Why are abilities so weak?

[Airkixer]

I realise while they activate they are powerful, but in totality, they achieve so little compared to weapons. You can't even get to a point with the engineer where your have your energy shield up constantly, seems like a staple example of an ability that should be able to achieve a more permanent presence.
But no, the abilities just aren't allowed to shine as a main form of damage, serving only to give you moments of respite when they finally come back around to activating each time.

[Null Winter]

I feel like the best performing abilities are the ones that are either buffs to your weapons (Stimpack, Tank's frenzy, etc.) or can have such low cooldowns (Kunai, Pulse, Grenade Trail, etc.) that they're basically an extra weapon.

[Vyss A'lare]

The best damage abilities are ones that have both good uptime and have the capacity to hit far away. Due to the subpar usage of many abilities they are frankly pointless.

Grenade trail rarely is effective because it only targets nearby enemies, has poor effective AI (Not aiming for big clumps) and awful sustain.

Tank's missile/bomber has pathetic AoE (Unless evolved specifically for it), awful cooldown and awful targetting. The bombs should home in on packs of enemies rather than missing 90% of the time.

Medic's drone specialized for offense is probably the biggest trash in the game. You will almost certainly get more damage from the increase in kinetic tags than the skill itself. The only time it will start actually doing functional dps is when you're extremely strained because otherwise it's shooting at things your weapon dps will be killing next anyway. Think this actually got like <100 dps when I tried it for a run.

In my eyes other than using them to kick start a run the one-hit damage abilities mostly suck. Huntress's arrow rain is amazing to fix her low dps at the start and has enough aoe (Especially evolved for multi) to be worthwhile if not a bit low damage endgame as well.

Then you have the standout dps abilities with swat/engineers turrets. These can dish out substantial dps because they are always up and almost always outputting effective dps.

Buff skills are the best and having 100% uptime cooperation fury from tank with stimpack from medic is just insane weapon dmg boosts.

Most damage abilities really really need a rebalance. The automatic usage on subpar targets really kneecaps their potential. We could also use some that are meant more for high priority targets rather than AoE damage.

[BigRowdy]

Just did a run where my tank's saw blades did 52 million damage, doubling his mini gun.

[Null Winter]

Originally posted by BigRowdy:

Just did a run where my tank's saw blades did 52 million damage, doubling his mini gun.

They have the advantage of being "always on", unlike other abilities and reloading weapons.

[BigRowdy]

Originally posted by Null Winter:

Originally posted by BigRowdy:

Just did a run where my tank's saw blades did 52 million damage, doubling his mini gun.

They have the advantage of being "always on", unlike other abilities and reloading weapons.

very good point. I play the game with random dice rolls but if I played it right I guess I would focus on ability cool down reduction to try and mitigate this issue.

[Vyss A'lare]

A lot of abilities only get good when the enemies start to become overwhelming. In a 20 minute run this will never really happen, whereas in endless taunts become god-tier and AoE rules the day. It's why I'd really like a mode where the zombies are slower but tanky as ♥♥♥♥ vs turning into speedsters.

[fwhite0782]

In earlier versions E-Shield was broken because it was easy to make it always on. E-Shield is still OP but it takes a little investment to get broken. I like how the power ups (not abilities or items selections) are true random. That makes each run a little different instead of beeline to your favorite weapons and items then walk away from the PC because you are truly invincible like a game of vampire survivors.