McFluffin: McFluffin: First, the bear gaining health on taunt is nice, but generally speaking a tank will need most of its healing after a taunt occurs. I wonder if an increase in regen or leech for a duration would be more mechanically valuable.

Hrm, I’m not sure I agree.

Certainly, if we were talking about a fight in World of Warcraft where two tanks in a 25 man raid were switching the boss’s attention between the two of them as they gained stacks of a debuff - yeah, this design would be ill-suited to that, and it’d likely need replacing entirely.

ARPGs usually revolve around engaging many enemies in a relatively short period of time, and we’re trying to avoid downtime caused by a non-player tank having relatively low health, and that discouraging the person playing from moving onto the next group. The iteration of Bear Roar we are playtesting is designed to allow you to effectively ‘reset’ your bear’s health when engaging a group of enemies so that you aren’t waiting around while it gradually recovers life. That’s not to say that this iteration is perfect and couldn’t be improved, but so far in our testing it does feel right to us. We’ll likely release it in a patch as-is or close to it, and if we get feedback that the design isn’t what people want, we can examine potential changes.



McFluffin: McFluffin: Second, the Spriggan now restores mana to allies and itself, which is a great addition, but it’s also a static number. If it instead increased mana regen for a duration it could interact with other mana regen mechanics, allowing for scaling and more player customization

That Mana management is more involved than in some other ARPGs is a deliberate design decision, which is intended to result in either greater investment being required to be able to regularly use a high Mana cost skill, to allow similar investment to get an initially lower cost Mana skill to a higher power level and thus help them remain competitive (which isn’t always the case in ARPGs), or to encourage players to use more active skills fairly regularly, rather than resorting to the One Button Wonder™ builds you sometimes see in ARPGs.

If the Spriggan’s restoration of Mana scaled with other sources of Mana recovery, that would almost certainly come with the trade-off of it being less powerful by default, so that for the average build it’d work out around the same - and for those not investing into greater Mana recovery, it would end up less powerful. Would you still want us to make such a change?