After seeing people in the forum complain about how HB doesn't really solve the issue of unwashed players in hard bosses, i thought about what makes them feel unsecured even with hb in a run. Even if you pass the hurdle of getting a dk in the party for your unwashed character, and the need to have him stay close the entire run, you still need to deal with a mechanic that can insta kill you if you are unlucky: a badly timed dispell. A thing that i've noticed many times while bossing with a mage in HT was that some combos can be a certain death. Getting dispelled and hit right after is a death sentence, no counter play other than washing. So, my suggestion is a very subtle change. For all the dispell attacks in the game, have the dispell also be a 1 damage attack skill. That way, whenever you get dispelled, you will instantly get the iframes of getting hurt, which should give any player enough time to react with rebuffing the skill that keeps them alive, be it MG, HB, meso guard, etc etc. This will also help people with high latency to react to dispells in time!
This seems like a nice QoL change, but just want to point out that there is some counterplay by keeping accurate dispel timers
Sure, you can counter JUST the dispell. The issue i have is OTK combos that offer no counterplay. Ht has multiple body parts that attack seperately, so a situation where a dispell triggers a milisecond before another bodypart attacks leads to a situation where you die instantly without getting a chance to retaliate. I'm against letting pure RNG killing off a run. Skill, stratagy and fundings are ideally the only factors that should decide the outcome of a boss. If a new boss will come to royals, and have in his skillset an attack that wipes an entire party with a chance of 1% every minute. People would be rightly salty if they got killed by such a cheesy attack lol.
Just to clarify, the dispell will still be unavoidable, even if you dodge the damage or be in some sort of iframe, it will still hit as it normally should. So the only difference is adding a 1 sec of invulnerability to a player that is currently not in an iframe of another attack. This doesn't make the game that much easier as you still need to react quickly and rebuff or you'll die, it just covers the possibility of getting 1 shot without being able to resist.
If you keep dispel timers and spam mg, I think the risk of dying is nonzero but very small. The RNG in a run is probably largely dominated by dc’s, which actually has no counter play.
I think a different way to introduce counterplay could be to make dispel occur after the animation is finished (instead of right at the start of the animation), just like how most attack animations work. This way you can time your mg or hb spam more accurately and reduce the rng further.
If that is doable, then a 100 times yes to that. Many dispells and deflect skill trigger before the animation finishes (some as soon as it starts). In terms of gameplay, this will be even more interactive than giving a free iframe. This change should honestly be given to all debuff skills if possible as well, because for some reason, the game notify you of the debuff like 2 seconds after its already under effect. Tbh, this suggestion is worthy of a seperate thread of its own. I might make a thread about it later today
