Lighting Magnet plays too big of a role in group pvp, I think we can all agree on that. It distrupts the flow of the battle by starting a pulling fest that is nye on impossible to avoid. It might not be a huge problem if there was say one invoker in each battle, but as we all know that is never the case. This is the first skill that should be addressed in my opinion as it is not only a class balance issue but due to the skills huge relevance a big gameplay issue as well.
I'll present 2 different options here, feel free to come up with your own. But first I'll identify the problems with the skill so we'll all be aware of the context. Skip that part if you don't think it necessary for you.
Issues:
The pulling effect is a very strong asset since it allows not only the invoker himself but also his team mates to stack skills in the same place. This pretty much quarentees successful hits. The quite frankly huge range of the effect doesn't help with this either.
The only real counter to a magnet is another magnet which can prevent the enemy from piling skills on their own magnet. This is probably the biggest reason the skill has such a big role. It can also be possible to work around one magnet, but because of the range of the pulling effect, low cooldown of the skill, quite long duration and the amount of invokers in the game it's very common to see 3-4 magnets running at the same time when a fight is started. There is no way to navigate around that.
What makes working around the skill even harder is the fact that if you don't see who cast it there'll be no way to know if a magnet is going to pull you or not. So in essence, if it's a friendly magnet or not. This is an issue that makes me think the skill in its current form with our current mechanics is simply not fit for pvp.
One way to fight back while being sucked into the magnet would be if one could still effectively cast skills. That isn't the case because the pulling interupts the cast even if you hadn't moved an inch.
A minor and probably the easiest problem to Innofix is the skills visual size. It's just simply too big for no reason, and since it last long it gets quite annoying at times.
As a side note I will mention that I have a feeling aweikening skills weren't originally supposed to be so easily cast. But fixing that system to one that would perhaps add more to the game would be a bit of a bigger task I imagine.
In a nutshell: Low cooldown, long range, long duration, nature of the effect, amount of invokers, no indication to if a magnet is friendly or not, large visual size.
So on to the solutions...
Option A: Rework the skill
Basically nerf every aspect of it so that the skill is about pvp and not the other way around. So higher cooldown (2 minutes?) lower range (cut it to 2/3rds), lower duration (3 seconds at lvl 5?). Change the effect so that it is a simple pulling root effect where people can still fight back or change it so that a player is only pulled say once after which they wont be pulled again. Would also be nice if the amount of targets it pulled was smaller, but that'd effect pve too much. And maybe most importantly add something to fix the friendly/hostile recognition problem.
Option B: Disable the skill in pvp
Some of you might remember that I'm very much against this solution to balance. But if nothing can be done about this skill, especially the recognition thing, I'm quite positive it simply isn't fit for pvp. I miss the days where you had to catch people instead of letting a skill do it for you.
Tl/dr
Lightning magnet has multiple issues and should be nerfed significantly and quickly, or simply disabled in pvp.
What do you think?
Edited by Precrush, 23 June 2017 - 01:35 AM.