[Feedback] On pierce strength

That will hurt non-pierce builds more than pierce ones lol.

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There was a proposal in one of the Discords that instead of removal of extra Blade Spirit at 24/16 you can make 3 Blade Spirits to be default and just reduce the damage scaling instead.

Thoughts?

Won’t help with BoW shotguns though, if that is truly a big factor.

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Totally, I sometimes use it on non-pierce builds when I cannot get a good amount of leech anywhere else.
Not sure if other players do that too. For example this Physical Winter King’s Might: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/YNn83p9V
I cannot use Haunted Steel here because it would screw my Physical damage.

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Welp, non-pierce builds shouldn’t use it in the first place. Having life leech, armor and resistance on the same component? It’s so good that I’ve seen it being used on a plethora of non-pierce builds.

If I can’t get life leech from anywhere else, I use Solael pants.

People seem to abuse Ghoul + Bat on every second build it seems. You can often see complaints about “having a hard time converting Bat”. Well, how about trying to play without it altogether?

Sorry but I’d rather use my Barbaros :laughing:

Then you should make a thread about it I guess.

I use it very rarely. Maybe it depends on builds one is playing.
Also great thinking - have a component be only used by 1 damage type :man_facepalming:
At least it’s a good rival to Seal of Might and you might need to think which of them to go for if building for defense.

So you’re ignoring the builds that can use both seal of blades and solael pants? And people use seal of blades both for pierce resist and lifesteal? Here just made it recently >1.1.9.1<Melee Templar, wait it's Channeler! DW Fire EoR Templar. SR 85ish. You’re forgeting that the ‘‘Adcth’’ is the only way to survive except a few certain archetytpes. Ability to reach lifesteal is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Abusing? lol. Ghoul is must not for lifesteal but for circuit breaker in most builds. And Bat provide sustain to some casters that have no/low weapon damage. The suggestions you’re making are affecting all builds, not just overpowered ones.

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While Blade Spirits are very strong im not sure they are the biggest contributor to these crazy CR times, rather i think their strength gets amplified by pierce damage & high amounts of cunning.
I’d hate for them to get nerfed too much and hit other damage types. What bugs me about spirits tho is that you probably should add them to any Nightblade build, which is entirely possible given their itemization - no need for big compromises.
Will of the Blade for any pierce build yields an easy +4, Chillwhisper Crown to easily convert them to cold, Fateweavers Raiment which is already very strong now gives +2 etc…

TLDR; Pierce is a strong damage type. Blade Spirits are very strong but please don’t overnerf them. Cunning-dump breaks the game - %dmg for both pierce and bleed, free high OA

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Interesting idea … it could work.

Does it mean that Blade Spirits are universally too strong for every build and every degree of investment?

@Zantai Do not forget that if you remove 3 spirit 24/16, then other builds will suffer, through other types of damage, such as fire. Which is far from fantastic. [1.1.9.0] Saboteur caster-auramancer 150-170 4m 53s. SR 75-76 and other super bosses

P.S. translated using yandex translate

Zantai already said he’s gonna put +1 summon limit on Blade Spirits mods that don’t affect pierce.

To be honest-it will be much worse than what is now at 24/16, for the reason that you will need to spend an important slot for such a thing, when spirits 24/16 could be made less important slots for pants and rings

It is already a very rare occasion that a given build cannot rebalance stats to fill the gear requirements, removing some cunning from the best affixes will disable a very tiny portion of builds. And even then you can replace some of your gear or change some devotions to fill the requirements for the time being, until you get gear with more stat rolls.

However the removal of an item with a mod that drastically changes one skill can send the whole build, the whole progress of many, many hours down the drain.

I agree, these are not comparable.

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Since you already need the conduit for fire blade spirits like in your build, i don’t see how it will be much worse if the summon limit goes from the skill itself to the skill mod on the conduit. It changes nothing.

If anything, non-pierce builds will have a much easier time getting 3 Blade Spirits since they no longer need to get to 24. Meaning not having to go for greens just to get ranks to reach 24.

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See? Barbaros pants are OP too for the sole fact they provide phys res, OA and proc. They used to have DA as well, so devs removed it. It’s the only nerf to those pants in recent 2 years or so (far as I remember). I personally use them only on physical builds, and I would be quite mad if they got nerfed just because people feel the need to abuse some items. This leads to the conclusion that average pierce builds should not suffer because some guy did X with Y in 4 minutes or something.

I play Crucible once in half-a-year, why the hell should I care for some dude’s timers anyway?

edit: oh yeah, another thing I forgot! Rember Prismatic Diamond? It was also abused by pretty much anybody, so it’s CD went up by ~2.5 times. Out of 25+ characters I had, I only used it on 3 of them, all 3 were pretty squishy. And they also got hit. But at the same time Runestone got buffed and became a decent choice now.

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Lifesteal is another topic that has been talked about to death for years already and while I also hate the necessity of lifesteal, it’s gonna stay this way unless Crate revamps the entire defensive scheme of GD which is unlikely at this point.

As for seal of blades, even if the component is totally killed, everyone except aether and relevant conversion builds will just move to seal of might. Kill that and there’s haunted steel, and seal of resonance. Every non 2h build had two component slots and you only want one spam skill component for yourself. The only builds that really want enchanted flint or the other “buff me with all your flat damage” components are melee builds and most of them already use those except for the pierce builds themselves. And pierce casters use either chillspikes or biting blades so it’s not like the component diversity on pierce builds themselves is zero.

I don’t think seal of blades should be included in the discussion of general pierce nerfs.

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There are plenty of builds reliant on Blade Spirits that are performing extremely well without the use of fantasy greens, specifically without the affixes being brought up here. So gutting those affixes would not even solve the core concern.

While yes, it would address Cunning stacking, we are talking about an extremely niche issue using gear most people will never see. And no, I do not consider stashing a set of perfect greens to be a reasonable frame of reference for balancing.


While we have changed Conduits in the past, we compensated those changes elsewhere (if needed), while removing attributes on affixes doesn’t just affect endgame builds. Players that are leveling are much more sensitive to losing a few points of Cunning than endgame min-maxed builds. Not to mention that the Attribute reset potions so callously recommended as a fix were not even added until Ashes of Malmouth. So cutting % Cunning on Cutthroat’s is simply out of the question. I can see lowering its value on the higher level versions of the prefix at best.


On the note of the summon limit changes reverberating to other builds unintentionally, I’ve already mentioned that we would look into adding +1 Summon Limit modifiers to more niche items to compensate. At this time, I would consider the Blade Spirit Conduit and Scarab Shell as likely candidates.

The concerns over Demonslayer’s and Chillwhisper performance following the proposed changes seem overblown to me considering that those have very comparable performance to their pierce counterparts.

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Adding +1 Summon Limit to items will reduce build variability. What to do, for example, with this build:https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZrBB86Z ? Never mind the fantastic greenery - this is just an example of a build that could be affected by the changes.

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I smell stat reset potions addition on base game on a future patch just like MI mods.

That technically is a goal of the proposed nerf tho.

Also without the “fantastic greenery” that build won’t even be able to get 24 points in blade spirit unless you use some specific non aether items which also still limits variability since you’re also locked in to a certain setup.