I love these two skills to death esp mortar, but feel like they need some love. Here are my suggestions
Blade Spirit:
Cooldown down to 5s
Switch cold/pierce values. Pierce casters aren’t really a thing (I’ve tried :D) and for cold users the damage really falls short later on unless you have 3-4 items converting pierce to cold. They’d still be great for leveling pierce chars this way, but it’d help the casters in late elite+ultimate. I would also buff the numbers a bit, adding some frostburn might be interesting
Small AoE increase
Higher move speed + more aggressive ai. Too much wasted time, lazy ass spirits need to be whipped into shape
Gear support. While I would appreciate some modifiers or cooldown reducers outside of conduit (the latter being more important) one of the main things is that it’s just obscenely hard to get this skill to the ranks needed to do real damage later on. There is a serious lack of +blade spirit across all gear types
Mortar:
This skill requires a fucking obscene point investment and that should be reflected in it’s power
Ability to summon 2 should be granted at 16/16
Rate of fire increase as well projectile speed increase, pretty unfortunate that despite being a squishy ranged caster that you need to stand there and tank for max dps a lot of the time! It feels really dirty that you almost feel forced into going light defender at times. Also it is so sad when a zombie outruns your 40 point investment
Small damage increase depending on rof/speed increase
Small reduction in mana cost would be welcome
I would like to see some mortar bonuses on gear, but it’s not in a horrible spot either. On the topic of gear I’d love to see the Anderos Amp get +1 Demo back. Mortar is so point hungry that I really think this gun is deserving of that
+1 to Blade Spirit buff. I’d prefer if they balanced the Pierce and Cold values, just bring whichever one is lower up to the same level as the other and then buff both if need be. It’s possible to convert either all Elemental (hence Cold) to Pierce or most Pierce to Cold that you can fit it into a build using either damage type without too much effort.
+1 to Mortar Trap buffs. “The Big One” could use a buff or rework as it doesn’t really feel impactful enough. 1-2 Mortar shots (depending on the rank of Mortar Trap vs “The Big One”) can equal or even surpass it, I’ve only ever used it for the 10 metre radius. Some people have suggested making it a modifier to the base Fire Mortar skill with a % Total Damage modifier which is an idea. I think a start though would be granting it a large amount of % Crit Damage similar to Nether Edge.
I definitely love the amount of support they’ve given it with Ashes of Malmouth, maybe it could use a bit more but it’s a great start. What I find annoying though is that it’s all for Fire/Lightning/Elemental.
There’s an absurd amount of ways to convert Fire or Elemental damage into something else and in large amounts but it’s all pointless for Mortar Trap as it is primarily focused on Fire. I’d even take a skill modifier for 100% Fire damage converted to Lightning to match Heavy Ordnance. At some point in the future, I’d like to see an armour set or some MIs that feature skill modifiers that are more adventurous with the skill like how the Justicar set is for Fire Forcewave or Valdun’s set is for Pierce Cadence.
+1 to your point about the big one forgot that in op as even maxed out it doesn’t feel super great. Not entirely sure what I’d do with it tbh, but the crit damage modifier sounds like a nice idea. Either that or make it hit a lot harder and be fired once in awhile not just at the beginning of the mortar life. There’s no shortage of aoe so while its cool it doesn’t seem to do much
From my own testing the big one doesn’t seem to do much more than the standard mortar round and the slow aspect is redundant on anything but trash and even some trash it doesn’t seem to have much impact. I also think being a mortar it might want to have a longer range than it does because that is what a mortar is for. Because the mortar has a reasonably short range your squishy ranged or caster is still in charge range which seems to be why you’d use a mortar to hit enemies at range. The big one needs a substantial stat increase to be worthy of the name. Maybe make it an attack that does massive burn damage as if hit with a white phosphorus shell?
The “slow” effect is very noticeable and appears to stack. If Eldritch Fire is on an enemy who is blasted by “the big one” they definitely have the turtle syndrome.
My issue with “the big one” is that the numbers generally do not show upon impact. This makes it difficult to tell if it’s even better than standard mortar shells. I agree adding a final blast with a high DoT would be an awesome addition
This is not entirely true. Mortar Trap scales fine with “lightning” damage. It can go either way. I’ve made at least 3 “lightning” based Mortar builds and they do just as much if not more damage than their fire based counterparts. My latest is a purifier but am missing a tonne of end-game items, it looks like this at this stage - http://www.grimtools.com/calc/vNQRQv82 (pants, tome and medal may end up being replaced by good MI’s)
