Oath Keeper has been bothering me for a while and I think I’ve discovered why: OK has certain skills that you basically always feel forced to dump points into. For one skill this is especially problematic: Celestial Presence.
All classes have some skills that you will probably always get. However, these are typically defensive options, such as Blood of Dreeg and Blast Shield, or movement skills such as Shadow Strike. Celestial Presence is an exception in several ways. It provides resistance reduction, a relatively rare but essential stat to have, which is not available to all classes and thus in high demand. Because it can be transmuted it is useful to essentially build that uses the OK class. Furthermore, because it is all the way at the end of the mastery bar it might not be a skill you can easily pick up “along the way”, such as CoF. Because -35% RR is so powerful and often hard to get otherwise, you are even further encouraged to make sure your secondary damage types are also the ones being reduced by CP, thus further limiting the design space.
As an example, imagine that Shaman’s Wind Devils not only reduced elemental resistance but also vitality and bleeding. It would turn it into a must-pick skill simply because almost all Shaman builds will deal one of those damage types. That wouldn’t be a good thing, because it limits the design space of builds. In my opinion, this is what Celestial Presence does as well. Instead, elemental builds get Wind Devil and vit/bleed builds get Devouring Swarm. With Oathkeepers, it seems that every build archetype will get Celestial Presence - this is bad, especially for a skill at the end of the mastery bar.
I understand the sentiment, but I think it’s probably fine. Having the RR skill be at the very end of the mastery bar means just means that you need to invest more deeply to get it, and thus have to decide if you get enough other stuff from oath keeper to be worth it. Thus if you’re a cadence build, this influences your decision between choosing necromancer, occultist or oath keeper as your support mastery. Because what oath keeper gives you other than RR is so good, you typically end up picking it over other choices even though you need to invest 50 skillpoints in the mastery to get the RR. But if you’re an arcanist focusing on fire damage, you’d probably prefer demolitionist, since the value of the other abilities in the oath keeper tree doesn’t quite add up so well and needing to spend 50 points into oath keeper might not feel worth it.
That makes the cost of oath keeper overall higher, but presumably you also get overall stronger stuff from it in the first place, since it demands 50 points in the mastery on almost any build. There ought to be some situations in which you don’t pick oath keeper in spite of it offering RR for your damage type and the position of celestial presence helps guarantee that. If there aren’t enough situations in which it makes sense to pick oath keeper, other tools in the class could be buffed.
There’s another debate about whether RR in general is too important and restrictive, but maybe that’s for another topic.
It is true that you can choose other classes over OK (if that wouldn’t be the case it would have been really bad), but my point is that if you take Oath Keeper, Celestial Presence is effectively a must-have ability.
I just went through all the 65 builds in the Build Compendium that include the OK class and found that:
86% (56) maxed out Celestial Presence
3% (2) used but did not max out CP
9% (6) had no points in CP
100% of Warlords, Templars and Oppressors use CP
So 6 out of 7 builds not only just use but even max out the same skill. It’s basically an Exclusive Skill without being Exclusive, resulting in almost everyone using it.
EDIT: For comparison’s sake I did the same with Raging Tempest, because it is highly similar to Celestial Presence. I found that out of 45 builds:
55% (25) use Raging Tempest
45% (20) do not use Raging Tempest
This is so much better.
The problem is not even necessarily that CP is used a lot, it is specifically that it is used a lot and that by using it you are limited in how you can specialize. You basically have to follow the RR of the skill, because RR is so uniformly powerful. Other skills that are (almost) always picked if you have access to it (e.g., Maiven’s Sphere, Blood of Dreeg, Deadly Aim) do not subsequently limit the design space of your build. CP has such desirable and such specific bonuses that it does; every build wants to have an automatically applied -35% RR.
It’s a resist reduction ability. And Oathkeeper’s only -x% based one at that, so you either take it or you don’t take it.
What you’re noticing is more so that Oathkeeper does not primarily support damage types outside of Physical, Fire, Acid, Vitality and to a much lesser extent Bleed very well coupled with people not experimenting with other damages frequently when some of the damage types supported by Celestial Presence create immensely powerful builds. Aether Oathkeeper is pretty much only enabled by Bonemonger and is scarcely touched elsewhere (Aether EoR has support but is not something that’s been experimented with much to my knowledge). Cold is similar and not touched much if at all either for example.
This is largely because there is very little support in the mastery or gear for it whereas other masteries support multiple obscure damage types pretty well outside of their natural damage types. Shaman for example is predominantly a Lightning, Vitality, Bleed and Pet user but also has support for and been built for Cold, Physical, Fire and Acid in the past all to great effect.
I’d like to see Lightning Oathkeepers become more prevalent outside of builds like Cyclone if this amulet became more focused on 1-2 damage types like Lightning with a little bit of Fire.
Edit: @CaptainObvious While I understand where you’re coming from and agree. I don’t actually think there’s a solution to this. As far as I can tell, just about no other skill in Oathkeeper except Celestial Presence is eligible for -x% resist reduction.
Well Celestial Presence is similar to Nightblade Night’s Chill, all the class’s RR is locked behind single skill. So it’s mandatory more or less to invest in it. The only minus for OK, compared to NB is that you need all 50 points in mastery bar to unlock Celestial Presence.
What if f CP was an exclusive? I suspect that it would then be the only exclusive picked for appropriate damage types, in spite of the other nice exclusives (except Inquis aura is arguably stronger). Yes RR is a primary focus of the game.
But I digress. OK offers a very strong staple of “must-have” skills early in the mastery. PoV and Ascension are very strong. It seems reasonable to not have everything up front.
There are chaos builds that don’t go the full OK (spin, etc.) And probably others.
No, there is a crucial difference between Night’s Chill and Celestial Presence. NC provides RR for a decent portion of Nightblade builds, but is not relevant for a lot of other builds such as ones using vitality, physical, and/or bleed. CP works extremely well for almost every OK archetype there is.
If Night’s Chill would be similar to CP it would also be able to provide RR for vit/phys/bleed damage and thus be a must-pick skill for essentially every Nightblade build. Luckily it isn’t, because that would limit the design space of any build using Nightblade class.
That’s because CP covers a lot more than Raging Tempest. CP covers physical, fire, bleed, vitality and acid, while Raging Tempest only covers the three elements. The spectrum of CP is much wider than Raging Tempest. Same for Night’s Chill, it only covers three.
Thermite Mines are also picked up by pretty much any Demolitionist build and it comes very late in the mastery. It covers the three elements, chaos and aether. Only physical and pierce Demo builds don’t pick it.
I don’t get your goal, do you want RR to be removed from CP? Because people would be pissed if this happened.
Exactly! That is pretty much the key argument. CP is so uniformly relevant and good that all (or at least 90%) of builds with OK are using it.
EDIT: Thermite Mines are similarly problematic (IMO), although to a lesser extent because it’s an active skill.
Regarding solutions/changes, there are several options. I think that the most viable one is to change the type of RR from -X% to, for example, -n reduced target. Because that RR type does not stack, this will increase the build diversity substantially because in some builds you will already have that RR type (thus not needing CP) while in other builds you will still want CP. I think that would be a good outcome, although there are probably other and better ways to get the same end result.
This issue with your argument is that CP comes at rank 50. People expect the late skills to be better than the earlier skills, hence why CP is better than Raging Tempest and Night’s Chill.
Curse of Fraility actually covers even more than CP and it’s pretty much used by all Occultist builds. Should we nerf Curse of Fraility as well? Seems like a silly argument to have stuff nerfed.
This is a terrible change in my opinion and it will make CP completely undesirable. Made worse by the fact we got more reduced target res sources in recent times, so getting that RR is not exactly difficult. Plus, that is the worst RR type in the game.
CP is not “better” than than Raging Tempest or Night’s Chill. I mean, it provides 5% more RR but that’s it. The problem is specifically NOT how strong CP is but how flexible it is and that it limits build diversity. Those are very different things.
Don’t see how CP is any different than Night’s Chill, Raging Tempest or Curse of Fraility. These are all used by a wide variety of builds and always picked when you have the appropriate damage type.
It’s the result of covering more damage types and the fact it covers all the damage types in the mastery. Curse of Fraility is also used by the majority of Occultist builds and i’m sure people want chaos RR in it, so that it supports one of its major damage types.
What you suggested will make no one pick CP, which will have the same effect but reverse. No one will pick it. Same if you just remove RR types from it.
I think what his point is is that CP is too encompassing for Oathkeeper’s RR.
If say, Physical and Fire RR were added to Heart of Wrath (somehow) in place of the RR on Celestial Presence and were given suitable QoL to use as an RR skill, not much would change (Physical and Fire builds would just move points in Guardians/CP over to Judgment/HoW instead) but it means there’d be more variety in which skills are used in Oathkeeper. Instead of every Oathkeeper taking Celestial Presence, you’d see a portion take it and a portion take Judgment similar to his Shaman example:
But then all physical and fire builds in OK will pick Heart of Wrath. What’s the difference?
And again, Curse of Fraility is pretty much used by all Occultist builds because it covers a lot of damage types. Should we start moving RR in it to other skills just so people don’t have to pick it?
Seems like a waste of time in my opinion to just start chaging RR sources just because some people don’t like they are picked most of the time.
Seems like a complete waste of time to me. People picking the same RR sources for the appropriate damage type is rooted into how the game is designed. Changing the RR from one source to another will just make people use that other source instead. We’ll be back to the same place, every build of that damage type picking that skill always.
And again, comparing CP with RT doesn’t make much sense because the former covers a lot more than the latter. Of course more OK builds use CP than Shaman use RT.
CP is also the only skill in OK mastery i believe can have -% RR. Unless Heart of Wrath can have it but that’s tied to Judgment.
I know there’s nothing that can be done about it. I was mostly just playing Devil’s Advocate.
Like I mentioned above, I think one way to reduce the amount of times Celestial Presence is taken is to make the support on damage types that either Celestial Presence does not support or builds that won’t take/heavily invest into it stronger like Cold or Pierce Righteous Fervor or some Lightning skill modifiers like the one for Judgment or Lightning EoR.
While you could just give relevant RR item skill modifiers to Celestial Presence for these builds and call it a day, I’d be neat to see other creative options, and it’s not like every build or damage type requires double mastery RR to function.
Think about it this way - Nightblade is another mastery with only one skill for it’s resist reduction being Night’s Chill. But several builds for it have come out that don’t really touch it - Vitality or Chaos PBlades, Aether Shadow Strike, Physical Cadence Blademaster, Lightning Fire Strike Saboteur, Bleed Trickster/Witch Hunter, DW melee Vitality or Chaos Witch Hunter etc.
Thank you Evil_Baka for discussing the core of my arguments (even if played as Devil’s advocate).
The RR provided for by Celestial Presence can certainly be spread out over more skills (which would be one way to increase build diversity). I’m not sure where Norzan gets the idea that CP is the only skill that can have -% RR. Aegis, Judgment, and Vire’s Might can definitely have it. All passives and buffs can probably have it as well, although Crate decided to limit those to “target’s” RRs, presumably to limit stacking and make RR a balanced stat.
The point is not, however, which of the various possible solutions are good or bad. It’s valid to address an issue without having a solution for it.
. That’s what his original point was: