Wyvern Design Feedback

Greetings. I'd like to share some thoughts on shapeshifting in general, and the wyvern in specific.

Some context, first: I started playing PoE1 in... 2012? 2013? I remember when Piety was the final boss—though I soon quit at that time, and didn't return until 2018, after having been so impressed with the wolf shapeshifting shown at Exilecon that I regained an interest; shapeshifting being something that I liked a lot in Diablo II back in the day, and which I hoped PoE would be able to recreate and improve upon. Put simply, I've been looking forward to Shapeshifting for a while. I also happen to be a representative of a small-scale community of dragon fans, and an amateur game-designer—though my medium is in pen and paper roleplaying games, where I write rules for playable dragons, because that's something I think ought exist. I convinced also one of my friends to give PoE2 a chance during the free weekend, and although he liked it, he is perhaps a bit confused and has some unrealistic expectations; regardless, you can find his feedback here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3887632

So with all that being said, and with the additional context that I know about Chris Wilson's stance about not wanting to make dragons too common of a thing in Wraeclast, I was very surprised and pleased to see the wyvern being revealed; it was just what I had wanted but which I had never dared to seriously hope for. And I've been very pleased with how it has turned out. So I'd like to be clear that I am not here to complain; GGG has shown time and again that they do the best that they can with the resources available to them, but games are big and complicated, and iteration takes time. This is feedback given with the intention and hope for the long-term development and iteration of the shapeshifting archetype, as although I have enjoyed my time with my wyvern character, and can see various ways I could build new wyvern characters with a different focus, the way it (and the wolf, perhaps to an even greater extent) is set up with a kit to be perhaps prohibitively samey in playstyle, especially if you don't want to use spells.

Lets go over the wyvern abilities:

Rend. This is a great ability. It's powerful, fun to use, and makes for a novel take on how such a creature could fight; and I especially like the detail of swapping between using just the talon or unfurling the whole wing depending on whether you have the power charge buff; that is good attention to detail. However... perhaps Rend is too good? That 50% damage as extra lightning is incredible; it lasts for a long time (and can be scaled!) and the buff applies to everything. So while I like the notion of it being appealing to mix a bit of wyvern into any other build on any character that has room for a talisman and has access to power charges... well, that power is a bit domineering, isn't it? In the sense that you really can't justify playing without it. If you wanted to play just Rolling Magma and make that your "basic attack"... you can't, really, because you're practically forced to mix in Rend, just for the numbers buff. And while I am personally down to play combo builds, which I think can be fun... it needs to be something you choose to do because you want to do it. This massive damage buff is obligatory, and that is something that I am a bit leery of. What happens when I want to play a wyvern that doesn't Rend? At best, I could set up a weaponset that stacks duration and buff up that way and then never use the ability for actual combat, but it's still forced to be used for the buff. While I like this ability, I don't want to be forced to always use it.

Also, in the first week of league launch, the buff had its own special visual appearance with a tailor-made lightning effect on the wings, which has since been removed in favor of a more generic-looking lightning effect which is universal when shapeshifted to other forms, or not shapeshifted at all. I miss the original appearance of the lightning on the wings a bit.

Rolling Magma. I have been very unimpressed with this ability. The numbers on it just aren't good, and seem to be scaled down deliberately to account for it combo-ing with Volcano or fissures. If you want to do damage, you have to get close and use better abilities... which is fair, maybe, that should be rewarded; but sometimes you can't get close, and in those scenarios I've found that Rolling Magma just does not perform adequately. Spamming just Rolling Magma on its own would be rather bland and boring, so it's good to have incentive to mix in other things too; but I think the existing options are not great. It works poorly with volcano, because enemies will just rush straight to you; volcano works better for the bear because the bear can hold their ground on top of the volcano and slam it, using their own body as bait, but wyvern's kit leads to you giving ground when enemies close in, and oh woops now the enemies are past the volcano, and you'd have to be a chronomancer with giga-stacked temp chains to really prevent that from playing out any other way, which doesn't seem worth the payoff. Fissures are better in concept as a combo ability with Rolling Magma, and is an idea I'd like to look further into in the future; Fury of the Mountain, Volcanic Fissure, Forge Hammer, and the Crater support all seem like they might offer a functioning combo idea. But this is all a long-winded way of saying that Rolling Magma isn't really strong enough to work on its own, and that in itself leaves it a bit of a problem; be foolish to build around a flawed ability.

I have found some use out of it, though, which is to use it with Salvo and Hit and Run supports; which makes it a fast but infrequent space-clearer, just to add some extra spice in between spamming Rend. But precious little else can really be used on it to turn it into a usable skill, in my experience. I certainly havn't heard of anyone who has had any success with it, and I have been trying to stay aware of what other folks are doing with the wyvern skills.

Also, shouldn't Rolling Magma be given a visual indicator that it is buffed up by Rend? Some lightning infused with the magma; this will better indicate to newer players what is actually happening, I think.

Wing Blast. I personally quite like this skill... using it is fun, and it has some utility to it. Doing Rend-Wing Blast-Devour looks and plays well, when circumstances align. But it is probably the least essential of the wyvern abilities. It struggles for the same reason that skills like Staggering Palm and Siphoning Strike do; that this whole priming things for stun interaction is just less effective than killing them outright, and very often the numbers just don't line up for it to actually get any practical use. My character happens to have a bunch of increased stun threshold and isn't actually built to be good at melee, so it sometimes works out; but even if what I wanted to do was generate power charges, and built a whole character around being good at stunning, I feel that I still could not trust Wing Blast to be reliable. 15% chance per monster power? I understand that this stacks up a lot against large groups of enemies or single bosses, but for a skill you get at level 6 and which has no inherent inter-play with anything else that wyvern does (other than giving power charges, which the skill is oft bad at and seeking other solutions just seems better), it perhaps lacks some coherency with the rest of the kit. Without investment into stun, the other wyvern abilities will often kill before they stun. I remember being very frustrated with the skill in the level 6-13 range, because even when I could get the payoff, it'd often be only against a lone white mob... and then the 15% chance really screws you, and you're left starved for power charges. At this level range, you don't even have access to Brink to put on Rend to make it actually functional with Wing Blast! And in the endgame people just use Ailith's Chimes on Pounce instead, or solve for power charges some other way. Which is a shame because the skill itself is cool and I'd like to actually play around doing those big shockwaves. And it is made worse by how Oil Barrage and Flame Breath are the big skills that you'd typically want to use to delete big targets with and which are actually good at building stun... but if you're in the middle of channeling one of those, you really don't want to interrupt it just for wing blast. It does not often fit into the rest of what wyvern is often doing, save as a desperate resort to acquire power charges when no better means are available.

Though my character continues to use Wing Blast, it is mostly just because I want to stick with the wyvern theming. If I were being objective, I'd swap it out for the mobility of Pounce, just for the ease of use movement.

It'd be less jarring if it swapped places with Devour for leveling purposes. Devour also has another good thing going for it, which is that it has multiple use cases, where Wing Blast only really has one—though I suppose that it does also double as a sort of dodge, but dodgeroll is perhaps just better in those regards. For the purposes of dodging, it's also just a lot slower than something like Cross Slash.

One thing that also bothers me about Wing Blast is that it is unable to cause stun build-up. Why was this necessary? Staggering Palm is allowed to do that (though Boneshatter isn't). But the nature of Wing Blast is already awkward; it moves you away from the enemy, so I think that what you are trying to avoid is a scenario where people just only spam it, but the in-built movement of it already ensures that. Why not give it a bunch of stun build up, so that it can enable itself? And perhaps give it a similar 2-sec cooldown as Cross Slash, it seems to work out alright there.

Fan the Flames is also a support that exists, but ironically I think that Wing Blast is one of the worse abilities to use it on, which is a shame.

Devour. I love this ability. It is the best of Profane Ritual and Killing Palm put into one, with the usability of both. It even heals you for a quite significant amount. And it is a slam, and a leap, which adds a lot of utility to what you can do with it with supports. It's fun to snack a bit on each pack you slay; or even to cull a boss in cinematically correct gory style (though you may be aware that there are some bugs with act bosses not playing their cinematic moments correctly if you do this, such as by devouring Geonor resulting in Sin not showing up or giving his speech... might want to put in some protections against boss corpses being destroyable). This is the most satisfying support ability in PoE2, I think.

In fact, I like it so much that I'd like to be able to use it even more. If it is technically feasible, might it be possible to make it usable on enemies even if they aren't dead or cullable? Of course, you wouldn't get the cull benefits like the heal or power charges, just the damage from the slam component. If this were an option, you could play a lot more reliably around doing Wing Blast + Devour even if the enemy doesn't die, and that's a fun and natural combo. Having this as an option also makes Crater support a lot more doable, which gives more options for making Rolling Magma function. That could be a whole 3-part combo play; Wing Blast away to land a stun, drop some rolling magmas, then leap in with Devour to put fissures on the ground for the magma to roll over. Or with Salvo on Rolling Magma, you'd Devour first and then drop a bunch of rolling magmas all over, which then aftershock the fissures. That'd be cool, right? But it doesn't work when it isn't reliable, so if you wanted to do that you'd just Pounce or Leap Slam instead, but Pounce has a cooldown and is more focused on applying marks, and Leap Slam demands a weaponswap, and they both take away from the wyvern thematic when there already is a suitable skill available.

In short, this is what a support ability should be, as part of this whole combo gameplay style; it enables so much, has multiple usecases, and it's fun and thematic to use.

Oil Barrage. I've had less time to test this one as I promptly replaced it with Flame Breath when that became available, which was what I built my whole zero-to-hero character around. From what I've tried myself and seen of others though, it seems monstrously strong; the empower portion is probably overtuned. It does kind of have to be quite strong, for being an awkward-to-use channeling skill that grounds you. I've also seen it being used in different ways; one infernalist player seemed to use it with Inhibitor as a way to perpetuate flamebreath compounding ignites, snapshotting the compound effect by reflecting the ignite onto themselves and then using oil pools to spread the ignite. And that's an interesting if rather cumbersome tech, but that sort of creativity is why we love PoE.

I kind of wish that the unempowered version didn't make you stop in place, though. Does tossing some exposure-oil at an enemy really warrant a complete stop of movement? I suppose I understand if it is for design reasons with consistency with how the empowered version works, but the unempowered oil really doesn't feel like it should be counted as a channeling ability or force a complete stop.

Feral Invocation. While I like this one as a concept and have planned out a character that will attempt to use it, I have not yet gotten around to properly playing with it yet. But it seems to me that the player base at large have disregarded it, and I have some concerns about it. This is an entire meta gem whose only use is to trigger four specific attacks, realistically speaking—you could use some other attacks with it, but a lot of the shapeshifting abilities are automatically disqualified from even being used with this meta gem due to how they work, so that seems to me to be a problem... all of the channeled skills simply don't work, and the basic attacks aren't gems so they can't be slotted in, and then there's the ultimates and trigger abilities like the bear roar and Pounce which don't work, and Wing Blast and Devour you wouldn't want to use with it in their current design, which leaves us with only Lunar Assault, Furious Slam, Rolling Magma, and Cross Slash. This was supposed to be a meta gem enabling creativity, but it's really hard to be creative with it! Not impossible, but... very demanding. It would help a little I'm sure if it allowed you to trigger Shred, Rend, and Maul with it, with the spirit gem defaulting to using the corresponding ability that you toggle your talisman to if you don't socket any skill gem into it; could that work?

Also the passive tree seems to lack a lot of good support for it. There's stuff for metagems in the Int/Dex area, but a lot of it specifies spell damage or trigger, and if I understand it right, Feral Invocation actually doesn't have the trigger tag (but it does have the Invocation tag, which specifically says that it triggers, so does it trigger or not?) and it doesn't cost any mana unlike normal triggers. And Ritual Cadence doesn't work for it because it isn't a spell, which is very sad. Even if you won't update those nodes to work for it—which might be fair—I think that some game wording still needs to be updated to be a little more accurate here.

Flame Breath. I knew immediately that I had to test the limits of this ability, and understand it fully. It has so many limitations built-in... but, it is also monstrously powerful. Worst of all is the dreaded movement speed penalty. I think this ability has confused and disappointed a lot of less experienced players, who hear that it costs Rage, so they pick Shaman for the rage nodes thinking that an obvious combination; but that makes for a terrible and un-intuitive anti-synergy; since Furious Wellspring causes all skills to cost Rage, and Flame Breath disables your ability to generate rage, what ends up happening is that these players spend more rage faster, and only get the benefit of not having to think about generating the rage again, but there are just way better ways to handle that, and going that route doesn't actually fix Flame Breath's other problems like its crippling movement speed and its power charge problem. So I've been telling people to play Pathfinder or Gemling to actually get good mileage out of this ability, since neither Shaman nor Oracle actually offers it anything solid (outside of CoA or CoC shenanigans, anyway). Even the Primal Hunger endgame build that GGG showcased prior to league launch wasn't actually... good, in concept. So the ability is unintuitive to folks who think they can just be a druid and still build around it. And while I understand that GGG's intention was perhaps to make it more of a boss-killer ability that was impractical for clear, that's not what players think when they see it and want to build around it; so because they don't know that things won't work out well for them if they just go for it without due planning, they end up disappointed later down the road. Maybe that is fine; that is part of the choice inherent in PoE, after all. But it sure might be nice if there was an option to specialize into fixing some of Flame Breath's downsides that were available within the druid ascendancies or the Str-Int portion of the tree, because right now all it offers is just Rage, and Rage is the easiest challenge to overcome when building for it.

Unintuitiveness aside, I like this ability a lot, even if it feels a lot like you have to have a whole checklist completed just to be able to press the button: a solution for movement slowdown, some kind of defense against being stunned, power charges both for the Rend buff and Flame Breath itself, and plausibly enough stun buildup to make it lock down tougher enemies. Because the long cooldown and slow startup/wind-down on using it demands commitment.

It's fun burninating the countryside, though. But even with all my effort put into optimizing it for movement, it is still nowhere near as fast as actual meta builds, and the rage limitation demands frequent downtime, so I'm not sure it warrants being so restrictive with it.

I really wish that you could do *something* while channeling, too. Like if dodgeroll didn't cancel the channel and instead performed a swoop and postponed further channeling, and if you held the button down it'd resume channeling; maybe that would be too strong. Or if wing blast did that sort of thing; wing blast at least comes out immediately, rather than forcing you to land first like with the other abilities. Which brings me to a proposal...

Proposal: Flight "Stance". The bear and the wolf both have their special stances for standing up and running on all fours; the wyvern has nothing like that. Why not treat flying similarly to those two, as an actual mechanical character stance; I suppose flying wouldn't have to do anything on its own except perhaps to make you immune to ground surfaces, and perhaps as a way to introduce alterations for the wyvern's other skills. But one of the thing that makes Flame Breath a bit clunky is just how long and cumbersome the animation for entering and exiting it is, which prohibits combo-ing with other wyvern skills. And it struck me at lower levels that I thought that wyvern felt like it had half a kit that didn't really combo with itself (other than adding a bunch of numbers damage from empowered Rend, which, isn't quite the same), unlike Maul+Furious Slam, or Lunar Assault+Shred having obvious in-built combos, so maybe further thought could be given to wyvern in that regard. I thought a new ability could be a good way to add some gameplay around that to grant more frequent access to this flight stance, and add a more formally fleshed out variant of the flight that already exists in Flame Breath... and make Flame Breath no longer auto-land you when you stop channeling it.

Proposal: Skylaunch Ability. Just like the bear wants to play around Maul to stand up in order to shorten the use time of other bear abilities, I reckon it might be cool to have something like that for wyvern, with a twist. Though I realize that GGG animators will likely be too busy working on Swords next, to actually have time to add more cool stuff to the shapeshift skills... especially anything as demanding as what I have in mind here.

The purpose of this skill would be as something that is fast to use that can take you into the flight stance, and does something on its own too. Perhaps a small whirlwind that pushes enemies back and inflicts strong stun buildup, or something. But the primary benefit would be to get into the flight stance, accessible perhaps only through this ability and Flame Breath. And while flying, a bunch of wyvern abilities are altered a bit. Perhaps rolling magma simply gets a +1 bounce and/or some area effect, and could be spammed from the air. But Rend and Devour might get some empowered benefits; Rend might get a short dash added, slicing with both wings and landing, and Devour might have its slam component boosted significantly. Wing Blast could turn into a dash instead, flying in the target direction instead of jumping away? Now that sprinting exists, there need not exist quite as many restrictions on travel skills; though I imagine such a thing would need to be handled carefully regardless.

But what I propose is a pipedream. It'd be so much animation work, essentially requiring an entire new animation for each wyvern skill just to enable this one thing. I think some of what I've discussed would be cool, and might help enable better options for combo-play; but I know quite well that animation is arduous, and in some ways PoE2 was born from the animators wanting better rigs, and we're still working through those efforts.

About Meta Skills. One thing that I had been looking forward to was being able to be very creative with shapeshift skills; the showcase at Exilecon showed a lot of potential room for such creativity, and while I think the new design is ultimately better-executed, it does lack a lot of room for variety. Wolf in particular is forced into doing things with freeze, and while wolf has Pounce and bear has their meta roar which can add supporting abilities from other archetypes, they're not so much creative as they are "just use the obvious one that definitely benefits your particular kind of build". And wyvern has no dedicated meta gem at all. I thought something like a wyvern breath metagem that turns any spell projectile into an attack could be something that might be cool (given a bunch of mechanical solutions to concerns that would arise from doing that! but it'd be cool). More options that allow you to add stuff from other weapon types would be great in general; shapeshifting is currently the best showcase for why the PoE2 vision of combo play can be good when done right, but I think further iteration and additions are still needed.

I had more to say, and a third druid ascendancy concept to propose, but I think I have rambled on for long enough.

Happy holidays,