After trying to level with Onslaught as my a Berserker, I’m left feeling like Onslaught is the worst-designed skill in the game.
Sure, attacking a few times makes your next Doom Bolt or whatnot bonkers and that’s wonderful against bosses. But against the regular hordes you’re encountering 99% of the time, Onslaught is tedious as hell to employ and little better than auto attack. Doom Bolt and its ilk already vaporizes mobs without even needing to charge it up.
Onslaught simultaneously boring and overpowered, the kiss of death for an ARPG skill.
Why doesn’t it do something cool and Berserker-y like make you attack faster and faster until you burn out and reset (or explode in a furious burst of energy or whatever), or increase your chance to trigger a Weapon Pool skill - any Weapon Pool skill? “Attack ten times and you next move is double damage” is so atypical and pedestrian for Grim Dawn design. At its core it’s a builder-and-spender: straight out of Diablo 4, not Grim Dawn.
I feel like that’s the same as every class, though. When you complete your build you simply barely bother with trash mobs. No need to apply RR debuff, use your combos, etc. - just a movement skill, and AoE to clear them out.
But that’s kinda the point of the game. The goal is to be powerful and you don’t feel powerful when you have to use your whole kit against trash.
I mean… Clearly you understand by now that the skill isn’t trying to be a mob clearing machine.
It’s a single target focused ability that enhances the damage of cooldown skills (Which generally already clear trash enemies instantly anyway). It’s designed to make bosses go down faster.
If you want mob clearing, then you’re looking for another skill (Likely from the mastery you’re pairing with Berserker)
This is quite literally as if you were trying to level with Doom Bolt and were complaining it sucked against trash packs.
As far as why it doesn’t do anything different and “Berserker-y”… Well, clearly they wanted to try something new and not rehash Savagery/Righteous Fervor’s scaling stacks system.
It’s interesting as a concept, because it means you can turn the AoE’s you use for clearing mobs, into skills that actually do decent damage against bosses. Or you can juice up your Doom Bolt into boss obliterating skills.
Simultaneously, it’s also making you by default not just dump all your skill points into WPS abilities like you might for other attack replacers, since you need to have a cooldown skill to spend the stacks on (Potentially multiple if you don’t get extra charges on them)
i’ve been very puzzled by a lot of the FoA reactions
and even if ignoring much of it seems to stem from “berserker means x/berserker should be X to me”, weirdly enough alot of the takes tend to revolve around the same: “please keep the game linear”
For once/finally we have an incentive to weave in CD skills as nukes on a spam build. And we even have a potential incentive to not purely focus everything into CDR for CD builds, both relatively largely ending up with 1 main button and holding it down… - so much so you were almost encouraged to take least possible support skills on AA+wps, or if so have them be passive when doable (auras/pseudo pets etc), because hold down AA superior to “interrupting” it with other skills.
Onslaught switches that up
Now you get to be an aa+wps build, and use a fat cooldown as boss nuke
But instead the ask is it “please just buff the AA and let me hold down the LMB harder and notice no difference than static dmg bump” - no gameplay or build difference
Also curious what trash even has to do with it…
Nuke boost seem like something you’d obviously want for fat targets not generic clear. And the game has always been like that, just insta clear trash, so nothing changes in that regard either way, but build addition and boss wise it layers now.
GD Berserker has some of it but it’s very different than usual. There’s also a question if GD should do their classes similar to other games or do it their own way. GD Berserker is basically “a primal man”, not battle-crazed warrior and this is completely fine considering their lore in GD.
I like that Crate sticks to doing things their own way because it makes it more interesting.
Personally I’d swap Berserker buffs from “energy reserved” to “health reserved” or even HP drained per second (like Dying God). And I’d love EoR style, channeled melee attack - maybe frontal cleave that would drain HP instead of energy.
This is my fantasy, though and I see some potential issues with these ideas. For an example: classes that give bonus HP and regeneration would be stronger out of the box. This could be fixed with some modifiers on items that would reduce HP drain for some builds but that’s a lot of work just to fulfill some “berserker fantasy”.
You mean “much much better”? Like 16/16 Onslaught is 170% weapon damage attack which means 1.7 multiplier for any WPS proc. 26/16 is 210% weapon damage… And it has insane damage reduction down the line. And you have two good WPS in the Zerker himself.
Like an example - Unwound Fate set (Necromancer/Inquisitor/Berserker aether gunner set). It is much better for damage to click Berserker while having literally zero support for aether damage in school just due to 2.5 WPS damage multiplier.
This class has been shit talked more than all the others combined and it’s purely because it’s called berserker. People care more about a stupid name than the substance of the class.
There are plenty available to you.