I made this thread so that anyone with skill mod feedback can join in on the fun, but I’m specifically having some trouble with Blazerush, a 2-handed mace geared towards Elementalists. I just cobbled together an edited character to see how the item functions with level 100 gear, and I’m not impressed. Here’s my build for reference: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/xZyoOQm2
There are a couple of problems I’m noticing:
1. Upheaval bonuses on a weapon with fire/phys damage
This weapon gives bonuses to fire/phys damage but also extra weapon damage to upheaval via its skill modifier. This means it intends for you to be using default weapon attacks to proc Upheaval, but since savagery is lightning/bleed/phys, this means the player will be using firestrike. While this isn’t a problem in itself, a lot of upheavals bonuses are wasted because upheaval offers bleed/lightning damage, which is useless to a fire-based firestrike build. Maybe a modifier like “100% lightning damage converted to fire damage to Upheaval” would solve this problem.
2. Grenado damage is too low
Since you’ll be splitting skill points between firestrike and grenado, there’s just not enough points to go around for grenado to be impressive. Even with the added 70% weapon damage, a grenado (skill points allocated 26/5/7) still only does as much damage as a max rolled firestrike hit (skill points allocated 12/12/4/4) while costing about 15 times as much mana. Blazing Charge, a skill from the Korvaak’s Deception relic, even does way more damage than grenado despite it being an item skill. Substantially increasing weapon damage to the grenado skill modifier would help solve this problem; perhaps something even as high as 250-300% weapon damage to grenado would really help it stand out and justify its high mana cost.
3. Grenado is too expensive for the build
If grenado is maxed (even with ectoplasms, arcane sparks, Ulzuin’s Chosen skill cost reduction, and Mogdrogen’s Pact), you can’t afford to cast it constantly unless you wear caster gear. If you wear caster gear, you likely can’t be in melee often enough to be dishing out firestrike damage. Against Nemesis enemies, I find myself casting grenado extremely sparingly because it completely drains my mana pool. Perhaps giving a nice chunk of energy regen to Blazerush or adding another skill modifier to reduce grenado cost would help this build along significantly.
Since Blazerush underperforms in both the Upheaval and grenado department, there’s really no reason to make a build around it. Other weapons do either grenado or upheaval better, and this weapon doesn’t even do both very well.