When picking between Empower Me Duration or Death Fleet Cooldown, it’s really no contest. You always want to go for Empower Me Duration, even if you’re using the Shadow of Death Prestige, because Death Fleet Cooldown has no effect on Shadow of Death, and Alarak on Empower Me is absurd.
I feel like that particular mastery could be updated with something like “Death Fleet Cooldown and Cost Reduction”, so that it always has an effect on Alarak’s Death Fleet when he isn’t using his P2. It’d obviously need adjusting to make it work, but you get where I’m going with it, right?
Realistically speaking (if we’re able to adjust this set), the amount of cooldown on Death Fleet need to go from 120sec to 180sec AND affect coolup.
This effectively changes the top bar to 7min coolup with a 3min cooldown (versus 10&6min without mastery).
Compare that to Empower Me without a very short coolup and cooldown. The duration mastery becomes comparably competitive to each other.
The fact P3 doesn’t need/benefit from Mastery Set 2 is negligible because it is one prestige out of 4 choices. And the change itself actually shortens that gap between P3 vs non-P3 by quite a bit.
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The thing about Power Set 2, Empower Me Duration vs Death Fleet Cooldown, is entirely dependent upon the player’s playstyle. Those who spam the Death Fleet (sans P3) and use it as a booster for your army and/or a mobility tool will find themselves taking the Death Fleet Cooldown. Others, like yourself and I, take Empower Me Duration for the extra oomf.
If I were to change Power Set 2, I wouldn’t make it Cooldown & Cost. It’d be better off with Cooldown that works toward the initial “coolup” time. The problem with adding on Cost or Damage to it, is that the timer would need to be percentage based, instead of flat value the way it is now.
There is actually a cooldown between motherships in p3, if you lose the mothership, I remember this cause there was a mutation solo that used this mastery cause motherships kept getting destroyed.
Yes, yes there is. It’s quite a long cooldown, too.
The cooldown applies on all prestige, and it is 6min without mastery. Coolup is only removed in P3 in favour of the 400/400 cost, which I definitely don’t think needs mastery support to make it cheaper lol.
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I believe the P3 cooldown runs while the mothership is still alive though. Ideally you aren’t losing the mothership every 5 minutes.
Cooldown runs the moment you cast it. This is true for all prestige across all of coop.
So the only time when the player is “wasting” that time is when they “save it” for the next “problem”. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, it is the very reason why the general recommendation is to use them off cooldown whenever you can.
The above rule isn’t an one-rule-for-all-situations but certainly covers more situations than “saving it”. So for Alarak’s Death Fleet, after that 10min coolup, if the player doesn’t use it at 10min but instead used it at 13min, then the cooldown only start to apply at that 13th minute for the next 6min. And that’s what lends this player to having their 2nd Death Fleet at 19min (13 + 6) at its earliest, whereas the 10min cast player would have one at 16min. Overall 3min wasted so to speak. Of course, the idea is this player needs to situate him/herself to a position where using Death Fleet at 10min is useful.
The implication of these 2 different timings are often what makes or breaks a game (as these situations only occur usually with less experienced players). So the idea of “saving calldown” is usually not very applicable, except in mutational situations or specific speedrun tactics.
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Wait, you guys let your motherships die?
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You would be surprised at how many motherships can die when you’re soloing mutations.
I killed 2 or 3 on the current mutation
Honestly, since the MS got buffed, I’ve lost it maybe… 3 or 4 times. It’s pretty hard to lose without purposely killing it, or a mutator nuking it.
No adjustments to mastery sets please. This game getting patched like once a year now. At this point I just don’t want them to break anything else and take 2 years (or never) to fix it.
I’m a big believer in do no further harm at this point. Likewise with multi player, balance changes need to be small and cautious now. Only thing worse than dead game is a dead game totally broken (lots of ladder players would say this is already the case).
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No need to worry about them breaking it with a patch. They are patching it zero times a year for the next eternity.