I love Briarthorn shield conceptually. It’s a great item that expands the arsenal of what retal builds can do, and how they can deliver damage as punishment for being hit.
I also like the concept behind how the ability is made: It has a very short cooldown, and hits in an AoE, which is a nice complement to retal alone. And since it procs on block, it also doesn’t go against its own interest of preventing retal damage to be applied if you’re too good at defense.
The very low cooldown on the skill proc is also a sign that the idea is that it would be a relentless barrage of spines if enemies get too close.
In testing however, there are 2 things stopping it from being great.
The first is a bit of a bummer, but it,s unlikely to change: Dodge chance come before block, so if you build this with nightblade, you will get significantly less block opportunities, so less procs.
The solution for that is to rework the mods on the shield, and replace blade barrier with either spectral wrath, counter strike, or something similar…
The MAIN point I want to bring here however is at the base functionality of the shield, and that is the fact that the chance to proc (30% on block) would be fine in a vacuum… but it compounds with character block chance. Every time you get attacked, you first roll your chance to block… then your chance to proc the skill… and regardless of the skill’s cooldown, you still need to recover from your block first, which kinda makes the cooldown on the skill irrelevant… and the skill not exactly reliable. You need to have both very good block chance… AND good block recovery… (It’s a good thing that this shield has great recovery time, so kudos on that)
The end result with 75% block chance and about 50% block recovery (which are both absolutely stellar values) is the skill typically procs no more than once per second or 2… rather than the multiple times a second the cooldown seem to promise.
Solution:
Lower the RATA to 18 if needed… but make the proc chance much higher (I would even suggest 100% on block). The block recovery in itself is already all the cooldown you’ll ever need to pace the skill, and the odds of attacks being blocked are already up in the air. So make the proc that already depends on all those factors more reliable. It would make the shield worth building around IMO.
You could also lower the cooldown on the proc. Something like 0.1 seconds should be enough to make it impossible to find a loophole to get it to spam, but would not penalize players who put a lot of effort to get their block recovery lower than 0.2 seconds.
