I know this has been discussed before, but I feel like this needs another round of discussion.
First and foremost, Head Count needs fixed.
Now that that’s out of the way I can get into what grinds my gears about Rakk Attack.
They seem to be meant as primarily an offensive action skill, yet they don’t really do much damage. They do a fair enough job at keeping annointments procced, but not much else. With splash and action skill damage on a COM they can make quick work of trash mobs. This, however doesn’t warrant sacrificing at least one roll on a class mod to center a build around Rakk Attack like other VH’s can now. I would love to see a noticeable buff to their base damage and possibly bigger bonuses on Interplanetary Stalker and Grim Harvest.
I know I’m beating a dead horse here but the survivability of Rakk Attack is well below Fade Away and Gamma Burst. This primary comes from the fact that you don’t get the health return from Falconer’s Feast until the Rakk return and the value is too low(especially without R4KK P4K). I would love to see the health returned when the Rakk damage an enemy and it bring back 10% of Shields and Health.
This kind of ties in with the survivability issues, but there is no CC with Rakk Attack. This leaves the largest survivability gap between Rakk Attack and Fade Away/Gamma Burst. My suggestions for this are rework Rakk Commander/new COM. After all, Gamma Burst’s survivability comes from Red Fang taunt. New COM/new Rakk Commander passive ability would be Enemies damaged by Rakk Attack have a chance to become blinded for a short time. Blinded enemies lose track of their target and take an extra 50% critical damage. If this was done correctly it could bring some synergy with Hidden Machine to Rakk Attack builds.
My fingers are getting tired so my rant will be coming to an end. I would love to see some improvements made to Rakk Attack to bring it up to the same platform as Fade Away and Gamma Burst.
I swear at some point we need a feedback megathread. I’m working on another one right now (should be done by tomorrow) and I seriously can’t keep track of how many we’ve done over the past few months.
To your points about Rakk, I’m on the fence about how much more damage they need to be doing. Granted I haven’t played with Rakk in M10, so I’m going off of how Rakk performed when they weren’t scaling in M4 (also note I have a potent splash set up which is also more than likely blinding my view) but they did very fair damage for the cool down. Especially with ASE elements they could even tear into badasses a fair deal. Again, I had a pretty good dedicated splash build and this before Rakk damage scaled, as I believe ASE elements are very meh for Rakk now and that probably accounts for needing to build for 200% splash and it not feeling worth it then.
If GB were to put life steal anywhere on FL4K, it should be on Falconer’s Feast. It makes the most sense imo.
As for CC, if they would just bump up the cryo efficiency more than cryo Rakk would be serviceable without needing to go all in with cryo efficiency on gear.
Definitely feel you on this feedback though. Rakk could use a general bump up all around.
I am running a pretty nasty splash build and when I try Rakk Attack they feel hella underwhelming. I found a Bounty Hunter with +3 in Frenzy and Action Skill Damage, still seemed to fall short. Especially when compared to other offensive action skills at the moment. I played a few runs of MTD with a friend running Clone/Drone Zane. It was insulting how much damage he got from action skills when I couldn’t kill badasses with both charges of Rakk. Amara is doing unspeakable damage all sorts of weird action skill scaling. IB is another topic lol
I run Deadeye with mine, which probably helps a bit. Still, like I said I haven’t really tried them in M10. I imagine that it’s way different than what I know since the ASE elements don’t scale with Mayhem.
Other than just flat-out boosting the damage of Rakk Attack, which I do believe still needs some work, the best suggestions for improving Rakk Attack (and Rakk builds) that I have seen or thought of myself are:
(a) making the percentage of Rakk healing higher than 7% - it should be probably at least double that;
(b) making Rakkslag (enemies damaged by Rakk Attack take 100% increased damage) an action skill augment instead of an anointment, thereby making Rakks much more of an offensive advantage for the survival you give up (by opening up the anointments you could run) - this also would give the Rakk Pakk a better niche;
( c) Rakk cooldown in general does not work well and needs some work, because even if you don’t use HC or ETI, the Rakk cooldown timer still resets itself randomly, and this can hold back Rakks even as purely just anointment proc’ers;
(d) Make Rakk Open a Cold One a guaranteed freeze chance for each enemy hit by Rakks;
(e) Make Grim Harvest boost action skill damage EVEN FURTHER - like, say 20% per level instead of just 10%, thereby making Grim Harvest more of a “must have” skill for Rakk build players.
These are the best ones I have come up with over time.
Agreed on the fact that Rakk Open A Cold one should bring more to the table than it currently does.
I’m not entirely sure what the best thing to do with Rakk Augmants are. As it stands Falconer’s Feast and Flock’N’Load carry too much weight. If Falconer’s Feast returned even 7% of damage dealt by Rakk Attack this would result in much greater healing, this would only benefit higher Mayhem levels though. I think this would also reduce the need to have more Rakk cast opening up different augments. But this bring up the argument that if Rakk Open a Cold One guaranteed a freeze Falconer’s Feast wouldn’t be as neccessary.
I would LOVE to see Rakk Attack given a duration. For the duration of Rakk Attack, Rakk will continuously attack enemies. Even if this was a short duration of something like 10 seconds it would let Rakk Attack bring a lot more to the table. Say Rakk Attack lasts 10 seconds and each Rakk damages 1 enemy per second, that’s 20 Rakk strikes without Flock’n’Load or R4KK P4K. This would make Falconer’s Feast much more noticeable at 7% HP return per strike. However, this also would make it so the health return from Falconer’s Feast REALLY needs to happen automatically and not on Rakk return. Not to mention open up the use of ASA annointments.
If a COM like I mentioned were implemented, I would expect a new COM tied to a DLC/Takedown. I’m going to guess it’s easier to create from scratch than re-code.
Thinking about the Rakk playstyle, which tends to be focused around high gun and crit damage and abusing the interactions between ASE anointments and reflecting/ricocheting projectile weapons, I would like to see a Rakk COM as follows (and this is assuming all skills worked correctly):
Name: Rakk Restorer
Skills boosted: Grim Harvest, Two Fang, Big Game (ideal in my books would be either +5 Two Fang if you want to min-max abuse of single-projectile weapons or +3 BG/+2 GH to maximize Rakk damage, but a +5 GH would be really interesting too)
Red text special effect: Each enemy killed by Rakk Attack or within 5 seconds of being damaged by Rakk Attack will immediately add an additional charge of Rakk Attack to Fl4k’s cooldown meter (max 5 total charges of Rakks)
@vCarpeDiemv Thanks, I was trying to think of a way that we could make Rakks spammable without having to worry about fixing cooldown skills for Rakks, which GBX clearly seems to be having some difficulty solving.
Then on top of that, I wanted to give the COM skills that would have the potential to be synergistic with having anointments up all the time and high action skill damage. I bet a Rakk-spamming build with the COM I suggested above would be really, really fun.
