So Wicked has careful soulslike combat featuring a large variety of weapon movesets with basic attack chains, rolling attacks, sprinting attacks, charged attacks and charge attack followups. That’s great, I love it, good job.
However:
Rune Attacks, the Ash-of-War inspired special abilities which can be swapped onto any weapon, are currently balanced in such a way that the only reason you would ever NOT use a Rune Attack is that you don’t have enough Focus. Not only do they deal much more damage than basic attacks they also interrupt enemies where basic attacks will not, travel a further distance, cover a larger area, can ignore shields, knockdown bosses, instantly apply status and in some cases are even faster than the basic attack options of a weapon.
The contrast between something like the Divine Scimitar’s normal moveset (which deals low damage, doesn’t interrupt enemies, has no hyperarmour and surprisingly short reach) and the Lightning Assault rune which can be placed on a Divine Scimitar, which instantly shoots you forward half a screen before knocking any enemy onto the ground in a single hit and dealing 3-4x the damage of the weapon’s slow normal attacks while also giving you free hits after the knockdown… makes it seem like some of these abilities came from an entirely different game.
We have absurdly powerful Rune ablities which are always better than your basic moveset whenever you have the focus available to use them. This might make you think Focus would be a scare resource, except it isn’t. In the current “end game” (It’s chapter 1, level cap is 30) it is very easy to build into enough focus regeneration through onhit effects and other bonuses that you can constantly make use of Rune attacks. This becomes the best way to approach melee and makes those interesting and unique weapon movesets irrelevant, because any weapon simply becomes a vessel for the strongest Rune attacks, some of which are absurdly strong and ‘break’ the game in various ways.
When you make ‘special abilities’ and character build minmax’ing this powerful you devalue the original careful and grounded combat which was supposed to be a selling point. I started out carefully positioning and winding up charged attacks on a beach, I don’t want to end the game being a PoE whirling top with infinite health regen who smashes their way through hordes of enemies due to the rolls on my gear.
Specific examples of some of the worst Rune offenders and what they do:
Lightning Assault / Surge Slash / Knockdown Shot etc
Abilities which force a knockdown. These force a knockdown on everything, including enemies holding up greatshields, the largest elite mobs, the Echo Knight etc and allow multiple free hits while they are on the ground. Using the correct weapons with Gain Focus on Damage Dealt bonuses it is possible to recover all the focus you spent while enemies during the knockdown period and then loop this forever. This can be done by any build using weapon swaps because without any stat investment everybody has access to:
Dashing Stab on Dual Dagger
Can be placed on the starting dagger which everyone can use in an off slot, deals enough hits that when used with “Gain X on Damage Dealt” gear it will fully restore your Health, Stamina and Focus on every use. It also inexplicably deals about 20x the stagger damage of any other ability and will instantly break the stagger bar of anything in the game. Is abusive by itself but also allows you to feed any other playstyle because you always have access to an immediate full heal + full focus recovery + posture break
Arrow on Bow
Costs 15 Focus, can recover more than 15 Focus on hit. Making it an infinite range attack which builds resources instead of spending them. Not too abusive until you realise the Crucible obviously isn’t designed to deal with infinite long range attacks and you can bow everything to death from safety while it just stands there and slowly dies.
Double Spin
I want to mention this because it’s the sort of attack design which doesn’t seem abnormal but the fact that it’s so good speaks volumes about how terrible normal weapon swings are. This comes out as fast as the fastest weapon basic attacks, but instead of regular enemies ignoring the hit to their face this will actually interrupt them. The ability to instantly interrupt anything in front of you is invaluable in a game which feels like it wants to punish you for ever daring to swing your basic attack at something.
All the very high DPS Rune attacks with multiple hits (Twirl Dash, Lightning Flurry)
Deal massively more damage than you’re ever going to deal with regular hits but then also recover most of their cost and your stamina and heal you because On-hit effects are pretty much a horrible mistake. Can also throw in pretty much any high damage Rune ability like Frost Dash too, because these are so much better than regular swings that it feels like they turn Wicked into a resource management game where the in-combat decisions are more about how much Focus you have than about the subtleties of timing/spacing and the different properties of your weapon swings.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tested every Rune in the game and I’m sure the nonsense is not limited to this list
