Any skill that is a 48 point investment probably can safely be considered a skill that can be called a primary damage source.
And yea, it was odd, but importantly it was fun. It had a unique clear style based on high mobility, with a unique scaling. Gameplay wise, it didn’t really overperform, but had great room for gear growth while functioning with basic gear. The thing that broke it, in it’s entirety, was Crucible, and that break was only in Crucible. So they deleted the build’s ability to function in the campaign to preserve the “value” of the DLC game mode.
That said, one part of it is the primary portion, and points into that affect the stun it causes. The second part lowers the CD, and adds some DOT damage to tick away as you fight, making it a good secondary damage source. The last part adds an AOE CC…And then the odd, unrelated damage types that Nightblade is infested with.
Overall, it seems to be a gap closer, that can be a secondary damage source, or a CC source, or both. What in that says to you, “Meant to be a primary damage source”?
As for breaking…Managing it AT ALL, was breaking the intent of the skill. Maybe the Crucible made it worse, but the fact it could even be done in the campaign at all, was broken.
It’s not like Crate hasn’t now gone specifically out of their way to support it with that ridiculous Scythe.
Hm…Blitz, Shadow Strike, Chaos Strike…And then I guess Spectral Strike from the Alkamos’ MI’s, and 4 would do it. Not sure how you’d scale though…Cold would work for Shadow and Spectral…Could convert to Cold for the Blitz, partially. Chaos Strike really isn’t going to sort out in there though.
Regardless,3-4 secondary damage sources making up for not having a primary damage source…Sounds pretty annoying, but not at all OP. Sounds about right, really, that 3 or so secondary sources make up a primary.
More buttons you have to press in a build, it must be more rewarding (damage for example) to play. To me, "op"ness is deserved by time, labour of creating build and labour of playing it. If all checks, then build must deserve a top spot. I am not saying that it should be at a spot where it kills everything with very ease and super fast. I am just saying, if very very specific gear is collected then it should not be nerfed tp where it does not reward less than where it should
Yeah but if you can make a skill your primary source of damage then why not. If people make it work then that just shows more build versitality. And you can spend 40 total points on shadow strike, if after that it was still only a gap closer it would be underpowered. I love seeing people make unique builds
Nerfing builds because they use a skill not meant to be a main attack is really bad IMO. No skill in the game should be restricted, if there is gear for it, and someone can make it work then well done to them. It allows for much more build options and a more fun game.
CDR-Breaker wasn’t nerfed because of Shadow Strike. It was nerfed cuz with cruci buff it has so much cooldown reduction it could chain Mirror and Blade Barrier for non-stop invulnerability (i wasn’t here then but thats what i heard and it seems most logical to me to nerf that).
I think it’s for similar reason (Blast Shield + Mirror) that they practically doubled the cd on Aldanar’s Vanity’s proc through the last 2 patches.
No, it was nerfed because it could reach over 100% CDR on Shadowstrike.
They didn’t even address the issue of Mirror at all (You could reach upwards of a perfect 80% Mirror CDR in crucible pre-nerf to the buff this patch. Which was 100% uptime. It only takes 66% to chain both together forever.) at that time. It was just purely a nerf to delete a specific build that was problematic in Crucible alone. They never hit the amount of CDR the Spellbreaker had access to, they just got rid of the whole reason to stack it for the sake of increasing your DPS with your primary damage skill.
I like this description. I also think that adjustments are ok, but they should be done in small doses. I know often they don’t have a chance to play test due to time constraints - to me it is better to err on the side of caution rather than over-adjust.
There has definitely been a lot of discussion about builds that are “OP’ed”. I am in the camp who feels that if you have BiS gear coupled with a good build, you should be facerolling most content and have to pay attention against a mega-boss like MQ.
We have like 18 ways JUST to do AAR. We don’t need to suddenly make secondary sources into primaries.
As far as being underpowered, I already covered that the various parts make it a better gap closer, a dual CC source, AND make it a secondary damage source…It’s not at all underpowered.
Nerfing a SKILL that wasn’t meant to be used in a certain way is perfectly reasonable, because the game was balanced around it as it was meant to be used. Would you prefer they rebalanced Nightblade, and all the items that interact with Shadow Strike…Or just rebalance the ONE Shadow Strike build and the few items it’s been using?
Crate can’t just let balance fall apart. If the players break balance…Well, it’s right there in how we refer to it. You “break” the game with some builds. Broken isn’t a good thing. Crate fixes those breaks where they can.
Then I guess most of those Blademasters and such who spec massively into Shadow Strike as a main damage source are all dead wrong. There has been many times in the history of the game that the primary build of Blademasters and such has been purely focused on Shadowstrike, and even now dual wield Deathmark Spellbreakers still get a majority of their DPS from SS procs.
Despite the fact that it has great +skills and gear access, and the fact that THE Nightblade set, Deathmarked, spends most of it’s +skill bonuses on Shadowstrike.
Obviously we should never use it for more than 1 skill point though, because it’s not “meant” to be a primary damage source (Hint. SS can easily make up more than 50% of a Nightblade’s DPS until insanely high qualities of gear).
Well it never was. In Campaign, it never did after the initial nerfs they did to NJE to cap at 30% CDR with perfect gear for it (It used to cap at 50%), it just got to 85% cap. Which required perfect gear in every slot to get to the minimum needed +9 Starpact and NJE, while not giving up CDR in any of the slots that provide CDR.
This was with perfect gear, including double-rare rolls of an insanely rare prefix/suffix combo, that I have not once seen in 1500 hours of playing the game.
The ONLY thing which broke the build was that in Crucible, it could go over the expected CDR cap thanks to the +20% CDR buff on that one buff, which Broke it there in Crucible.
Rather than fix the problem caused by the CDR buff in Crucible, by nerfing the buff (Which I said they had to do anyway, because it broke any form of CDR-stacking Arcanist, not just CDR-Spellbreaker. Because it got them to 80% CDR on Mirror of Erocretes, aka 100% damage absorbtion 100% of the time…). They instead deleted the entire mechanic which made CDR-Spellbreaker even work, the fact that NJE added +CDR, and didn’t reduce a flat part of the CD (Which has an anti-synergy with CDR). It put the optimal best case CDR for SS from .6 with perfect gear to 1.3 in campaign. More than halved it, in it’s absolute best case. And the worst part was they had the gall to call it a BUFF to it, when people did the math and showed that even in it’s absolute best case scenario for that “buff”, a nightblade with 0% CDR, that it was a nerf. It’s the fact that they had the gall to call it a buff that really pissed me off. At least admit the reason you are doing this, that a build broke your precious DLC game mode (that they said from the start they had no plans to balance around at all, and would not do any changes to main game balance based upon it). I called for them to just impliment a hard CDR cap into the game instead, which would have let them completely prevent the abuse case in Crucible, and any other CDR abuse cases that have popped up in the past (Cough, Mirror, Cough, Time Dilation, Cough). Best part? This latest patch they actually nerf the CDR on the Crucible buff from 20% to 5%. Meaning CDR Spellbreaker wouldn’t break anything anymore in the Crucible.
Nope. Build’s hard mechanic that it depend on was deleted instead. After that change there was no reason to even consider running a CDR Spellbreaker, it was inferior in every way possible to a dual wield Belgothian’s Carnage Spellbreaker or Blade Master.
I personally don’t have issues with OP builds as long as they follow a criteria:
the gear setup requires allot of farming
the build requires time and energy and skill to execute.
the only OP builds that break the game are the ones that a monkey could play with gear that’s easy to get. And since skill is really a huge variable, one persons “easy” is anothers “hard”.
Plus, not everyone plays just to play the “fastest and easiest and most OP” builds. I personally have always been an Underdog builder…I like to build oddball setups and try to make them work. Whether they work or not is part of the fun for me. So someone posting an OP build using a common setup and a full set of endgame gear doesn’t attract me that much. So even if there are OP builds, not everyone plays that way. So no, I don’t think they break the game. they only break it for a small subsection of players who are willing to play those builds.
I wish people (not the ones in this thread, more the ones on patch notes) would stop complaining about how hard it is for casters to clear Crucible and how op tanks are, etc… It’s true that Crucible can be tweaked to be better balanced, but I don’t want it to be Crate’s main focus. Crucible was only ever meant as a fun extra mode, and the base game still has massive amounts of content and plenty of challenge areas. Remember when people used to go by dungeon clear times and complain about how good Offensive Ability is? If you’re the type of player who cares about which build is strongest or clears crucible the most reliably, go make one of those chars! Otherwise, make a char that’s fun. This game has a staggering amount of viable builds, and I’d rather the community focus on pointing out to Crate which options could be buffed rather than complain about OP builds and then complain more when they actually get nerfed.
Sorry if the post sounds complain-ey or this has been said before, I just think Zantai’s had a tough time of it since Crucible came out.
Edit: Ty for starting this conversation op, I didn’t go through all of it but it seems like it’s been a pretty civil way to talk about it.
