Please don't give us any of the skill changes that Lara got from recent KMS update, this just ruins the class, makes her play way differently, removes her uniqueness, and makes her play way worse.
If players did not like how she plays now, then they would not be playing her. Players that like playing as Lara, like playing as Lara in her current form so skill improvements should be just that, improve on the current skills outside of fringe skills like River Manifestation should be remade to something players would actually use and is useful for mobbing and bossing, but remaking a skill should have a clear reason for it and be a very rare scenario.
The changes Lara actually needs are simpler than they appear:
(All) Eruption Skills:
Buff: Increase the duration to all 3 summons from 16 to 30 seconds.
Improvement: Allow the duration of the summons to be increased further with Summon Duration.
This would still retain Lara as being an active summoner, but the durations being so short gets draining to do for long gameplay mobbing.
So letting the summons have a longer duration at 30 seconds at base with the ability to increase the duration further with the summon duration increasing stat will greatly improve Lara's gameplay when using Lara's summoning gameplay for mobbing and/or bossing.
(All) Absorb Skills:
Buff: Increase the duration to all 3 absorb skills from 90 seconds to 600 seconds.
Similar to the above point for the Eruption Skills, a longer duration will create a more pleasant experience and make the Absorb Skills feel like passives and the decision making is between whether or not you want to use Absorb Skill gameplay or Eruption Skill gameplay for your mobbing and/or bossing gameplay.
It is important for Lara players to decide between Absorb Skill style with max CD Skip builds or Eruption Skill style with managing the summons to do the work for you, whether it is for bossing or mobbing or a mix of both. Both playstyles are unique and offer a different way to play as Lara, so both style should be supported and separate from each other instead of trying to fuse the two together.
Dragon Vein Traces:
Improvement: Remove the recharge time, charges, and cooldown.
Change: No longer deals damage or stuns as a result for the above change (remains with the same function of how it does now which is teleport to the closest Dragon Vein in the selected direction).
This is a good skill to how it is now, and to make it feel better and smoother to use both the charges and cooldown need to be removed and it functions like Lara's main teleport like all other teleports in the game, but with its exclusive unique function of teleporting directly to a Dragon Vein.
The damage and stun are irrelevant to this skill anyways, so I would rather have this aspect removed to make it better at its main and only purpose which is as a mobility skill for Lara.
Dragon Vein Conversion / Unconstrained Dragon Vein / HEXA Wakeup Call:
These will be lumped together, but the purple wild card dragon veins are kind of an annoyance to use and removes the flow to playing as Lara.
So keep the Dragon Veins, but delete the purple wild card dragon veins, and we just have sun, wind, and river veins only instead.
Dragon Vein Conversion:
Buff: Remove the cooldown.
Unconstrained Dragon Vein:
Mini Rework: Instead of placing down a purple wild card dragon vein, you instead...
New Effect: Create a random dragon vein between sun, wind, or river on each skill use. Up to 3 unused dragon veins can be created from this skill at a time, if a 4th dragon vein is created then the oldest dragon vein is deleted (unused meaning it was not used with either an Absorb, Eruption, or Manifestation skill).
Improvement: Remove the cooldown and holding charges mechanic.
HEXA Wakeup Call:
Improvement: When this skill is used, instead of recreating a purple wild card dragon vein after, it instead will create a random dragon vein between sun, wind, or river.
Manifestation Skills Improvements:
Two parts to this:
~Help reduce amount of skills to be bound by making all the Manifestation skills summon with only one button, similar to how Absorb and Eruption skills work.
~Both allow Lara to live out the support fantasy with significantly stronger manifestation skills to actually help out the party in a meaningful way to survive a long boss fight.
Lastly, remaking River Manifestation to function more similarly to its river and sunlight counterparts, but also introduce cool, unique, and fun party supporting capabilities while drastically improving on Lara's own movement options to help get her around the map while mobbing and be useful to have for dodging boss attack patterns while bossing.
Summon Manifestation!:
New Skill: On use on a Dragon Vein, create a Manifestation in accordance to what type of Dragon Vein this skill was used on.
Change: All Manifestation skills become passive skills as this new skill will become the only active for all 3 Manifestation skills. Effectively nothing changes as these skills are still treated as active summons.
Buff: Remove the cooldowns to all 3 Manifestation skills.
Manifestation: Sunlight-Filled Ground:
Improvement: Increase the size of this skill significantly by at least 100% vertically and 100% horizontally so it can properly do its job in the chaos of a boss fight.
Improvement: Increase the duration from 20 seconds to 30 seconds.
Buff: Increase the healing from 10% HP every 2 seconds to 25% HP every 1 second so that this skill can function as a proper healer (anything that is both slower healing tick rate and weaker healing than this is to weak and to infrequent to do its job properly).
Manifestation: Wind Swing:
Improvement: Increase the size of this skill significantly by at least 100% vertically and 100% horizontally so it can properly do its job in the chaos of a boss fight.
Improvement: Increase the duration from 30 seconds to 600 seconds.
System Change: Change how to enter flight from holding both up+jump into holding jump to remain flying to instead simply hold jump to enter and remain within flight; allowing for much smoother and easier time for Lara and especially her party members to utilize this skill!
Wind duration to be an extremely long 600 seconds is so that this skill, once active, feels like it is always active for players to use the skill whenever they need to as a movement ability such as this needs to be always readily available to be both usable and used, and to serve its function properly.
This will apply to the River Manifestation remake below.
Sunlight is a short duration to have Lara feel like an active healer. Skills that affect movement should feel like they are always active however.
Manifestation: Where the River Courses:
Remake: Create an aquatic zone that restores 2% MP for Lara and party members inside every second. While Lara or party members are inside of the area, they can double tap any of the directional keys to quickly dash a set distance in that direction. Pressing the jump key while dashing will immediately stop the dash early.
Improvement: Area size is set to be similar to the new increased sizes of the sunlight and wind counterparts.
Improvement: Duration is set to 600 seconds.
The novelty of the current river manifestation is neat and all, but you use it once and never again because it really is not useful for any situation.
This skill will be a lot easier to set up since it would be used the same way as the other 2 skills. With the ease of set up, it would be used more as a result.
The other part that would really improve Lara's gameplay, besides adding in new and unique party utility into the game, is offering Lara an easier time to restore MP like how the other mages have an easy time to regain MP.
Another part is giving Lara a set distance dash that can be used in the air or on the ground to either help her correct her position in the air or quickly dodge a boss attack, which would help her out with bossing.
For mobbing, with a very long duration increase makes it worth using and setting up in a good location to help her more easily and smoothly get around the map, and an easier time to go through platforms that doesn't involve down jumping.
Please don't implement Lara's KMS changes for GMS and instead try a lot more of a conservative approach like this that is mostly just quality of life improvements and/or straight buffs that makes Lara play better with her current playstyle.
This does not alienate current players that like playing as Lara while making her more enjoyable to play to potentially get new players to enjoy her as well.
This would be the best thing to have without thrashing her gameplay and movement, and without needing to touch her damage (even though she may still need damage buffs in the future, it is best to make the core gameplay as best as possible).
