One of the staples of melee has been lacking for quite some time now. During our current top20 testing we have a high amount of melee builds making it into the top. None of the is based on Cadence. In fact, the only Cadence that was somewhat close to being competitive with other melees was Warborn Death Knight. As you can see from the sheet testers didn’t think highly of its damage.
Let’s break down this Warborn Death Knight offense: ~3600 OA in-game, 40% crit damage, high amounts of flat, almost capped attack speed, 3300% to Physical damage before Ulzaad, decent resist reduction, main skill capped with extra targets and extra arc.
And yet the damage is nowhere near top melee performers. What’s wrong with it?
Warborn set design is awkward. Necromancer’s side of things out of all skills focuses on Reaping Strike for some reason - single target wps that practically doesn’t do anything for Cadence. And then it does even less for EoR Oathkeeper side of things.
Soldier’s side is Cadence and yet set doesn’t have a single mod to it.
Defensively it never had high Phys res but compensated with Armor. Well now Armor is available to most builds while Soldier had it nerfed on Field Command and physical devotions.
Core skill is lacking. This Death Knight is probably the best Cadence build there can be (outside of fantasy gear cold Cadence Blademaster). And yet most top melee builds that use AA + WPS are better all around.
Since damage reduction doesn’t lower monster’s debuffs War Cry became less potent. Moreover, sometimes it can aggro too many mobs in SR.
I think both skill and a set could use a bit of rework. Make Cadence great again!
EDIT: I also tested 2H Physical Cadence Witchblade with double-rare (thus practically impossible) Voldrak’s Crusher and it was much worse than this Death Knight.
The very reason Physical Cadence no longer has advantages over others is that flat physical damage is very cheap now, making Deadly Momentum not that important any more.
I will die on the hill of making the Warborn Gavel skill mod anything but flat phys to warcry. It’s not enough to kill a single weevil in MC, on a 5 sec cooldown skill. You also have 0 reason to dual-wield gavels either in any of the builds WB supports. I have literally never seen a situation where that skill mod would contribute to a fight.
the way i’ve seen it for a while balancing wise, and mechanics aside, is that Cadence is just scaled too low now
even if we ignore the clunky swinging and leeching etc some have mentioned in the past, just on a base dmg scaling it seems to just not serve its prior main purpose.
500wd+innate flats every 3rd hit, with no scaling on first 2
this would on appearance seem like an ok tradeoff, 2 small hits for 1 big bonk
but, when we compare to other AA that also scale WPS, it suddenly doesn’t look so good when you have potential max peak higher than Cadence, while still getting scaling on every hit guaranteed…
It could be said that for regular DAR+wps it’s fair because it’s “rng”, you wont get those 5-600wd wps hits all the time/every 3rd hit guaranteed, and that’s true, but you still get guaranteed scaling on all 3 hits, so when the peak wps hits, combining it with the prior 2 it’s always more combined…
Not addressing the clunkiness of cadence interactions, i think Cadence needs to be restored to the big(est) bonk hit skill “guaranteed”, making it worth to sacrifice those two first swings for the third dmg scaling
if there is any grievances left mechanical/clunkiness wise i think that can be addressed after, but 2h cadence need to slap for 2million dmg “every” time for now
Surely FoA will finally give us a melee Cadence set COPIUM
OK, for a more serious reply:
I think Cadence is in a worse spot than it appears when you’re looking at high-end, maximized builds like
This is a build loaded with complete conversions from multiple damage types into one and has basically everything going for it imaginable, the sorts of raw stats that most builds would only ever dream of having.
And while capable of SR75 farming or situationally pushing SR90+, it’s still on the weaker side of autoattackers in general.
When you start making more esoteric Cadence builds (COULDN’T BE ME, making a Cadence build with every weapon…) the middling power that’s present in the above fades away very quickly. More to the point, I think it speaks volumes that the “”“meta”“” for Cadence has been Warborn + Beronath since before Mythical items were even a thing. There’ve been some attempts to shake things up over the years, like Scion of Arcane Force to try to get the Transmuter functional, Aetherwarped Cleaver (which was pretty promising pre-AoM but then fell off hard), and the Chaos approach via Rah’zin + Servitor Corruptor + Voidrend Talons (which suffers primarily from being a Chaos Soldier build more than anything else).
Unfortunately none of these items on their own are sufficient to bring Cadence where it should be. Particularly egregious are “Cadence” items which are seemingly intended to be used with the skill but provide no skill modifiers to it. Deathdealer Sidearm, Havoc, and Leviathan all come to mind.
So the question is “what does Cadence want” and the answer is “more % Weapon Damage.” Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge there are only two non-set ways of getting that: Voldrak’s Crusher (2h Phys mace which gives a tiny 33%) and the aforementioned Voidrend Talons (which give 40% but force you into Chaos). Both Goredrinker (Bleed) and Valdun (Pierce) do not provide % Weapon Damage to Cadence despite both being other Cadence sets (which are still behind Warborn in usability all the same).
If you’re looking for quick edits to make to existing items, % Weapon Damage to Cadence on Weapons, Heads, or Necklaces is the one.
Last Epoch came out semi-recently. You know what the first build I made was?
Cadence. Or Rive, as it is known in LE.
Rive has some very interesting things going for it that Cadence would kill for. In addition to an unlimited Attack Speed cap (which I exploit as far as I can), it also has some special effects like
which ensures the unending hordes of enemies is eternally sucked within melee-killing range, and
which puts multiplier atop multiplier on our third, big bonk. Finally, Rive has unlimited RR:
Quite nice, especially as the RR is given as a buff to the player, meaning if you hit a pack of ignited mobs you can get many, many stacks of this buff.
On skills like these, Attack Speed and damage multiplication are king. But when Attack Speed is easily cap-able by everything in existence, and when damage multiplication is limited (or easily mirrored/surpassed by RR support for other skills), these sorts of skills only lag further and further behind.
Now, obviously, the tech behind Cadence is a decade+ older than the tech behind Rive, so there’s only so much one can ask for. We don’t have the largest pool of options beyond “make Weapon Damage bigger.” But as a thought experiment, consider this: I made a Acid Cadence Witchblade set in Grim Armory, with most values comparable to existing items, gave it Sunder, and it was still pretty underwhelming. Probably the weakest set in my mod.
This looks incredible. But it isn’t.
So even with one of our newfangled damage multiplier technologies, Cadence still needs “bigger numbers”.
The skill mods on the aetherwarped cleaver should also get a second pass. Right now you’re competing against offhand Beronath on both relevant classes that would use this set for phys Cadence (DK and BM, on the worse end Warlord and Witchblade). Even ignoring damage conversion and therefore fat flat damage, Beronath gives you the ever-elusive crit damage, OA, and a crafting bonus for flexibility. Compare this to the cleaver:
2 targets and attack arc to Cadence: not really relevant. It’s already easy to get up to 4-5 base, and every physical Cadence build will take Crimson Claws for another 2. Hitting 7 vs 9 is not that impactful in the grand scheme of things.
180% phys/trauma to Cadence: not bad on its own, but again you’re comparing to the flat you get with Beronath. In sum for something like an officer’s/ruin cleaver, you get about 250% more phys on your Cadence hit, but you’re losing out on a lot of other core stats and the flat damage on your other hits.
Pipe dream would be to give it a +1 to nightblade to alleviate the skill point drought BM has, but realistically following the conventions of the game, some %crit or an innate conversion on the base weapon could make it a bit more attractive. Maybe go back to the days where it had +Belgo’s shears on it and give it physical Whirling Death/Execution mods.
BTW, here’s a screenshot of how much health the war cry mod takes off against main campaign chaff that I have a 12% racial bonus against, on a build with 3.1k% phys damage. This is with an 8% total damage mutator and factoring in the base %health reduction of war cry, mind you. It’s literally the “break environmental objects” mod.
Double-rare Aetherwarped Cleaver is still better for physical Cadence. Even if you stack skills points of Soul Harvest, Aetherwarped Cleaver stills has better flat physical damage and higher % physical damage, and faster basic and % attack speed. % cunning makes up for the OA gap, more or less. Let alone skill points and modifiers.
The only advantage of Beronath is the % crit damage, but I don’t think that worths a 10% armor piercing.
I tested both on a Death Knight and Beronath was better. For Warlord Cleaver is better of course. I think for DK, besides obvious conversion, it’s the combination crit damage, huge OA and total speed. Latter is important because you are casting War Cry and Bone Harvest.
Don’t know if its possible but maybe Cadence could be changed for weak attack replacer (so the first hits are just bit better than regular attack) with something like 110% weapon damage ? Then it could be possible to get the third strike nerfed if too strong.
That would help with stability of builds using Cadence and would help with conversions which are now only affecting third hit.
110% weapon dmg on first 2 hits still wouldn’t come close to charge based DAR+wps scaling, don’t see how that would warrant a reduction on third hit - aside from generally just complicating the first 2 hits if using wps
^i’m saying that would default not be be necessary to even consider, because 110% WD would already be weaker than regular charge DAR+wps
“and cadence at 500%wd is already currently weaker”
