I know I’m far from the first person to make this suggestion, as seen here and here, but I would like to bring it up again. Can we please have Blade Arc actually just knock enemies down, not away?
I’m currently testing a Blade Arc build in endgame after not playing it for a good long while and I forgot how torturous it is. The whole idea of Blade Arc is that it’s, well, hitting in a wide arc. AoE is supposed to be its strength. And yet, with the way it works, doing any reasonable amount of AoE with the skill is an absolute pain. I can jump into a dense group of mobs, say, 20 Aetherial zombos, tightly packed together. A perfect harvest for Blade Arc. After two or three swings that entire pack is scattered to all corners of the screen and I have to chase each and every one of them individually. The high target limit on Blade Arc barely ever gets to do its thing because Blade Arc implicitly spreads the hordes out into dozens of small 1 on 1 fights. It’s so bad I’ve started skipping dense hordes of enemies in SR unless they’re the type that can’t be knocked down like Aetherial Titans or Wraiths, because it eats up so much timer to clear them. Trying to kill a healer pack is like herding cats. Ideally, the build would like to keep the pack in a nice, tight cluster and swing away at all their health pools at the same time. Instead, the build has to carefully navigate which direction it’s knocking the healers in, else it ends up spreading the pack out. It then ends up swinging away at just one healer instead of all of them, while the rest keeps healing the target up. The build has to sweep up all the healers together into a single pile and then push them against a wall so that they stay together, else it’s not gonna kill them. The AoE, which is supposed to be the main allure of the skill, is one of the worst parts of it, all because of the knockback.
GD’s introduction of knockdown instead of knockback seemed like the perfect way to introduce this form disable without making it terrible for melee, but I feel like it’s not quite where it needs to be. If there is some sort of coefficient that can be set on a skill to determine how much it knocks enemies away, Blade Arc (and Blitz) really need that coefficient to be next to nothing in order to do their job. These skills need to have the enemies lying on the ground at their feet, not 10 meters away.
just gonna reiterate my minority stance mentioned before: I hope it stays
love knockback in GD, give me moar ragdoll, not less
i know the “general” or endgame/meta consensus is it’s annoying, “less optimal”, but knockback is fun, sending stuff flying is grand entertainment too,
and sometimes i don’t think it’s bad if “less efficient” takes a tiny backseat to fun.
Pretty sure when march of the memes were active i even asked for a modifier adding more knockback to other skills
and from a “balancing” perspective, i think it would be slightly “op” if knockback was just changed to knockdown; it would give you a crapton of freebie kills off the bat
How is that any different from spam ABB permafreezing enemies or Aegis permastunning? It’s perfectly acceptable on those skills but Blade Arc is somehow going a bit too far? Not to mention that knockdown is far more selective. Very few enemies are naturally immune to freeze or stun, there may be resistances going around but your average mob is generally freezable. Knockdown is already generally limited to smaller enemies while the big ones don’t care, so making it better/more user-firendly is less likely to blow things out of proportion. And it’s precisely those smaller enemies that tend to come in very large groups, and there, the knockBACK is the most detrimental.
I don’t disagree that knockdown is fun. I love seeing enemies flying around when I hit them with something bombastic like a Grenado, and I don’t mind it on a more single-target focused ability like Fire Strike. But Blade Arc is a spammable skill, applying knockdown all over the place all the time. If it’s is supposed to actually do its job as an AoE clearer, then it can’t be actively working against keeping enemies in a dense pack.
knowdown is far more abuseable than stun, from my experience atleast
way more enemies are resistant to stun, and the main exploit of knowckdown vs stun/regular CC is enemies actually have to get back up: some enemies straight up can’t do that(/don’t have such animation or something)
and because it’s not a resist thingy, means it’s an all or nothing type of deal: either you just perma CCd any enemy, or you didn’t, no half measures of 0.01% duration effect etc you get on stun
and that’s just where i feel the knockback isn’t that big of a deal,
yes it’s technically less efficient, requires you to move more, clear slower, i’m not disputing that, but it would be less fun otherwise, because sending stuff flying is fun, and it’s about the only skill left that does that
if 99.9% of the game is balanced/modified based purely on optimization efficiency and meta clear times, leave a tiny bit left just for shts and giggles (imo) - specially since the skill still currently works on the meta front, even if more annoying to many players
blade arc is like the 2nd most fun soldier levelling skill purely because of the knockback
If you want shits and giggles why not make the amplified knockback a part of an item modifier so that you can opt in and out as you please?
I don’t know how BA performs as a meta skill, but I can tell you that from the perspective of what I’m doing (1h Vitality BA with Howl of the Wendigo) the skill does not perform particularly well and this extra level of nuisance on top of that makes already a horribly mediocre build close to unbearable to play. If BA was one shotting mobs through a combination of up-front damage and DoT ticks, I’d be fine with it sending enemies flying everywhere. But when killing pretty much anything demands dedicated spamming of the skill, the knockback makes it just horrible to play. So ironically, the funky/memey aspect of the skill makes any funky/memey takes on the skill sufficiently worse that they’re no longer fun.
*i’m not arguing any of these builds would be blown out of OP time proportions, just saying that the players that usually build meta time builds, can get meta times with meta’ish versions of blade arc
and i’m probably not gonna feel bad for not including 1h vitality blade arc in that sentiment, even if it just happens to pronounce spam blade arcs knockback as drawback for those same players
The Community League does this by removing knockback on spam blade arc and instead adding 100% chance to knockback on CD variant. We had only positive feedback about that change, so I’d take this opportunity (again) to suggest changing it in this way in the base game as well.
I wonder if it’s possible to have a skill mod on a couple of items that add knockdown to BA, remove it from spam version and make CD version have it by default. Would be kinda a middle ground, I guess.
I personally like Reaping Arc better, although I haven’t played both skills very much, but still.
