After the hotfix has been out for a while I can say with certainty is that the flow of gameplay suffers with the ASE change. The biggest reason that I feel like this is true is not because of the damage output which Amara has post nerf, but the fact that there is a difficulty in getting 25 stacks of mindfulness. For those who don’t know Amaras mindfulness stacks give her increased speed, much like the skill for Zane when he is frozen he gains a 100% speed buff. The ASE nerf affected the Driver com so that you cannot get 25 stacks of mindfulness without using a non red tree action skill. The reason the gameplay suffers is because the time it takes for you to get the action skill back is longer than the time your stacks last by a significant amount of time, which prevents you from keeping your speed, and damage up perpetually. I may be biased in my thoughts because I enjoyed playing the driver com before this and now I don’t nearly as much. the driver com now works so you have to be doing limited damage or stopping your gameplay to wait for your skill to recharge the skill. What I would love to see is not an ASE reversion, but a buff to the driver, either giving the com action skill cooldown or increased DOT damage to allow players to use the driver with 25 stacks of Mindfulness. Hopefully someone sees this and at least considers it. Even though I would love to see this back in the game I can accept that I have no real control, and I will still enjoy the game. Maybe they wanted the driver to be stuck at 15 stacks who knows.
If they allowed to the Driver to apply a dot by itself when triggering an action skill (perhaps a dot matching your action skill element) and this was combined with your ASE, this would be enough to always give 25 stacks, right? You’d have double the number you currently have now.
The initial Driver gameplay was never intended and was the result of a bug that was present for a long time, until they actually fixed it. You should still be able to get to 25 stacks with Avatar and Phasecast (double ASE on shield grenade).
Driver still applies a dot with fakegrasp, just doesn’t count as action skill end, so it will work with the elemental projector.
Yeah, the problem I am facing though is that there is too much cooldown time with phasecast, and while the damage is there, the flow of gameplay is really damaged which is what I was addressing.
You definitely have to work to make it flow.
Takes some hard farming.
I’ve got action skill cool down on my elemental projecter, my driver mod and my shield(the plus ultra).
However I’m not even specced into the blue tree at all and with expedite and ties that bind I can run around at 25 stacks in combat. And have a 6 to 4 second cooldown. With a corrosive dot of course(because they last the longest). Sometimes I even get my action skill back instantly with groundbreaker procced fish slap grenades. Or by punching people.
You can make such crazy diverse builds nowadays it’s crazy.
The driver is still alive and well. If I can do this without even speccing into rush stacks or avatar, or restless. Imagine what is possible.
I use the Driver and I find it frustrating they removed the ASE effect of fakegrasp in the first place. The fact that both Zane and Flak and literally spam their action skills and use them while I can’t spam PG and not use it boggles my mind.
And it’s not like they actually nerfed the interactions, they just added an extra step. Now I have to PG something and one shot it to get my ASE, and then I can do whatever and then PG is up. It’s something I would do anyway with particular enemies. So all they did was make fakegrasp less fun, they didn’t really nerf it at all.
That said you could go old school and use Sellout. Fire/corrosive, just keep the one from the first play through it will be around level 30. For shock you could use maybe a low level grenade like Stormfront or something.
If you are doing a melee focused build you want to put at least 11 points into purple tree for Combo Breaker. I feel like between that and Expedite on PG I can have it available almost all the time without action skill cooldown.