These new components are really cool and give the player another thing to farm for and play with, but the balance between them is questionable.
Without a doubt the best one is the Seal of Blades: not only does it have the same damage values as the others (50%/10 flat), it gives a huge 5% leech so you don’t need a Haunted Steel.
But that’s not all, its extra ability is a toggle that does good damage and gives some defenses on top of that. And then you can bind devotions to it to proc them.
Many of the others are good but nowhere near as good as the above.
And then there are some outliers on the negative end, mostly the ones with a spammable spell ability.
I really like that the game finally has a castable Chain Lightning type spell, but its practical use seems limited since their damage is relatively low and they don’t have linked supporting skills like mastery abilities.
The low level components with spells like this are useful because you can use them during leveling, but these require lv. 90 and rare materials: by the time you can acquire them the spells have very little usability.
At most I can think of cooldown caster builds that want something to cast between their main spell or to trigger devotions with.
While I like the idea of these new abilities, they would be significantly more interesting and closer to Seal of Blades if they were converted to procs.
(Who am I kidding though, a post like this will probably just serve to get SoB nerfed. ;))
The best is seal or resonance - a huge chunk of secondary resistance and some HP. Too bad some builds wont use it due to conversion dmg loss =( Seal of blades is good too.
Seal of Blades > Seal of Might = Seal of Resonance >>>>> Everything else.
In keeping with tradition, I wouldn’t be surprised if Blades was nerfed at some point or had its devotion applicability adjusted. I think Might and Resonance are essentially fine now that they give flat health and not % health, but much of the other seals are just bad.
I’ve used Destruction and Skies on occasion, and they’re ‘ok’, but the cooldown-based granted skills are just atrociously bad across the board. In fact, they could have no cooldown and be “average” at best. Seal of the Void, for instance, is literally just a Riftstone that doesn’t move you.
Considering their cost and level requirement, any nerf would be unwelcome. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the others buffed a bit, but I think they’re all pretty good considering their elements. Night, Skies, Blight, and Destruction, for example deal more damage and could easily become the primary skill of a build, opening up more skill points for other things. That can’t necessarily be done with Blades. A couple of the others are buffs and not really able to be compared. Shadows and Void could use some love though. Removing the cooldown from the thrown blade would put it closer in range with the others, for example.
Ultimately, however, I I think the ability for the spammable skills to be the central foundation of a build makes up for the fact that they might seem slightly weaker or more targeted with a smaller area of effect. 10 - 30+ extra skill points more than makes up for a small gap in power, as far as I’m concerned.
I would prefer if the other Seals other than Blades were buffed, but i can see Blades getting nerfed. Specially because of how popular it is becoming to slap a devotion proc on it.
I hope they don’t nerf blades too much. It is the only reason I was able to survive early Ult AoM areas.
I do agree that the others could use minor buffs. and I’d like to see more component options open up in the mid level areas (50-60) most stuff is either lvl 25, or lvl 90.
It would be nice to see higher tiers of the basic ones, that do things like buff armor or resists. say a lvl 50 bristly fur that gave you 300 health and 35% consitution. or something like that.
Ancient armor plate is something that could use a boost in the new areas. a lvl 75 one that gave you 75 armor, 25 physique, and 10% armor boost as an example.
Other ideas could be stuff that would help out builds that suffer on defenses. like a basic component at 75 that buffed DA and armor at the same time, with some added stun resist? if we all need tons of those now, it may benefit us to have a single Component as a choice, instead of losing out on all the other stats that are already necessary.
I feel like Seal of Blades ability to proc a devotion without player in-put is so out of line, it’s going to have to get removed or other Seals need to get a similar, gameplay rules breaking level of power.
I’d prefer the latter obviously, but unless they removed the former, I feel like I would use Seal of Blades on any build that spends any amount of time in melee range.