Aspect of Artemis Rework

[Artemis ❤]

tldr, Aspect of Artemis is designed in a way that encourages safe and slow campy play where the usual fantasy of a parry weapon is fast and reckless aggressive play. Reworking the parry to be available without cooldown in exchange for rebalanced rewards and higher execution demands will allow Artemis to behave in a more satisfying and exhilarating way that delivers on the promise of a parry weapon

Aspect of Artemis being a crit based parry weapon is a phenomenal idea on paper, however in practice it fails to deliver on what you'd actually want out of that kind of weapon. When I think of a parry style weapon, I imagine I'll be playing something like Sekiro or Bloodborne, a frantic playstyle where you're constantly avoiding damage by the skin of your teeth by using your parry to narrowly iframe every incoming attack without backing down to dodge. It should be chaotic, aggressive, dangerous gameplay. The parry should be a consistent part of your tool kit, it should be your primary method of avoiding damage, and you should be in constant danger of dying if you mess up your execution, high risk high reward.

Artemis has a ""parry"" which plays directly opposite to this fantasy, you cannot rely on the parry as a clutch way to narrowly escape damage because of the insanely long cooldown, and when you do get to use it you can hold it indefinitely until it triggers off any incoming damage with absolutely no skill or timing needed. The reward, a large number of free followup 100% crits, is an enormously rewarding payoff balanced around the long cooldown. This results not in a frantic and aggressive weapon, but a weapon where you dance around the enemy prioritizing safety until your parry is off cooldown, at which point you will immediately trigger it on purpose to burst down enemies with your free crits. When was the last time ANYONE actually used the parry to avoid damage? You can't really, the cooldown is so long that if you try to rely on it that way it's almost certainly going to be unavailable when you need it and if you decide to save it then you're wasting a ton of potential DPS by not triggering your crits often enough. It's a campy setup weapon, which is fine for an aspect like Eos or Charon which are designed to be slower tempo weapons where you work your combat loop around engaging with their setup mechanics, but not fine for a fast parry weapon.

I think the parry timing should be rebalanced to be available on a middle ground between the previous "parry" style mechanics timing wise, not as fast as the old ax blocks but a little faster than Athena's Mental Block, maybe a one second cooldown, enough that it can't be spammed literally constantly but is still consistently available when you need it. To balance the new low cooldown, you can no longer hold parry indefinitely waiting for incoming damage, instead you will need to time it. There are a few ways to handle this, the two that jump to my mind are that you either need to release your omega attack right at the moment you would take damage to parry (with improper timing resulting in a normal omega attack instead), or possibly trigger a parry at the moment you cancel your omega attack charge into a dash. Either way works, what's important is that you get only a fraction of a second where the parry window is active and you need to properly time it instead of just holding omega attack forever. Naturally the reward for performing a parry needs to be reworked too, and to do that I think we should look at how other games reward a parry. You usually don't get a buff of your own for parrying an opponent, instead the opponent is usually negatively punished in some way, such as being trapped in an attack animation while you are free to act or being left in an exposed state where you can perform special punishes on them, so I think Hades 2 should also reward parries by punishing the triggering enemy. Instead of buffing you with X number of free crits, the enemy that triggered your parry will stunned (Hecuba bark stun) and have the Marked curse applied to them. This allows you to get a potential free followup crit on only that specific enemy, but not totally guaranteed. If these changes are deemed too strong, then the weapon can have a baked in +10% damage taken or something, people who like a parry style are absolutely the kind of people happy taking bonus damage as a glass cannon to compensate. These changes would result in a fast paced and frantic parry playstyle where you need to constantly be making risky plays to narrowly avoid damage if you want to keep a steady supply of your parry rewards moving, which is what I think players would actually want out of a parry weapon instead of the current slow paced setup weapon we currently have.

[Pauma del Sol]

I think the parry was very useful when there was Omega Attack Slow Time, while also there was the 4 second limit to use it right. The game was wholly balanced along that feature and now it's a keepsake mutually exclusive with seeking any particular god's boons

[Artemis ❤]

Originally posted by Halcon del Sol:

I think the parry was very useful when there was Omega Attack Slow Time, while also there was the 4 second limit to use it right. The game was wholly balanced along that feature and now it's a keepsake mutually exclusive with seeking any particular god's boons

This is an interesting perspective, to my knowledge many players would actually turn the old Sorceress off when running Artemis because it was generally seen to be a nuisance. Since there isn't a timing aspect to the parry, you can hold it forever, the slow down would often result in more time spent waiting for the slowed attacks as they crept towards you without actually making the execution any easier