A quick suggestion about this wildly underused relic: change the pierce resistance and bleeding duration to block recovery and reduced critical damage taken.
Why? well… This is CLEARLY a soldier oriented relic, a class that has pierce resistance for every point of experience it gets. On top of that, the bleeding duration is quite commonly gotten through dryad’s blessing and the menhir’s devotion, both commonly gotten in soldier builds. Those changes will be in theme with what menhir represents, and will provide substantial (and unique) bonus to defensive builds. The block recovery is a stat incredibly hard to get without sacrificing a lot of something else, wich would make this relic far more attractive, and the reduced critical damage taken would give and edge against big damage spikes in the middle of the fray.
Right now, offensive relics are so much better than Menhir’s, that even when is the best defensive option, it has so much overlap with bonuses from other items or skills, that ends up being weak. It needs to get a boost, specialy providing what’s needed, instead of overkilling stuff we already don’t have problems with.
I’ve never played a shield based character, but this suggestion seems reasonable. Extra pierce resistance always seems kinda useless on Soldier based builds, and I am not even sure what kind of nemeses do that big pierce RR/damage besides poor old Fabius to make it relevant.
well, in the rare ocations i use the juggernaut relic, still gets triggered, so even with high def builds, getting critd is still possible.
I do admit is a weak bonus, but much better than something i already have maxed.
Anyways, aside from the shield recovery (wich i do consider important), this was just a suggestion. Can be pretty much ignored and the relic won’t be weaker than now.
I don’t think crit related stuff is necessary. It’s impossible to be crit on a soldier unless your build isn’t optimized for the content. With 0.6 DA changes it seems even in Crucible this wouldn’t be of any use
I personally like the relic the way it is. Not saying it should not be changed, I don’t mind any changes to it. The only thing that, in my opinion, should not be changed is the active. It provides good stats, even the elemental resist. In multiplayer (which I never play, lol) you can nicely support other members with low elemental resist, and you yourself can give up on overcapping it. In the base stats, I would not want to see it gaining more shield oriented stats; some relics should be open to pick for other builds, doesn’t matter if soldier or not. This is the most defensive relic (if I am not wrong) and I think it should be wide open for any build. If they removed the bleeding duration and pierce resist (or reduced the pierce resist) and changed +1 soldier to +1 to all skills, it would be cool. Maybe then add a little bit of armor (flat maybe?) to compensate for the loss of stats. Also, the -10% Physique Requirement for Armor is totally useless, imo.
> -10% Physique Requirement isn’t useless. It enables non-Physique OR Cunning/Spirit Heavy builds.
> +1 to all skills nice but I have serious doubts regarding them implementing this since that particular change to the item would affect vanilla as well. Not to mention leave us short of a Soldier relic. I am not opposed to this particular suggestion of yours
> This is not the most defensive relic - Citadel and Avenger are the most defensive ones
> The relic will still be open to non-soldiers, the idea of the thread is to make it more useful to Soldier builds since it is at the end of the day a Soldier Relic.
There are plenty of relics open to pick for exotic builds and Menhir’s Bastion has literally nothing to make it desirable for exotic builds
> Multiplayer has never been taken into account for balancing decisions to my knowledge. And it never should. The elemental resistance is practically useless, Damage Absorption is much more useful in both Crucible and MC
I don’t agree with you with the two relics being more defensive. Avenger provides damage in its active and only 6% DA and 42% of elemental and vitality resist, while Citadel provides only health, DA, damage blocked by shield and also has 6% block chance. Now, Menhir’s Bastion gives physical resist, pierce resist (which isn’t that needed since you can get it kind of easily), shield block chance and damage while also providing 30% armor, 5% additional cap to elemental resist, elemental resist and damage absorption. Moreover, the stats to shield Citadel provides are even weaker than Menhir’s (Citadel actually gives 1% more chances to block, but that doesn’t make much difference). So I don’t have a reason to agree with your statement that those two relics are better defensive relics.
4% Physical Reistance doesn’t make much difference. In my experience things start to look better at 20% or so Physical Resistance
The skill on Menhir is a temporary buff and is non-consequential in an end game boss fight. The armor is good on the skill no doubt but the Elemental Resist it adds doesn’t add much
The DA from both Avenger and Citadel are permanent defenses and we can step it up a notch with a 4% DA completion bonus. It is much more reliable than Menhir’s temporary defense
Also, it’s not just stat based comparison I have experience with all three relics and Menhir doesn’t come close to either of those. It can out-do Avenger on a Soldier build but it’ll still loose to Citadel
The skill is interesting. Area heal with damage absorption and quite a lot of flat physical damage, that can be useful to a wide variety of builds. Shame about the uptime though.
