconds more, and the fight is over, in 14s total.

But what about party B, the defensive party? They bring the enemy down to 750 in the first 5s, which gets bumped up to 950 when the enemy applies guard. Then the next 5s, they bring the enemy to 700, which shoots back up to 900. At this rate, it takes them (5s/50 damage)*(750 health) = 75s to bring the enemy to 250 health, at which point they can kill them in the next 5s. It takes them a total of 80s to kill the same enemy.

Even though party A only has twice the dps of party B, they killed the same enemy 5-6x faster. Because the enemy raised guard 2 times for party A, and 15 times for party B, party B had to spend much longer burning through all the extra hp. So in this toy example, party B has to soak/negate damage for 5x as long as party A. That means 5x longer to get hit by enemies, 5x longer to get crowd controlled, 5x longer to make mistakes, and 5x longer chipping away at the fight. Defensive abilities have to be really, really amazing to have any hope of offsetting that.

Barrier and guard-breaking abilities do reduce the severity of this problem (by reducing the effective barrier/guard amount an enemy applies), but it's still the case that doubling the party's damage more than halves the length of the fight.

In short, I'm still very happy with a glass cannon party.

[PapaCharlie9]

Dead enemies don't land any hits, so it's as if the higher-damage team has infinite Elusive stacks.

No argument there, but don't you get bored one-shotting every enemy? Personally, I prefer long, drawn-out battles. Granted, wearing a dragon or Darkspawn Emissary down to 10 HP and having it regen guard/barrier over and over again isn't all that fun, but barring those exceptions, I think a 20 minute boss battle is more satisfying than a 20 second one.

[Arvaarad]

No argument there, but don't you get bored one-shotting every enemy? Personally, I prefer long, drawn-out battles. Granted, wearing a dragon or Darkspawn Emissary down to 10 HP and having it regen guard/barrier over and over again isn't all that fun, but barring those exceptions, I think a 20 minute boss battle is more satisfying than a 20 second one.

Fair enough, but my point is that Elusive doesn't magically make defensive fighting OP.

[Evelynne]

Pre-Trespasser, playing defensively was exceedingly weak. Giving defensive play a few buffs isn't going to make it awesome, at most it might maybe become "not awful".

To get Elusive and the Horn of Valor guard upgrade requires giving up quite a lot of damage. First you have to spend points up to those skills, then you have to reject their damage-buffing upgrades (in the case of Horn of Valor, it's a very very good upgrade you're giving up) to take the defensive ones instead.

While a party with the defensive upgrades is busy cosplaying turtles, a higher-damage team has already killed the enemies. And since enemies often spam barrier/guard, especially with Walk Softly on, a higher-damage team kills them much faster than a lower-damage team.*

Dead enemies don't land any hits, so it's as if the higher-damage team has infinite Elusive stacks.



*Here's what I mean by "much faster". Spoilered for wall o' math:

Spoiler

As a rough example, say party A does 100 dps, and party B does 50 dps. On an enemy with 1000 health and no barrier or guard, party A takes 10s to kill them, while party B takes 20s, twice as long. But now imagine the enemy can add 200 guard on a cooldown of 5s.

Party A takes the enemy to 500 hp in the first 5s, then the guard brings them back up to 700. Another 5s and they're down to 200, then guard brings them to 400. Four seconds more, and the fight is over, in 14s total.

But what about party B, the defensive party? They bring the enemy down to 750 in the first 5s, which gets bumped up to 950 when the enemy applies guard. Then the next 5s, they bring the enemy to 700, which shoots back up to 900. At this rate, it takes them (5s/50 damage)*(750 health) = 75s to bring the enemy to 250 health, at which point they can kill them in the next 5s. It takes them a total of 80s to kill the same enemy.

Even though party A only has twice the dps of party B, they killed the same enemy 5-6x faster. Because the enemy raised guard 2 times for party A, and 15 times for party B, party B had to spend much longer burning through all the extra hp. So in this toy example, party B has to soak/negate damage for 5x as long as party A. That means 5x longer to get hit by enemies, 5x longer to get crowd controlled, 5x longer to make mistakes, and 5x longer chipping away at the fight. Defensive abilities have to be really, really amazing to have any hope of offsetting that.

Barrier and guard-breaking abilities do reduce the severity of this problem (by reducing the effective barrier/guard amount an enemy applies), but it's still the case that doubling the party's damage more than halves the length of the fight.

In short, I'm still very happy with a glass cannon party.

 

Honestly, what it does is make have 'enough' Defense to be Hard to Kill easier and less expensive to obtain. 5 out of 30 Skill points for both on two party members. So, 10 points out 120 points across your party. If we add Barrier -- it becomes 12 out of 120 points. So 10% of your points make your party very difficult to murder -- which means more focus on DPS, and to be honest, a well crafted team does both, here, I'll show you.

 

I'm playing with Iron Bull, Varric, and Dorian as a Rift Mage Inquisitor. Dorian and I are both Storm heavy mages, we went all the way in for Static Cage and its upgrade.  Varric is running a Critical Throwing Blades build. Iron Bull is running a typical Reaver heavy build.

 

Iron Bull is toting Horn of Valor upgraded, because I already wanted him to have Chains for Days and Horn of Valor -- why not invest that point and generate Guard for everyone -- which frees up a Masterwork slot on all four of my team members.

 

Me and Dorian both have Barrier -- because I wanted Dispel to shred barriers.

 

Varric is really deep into the Sabotage tree -- so I go ahead and fill it out, because the passives on the otherside of the tree buff his Sundered stacking main ability, letting me get higher stacks of Sundered.

 

So Varric there is probably my main DPS, followed by My Inquistor thanks to how his attacks work with Static Cage. Then Dorian, and finally Iron Bull. 

 

So what do I have all up in this team build?

 

Weakened, Slowed, Sundered up to 25 stacks, Shocked, Asleep, Fear, Elusive, Poisoned, Immobilizing, Bleeds, Burns, Freezes, Chilled, Discharge, Shatter, Barrier, Guard, and Horn of Valor, as well as approximately 50-60k DPS.

 

Things do not live long around me.