Can you please repair Flash Freeze and Blade Trap, so you can apply their debuffs even if the enemy can’t be frozen/trapped? I for one would like to include these skills in my builds, but I can’t since bosses are immune to freezing/entrapment and the other debuffs aren’t applied as a consequence. Also, could you repair Cadence so that any skill modifier will apply its bonuses also to the normal attacks (and WPS) that precede Cadence? For example, the Crimson Claws convert piercing damage to physical. It would be normal for the conversion to be carried to the preceding normal attacks and any WPS triggered by them, since all these attacks are made by using the Cadence skill. Same goes for any damage bonuses added to Cadence through skill modifiers.
Having Flash Freeze & Blade Trap do what you want them to do would require the dev team to remake them entirely. Their templates simply do not allow the debuffs to happen independently of the freeze / trap check.
It’s true that the game is optimized where using skillpoints just for Hero mobs is unfeasible, but what you are asking them to do is to make an entirely new template. It’s possible, considering they made one for the new Upheaval skill, but the template currently used for these skills mechanically cannot do what you’re asking them to do.
The purpose is not “to do what I want”, it’s to make them actual usable skills. A skill that can’t be used against bosses would be better off gone from the list, instead of being there just to tease you and crush your expectations (especially for a new player). There are solutions to make it work.
- Give the effects (like lower resist and reduced defensive ability) separate durations in the skill, so they won’t depend on the entrapment/freeze duration.
- Don’t make bosses immune to entrapment/freeze, but rather allow a gap of 20% in their resistance to these effects, so you can actually have a small period of debuffs applied to them.
I don’t think either one of these modifications would turn everything upside-down. I for one would make both modifications too, because having separate durations for the desired debuffs would make the skill behave like a lot of other similar ones and making bosses susceptible to entrapment/freeze also means that an investment in these two effects is not entirely useless. Same goes for other effects that don’t work at all on bosses, like slow.
EDIT.
I understand that freezing/trapping bosses would make them harmless, especially if you apply this effect often, even if it has a small duration. But at least transform these effects into “slowed” when it comes to bosses, with a gap of 20% in their “slow resistance”, so you can have your investment in these effects pay off somehow.
The skill is perfectly useable. Just not on bosses.
This game is 10+ years old. Many players recognize that the skill doesn’t work on bosses. The devs are not removing the skill because it hurts your sensibilities; they are working on an expansion and they have other priorities.
There are endgame sets that reduce the freeze and trap resistances on bosses enough that OFF and Blade Trap work on them, which matches your point #2. Whether the new expansion revisits these skills remains to be seen.
Well yes, but you don’t play this game to eliminate mobs, the main target for farming is bosses. And that’s where most of your hard work to gather gear and improve your skills matters most.
I understand that, I didn’t expect anyone to execute what I believe to be right. But I’d just like people to akcnowledge that this is a problem and that it could be improved. It’s horrible to look at that list of skills and always avoid the ones I’ve mentioned, as they won’t make any difference where it matters most. Same goes for Cadence, you could create much more variations with this skill, if it would be corrected.
I saw that somewhere on the internet before, but I don’t really understand how a -30% in freeze resistance would diminish the 500% resistance to freeze, so that a boss would become freezable. I haven’t tried it, but at first glance it looks unfeasible to me. In any case, each class has debuffs that can be used in all cases, without specialized sets. These two skills should’ve been the same. The Arcanist has an affinity with fire and physical, by providing a debuff to these resistances, but the fact that you can’t use the skill (where it matters most) makes the arcanist have no practical affinity at all, so you end up just avoiding it and picking Demolitionist or Oathkeeper or whatever.
Most SR bosses/Nemeses have 133% CC resistance, Freeze included.
Notably, Shattered Alkamos (I forget his specific name) still has 500% Freeze res.
To expand on tpom’s point, note that the base skills themselves reduce Freeze/Trap res as well.
Ok, I don’t know how much of a difference that makes, to go through all that trouble just to make the debuff work for a quarter of a second against some bosses and not all, when all the classes have debuffs that can be applied with zero struggle. I still support my original point, I’m sorry. The sets that decrease the freeze resistance should’ve provided a longer period of freeze, making it more potent, not make the freeze effect workable.
I’m not sure I really understand the “all classes have debuffs” argument. Not all classes have debuffs that CC.
And Arcanist and Nightblade both have other debuffs, like Veil of Shadows or Nullification (arguably the most potent debuff in the game in the right situation).
What you’re asking for is to trivialize the game by offering easily-accessible permanent uptime on CC effects. I don’t think that’s a very reasonable request.
No, I meant that all classes have a lower resist debuff or lower DA/OA that can be used anywhere with no fuss. Except Flash Freeze from Arcanist and Blade Trap from Nightblade. That’s what I meant by “affinity” with a damage type, the ability to lower that resistance through a skill. All skills can apply their debuffs anywhere (including on bosses) with zero special gear, except these two. And these two don’t manage to apply it even with that unique set, from what I can tell.
Nightblade’s Veil of Shadow does these things.
But yes, you’re right that all other classes have such a debuff…except for Soldier. Soldier’s War Cry, while featuring N Reduced Phys Res, cannot apply -% RR or other -X stats. Not all debuffs are created equal, as is the case with Olexra’s Flash Freeze.
I’m not going to lie and say this doesn’t create some problems, but if this was “repaired” as you suggest, it would cascade into undoing a decade of item/class design that has been built in spite of these inconsistencies. Can Arcanist continue to offer things like Nullification, Mirror, Maiven’s Sphere, Inner Focus, and a generally high amount of CDR in a world in which it has similar RR debuffs as other masteries? There’d be no reason to take anything other than Arcanist!
But War Cry applies its RR to everyone, right? From the lousiest mob to the most powerful boss. Of course that the debuffs are not equal, but all of them work everywhere, except those two.
Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m sure that where there’s a will there’s a way.
Yes, but if I want to maximize my damage output by taking the classes which have “affinity” with a particular damage type, I can’t include Arcanist in my choice, since it has no workable RR debuff. Same goes for Blade Trap, why would I take a skill that provides an interesting % reduction to DA when I can’t use it at all against bosses, who have the largest DA in the game?
Tell that to the Spellbinders of the Top 20, or the Battlemage of the “Top 31” - Battlemage doesn’t have any -% debuff on it, yet it still came out as a top-performing class.
You take skills like OFF and Blade Trap if you want the CC they offer. Their added effects are just a bonus.
I understand that you can make good builds without the RR debuff, but wouldn’t it be even better with it? You provided workarounds in your examples, but that still makes these skills unusable where they matter most. I don’t want to cycle through the same idea indefinitely. My final impression is that these skills need to be patched to become valuable or even workable with.
To me, their most powerful characteristics are the RR and the -%DA. I don’t see any good reason to take them for anything else, especially since their freezing/entrapment already doesn’t work where it matters most.
Yes, that was kind of my point earlier:
There is such a thing as being too good.
But hey, if you want to trade the above just so OFF can be like any other debuff, power to ya’.
If Occultist + Soldier, both providing a RR debuf skill each, isn’t “too good”, then neither should Soldier + Arcanist be.
Bluntly, this is indicating that either a) you are ignoring what I am saying, or b) you’re missing the forest for the trees.
Witchblade is historically one of the weakest mastery combos in the game, despite both masteries having RR skills. But as stated, Battlemage (Soldier + Arcanist) already made it into the Top builds of the game. And…you want to make the stronger one stronger without doing anything for the weaker one?
One might deign to allege that RR skills are not the end-all be-all of a build’s performance.
It could be that or maybe it seems to me that you want to cover the fact that a skill doesn’t work with the fact that I can use other skills to make the build better. I’m interested to use this skill and this skill alone. Why can’t I use this skill? I don’t want other skills, this is the one that I want to include in my potentially lousy build. If this skill is here in the list and I have the option to choose it and make with it whatever build might result from the mix, why doesn’t this skill work like the other skills, applying whatever it provides to all enemies, without any problems? Like any other skill does (Blackwater cocktail, Curse of frailty, War cry, Thermite mine, Celestial presence etc.). That’s the issue.
Evidently not.
You want the skill to be something that it isn’t, so can it really be said that you want to use the skill?
Because that would break the balance of the game in other ways, because your singular build choice, optimal or suboptimal, does not represent the possibilities of the rest of the game.
Put it this way: would you trade Mirror of Ereoctes for a Curse-of-Frailty like debuff? You can’t have both.
But you can. You can take Demolitionist and Oathkeeper, with Blackwater cocktail, Thermite mine and Celestial presence and not have only two RR debuffs, but three. And they all work everywhere. There’s no such thing as “too powerful”. So, you either tell me that this skill was intended for mobs only or that it’s not good for my build. The first part makes it useless, when compared to any other skill, and the second one shouldn’t even be an argument, since it’s my choice what I want to take as a skill.
Just to make it clear, because it seems that we’re talking about two different things, I’m mainly interested in the fire/physical RR from OFF. And in the -%DA from Blade trap. No matter what you think about the usefulness of these debuffs, I for one find them very useful and would want them to work in general, like any other similar skill does. Like Thermite mine, War cry, Celestial presence, Curse of frailty etc. Almost every class (if not all) has a resistance debuff skill which gets applied everywhere, except OFF. That’s why this skill is broken and I’ll never use it until it gets fixed. Because there’s no point to have a debuff skill that only works on minions, while every other one works everywhere.