Its not justified. Neither of those skills are overpowered in any way if you could use a shield along with them. Melee already craps all over casters bad enough to where the later certainly doesn’t need skill limitations based on gear selection. And caster offhands provide more DPS stats than shields do. So there is already a reason to use a caster offhand without the limitation, but denying the usage of shields with these skills just destroys build diversity.
I could understand if the skills had weapon % to prevent 2H use but I agree, requiring a caster OH is silly.
Yes because you’d totally be able to such a powerful skill by winking or waving your hand.
AAR is a channeling skill as such you need to have a “focusing” implement to be able to control it and aim it.
Devastation summons waves of meteors, the amount of power to do that would tear the body apart without something channel or focus it.
Casting a fireball or something like that with bare hands is easy but when was the last time you saw a TV show or anime or game that you saw someone display such power without a focus or implement?
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I think the initial idea was not being able to use shield for being a glass cannon
If those builds were particularly powerful I would agree…but they’re not, they’re no more less offensive than a PB build or PRM or any other caster build. With AAR you’re literally a statue while casting so a shield makes complete sense especially in ultimate. Even if they are designed to be glass cannon, you probably won’t be stacking too many shield stats so its not like just adding the shield makes you unstoppable all of a sudden.
Conflagration (Relic Skill) doesn’t require a caster off-hand.
Meteor (Devotion Skill) doesn’t require a caster off-hand.
The CONFLAGRATION RELIC in Grim Dawn is exactly that, m8 - an AAR spell that deals pure fire damage, applies a DoT and doesn’t need any implement.
Actually I suggested removing the caster off hand requirement because any sane person can see that a Sorceror or Warlock can simply breeze through veteran without investing a single point into AAR. The conflagration ray has far better synergy with OFF and also applies burn. Just take Kraken (3 points), Prismatic Eviscerator and all points can be put into CT or defensive / CC skills. You can finish Hardcore Veteran much faster than with AAR.
In contrast, the AAR has 3/4 aether damage which you cannot even debuff until you have Widow (in Veteran) or massively powerful legendaries like Warpfire (in Elite) +…it requires a caster weapon that most of the times gives you cooldown reduction, not cast speed. Even if it would give you cast speed, you won’t have the mana to sustain it.
Trust me on this one, I played all possible variations of AAR builds, a 16% WD at lvl 1 with 2% increase will not make it broken at all. It will increase build diversity (especially with off-hand removal) and allow pure casters to shine in Ultimate. Compare 40% at 12/12 with the massive 300% WD of Shadow Strike and it’s “massive” 104 energy cost (LMAO) at 3.8 sec cooldown ! In fact, as a dw blademaster / WH / spellbreaker player - this massive 300% WD at low energy cost is what allows me to cheese the game and not play by the book puting all points into physique 
yeah this is a needless restriction on an underpowered skill
devastation isn’t underpowered but it would be in no way broken (or even better) if it could be used with a 2h weapon. this would actually make conversion tremor builds with temporal arc blade kinda cool but probably still not very good. either way, i have no idea why this restriction exists
It would maybe allow for that skill to actually be useful, maybe a weapon or some combo could make it good because atm I think it’s just bad and restricting a caster to stand still while holding something like a book for defense makes no sense. A shield could be a good combo, or you know, all the other weapon choices that could be interesting with it.
People complain about energy consumption with the way AAR is now. If they didnt have to wear a focus to boost their energy regen they would bitch and say the skill is even worse.
Huh? That’s not a reason to FORCE players to get their energy regen through their focus, there are plenty of other ways to get it if they give players the option to hold a shield or 2H.
Actually, I think people complain about the energy inefficiency of AAR. As I have shown in another thread, a SS DoT WH is 8.25 times more efficient than a AAR build (assuming BiS gear, ofc) while having 2.08 times more damage. As such, I don’t think people would complain if the cost was justified in some way by the outcome.
Imagine your character in the coordinates of a spider chart. Each point of the pentagon represents an aspect of your build that you would want to optimize, namely: (1) single target damage; (2) AoE; (3) Survivability; (4) Mobility; (5) CC/Escape.
A skill like AAR would in theory increase dimension (1), while reducing (3) and (4) - and this would be a good and balanced design. However, it does not deliver in terms of single target damage even if you have 26/16 in it and the best gear in Cairn. Compare that with Shadow Strike, a skill that maximizes dimensions (1); (3); (4) and (5) at the same time with no real cost in terms of gearing or mana consumption. I mean you can construct whatever you want around SS - aether, acid/poison, pierce, physical, even chaos/vitality…
Ergo, if AAR is still so bad when you compare it with a skill from a class that should also be a “glass cannon” in terms of both damage and mana efficiency, at least the “versatility” part should be touched here.
If people want an AoE ray for their caster, you will always have the Obliteration Ray. AAR, however, was designed as a single target skill…
You can get energy regen from other pieces of gear. AAR is redundant if you can’t ever sit still long enough to make use of its DPS because you’re too busy scrambling to not get your face wrecked in. A shield might help with that. Just a little. And then I could grab some defensive devotions that help the shield to boost my survivability a little more. The way things stand right now, it would be worth cutting my total DPS potential by 25% to increase my survivability by 50% with a shield + devotion rework. Being able to stand still for a few more seconds without moving would easily make up for 25% less DPS on paper.
As the skill currently stands, its complete garbage. Crate needs to buff AAR. Even if the energy cost was cut in half, I still don’t think the skill would be very good. Even if they removed the caster offhand limitation on top of that. But devastation might be useful for some builds that don’t use a caster offhand. Arcanist is probably the worst mastery IMO.
My friend, please allow me to put this fear to rest about how good a 2h AAR build would be not by a priori armchair theorycrafting, but an in silico experiment:
First of all, let us assume that we are talking here about a new, hypothetical AAR and all of my suggestions to make it decent (REMEMBER: the word here is decent , not overpowered ) in this regard were respected, namely:
- Energy cost is reduced by 30%;
- Caster weapon requirement is removed;
- Vitality damage on disintegration is replaced with %Weapon Damage that starts at 16% and ends at 40%.
The highest dps build you can make around this new, hypothetical AAR would be a Warlock with the following characteristics:
- Temporal Arcblade + Iskandra’s Focusing Prism;
- Time Dilation + 3 poins in Spear of Heaven + 3 points in Kraken + Falcon swoop => you will have no Giant’s Blood and no other defensive proc. In other words, Blood of Dreeg and Time Dilation mirror is all you have as far as your survivability goes.
- HP stands in the 6.5-7.5k range, while DA stands in the 1700-1800 range…so be prepared for a lot of crits.
Now, let us see how this character fares vs a dangerous boss like Fabius or the Iron Maiden…
1 AAR tick at [+1500% aether, +900% fire] = 7000 (aether + fire) + 3000 (Temporal arcblade WD component as aether + elemental). Since you will have Falcon Swoop attached to AAR at 15% proc chance, you will reliably proc it once per second at 200% cast speed and you will have 6.66 ticks / second.
As such, your total damage during the Time Dilation window will be:
532.800 (AAR beam) + 201.600 (Falcon swoop procs. Bleed is irrelevant as you will have max 350 cunning) = 734.440. Add in another 100.000 from devastation and the damage reflected by the mirror and you get 800.000-900.000 damage at most .
If this is overpowered I am going to eat my keyboard. Even with this hypothetical new AAR and with the best gear, as you can see, the most offensive build you can make is massively inferior to a Blademaster or even a WH by a margin of 1.7-2.38 degree, while ALSO LEAVING YOU WITH 0 ENERGY after Time Dilation is over. If you want more damage, ofc, you would need high OA and that would be a reasonable trade-off but I highly doubt you will kill Fabius in your 8 second time window even with bloody pox on.
So another thread tearing AAR apart…with about the same people posting to… Since I’m usually one of those people, I supposed I should post too…
My main character is an AAR sorcerer and I’ve beating the Log (fastest kill time I’ve gotten is 30 seconds), cleared BoC and SoT(unfortunately didn’t time these…) and taken out the Mad Queen (typically 1-2 minutes depending on how well I can avoid spikes) in ultimate with him. It is not that difficult. So AAR as an ability to complete the game, it is doable. It is definitely a viable build for completing the game. You can still farm BoC, SoT and nemesis like Valdaran and Moose pretty easily. Yeah, you need some high end gear to do that…but isn’t that the same for most builds? Is it the best build? definitely no… Is it an easy build? Again not really… Is it good at farming Fabius? I don’t know as I’ve never tried. And frankly, I don’t want to. I farm him with my Bleeding warder. You have to facetank him and any caster isn’t going to do that well. So I don’t see the point of using him as a comparison. I don’t understand why everything needs to be measured by how fast you can kill Fabius. There are soooooo many other faster/more efficient ways to farm with an AAR sorcerer (or in general for that matter). Seriously, if you want to farm Fabuis then don’t use a caster…not just AAR, but any caster really that can’t tank things. The caster thing as whole is another issue and mostly due to the lack of end game scaling from not having WD build into many skills… But end game caster scaling vs melee is another topic… Does AAR need a buff? Probably, who doesn’t like stronger skills… I will still take AAR over TSS or PRM (and Demo skills too) any day… I thought about trying out CT as I’ve heard that is good, but don’t have enough Iskandra pieces to make myself tanky enough yet… The clear speed (of trash and heroes) is still really fast with warpfire/OFF/devastation using AAR as clean up. Warp stone solves the mobility issue… Nullification takes care of reflect…and most heroes don’t have the HP to stand up to devastation and the beam on them. The DPS issue (at least in my eyes) is mainly just nemesis or other “big” bosses that do have a sizable HP pool…
Using a SS build as a comparison is also crazy… I think Primal Strike needs a buff as it can’t kill as fast as a SS build. SS is THE most powerful single target skill in the game right now (as long as it is used in the correct build). It should not be the bench mark…
The biggest issue with AAR is simply the mechanism on how it works. It is the only skill in the game that you have to aim and maintain aiming for it to work. With this being a point/click/move game, not sure that can be fixed. You have to stand and shoot and you have to remain standing to shoot. This could be improved…but not fixed… Would be too difficult to change the game mechanics to allow you to run from point a to point b while trying to shoot at point C. No skill allows this currently. What the other skills do allow is for you to shot, then run and what you shot will continue towards the monster. The beam will not. One way to “improve” it would be to remove the build up of the beam. Allow it to be instant. So stop, aim, shoot and the beam instantly hits the target. However, not sure if the game mechanic will allow that… You are still going to lose DPS as you have to run. You lose DPS when running with a gun too as you’re not constantly shooting… A way to help with this “loss” while running would be to increased damage per tick it does. So when you can only get a couple of ticks off at a time, they should be hard hitting. Course some would say this will make the beam OP if one could maintain the beam (like when facing mobs like Valdaran and Moose where you can stand and shoot longer or using TD/Mirror or facing log as he doesn’t move at all…), so to compensate, the number of ticks/second could be decreased. This will allow you to take some shots while kiting (used like any kiting build) and not become OP if you can maintain the beam. Well these, or any other change make you a Fab killing machine? Probably not… he is still fast and does a lot of damage… You need be able to face tank him or at least be able to take some damage… Upping damage by AAR will help, but still make it a hard fight and not worth it… Move on to someone easier to kill like moose or valdaran…
I’d rather see AAR and some other skills buffed, they should keep their offhand requirement however.
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You can’t compare Primal Strike with SS because PS is both a single target damage skill, as well as an AoE one. It can also be used by both melee and ranged characters as opposed to SS. A better comparison would be Savagery and that line is ballanced as it is right now because it gives you high dps AND high survivability if you invest in it and have good gear.
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Sure you can compare AAR with SS because they are both:
a) quintessential single target damage skills;
b) skills that belong to the “glass cannon” arhetypes, viz. the nightblade and the arcanist.
Let me refer again to that spider chart of a character / build:
AAR PROS:
- reasonable single target dps;
- decent proc machine;
AAR CONS: - destroys your mobility;
- requires you to have special gear in order to maintain a sufficiently high energy regeneration level;
- can only be used by casters.
- can’t apply debuffs from the Viper constellation (!!!) - this is very important btw. In fact, it can’t apply debuffs from anything on you gear, not even that Kymon’s Chosen augument that would help your survivability.
- can’t make use of AdcH.
SS PROS:
- increases your mobility by a high degree;
- can be spammed by every class, including the Blademaster who has the lowest base spirit stat in the game.
- synergizes with any damage type you want.
- allows you to escape if you are crowded or cornered (so it increases survivability);
- allows you to jump over environmental hazards (!!!)
- is available to you at lvl 4.
- scales exceptionally well.
- allows life steal abuse.
- allows Time Dilation abuse.
- has insanely low cooldown.
- insane damage / mana cost ratio.
- makes gear upgrades meaningful.
SS CONS: - it is single target (but you can take Nighfall )
- bad proc machine (but, again, you can take Nightfall )
Don’t get me wrong, man, I don’t think every class should be able to demolish Fabius in 8 seconds or have both high AoE and single target damage capacities BUT here is the catch…I am not talking about how anything with arcanist is better than anything with nighblade in terms of clearing trash mobs because you have strong AoE (Devastation) and CC (OFF). I refer strictly to the fact that AAR IS the single target damage skill of the Arcanist Mastery just like Savagery is for the shaman mastery. A conjurer or warder with the Ultos set is massively powerful in terms of dps while still having strong AoE. Can u say the same thing about an AAR caster ? Are the mana costs, gear and constellation restrictions, as well as the mobility and survivability decrease justified by how much damage it does to a target ?
Just for the record, I think DEVASTATION should remain linked to a caster off-hand but AAR shouldn’t. I also think the mana cost of SS should be increased by 20-25%.
The mobility thing boils down to how it works mechanically. All beams work like that (although AAR is one that doesn’t also pierce…) and I don’t see a way to fix that…I think there is a way to make it a little less of an issue…but to completely stop the standing still thing I don’t think is possible with how the movement mechanics work…
The mobility from SS is part of the skill itself, so harder to compare those two directly…
Arcanists are casters…they should have caster skills… I don’t know… So maybe the beam could empower our weapons to shoot the beam instead of out of a focus item? Shoot the beam out of a mace? Actually sounds kinda cool…and then maybe you can take advantage of WD…
The late game scaling, not being able to use devotions, (flat damage and debuffs), most of the stats on IEE, ADctH and changing damage types are all related to the general issue that all casters have of not being able to take advantage of WD…I don’t believe that is exclusive to just AAR…
Comparing AAR by itself defiantly makes it look weaker than it its… But it is part of a whole and I feel a build should be compared with how it works as a whole build. The single target damage is definitely lacking and probably one of the weakest things in the build, but the other AOE and CC abilities you can pair with it overall, makes an AAR build viable. If an AAR build had really strong AOE AND really strong single target skills, how long do you think it would take to have threads asking for builds with other single target skills or AOE skills on those build to be buffed so they can compete with AAR… Maybe it would take a while as clearing trashing really isn’t that important and end game is mostly nemesis farming… (Although AAR can take down valdaran and moose quickly…just not fab…which also has to do with him being able to beat down most AAR builds…He uses that OP SS ability… 
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The animation always shoots the beam (AAR, Conflagration, Obliteration) from your left hand. It doesn’t matter what you have equipped because whatever it is it will dissapear…therefore …you NEVER shoot it out of a focus to begin with. You shoot it out of your hand.
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It is not AAR that takes Valdaran or Moosi or Log fast…it is Devastation that capitalizes on their huge hitbox. Do some trials and determine how much time it takes with Devastation on vs. off. Over hundreds of cases I have determined that Devastation is the one that contributes to almost 60% of your damage output. Furthermore, OFF amplifies the fire component so it also creates a distorted view over AAR’s efficiency. As I said previously, I see no sane reason not to level in Veteran with Conflagration and switch to Obliteration ray if you are a Warlock.
1)Yeah…but it would still be cool to shoot it out of a weapon… I know the animation limits this to a non-possibility, but it would still be cool…
- The fastest I’ve taken Log down is 30 seconds, but that is a perfect fight. Most of the time he goes down closer to 40-45 seconds… Although I’m still tweaking my bleeding warder and haven’t tried it out yet since I finally got my Grasps of Unchained Might, I haven’t been able to get log in under 1.5 minutes. I have been messing around trying to make a build to get the laceration mega crit so if I can land that I could beat that time for sure…but that can be fluky… Clearing the way to log is soooo much slower too…
I can usually take moose in 2-3 rounds of mirrors (which I only use when needed) and valdaran in 1-2 rounds. Haven’t time it, but would guess based on mirror cycle times (I do have mine soft capped for the reduced cool down time as I don’t use TD) it probably doesn’t take more than 30 seconds or 45 for the worse case. Yeah, definitely not a Top speed killing build, but log under a minute shouldn’t mean the skill is broken… if it was taking 5+ minutes I would agree… 30 second or less nemesis kill speed is still pretty effective… If it you takes you 5-10 minutes to find the nemesis or 4-6 minutes to run to Log (tend to kill on the way to collect chipped claws…those damn bloods for BoM cost soooo many claws!!), 20 seconds isn’t going to make a huge difference to your efficiency. Farming trove in 1st floor BoC is probably way more efficient anyways, and with the clear speed of OFF/Devastation an AAR build can collect those fast!! It is just a little boring as there isn’t much of a challenge from getting that “big kill”. I do kill the boss at the gate, but he is down in under 5 seconds so not much of a challenge… I use a warp stone to mimic SS mobility too… Just wish you could use it to target anywhere instead of only mobs/breakables…
Most of the damage from Devastation goes back to the sum of the whole working out good for an AAR build… As I also use meteor shower on thermite mines, have an outcasts secret and Herald of the Apocalypse, I’m sure my % damage from the AAR beam is probably even lower than your %'s when you were testing (especially vs log). But it does pick off those tentacles and other adds quickly when they pop and will drop Logs health fast when I can focus the beam on him. This is also another reason why I leave Fab alone… His hit box is too small so I get less out of those other spells and would need from the Beam…