Spear of the Heavens proc is much too weak

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Once per second, if I’m standing around getting hit, I get a damage effect in a small radius around a random nearby monster which is… 15% larger than a single basic weapon attack. A spear won’t even kill a white-name trash mob, much less make an impact on anything bigger. At least that white mob will be stunned for a second… not that you care about stunning anything which is susceptible to stun.

27 affinity for one extra basic attack per second?

This needs to be improved somehow. 100% weapon damage, or multiple CC effects, or a much better radius or rate of fire. I appreciate that this is an offensive ability with a passive trigger, which means it does need to be balanced differently from abilities which map to attack skills - but this is weak sauce even so.

Attachment: Say What Meme.png

2

I feel the same exact way. I tried it in my Cadence Aether Battlemage and found it really underwhelming.

Then again, most T3 offensive constellations procs are underwhelming. Only Whirlpool and Tainted Eruption are good, at least from experience.

3

What are your lightning and your aether damage types %?

Skills are only as good as your stats for it, if your stats are low, your skills will suck. Maybe try to boost your damage. Anything below 1000% is not good.

4

Having used it with 1500% aether damage, it’s still mediocre. One of the weaker tier 3 skills.

5

My Aether Cadence Battlemage has 1450% Aether modifier and can reach 1650% with Mindwarp proc and Spear of the Heavens proc is still terrible.

6

If your lightning % is 0, you are missing 50% of its damage, it’s obviously not going to be good. Don’t pick a skill that you can’t use effectively.

7

It’s not like i have around 900% to 1000% Lightning damage modifier. Oh i wait, i do. The proc still sucks. An extra 300% lightning damager modifier is not going to make the damage suddenly good.

8

If you have 1100% Lightning and 1400% Aether, it’s still not good. I mean, do the math: 196+236 (assuming you ALWAYS get the high lightning roll) = 432 flat damage on a 1 second cooldown, meaning around 4-5000 damage a second after modifiers…to a random target that the player has no power to decide over. Shame that enemies have hundreds of thousands (or, in Mog’s case, millions) of health in Ultimate.

9

900% is not good, I just wrote that above.

Either way, a skill has a base damage value and a damage scaling value (that scales with your stats), that’s why it’s important to report both values when you write some feedback, so the devs can test the skill to see if it performs as intended at both ends of the damage curve.

10

If you are doing 50K dps, that’s 10% damage increase with one single skill. Seems okay to me. Would have to compare with other skills.

11

Except it isn’t. Because its target is randomly selected meaning it may not even damage a target you intend to kill, if you’re just doing hero+boss-runs.

And even if you could choose, a 10% dps gain for something requiring so much affinity is definitely not worth it. Affinity better spent elsewhere.

900% is fine. Most of my endgame characters have 600% sheet +200% from Cunning/Spirit. % damage stops being worth stacking somewhere around 750% of it unless you find ways to get 100s of extra % cheaply on gear.

12

And again, an extra 300% to lightning damage modifier (bumping lightning damage to 1200% and something) is not going to make the damage good.

It’s a terrible T3 proc. Several T2 procs are actually better, like Arcane bomb. And T3 procs like Tainted Eruption and Whirlpool are miles better.

13

Dunno, Unknown Soldier gives me maybe 10%-15% damage increase per shadow (I have 2500% bleeding damage and 1000% pierce damage though) which translates in grossly 20-30% damage increase with 2 shadows (2 shadows is common, 3 not so much), which seems to be on par with Spear Heaven given my better stats and the requirements on the skill (needs a critical hit), if not a bit better.

Dunno about other T3 skills, I don’t have many maxed other characters to compare actual values with but I’m sure it’s the same ballpark.

14

15

By my estimate he has around 17.5 million health in Ultimate.

16

Again, you can’t assume the proc will apply its damage effectively as it is random as Ceno said. If I’m attacking a boss and the proc hits some incoming white level add thats walking in (away from boss) that would have died to my incidental AOE eventually anyway, that isn’t a DPS increase at all.

The T3 devotions in general have the same problem, way too weak compared to something like Arcane Bomb when you consider the affinities required, but even amongst the already weak T3’s Spear is one of the worst.

17

All the T3 skills are significantly more powerful than the T2 and T1 skills, it’s just maths. Arguing otherwise is silly. That wouldn’t make any sense the other way around haha.

The whole affinity argument is also a moot point, for every pt spent, you are unlocking a node that buffs your stats, whether you spend that pt on a tier 1 or tier 3 constellation is the same, albeit, the more expensive nodes are usually better than the cheaper ones (some unique stuff) and you also get a better skill at the end of it. If you are spending your pts on stuff you don’t care about to get there, you are doing it wrong and you should rethink the way you spend your pts.

You don’t like T3 devotions, that’s fine, I don’t really care, but misinformation isn’t cool.

18

…yes, hence this thread. :rolleyes:

19

Math is hard. Spear of Heaven is numerically better than every single T1&T2 skill. Now cry me a river. “But I don’t like spears…” qqqqq

20

Being numerically better doesn’t mean it is functionally superior, which seems to be what many dislike about it.