I think the current model of 1 minute-3 minute buffs leads to highly tedious prebuffing routines before every boss that should be trimmed away, or buff durations need to be changed or focus costs for buff abilities reduced.
You currently undergo a really lengthy ritual of first casting 1-3 buffs (damage surge, stamina wellspring, health increase) depending on your total max focus pool. In between these casts depending on how many you can fit per focus pool, you then slowly channel that focus back, then heal yourself, then proceed to drink the flasks, then maybe apply shock aura or some other consumable, then channel some more, and eat the stat buff food.
This is also corrosive to the utility rune environment. The fact is, combat enhancements will always overtake more niche non-combat utility. Return and Illuminate and Repair are cool. They cannot compete with combat enhancement utilities, especially once encounters start getting more difficult as you progress down the campaign whenever more content is released.
So right now you have at least 2 utility runes reserved, one for heal, the other for damage surge (damage surge’s damage increase bonus is way too good to pass up, the stamina and health might be luxuries, but more damage is never frivolous). That only leaves space for 2 utilities, and sadly the more interesting utilities lose out.
Suggestion:
1- Remove the enhancement utility runes. We don’t need more damage creep, and damage surge does just that. Stamina Wellspring and the health increase spell also undermine the point of gearing and stat investment. Leave utility runes for just heal and the 3 remaining situational utilities.
2- Please look at flask, food duration and especially elemental infusion consumable effect durations. The 2-3 minute durations are too short and make prebuffing feel like a chore. Increasing the durations to 15-30 minutes for consumables would go a long way to letting users space out the usage of items, and it would also justify the material cost of these items that often times ask for rarer materials.
I have never used buffs in soulslike except for doing elemental damage, not because they are not strong but I completely forget that they exist, they do not change the way you play, and therefore they are not interesting enough, every now and then you find a video of someone who uses 20 buffs and disarms a boss and it is fun to see but it is not for me, if there was something more interesting like the Flask of Wondrous Physick in Eledring I would use them.
I think the current model of 1 minute-3 minute buffs leads to highly tedious prebuffing routines before every boss that should be trimmed away,
I have never seen any game make a good consumable system including No Rest for the Wicked. I don’t use buffs ever. If adding 10% stamina recovery is the same as me doing 5 more tries and learning the boss pattern better, thus not using so much stamina, why would I ever keep using a consumable when a small amount of git gud is having the same effect?
I never use consumables. I see no point in them at all.
Even if I needed consumables to help me beat a boss because I’m not good enough, that means that I use, let’s say 10 food buffs and in case I didn’t beat the boss, I would need to stop doing boss tries and go farm for more food, in order to beat the boss. Well, if you used the time you needed to farm new materials and use each consumable before each try, in order to do more tries on the boss, you would have wasted less time to beat it.
Consumables are irrelevant and uninspired in every single game I’ve ever played with only ONE exception. Expedition 33, because they aren’t really consumables. The serve like Soulsborne flasks but have multiple uses and replenish each time you rest at a checkpoint.
You people play this game in a really convoluted and overengineered way. Just swing at the trash/boss one/few more times. Or spend that boring buff-up times on something else - like learning boss patterns (and parrying).
As in almost any other souls game, they are useless. Literal checkboxes on development spreadsheet.
There are exceptions - e.g. Nioh 2 somewhat forces you (in underworld depths) to not only use elemental effects but also cycle through them as with each use the boss is gaining resistance to it. And you have to apply two effects to cause confusion which allows you to damage the boss in any meaningful fashion (while that debuff lasts).
But these are exceptions, not the rule.
Before the “Breach” update focus potions were useful to test runes in town. Now it’s just house + bed + hp->focus rune.
