The "leap" skill is perfect for a retreat skill. It is what I used when testing and it worked fine for me. It is similar to the berserker shadow leap.

What skills do you think are too slow? The leap is pretty fast, so I doubt it is that one.

I have not yet really played a shapeshifting druid, so I appreciate the feedback and more information on what you think can improve it.

Originally posted by drewrobi:

The "leap" skill is perfect for a retreat skill. It is what I used when testing and it worked fine for me. It is similar to the berserker shadow leap.

The leap skill is basically just a "move slightly faster" skill, but it has nothing to envy to shadow leap.

I think you copied the skill from the wolves in Act 3, but actually these wolves execute the skill much much faster. I'm having these issues in early game basically.

Maybe you've been testing it with additional cast speed or something like that ?

Originally posted by drewrobi:

What skills do you think are too slow? The leap is pretty fast, so I doubt it is that one.

Well, every shapeshifting skill basically. Or at least, all the one that change yourself into a wolf when executing the skill.

Let's take strike as an example. This skill basically executes using the following behaviour :
1) Consume a fixed mana cost and change yourself in wolf (1 sec maybe)
2) Hit what are near you while channeling mana
3) Do the reverse transformation (1 sec I'd say)

The problem is that the phase 3) is pretty slow, and you can't really interrupt it. So if while executing 2) you realize you are too low on health and needs to retreat, you need to wait 1 additional second (the time for 3) to happen), and this 1 second can make the difference between life and death.

The problem is not the skill structure by itself - it's really the animation speed.

I did not mention that all these problems happen while being equipped with a big two-handed weapon. I think I had read somewhere that the animation speed partly depended on the weapon you're wearing (single handed or two-handed).. Might be wrong though, but that could explain why both of us experience different feedback when it comes to these skills.

Animation is only based on the .skeleton file and the cast speed of the skill. I'll look into shortening the duration of the two skeleton files (the one leading into and leading out of the strike skill)

Note that you, are only talking about one skill. All the others are a single cast, there is no transformation time (I simply grow in a wolf model while fading out the character model and time it to the core animation speed underneath that the character is using for the skill).

Weapon speeds (and attack speeds) have no effect whatsoever on the shapeshifting skills as they are skills they are only affected by cast speed.

I did use the wolf leap in ACTI and did not notice any issues with being able to escape. I did consider a "leap back" skill as there is a leap back wolf animation but (1) I dislike backwards skills like the one for the outlander (I find them hard to control) and (2) I couldn't think of anything useful to do with the skill besides make it jump back (would you really want a skill that does no damage). Perhaps I could do something like phantom wolves attack at the place you leap from or something. If you like that idea, let me know what skill could be replaced. Perhaps Roar?

I don't think there is too much to change, the animation for the start of the wolf strike skill is a third of a second and the animation for the end is 0.26667 seconds. I'll reduce it a little but this is not that much time.

-- EDIT --

Going to upload a new version soon that does not use continuous looping but still looks good. It will get rid of the start up/end animation times.

Originally posted by drewrobi:

I don't think there is too much to change, the animation for the start of the wolf strike skill is a third of a second and the animation for the end is 0.26667 seconds. I'll reduce it a little but this is not that much time.

-- EDIT --

Going to upload a new version soon that does not use continuous looping but still looks good. It will get rid of the start up/end animation times.

I do think that the animation was taking way longer than 0.5 sec to fade in / fade out.
Or maybe it was just placebo. If I see the issue again I will make a video out of it.