Spite Blademaster's feedback

Grim Dawn Public Test Discussion
1

Since Phantasmal Blades and their supporting items have been buffed and re-designed a bit I decided to test Pierce Blademaster. Here is one SR 30-31 run. As you can see, build got decent damage and Blademaster’s offers nice mobility and a lot of raw %damage (tooltip is still lower than on Demonslayer so allure of a “big bad” two-hander is kinda lost here). Itemization allows us to get converted hard capped Blade Spirits, which is a great damage support here.

Now there are two big problems with it:

Energy!

Build has 52 energy regen, 30% absorb and Scales, plus a bit of energy leech from 5/12 Phantasmal Armor. I am not sure if it’s Scales not proccing enough because of high DA or just PB being that costly here. Besides adding energy regeneration to some of the Pierce items (Korovan chest, wink) my suggestion would be adding flat energy regeneration or/and %increased energy regeneration as a mod to Field Command or Oleron’s Rage. But why Soldier’s passive?? Well…

Infiltrator can do all of it better

Not only has this class infiltrated top ranks of the Belgothian order but it also (surprise surprise) outshines Blademaster here. Especially now that Vigor can almost match Soldier’s armor passive.

I think in general power creeping this weapon more towards Blademaster is only fair. In the end, even if you give it 100% elemental converted to pierce to Oleron’s rage mod it still will be just on par or maybe still a bit below Infiltrator. Personally, I find it sad that Blademasters, masters of blades, don’t excel much in anything. Even in Blades.

3 Likes
2

PB is that costly, I used this build with both Scales and Harvestman and energy would still be a bit wobbly, especially vs single entities. Them’s the breaks of playing a caster skill with a cunning dump.

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I feel that phantasmal blades items are still mostly designed with the cooldown version in mind. And that was the right thing, previously, but with the spam changes made in this update all that is rather outdated. Besides the energy issues there’s also the fact that relatively few sources of cast speed are available on items with phantasmal blade mods.

3 Likes
4

just to second you and the OP, i wanna mention that the energy issues are a thing even in the case of builds that use offhand. Moreso, i personally tried pierce PB infiltrator and it has the very same issues with both energy and cast speed. Both of these stats are almost absent in pierce items/devos, and to further confirm the energy issues and cast speed issues, aside from Demonslayer Reaper which has plenty of cs% on its exclusive + total speeds from pneumatic, tricksters and witch hunters have issues on that department and PB also eats them alive too for energy.

2 Likes