Witchblade it’s second best or third best then after Battlemage and Commando .You have CoF and Pox to cast all major devotion procs - Azraaka, Oleron and ofc Assassins mark. Problem is you end up with 2.5k DA. That’s easy to correct with Ravager’s eye on both weapons combined with OA shred from two separate sources.
Results? Build have incredible sheet DPS combined with two best physical procs. But damage isn’t better than DK or WL and now Dervish. You have less RR and it’s on cast so you have to interrupt Cadence unlike DK and WL. Death Knight have massive life steal and WPS. Warlord have another WPS and overall best support for physical outside of Soldier.
Both Necro and Oathkeeper have higher health and passive RR. So Occultist it’s looking good but only on paper. In reality it’s squishier option and not even faster.
Commando have zero - RR, Demo have no WPS, health and useful skills are casts that interrupt your Cadence. So will not be better than DK and WL for sure.
Even though melee AA builds are weaker than casters, there are still a lot of them to perform around 6mins in Crucible. And the majority of autoattacks have single target focus.
So the argument about Cadence being single target and thus performing badly in Crucible doesn’t work here. Cadence even has 3-target mod on the main attack as opposed to things like Savagery, RF or Belgo, Beronath and Touch of Chaos. All of these skills are purely single target yet they can easily pull off 6:30 in a DW build. Somehow phys Cadence is 1 min slower on a pretty optimized setup. Reasons are evident: phys dmg nature and DW working badly for Cadence.
Btw. The whole game is AoE focused. The one and only instance where single target dmg dominates is Celestial fights. So if the argument is about “this AA skill is good for single target gameplay” it’s like saying don’t use it.
Cadence was good for dw only when we could gain cadence charges from WPS, resulting in Execution->cadence->AQQ->cadence rotation . Since the fix of that interaction cadence was inferior to belgotian shard for DW , as it can’t multiply wps and can’t even hit with both hands. To make it worse, fumble can effectively remove your cadence hits at all, so its not surprising that the dmg output of warborn is close to zero in crucible, when we run fumbled all the time. Add to this multiple dmg debuffs that destroy phyz dmg output and we have what we have now.
To make it worse, stupid shield nerf removed any iniciative to play s&b outside of retarded retal.
And Roguelikes. And MQ. And Nemeses. And target-farming MIs.
In Crucible, you get the above all at once, so ambient AoE damage that can clear regular mobs with ease falls out of importance relative to higher-damage higher-range AoEs, such as Devastation, AAR, or the likes.
Today I learned a 30 second difference is no difference at all!
Now I understand everything; 4 minute builds are as perfectly balanced as 8 minute ones!
All of these any decent AoE build can do with ease, i. e. Cadence has no redeeming qualities in htis regard. The strongest content in this game - Crucible and high shards - is all AoE. Even in boss chunks of SR, in any unlucky chain agro situation casters and AoE dominate. You know that yet you still try to make an argument where there is none. Why?
One of the strongest, if not universally the strongest, single target skills in the game right now.
That’s because your single target damage on an AoE build is the minimum of your AoE damage, whereas the AoE damage of a single target build is the maximum of the single target damage. And it’s much easier to hit a min than a max.
It has great single target damage, but it’s not only single target. I actually remember when it was only single target and the damage was way higher than it is now.
So? What’s your point? How is that in any way in favor of phys Cadence? All the casters and all the melee can do pretty much all the content better than phys Cadence hence it needs a buff. Case closed. A simple case really.
I legitimately do not care whether Cadence sees a buff. It’s my most-played skill, so who would I be to complain? But I do care if it becomes the only thing to play because it performs miles ahead of everything else. And if Physical Cadence is ever as potent in Crucible as some here seem to want, the skill as a whole will be all but omnipotent in the campaign.
Because the only thing people play in campaign right now is Reaver’s Claw/ SR set blademaster, right? There already is a spec that performs how people would like physical Cadence to perform, and it’s just one build out of a whole set of great ones. It’s not even among the really broken builds like Spite BM or Dark One’s Ritualists.
If you want to play a high-end variant of Cadence, you have one with Pierce. But Physical Cadence is still very much viable and performs appreciably well, as mad_lee’s post demonstrates.
This right here. Again, i’ll drop this quote from Zantai in with the key portion in bold:
Crucible is an AoE-centric environment. Physical Cadence by nature then should be at a disadvantage here. If you push it to perform decently in an area it is going to struggle in, it’s gonna be insane in situations that play to it’s advantages.
I think the problem here is that certain players/builders have come to expect a build to perform equally in all areas of the game whereas there is an intent that certain archetypes should excel in some areas and be less efficient in others evidenced by Zantai’s initial response.
As far as i understand the problem is not that cadence itself is mostly a single target skill but the combination with physical specifically is under-performing. To me this is unexpected as in the given example with the 3k % phys damage warlord should absolutely smash stuff to bits just like other single target skill builds that do absolutely fine. It is not that other physically based skill suffer the same problem compared to their other damage type counterparts? Has this been researched enough?
In other words is it a physical damage type of problem?
Because it’s reasonable to expect that a set dedicated to the main damage type of Cadence will outperform a generalist set. You don’t see builders picking the SR set over Clairvoyant for AAR, or over Demonslayer for transmuted PBlades, or over Warborn itself for physical EoR. That any viable class combination for physical Cadence with Warborn is inferior to a generalist set indicates that Warborn’s Cadence support is seriously lacking.
Again, this hasn’t been an issue with pierce Cadence, which does perform noticeably better in Crucible and has adequate MC performance. Warborn Cadence currently has lower single target AND AoE damage, as well as lower durability. What’s the secret area where it performs better than the generalist option? All this fearmongering about Cadence suddenly becoming too good is ridiculous next to the performance of AAR, double Wendigo totems, and set-supported PBlades.
Perhaps the thing to suggest then is that the combination of DW Reaver’s Claw and the Shattered Realm set need toning down.
Look at Fluff’s Belgothian build. Belgothian is another single target focused build by nature and he compensates for this in Crucible by taking Azrakaa’s Epoch and maxing Blade Spirit for AoE, choices that previously would be seen as unorthodox.
.You have CoF and Pox to cast all major devotion procs - Azraaka, Oleron and ofc Assassins mark. Problem is you end up with 2.5k DA. That’s easy to correct with Ravager’s eye on both weapons combined with OA shred from two separate sources.
, as it can’t multiply wps and can’t even hit with both hands. To make it worse, fumble can effectively remove your cadence hits at all, so its not surprising that the dmg output of warborn is close to zero in crucible, when we run fumbled all the time. Add to this multiple dmg debuffs that destroy phyz dmg output and we have what we have now.