Risk of Rain Distortion Chef

Distortion's description is straightforward and surprisingly incomplete.

It always rolls for a new locked skill exactly when the in-game clock reaches the next minute. It does not have to choose a different skill -you can absolutely have a single skill locked four minutes in a row.

And, not mentioned even on the Risk of Rain wiki, Distortion lowers all cooldowns by 25%. (It doesn't round, either! It keeps track of fractional seconds)

This is important, because it means that even though Distortion sounds like a pure challenge Artifact, it's actually a trade-off Artifact. You can't count on any given skill, but you can spam the ones you do have noticeably more than normal. This is particularly appreciated when it comes to having your basic attack skill locked for a number of classes -the cooldown reduction is enough to often allow you to lean pretty heavily on your other attacking skills just fine. (Unless you're CHEF and only have one other attacking skill, or HAN-D and have only one other attacking skill that's actually cooldown-based...)

Though do note that since a class' basic attack isn't considered to have a cooldown, it doesn't benefit from this particular effect.

Anyway, discovering that particular tidbit as part of doing these recordings actually gave me a new appreciation for Distortion, but overall it's still not an Artifact I'm fond of. For some classes, having a random skill locked periodically forces you to change up your strategy periodically without actually crippling you. For others, it's horrifically uneven, as one or two of your skills is vitally important while one or two others really is basically ignorable. I haven't even gotten around to testing how the Enforcer experiences Distortion just because the idea of potentially being locked into Serve and Protect for a full minute is dreadful, and being denied the ability to enter it isn't much better!

I went with CHEF for this run for a couple of reasons. The first one is that I wanted to use somebody other the Engineer, because I've already played the Engineer with Distortion on a fair amount and wanted to do something new. The second reason is that Distortion provides a really good illustration of just how uneven CHEF's skills are. Anytime DICE/MINCE is locked, the run dramatically slows down while I painfully slowly wear down targets with GLAZE and SEAR/BLAZE. Anytime SEAR or GLAZE is locked, I don't actually care. Anytime SECOND HELPING is locked, it's a little annoying how it reduces my damage output against bosses and stuff but not actually that big of a deal.

If you just looked at CHEF's design as a whole without having played it in particular, the thing you'd probably guess would be most problematic would be losing SECOND HELPING, since it's so obviously meant to be the linchpin of CHEF's design. Even if you guessed that DICE being lost was the worst possible scenario, probably you'd base that on it being your staple basic attack, not on DICE in particular being overpowered -but other classes just don't suffer under Distortion the same way.

DICE and MINCE really are just that good, and CHEF's other skills that lackluster.

Here, have a Glass+Distortion Commando run real quick.

By contrast with CHEF, what skill I had locked messed around with my actual strategy, but didn't really cripple me -admittedly, there was a certain amount of luck involved and Glass distorting things  (The Magma Worm could have been a serious problem if Tactical Dive had ended up locked... if I weren't playing Glass and so didn't kill it before it made a single dive), but it's still pretty representative of the contrast between CHEF and the Commando's interactions with Distortion.

(Why Glass? So the run would be faster, of course)

Distortion is overall one of the better Artifacts on a design level, regardless of my own personal feelings, at least.