Artificer Ion Surge bricks her and makes her unusable.

[raffa2]

Ion surge is a skill so weak, and decreases her DPS so much, that replacing the flamethrower with it, makes Artificer trash tier.
Contrary to popular belief, the flamethrower is actually usable even in late monsoon if you're not a scrub, and makes up for DPS and dead times of cooldown.

My suggestion to fix this skill is to give it a longer cooldown, but bring it up to a higher damage scaling, possibly stronger than nano bomb, since it has to be used melee range;
or remove the damage falloff with distance and apply full damage to all enemies hit.

PS:
Notice, i only play on monsoon, so this is a review on that difficulty.

[RED<color=#ba0000>SHADES]

Ion surge is her best skill at the moment,
While it does cut your dps it greatly improves survivability, which is the more important thing on monsoon.

Just remember you are actually a Apache helicopter and you rain death from the sky.

[raffa2]

Try it on monsoon and see what happens, maybe in drizzlet difficulty it might be good, but on monsoon, that lack of damage is just crippling.
Also what's the point of surviving if you can't kill stuff?
In monsoon you have to avarage 5 minutes per stage to survive, with that extremely bad ability, you get stuck at each boss wasting precious time, and being unable to finish off the most common enemies.

[Dr. Cheech]

It's purely preference. Damage vs mobility/survivability. You can't play the same way, though.

[Shurenai]

As an artificer player on monsoon myself, I rarely ever use the flamethrower.. It's damage never seemed worth the risk of instant-death by getting so close and being incapable of sprinting for the duration.

For me, the new ion surge is a Huge and badly needed increase in survivability and mobility, to be able to get up out of melee range instantly, do a small burst of damage to anything near you, and be able to take proper advantage of your hovering passive..It's nice. It's also good to get a good vertical vantage point to scan a stage for chests/shops/etc from.

To each their own.. If its not for you, it's not for you. But it is for some of us, myself included. :)

[screeno42]

I'm just curious why it replaces the flamethrower instead of the ice wall(since it's a mobility tool and all.)

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by screeno42:

I'm just curious why it replaces the flamethrower instead of the ice wall(since it's a mobility tool and all.)

To hazard a guess, I would say it's because Artificer's Ice Wall is the classes only crowd control; Pretty much every class has some kind of crowd control capability, and taking ice wall away in favor of mobility would remove artificers.

On the other hand, Artificerhas several damaging skills to replace, of which, Flamethrower is the only one which would almost directly conflict with Ion Burst, as it requires close up nearly melee range to use, and ion burst would keep you up in the air or far away from enemies a lot of the time if you used it right.. Meanwhile firebolt and nano bomb are both great for long range aerial bombardment, which synergizes well with the ion burst, even ice wall can be thrown at long ranges letting you immobilize targets for nano bombing.

[raffa2]

I can say with confidence that anyone in this thread using Ion surge, hasn't been able to even obliterate themselves while equipping that skill.
It's that bad, that damage loss is huge, not just "a bit of damage", it's literally the damage you deal when your cooldown on the other skills is still recharging.

Also replacing a 1700% of base damage is a pretty hard blow on the character, i'd say that replacing ice wall with it makes more sense, as ice wall still can be replaced by ice spear.

[raffa2]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

As an artificer player on monsoon myself, I rarely ever use the flamethrower.. It's damage never seemed worth the risk of instant-death

And this is where i say, just be aware of your surroundings and know when to use it, i've seen a lot of people complaining about the flamethrower, but so far my impression is that people don't know how, where and when to use it, or disengage from it aswell.
Plebstorm and drizzlet players in short.

[Dr. Cheech]

It really is just a change of play style. Because while you are obliterating at stage 7 or 11 because you maybe didn't get enough mobility items I can just jump into the air and clear the gathering pack underneath me in 3 or 4 hits(on monsoon). The volcanic egg combos really well with it too.

It just requires a different play style. If you're play style is too rigid to handle adjustments like that you might be thinking like those "plebstorm and drizzlet players" you seem to dislike.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by raffa2:

Originally posted by Shurenai:

As an artificer player on monsoon myself, I rarely ever use the flamethrower.. It's damage never seemed worth the risk of instant-death

And this is where i say, just be aware of your surroundings and know when to use it, i've seen a lot of people complaining about the flamethrower, but so far my impression is that people don't know how, where and when to use it, or disengage from it aswell.
Plebstorm and drizzlet players in short.

I'm well aware of my surroundings...and I do know when to use it. But, What I consider to be a 'safe time to use it' is when I know for sure I will not die if I do it.. This often left my flamethrower off CD for large stretches of time in the mid game, and it only really got used in the early game or really late game when i knew nothing could kill me anyway.

To me though, that loss of 1700% damage that you seem so worried about is immediately remedied by one or two backup mags which are strangely common for how powerful they are; Nano bomb is amazing and its relatively easy to group enemies up to land one right in the middle of them using ice wall and some clever footwork. Add to this the ability to blast myself high into the air and my options for movement and survivability become way better, and over the course of the run i'm able to take better routes through the stage and dont waste so much time trying to get around a hill or mountain that i can now just jump over.

As I said.. To each their own; Your style is for you and apparently Ion Burst disagrees with it..But for some of us, Ion burst is a breath of fresh air that gives the least mobile character a good shot of mobility. This is exactly the kind of thing that alternate skills are for- They're not meant to be the be all end all 'this is the best skill you can get'; They're alternatives. If you dont like skill A, use skill B.

[Gyan Rosling]

This isn't a competitive game. Skills that you can freely pick at the start of the game (no luck involved) don't have to be perfectly balanced with others and it is generally better if they are slightly worse rather than slightly better. It's the same as choosing to play Monsoon over Drizzle. Or choosing artifacts that make your runs more challenging. It's not like items (which DO need to be balanced well) that you get randomly throughout the run and can be used on all characters.

This is actually a really cool skill the way it is because you can play Artificer as more of a support in multiplayer with other people (other people get DPS items you get survivability items).

I hope they instead nerf the skills that are too strong at the moment. While perhaps also changing the challenges to unlock them.

[Dom]

Originally posted by raffa2:

I can say with confidence that anyone in this thread using Ion surge, hasn't been able to even obliterate themselves while equipping that skill.
It's that bad, that damage loss is huge, not just "a bit of damage", it's literally the damage you deal when your cooldown on the other skills is still recharging.

Also replacing a 1700% of base damage is a pretty hard blow on the character, i'd say that replacing ice wall with it makes more sense, as ice wall still can be replaced by ice spear.

Speak for yourself, literally just got Artificers alt skin with Ion Surge, while visions of heresy played a big part in that run, i had gotten to the portal 3 times before that but i got one shot by something as i was entering/approaching it.

Ion Surge is so much better than flamethrower for me. It makes me virtualy unkillable, nano bomb and ice wall's aoe are enough to keep me going and killing ♥♥♥♥ throughout the run. I am a much more mobility focused player. And ion surge makes Artificer insanely fun for me. The achievement you do for unlocking is called orbital bombardment for a reason.

[AstraGaloi]

Damage is survivability. A dead enemy cannot hurt you.

It's not "bricking" her for sure, but it is much weaker for monsoon first loop, which determines a whole run in monsoon.

It's no Slicing Winds garbage, for sure.

[Dom]

Originally posted by ductvader:

Damage is survivability. A dead enemy cannot hurt you.

It's not "bricking" her for sure, but it is much weaker for monsoon first loop, which determines a whole run in monsoon.

It's no Slicing Winds garbage, for sure.

If I can stay at the top of the map indefinitely and not get touched by anything cause the enemy AI is dumber than a sack of rocks and has a limit on how high they can go. that's survivability too pal

[raffa2]

UPDATE:
Vision of heresy makes this thing viable, i've tried it again to give it a shot, it doesn't suck as much now with that item as you can keep the DPS going with low downtimes.