every soldier attacking skill feels clunky and underpowered and their items are bad

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

a lot has changed since early access, and while soldier was toned down significantly as a support mastery, it still feels like a decent enough supplementary class for some builds

unfortunately, all of its attacking skills feel horrible. the recent change to the justicar armour is really cool, the only problem is that forcewave is just awful to use. it feels like a worse primal strike with a really awkward hitbox. the set goes a long way towards making it a viable skill, and i’m sure decent builds can be made with it, but the hitbox is just so gross and inelegant. the damage is probably ok, i know it’s nowhere near top tier but it can probably clear all the content without too much trouble. that hitbox is so needlessly terrible though. can you widen the cone or something? or alternatively make it shoot three projectiles (with reduced damage ofc) a la obsidian juggernaut/crown of the winter king.

when i saw eldritch gaze i tried out a blade arc witchblade, but even with 26/16 in blade arc, -100 phys/bleed resist, and a constant stream of 2.43x damage critical hits coming from my 3k+ OA the skill STILL feels average at best. i’ve really never been so disappointed with a build before; the available items and the interplay between the two classes feel conducive to such a build being super potent, but it really just falls flat. please add some flat physical damage or something to the skill while, again, boosting its aoe in some capacity. the target cap is fine, the aoe is just really clunky unless enemies are super tightly packed together. i understand that not everything is going to be as smooth as primal strike, but i don’t understand why an ostensibly aoe-focused skill has such an awkward area of effect.

cadence is also terrible, both ranged and melee. i shouldn’t have to go into too much detail as to why ranged cadence is still the least enjoyable experience you could possibly have playing grim dawn despite the shockingly numerous attempts to make it playable. it needs a complete and total overhaul for ranged. like seriously, i do not think there has been anything except constant complaints about this for as long as it has existed, alongside equal parts frustration and confusion at your inadequate attempts to improve it. the recent change that slipped out in this hotfix is just offensively insufficient.

for melee, it just doesn’t do enough damage. aoe every third hit is awful, especially when you’re using a slow 2-hander (more on this later). give deadly momentum some attack speed or something so people can’t benefit from it as a support mastery, or make it trigger every second hit, i don’t even know. the skill is just so bad. 300% to 325% is not anywhere near enough of a buff.

further, itemization for the class is absolutely abysmal. i have no idea why you have so few good physical damage legendaries (iirc it was kaljurei who made a lengthy and well-reasoned thread about this), or why most of them involve shields in some way. soldier has 2 attacking skills that involve the shield, and they both have cooldowns, so they don’t work as main attacking skills. weapon choices are awful for the class as well. leviathan is literally nothing more than a slightly more damaging stonefist rebuke. why does it even exist? the cold damage is completely irrelevant. why isn’t there a 2h weapon with physical damage and attack speed? i genuinely do not understand.

i get that there is a tendency in rpgs for physical damage to be over-represented because it’s easy, and there is a blandness to that that i can understand your aversion to as developers. the result of your aversion though is that every other damage type is easier to gear for, and this game has a lot of damage types. i get that one damage type needs to be at the bottom in this sense, but it does not need to be nearly as egregious as it is at present.

it’s disappointing knowing that so much of your balancing attempts for the class require that you keep shields in mind; this vitiates the class tremendously for the sake of balancing an item type/playstyle that almost nobody plays at all.

i think the main problem with the class is that it really just feels like a worse version of shaman from an attacking standpoint. savagery is a better cadence, primal strike is a better blade arc/forcewave. the easiest way to rectify this is to just modify the skills i’ve mentioned so that they’re closer to their shaman counterparts. i understand that this might seem homogeneous and boring, but i think the prevailing sentiment is that homogeneity is significantly better than a whole class being unplayable as a main. a more elegant solution would be to completely rework them into something unique, but that’s a lot of work.

soldier is just so obviously the prototype class, and you can really feel it when you use its attacking skills. you guys have come so far as developers in the time since you created the skills i mentioned, and i think the class could really use some of the polish you’ve since graced other classes with.

2

The lack of good physical or non-NB based pierce, bleed, trauma legendaries is really obvious to me, even the pierce NB ones have heavy cold damage making them useless for a physical/pierce soldier build. They’re trying to tie Blade Arc to Occultist which feels clunky to me I agree, BA is probably better off staying physical/pierce/bleed/trauma but the itemization is so awful for it. I also agree that the tie to shields in the few available soldier sets and relics (i.e. the Markovian set) also cripples the itemization especially when shield builds aren’t so popular right now, or at least not as popular as their itemization and devotion skill amounts would imply.

As far as skills go, Forcewave will never be all that viable as long as it uses Cast Speed while the rest of the class uses Attack. Cadence is beyond repair as long as Savagery exists and should be heavily redesigned (and the ranged version is unusable).

3

Melee Cadence is rectifiable without a rework.

That is perhaps the most heretical thing I’ll have said in a while, but it is true. Many patches ago, melee Cadence was actually viable and fun. And then it was nerfed into the ground (and its synergies have been nerfed) and it’s been shit ever since. I hate saying something ‘needs’ something because that sounds so demanding, so instead I’ll suggest that Cadence ‘could use’ a significant increase to its damage and for other skills to be rebuffed following their nerfs. Also undoing the multiplicative base attack speed change would help fix Cadence for melee 2H a lot.

Ranged Cadence isn’t fun by any stretch of the imagination, but it was viable once upon a time. Likewise, its synergies have been nerfed too heavily.

Forcewave/Tremor is hopeless. It can be made viable with number tweaks, but it won’t ever be competitive in its current design.

Blade Arc is among the most boring skills I’ve ever used in an ARPG. The only time I’ve used it at level 85 is when I respec’d out of Cadence on my Battlemage following Cadence’s nerf-into-ground. Upon finding that Blade Arc was so mind-numbing, I proceeded to delete the character altogether.

4

Nah, making the base attack speed a multiplier is actually a good thing since it creates much more relevant differences between weapon types. What needs to be changed is the base multipliers of the weapons themselves, giving faster weapons a positive multiplier to speed, slower weapons a negative multiplier and weapons with “normal” speed a neutral multiplier. The multipliers are just excessively punishing right now because they are always a net loss in attack speed and the slower that weapon gets the more dramatically punishing it becomes. The way base speed is handed out could be a little more liberal as well. I mean is there any good reason a rifle couldn’t have a fast multiplier for example?

5

while we’re talking about clunky skills, can we add thermite mines to the list? the time it takes for them to be tossed, then split, then finally detonate is like watching paint dry.

Otherwise, I agree with everything in the original post

6

Agreed, though I would note that I believe Cadence was only viable in a game without Savagery or a lot of other default attack replacement skills (except Fire Strike). I think those builds with Cadence that were considered OP weren’t OP because of Cadence so when those other synergies were nerfed, Cadence was left in the poo poo state it is in now. A lack of decent itemization for purely physical/pierce builds (that don’t involve shields) is a large part of the problem. If physical Cadence had a good set like the Fire Strike Demo set, I think that build would at least be viable.

7

Savagery existed in the videos I linked.

8

I’ve seem a lot of threads and certain users bringing up Cadence and how undeperforming it is these past days/weeks which I agree BTW, but there is something else that bothers me:

Why hasn’t Medierra, Zantai, or any Crate employer commented on these threads, like, ever? :eek:

It’s pretty clear that there is a lot of disatisfaction with the the skill currently, and yet, I don’t think I ever saw any of them commenting or even asking why we think the skill is underwhelming, or if they ever plan on changing it later.

9

Do they need to?

10

I’m really curious about Cadence before it was nerfed to hell. Can somebody tell me how it was before it was nerfed?

11

It did good damage at a good rate. It wasn’t mechanically different. Edit: At least not for melee; ranged was a little different.

12

Yes, they should at least let us know if they are aware of how vocal people have been about it and if they’re planning any changes later, and remaining silent about it could look like otherwise.

If it were only a few users bringing it up, then yeah, they shouldn’t really bother saying something, but since it’s something comming up from a lot of people…

13

I think the fact that Cadence was buffed in both v1.0.0.4 and v1.0.0.2 (with v1.0.0.3 being the release of the mod tools, and not centered on balancing) means they’re aware that there’s a problem.

14

Yeah, well, but not really aware about the issue being how the skill works, and not about giving it some barely noticeable buffs…

But anyways, about the Soldier feeling underpowered in general… maybe that is because the Soldier mastery pretty much has skills that focuses on Physical damage only? I’m disregarding DoTs here

I mean, if you take a quick look at all other masteries, you’ll see that most kills have at least two different damage types (ex: Demolitionist’s Grenado has Physical/Fire/Lightning damage,Nightblade’s Phantasmal Blades deals Pierce/Cold/Vitality/Chaos, Arcanist’s Panetti’s Replicating Missile deal Fire/Ice/Lightning/Aether, etc.)

IMO it would be nice if some of the Soldier mastery skills also dealed Pierce damage as well.

15

Oh I was referring to back in the old OP Blademaster days when I remember the Cadence melee build being the most OP as it was. My point is that Cadence isn’t the reason the build is viable or OP, its usually in spite of it and there weren’t as many alternatives then. Cadence’s main problem is that relative to other default weapon skills, it is a lot of skill points for something that largely only affects every 3rd hit which in a DW build isn’t catastrophic (though still annoying compared to Savagery or Fire Strike), but in a 2H or ranged build it is a deal breaker period.

I’d much rather Crate address the current non-shield Soldier itemization as I look at skills like Forcewave and Cadence as hopelessly broken in their current forms.

16

I agree with cadence. My fire strike char does triple what my cadence char does and just feels much, much better at clearing. Cadence just feels bad and doesn’t work that well. I would prefer a rework but a buff would do.

17

just adding to this since i think i’ve found probably one of the highest dps (both sheet and actual) forcewave build and the damage is not ‘probably ok’, it is in fact awful

3k OA 26k dps 81% crit damage 200% cast speed etc, skill is just atrocious in every sense. justicar set is amazing and the stats are all fantastic on paper, but it doesn’t make the skill anywhere near good. needs to deal significantly more damage and needs a better hitbox.

edit: could also be rectified to some extent by boosting the base cast speed of the skill by a sizable amount. with 200% cast speed i’m firing off 2-3 callidor’s tempests in the span of a single forcewave. why should this be the case?

18

obviously they are, they follow the forum… as to whether this really is all that vocal or just a few scattered posts is in the eye of the beholder though, I guess :wink:

19

I don’t see the correlation, physical is the most frequent / widely supported damage type, so definitely not underpowered…

20

Not by legendaries. :rolleyes: