tencharacters
This is a weird request. Nullification has such a high cooldown, why would you want to bind a skill to it?
It’s cooldown and radius goes down/up respectively with investment but just about no one invests into it as there is always something more preferred.
Several reasons.
- high cooldown skills usually give 100% chance of activation.
- maybe all other skills are already in use.
- consistency (I believe this is the only castable spell that cannot have a celestial power).
The cooldown is not an issue and is pretty low when you have a few +skills. Plus there are devotions with high cooldown too: it could be a on-demand cooldown reset coupled with Time Dilation, or a self-buff coupled with Abominable Might or Hungering Void
While I agree about making it possible to bind Nullification to a devotion skill, you couldn’t bind Abominable Might to it anyway (the skill AM is bound to must land a killing blow to trigger AM), and binding TD to it would be pretty awful. Those times you want to use TD are usually times where you want to have cast Nullification beforehand. I could see one want to bind Hungering Void to it however.
Ah yes, I did not remember if AM was on kill or on attack.
These are just examples anyway. I’m not concerned like Dioarchet about Nullification having a high cooldown. Just use something that lasts with it, like Eldritch Fire or Whirlpool.
That skill will remain pretty useless compared to the others as long as the cleaning effect won’t last on the targets (granting resistances against debuffs for the allies and against buffs for enemies for x seconds) and/or damage the summoned enemies and/or cancel persistent AoE attacks (such as sigils of consumption, chaos wells etc).
The guy is called spellbreaker but all you have to do is to simply recast your buffs/debuffs right after he has used his only spellbreaking ability?
You can remove the Mad Queen’s red aura, Cronley’s aether cluster or Fabius’ pneumatic burst and reduce Moosilauke’s damage by 33% but it’s useless?
The skill is far from useless, it’s one of the best 1-pointers. People don’t invest in it not because it’s bad, but because you get all the effect you need out of it from a single point investment. You rarely need to dispel buffs from more than 1 target and they usually die before recasting if your character doesn’t suck.
You have to accept that some skills just aren’t mechanically worth maxing because their usefulness doesn’t scale. And I’d rather not they “fix” it by nerfing the early ranks or by overloading it.
It is a useful skill no doubt. It drops the damage output of elemental enemies (Valdaran, Moosy and even AoM).
I feel the devs made it so it couldn’t be bound because it’s also used a status cleanser. It can be cast on one-self separating it from every castable skill.
It’s the skill that turns Valdaran and Sharzul into little bitches (probably Moose too). So yeah, far from useless.
I didn’t know that. I always was under the impression that that skill was for nothing else but the common buffs/debuffs of the common monsters and that that was it.
But still, those are there very specific uses of that skill, and I am not sure that I may want to invest 5% of my total skill points into something that will be really useful only in 2% at best of the game situations.
The skill used as a 1-pointer has a cooldown/duration ratio that is too broken to me to make much sense by itself.
But maybe it is just me. I have never used that skill since I have never been impressed enough by its description compared to what I know are doing the other options available within the arcanist skill tree. And I have therefore always considered that skill as a kind of an uncompleted/awkward attempt to add some kind of dispel magic/anti-magic shell to the game.
But still, even with that information, the Mad Queen is not enough of a critical concern to me when I am thinking about a build, and the Cronley’s Crystal clusters already have well enough other options to deal with then, to make me consider investing even just 1 point into that skill as it is at the moment.
In games like Warcraft 3, the dispel magic options were strategic parts of the game, but I just don’t have enough of that feeling in Grim Dawn to really think about builds into dispels. Especially by reading its description and features. That is why I gave those suggestions.
MQ, Cronley and Fabius were just examples. Literally all heroes you encounter have auras, even boars. It’s pretty handy to have. Think about knight skeletons and reflect aether mages. Also, it can cleanse you from effect like long-lasting DoTs or resistance reduction (Valdaran, Anasteria) which is nice. It has saved me a few times!
I understand your concern about the long cooldown, but honestly you don’t need to use it more frequently that once every 30 seconds unless you are rushing.
When you’re farming Moosilauke, Mad Queen, Fabius, Valdaran and so on - some of the big end game bosses, that 2% inflates and it’ll save you some headaches on occasion.
But rarely does anyone invest more than a single point into it unless it’s for the elemental damage debuff as discussed and there’s fewer times you’ll use it for that than removing buffs.
I prefer a skill that is great exclusively against the major threats of the game (you know, the enemies that actually matter in the end) than a skill that barely does anything against those same threats but it has a somewhat more usage overall.
I would say -33% damage and DoT/debuff cleansing is pretty neat.
That’s why i said i prefer skills that have a great usage exclusively against the major threats of the game. Reason why i think Nullification is fine as it is.
Can you give an example of an Arcanist build where the number of offensive devotion skills comes close to exceeding available skills to bind to?
And even Hungering Void isn’t optimal. The opportunity cost of casting Nullification just to trigger HV is casting something else to trigger it that’d be useful in every battle, like a damage dealing skill.