Since the expansion was released, I have seen a large numbers of builds posted on the forums or on Youtube using 2x Seal of Blades. Its ability to proc devotions is really fun and satisfying. It allows you to play more like an auramancer and also sometimes you just have too many devotions and too few attacks so that’s a solution.
Now all item-granted offensive auras (Plaguemancer’s Amulet, Consumption of Agrivix, Shard of Asterkarn, etc…) can proc offensive devotions while Mastery offensive auras (Veil of Shadow, Counter Strike, Vindictive Flame, Aura of Censure, Spectral Binding) cannot. I think that’s a shame. In my opinion the game would be more fun if we could improve those aggressive auras with devotions too. What do you think?
I think they should be able to, since we’ve already got things like CoF and Bloody Pox. Why not put all masteries on equal footing? Plus the Seal of Blades thing is simply amazing. However, it’s hard to craft due to cost and requires high level simply to equip, so I don’t think it’s overpowered.
Unfortunately, Big Z already said SoB will be nerfed. I assume we won’t get any offensive devotions from offensive auras, which I find offensive. We’ll probably get the nerf and nothing more.
Maybe this poll will change their minds! If that doesn’t do the trick, maybe Leela could ask a little more sexfully…
People don’t understand quite how bugged the seal of blades is. When you bind a devotion to seal of blades of course the whirling blades will proc it, but so will ANYTHING else your character has. You’re effectively binding that devotion to everything on your character when you put it through an aura like seal of blades. I first noticed this when idling in town on my spellbreaker. Even after some minutes there was still a chain going on of alkamos rings proccing and crescent moon tickling the dummies and… yup, rumor was still jumping onto the dummies even when I was well outside the range of seal of blades. A much simpler test I performed on my infiltrator was to cast word of pain on the dummies which did proc all the devotions I had bound to my seals of blades.
The above is far far too much and clearly not worth the time and effort by crate to rework every aura so it would only be proccing on that damaging aura. They’ve already said the game is balanced around devotions needing the player to actively proc them (which I wholeheartedly agree with after seeing my infiltrator kill basic monsters while shadowstriking past them)
Imo, the game has too many “offensive” devotion powers, and many of them arent even so powerful. Why the game is designed so ALL your “defensive” devotion powers could be used simultaneously (any realistic build has enough buffs to proc all defensive powers), but among “offensive” powers, you usually have to choose 1-2 “best ones” and just forget about all others. Even despite many of them are kinda weak anyway, and the strongest ones (various resistance reductions, etc) are linked to main skill by everyone and their mom, anyway!
I ask, when it was last time you used powers like Twin Fangs or Maul, or Aethefire, or Raise Dead, or Living Shadow for your main skill?
If some powers are too powerful, they could be nerfed. But having access to 5-6 powers, among which 3-4 are mediocre, and being unable to trigger them in any meaningful way, is very dissapointing.
I seriously disagree with the claim, that all “offensive” devotions are balanced around the need to actively trigger. The “best” ones, like “Rumor” or “Assassin’s Mark” - yes, sure. But many others are weak as shit, unless you force them to proc off every CD. For example, Maul isnt worth it unless you trigger it every second. And for some wierd reason, it cant even be bound to skills like Curse of Frailty, to trigger it often! Aetherfire, Tsunami - would you even used that crap instead of “monsters” like Arcane Bomb, Rumor, Whirlpool?
The reason I’d say yes, is casters need better means to use devotions. Weapon users can use proc attacks to apply offensive devotions as well as their primary attack. My dual pistol user can have 7 offensive devotions that go off simply by autoattacking.
Meanwhile, my AAR caster, gets 1 to apply. The AAR caster already struggles with no means for ADCTH. So he has to decide between resist reduction, or healing, and he already doesn’t get anything other abilities you can apply to weapons, such as slow, resists, OA, DA debuffs.
Please read what I actually wrote. If you bind blades of wrath to whirling blades, stand outside the range of whirling blades and cast inquisitor’s seal or word of pain then blades of wrath will proc.
I bound BoW to SoB, but other stuff is proccing it. Rumor was bound to SoB on my spellbreaker but ALKAMOS RINGS procced RUMOR.
Not saying it should stay, didn’t think so in testing phase either. I’m saying that some sets will need tweaking. Imo the problem is a bit deeper than this for some builds
When starting AoM, I got my weapons, the Blueprint and enough material to build two Seal of Blades very soon.
That was fine because in Vanilla, I bound Howl of Mogdrogen to a WPS because all my active attacks without cooldown were already used. I couldn´t bind it e. g. to Wendigo Totem like I could have done with all my other active Devotions (Acid Spray, Falcon Swoop, Rend; they´re more important, so they stayed to their bindings). Howl of Mogdrogen is “only” a buff; in my opinion, no harm done when binding it to Seal of Blades and proccing as often as it can.
On the other hand I bound Falcon Swoop to Seal of Blades just for testing. Well, now I have a shotgun which shoots permanent. Just with LMB (Savagery with Acid Spray) I get 400k Bleeding Ticks on one Dummy while the second gets 40k only from Falcon Spray. That´s a bit too much imho.
Really, I would like to have Howl of Mogdrogen as buff bound to the seal. But with other devotions I can understand if it will get nerfed.
My thought is that they need to find a way for casters to apply more devotions to their attacks. Weapon users often have several procs to attack them to, casters don’t.
Yeah I’ve been using word of pain and noticed each damage tick was proc’ing things, surely it should be only proc’ing once on cast to each effect (RNG checked individually to each monster cast on unless it’s a self firing skill as opposed to like a panetti’s style split from destination instead of source).
However I’m not a fan of nerfing games.
It’s a niihilistic process that aims to rescind everything to a normative state that equally is destructive of a games enjoyment.
By removing incentive to innovate is one of it’s mechanisms (why discover if someone else will and publish it to the endpoint of it then being nerfed with the probability of a character no longer being enjoyable?) Restricting to world view whereby the bias of the developer is the end point of balance and not actually attaining balance just conformity to the perspective (why we have ranged being a completely useless afterthought in comparison to melee or DoT AoE casting; in this instance caster would become possibly nonviable next to melee). Compressing Diversity, similar to ‘restricting to world view’ but focused on amalgamation instead of ‘diversity balancing’ where you create balance by increasing making more viable branches generally (because all characters are effected by AoE & reflect therefore all characters must have high Armour/absorption and resists).
It’s also simply a negative process in that someone discovers something that rewards them in this primarily single player game and another impacts that enjoyment by removing it.
These were just the aspects off the top of my head, I’m quite sure there is a swath more to prove it’s nihilistic quality.
Well, on the bright side: Since this is primarily an offline game, if all Crate does is remove all functionality without giving anything back, you can just mod it back the way it was and play offline.
I doubt 0.1% of the players can defeat the world bosses on ultimate; I can’t and I have over 1500 hours played. Grim Dawn is the most difficult ARPG there is, I don’t think we need to worry about it being too easy any time soon.
Games built only for hardcore players die the slow death.
