Patches come and go, meme skills find their way to rightful places among respectable builds and others sit forgotten on the sidelines. Some classes may very well have nothing worth mentioning here in terms of specific skill deficiencies, while others may have two or more skills in glaring need of improvement/support.
The announcement of a blade arc set got me thinking. It has been quite a while since the last blade arc build got any amount of attention (erroneously statted guillotine warder). Dreeg’s Evil Eye hardly made a showing throughout Ashes of Malmouth and is barely so much as mentioned this year. Similarly the shadow strike bonuses on another one of the upcoming sets has me struggling to pinpoint the last time the skill was rightfully used as a primary skill in a build instead of a devotion proc/mobility tool.
Delving into these or venturing beyond to other dustbin skills, what does the community think about such forgotten abilities? What specific items/sets are candidates for rework in light of bringing abilities out of the grave - much like Ulzuin just did for canister bomb (or any number of various changes over the past year)?
The only skills I can think of that either don’t have a set or have very little set support are weird ones. Vindictive Flame only has Agrivix (and isn’t the focus, it’s more of a secondary damage/support skill) and Wendigo Totem doesn’t have anything.
Nightblade-blade trap
Shaman-vines and wendigo
OK-more damage modifiers to guardians
Occultist-full vitality suuport for DEE,more damage to sigil or pox
Necro-CD and damage for Siphon souls
Demo-improved lately
Soldier-maybe elemental Blitz or Blade Arc
Arcanist-RR modifiers
Inquisitor-cold rune,fire rune,words of pain,Storm box,Foi,Gandarr
Sets-Deatthguard,Wildblood,Divinity,Sentinel of three
Not trying to be confrontational, just giving my opinions:
Vines is fine in end-game now.
Wendigo I agree could be better. The heal isn’t consistent enough. A slightly bigger radius and if it procced twice as fast (even if the heal was halved) it’d be a lot better consistency.
Sigil I agree relies too hard on the sets supporting it to be good. I wish the dmg was higher, even if it meant lower heals, and then the sets/gear giving it skill mods could be toned down. They’re pretty weak.
Full vit DEE, can’t comment.
Siphon Souls is OKAY but skill is not great on builds I’ve played. But I’ve only tried going full siphon once, long ago.
Blade Trap is only good with that one set. It might end up staying that way though. Technical issues with it.
No comment on the rest.
Mainly I wonder if Vines and Sigil rely too heavily on gear to do well, and should have some power taken off the gear and put into their ultimate rank scaling.
spam dee is actually enjoyable and its been one of my first builds. But dropped it like hot potatoe at end game cause of how lackluster it was. I hope Crate realizes that people love to spam things. Phantasmal is very good and another projectile build, stun jacks is beyond the roof in damage. Also they brought back up panetti from trash to god tier. Why cant spam DEE get some love?
I havent tried biting b but if a component is better than a mastery skill then something is terribly wrong here.
dee its quite good for leveling… until elite. Ultimate is a different story especially when fighting one on one with a boss. You feel like you want to delete your char immediately.
Thanks for your input!I mean that until recently spamming biting blades and have DEE as nuke was better than spamming it.But the set was so bad and weapon was weird.Now is improved,don’t know how much.One thing sure is that you need energy to sustain casting it.
This is my current work in progress and i must say it breeze through ultimate however the most annoying bosses must be kited-poisoned down though. Once i get decent Snake clan Effigy with DEE wd mod i switch Seal of Shadows with Seal of Blades and try how it will perform in the Crucible. The main idea is DEE spammer + psn dot hybrid.
Alsoooo, the damned Mines. Why could they not be Storm Shard like?..
Wendigo Totem is crazy good. As long as you stay stationary, you got an equivalent 2.5k health regen (12/12 on a 15k health toon) for just a couple of points. Some builds need that. And it’s cheap&good for SR where all you do is stand in one place and facetank stuff one-on-one. Worth one-pointing on any Shaman build going for SR.
Siphon Souls is basically a debuff and heal. It deals no damage. It’s quite good at what it does. One thing, though, why punish the original vitality version with non-100% uptime of the debuff?
Storm Box? Why is it even mentioned in this thread? Storm Box builds have been beating crucible records like no other skill lately (except Canister, maybe). It doesn’t look it but it’s a top-tier skill. Even on Stormreaver that has no mods to the Box maxing it took 30s from already top-tier Stormreaver clear times.
I think vit siphon needs to have its duration extended and the heal/damage cut into half. Just for QoL purposes
And Box is the maker of current lightning builds. If your lightning build with inq has any problems then add box and you’re set. Seriously the next build I’ll post is about an old build that got outdated then got competitive again MOSTLY BECAUSE OF BOX
DEE is in a strange place, it’s fine with the mutator as a large poison source, but joke tier without it. But with all that poison damage being on there, it will never really work as a spam skill. Hard to see a way out there to be honest, short of removing all the poison from the skill nodes and putting it all on the mutator. Which is probably a bad idea, if possible at all.
Vindictive flame is not really bad, but I dare anyone to say that they picked it for anything other than the speed bonus. There once was a joke build that reduced its cooldown to zero, but that was nerfed, and then it just became a speed bonus again. Bit of a shame really, it has potential but lacks support. Also Ulzuin’s wrath … I don’t know how many times it’s been buffed in recent updates, but it still feels pointless.
Let’s be honest, it’s barely acceptable with that set, and useless without it. You can lump OFF in with it, same problem, different CC resist.
I’ve spent many a moon trying to figure out why this build has the DPS it does, and for the life of me I can’t piece it together. But regardless, a Vindictive Flame build is actually my fastest SoT farmer at present:
The problem is if you give them too much power against Bosses/Nemeses they have the potential to become overpower in terms of burst damage due to the insane debuffs they provide (100+ Fire RR and -35 to 40% DA shred). I think both are fine as they are now.
I use it currently on my Harra cold Jacks sorcerer. that builds badly needs every bit of possible healing. And converted to cold it does suprisingly well. Nowhere near a top tier skill but it’s not entirely useless.
And visually it’s among the best skills out there. Need some active skill like that.
That’s fine. Designing the skills like that is their choice and I won’t object, I simply won’t touch those skills. Something that only works on trash is not worth my time.
I’ve had an idea for a while (and seen others propose it alike) on an OFF/blade trap rework where the skill is changed to be a debuff that applies a short freeze/trap effect on each tick. Damage, duration, cooldown and effects will obviously need adjusting. The main benefit I see is you get the damage and (adjusted) effect against targets that are currently immune outright as it’s no longer conditional on the freeze/trap. Given that there are few items that interact with these skills it’s not a ton of stuff that would need changing. However they are more or less “working” for devs purposes at the moment and I don’t see a case being made for urgent changes.
