I love Zane and I think he’s a great character and, although I think he could really use a buff/rework of his skills, I finally had enough today with the under cover tree.
It’s a really cool tree that seems to focus on survivability and challenge/reward for skillful play. Adrenaline, Brain Freeze, Compitent Confidence, Calm Cool Collected, all of these are awesome skills with great synergy and high conditional benefits (even though you could say it’s lame that other characters get some similar abilities flat out without conditions, but that’s another story.) There’s great build potential, but with the way mayhem works it’s usually pointless.
Mayhem seems like a good idea, but the fact that you can roll modifiers that totally break builds right now is pretty bad. Making players change the way they play is always great and I do love that, but the way it’s implemented can seriously ruin builds, especially Zane.
I’ve been fine with this so far, just patiently waiting for balances and buffs and all sorts of changes that are probably on the way. But today I sought to finally utilize the under cover capstone, Distributed Denial. I’ve been trying to find a build that could work to really utilize it. I figured out that shield effects that are always on is the best way to utilize it and started thinking of ideas. The impaler and whiskey tango foxtrot seem like good ideas and could be fun to play with but I haven’t managed get those yet. But I finally got something interesting, the rerouter. I thought here it is, finally the boss melter build I’ve wanted to build and utilize this capstone! I built for it, and dropped in to gravewardens arena with the lyuda in hand ready to melt him. I drop the shield, and throw the sentry and start shooting and…nothing.
For whatever reason the shield doesn’t work with the capstone and it seriously pissed me off. The game that challenges me to try to come up with fun, interesting and powerful builds literally lies to me. No real explanation I can tell other than “could be op” so it just doesn’t work. It works with other shields, but not the one with the most interesting potential. Literally no explanation. I felt like the game was just giving me the bird at that point. Why have such a useless, conditional capstone if I can’t even reap some reward from it? I just don’t get it man.