So, I love being the team medic, and I love elemental weapons, Maniacal Laughter is the perfect skill. Problem is, I can’t figure out precisely how it works.
I know you have to deal DoT to gain stacks. I know that each DoT has it’s own seperate timer for the stacks and that simply by getting more DoT stacks it will NOT prevent the decay of previous DoT stacks.
My real question is the health regen. I’ve had 100+ stacks and rising due to using a ton of elemental weapons at once, with 9/5 points in the skill. Everyone on the 4 man team was low on health, and nobody was gaining any health. My observations seems to be that Claptrap actually has to be laughing for the health regen to start. If he’s not laughing, there’s no regen, even if consistently proccing DoT. Can anyone can confirm or deny this?
As an update, for anyone other than myself wondering, the data is still slightly inconclusive. What I can say though, is that if Claptrap actually is laughing, his own HP will regenerate at a rate that lines up with maniacal laughter.
If he is not laughing, it does not appear to regen any faster. I was fighting the raid boss, revived someone, then got hit by the nova. I had about 50 stacks with 5/5 and was not gaining HP back.
Still can’t tell if it affects co-op partners. I joined several games yesterday and unfortunately/fortunately, it seems everyone is smart enough to have at least 1 way to regen their own HP. So outside of having 100+ stacks with more than 5 points in to the skill, I can’t really verify that it was maniacal laughter healing them and not say a health regen pickup.
And a weird note: it at least APPEARS that having 2 different types of DoT active gives you a much higher chance to proc Maniacal Laughter.
I have 10/5 with the Celestial Claptrap COM (don’t ask) and I can facetank the Shug’s lightning attacks with a Storm Front @ level 60, so I know ML works on Clappy at least. I’ve been watching Arielle and Nisha, but I think both of them also have healing abilities specced, so I dunno. If I can figure out anything conclusive, I’ll report back.
Personally, I’ve never liked Maniacal Laughter since I first tried it. It just doesn’t work. They should have designed it to function more like Krieg’s Elemental Empathy skill but with a smaller percentage of healing from elemental DoT, say 1% per skill point, since it’s team healing (also comparable to Maya’s Elated). It’s just too ■■■■■■■ complicated to be a practical tier 1 team healing skill.
Agreed. I was hoping to figure out all the conditions and just work around it. Highly impractical, but I’ve got 10 more levels to try and make it decent.
Perhaps knowing it’s based on your health rather than teammates’ health will change how you use it. Teammate healing becomes more of an indirect function of you trying to heal yourself through DoT. Everyone should have their own way of healing anyways.
That’s pretty much what I do. I use it to stay alive in thick firefights, plus I don’t have anything else I can really use those five points in. As I’ve said before, it has saved my butt a time or two.
Alright, just finished TVHM. As noted above, it is based on how low Claptrap’s health is, for the entire team. Claptrap does need to be laughing for it to take effect. Fortunately, this happens much more frequently when you are at lower health.
Also, 10/5 points in ML and 200 stacks is AWESOME.