I don’t know if anyone else will find this interesting, but since I took the time to do it, I figured that I would post it anyway.
Now that I have a pretty good stable of characters under my belt – 6 level 85’s, 1 more well along the way and 4 more in the early stages but with end game gear, skills and devotions already planned out – I thought it would be interesting to do a cumulative look at what devotions these characters used or will use. The 11 characters comprise a pretty broad scope of the games offerings – across the characters all masteries were used at least twice, attack styles differed between melee, ranged, spells, pets, dual-wield, 2-handers, sword and board, and primary damage types included either fire, cold, lightning, poison, physical, chaos, vitality or aether.
I know the developers try hard to balance the game so that all options are potentially useful or at least usable, so I was surprised to find that, based on my fairly broad spectrum of potential applications, there were 24 devotion constellations that I’ve never used once. I don’t know if that just says something about the way I tend to build my characters or if some of these devotions are just universally underpowered, hard to work into a devotion set up or just pretty much useless. I realize that some of these devotions may appear on my unused list because they’re beneficial for only pierce or bleed builds neither of which I’ve built yet.
Anyway these are my unused devotions listed alphabetically:
Aeon’s Hourglass
Amatok the Spirit of Winter
Assassin
Autumn Boar
Bat
Berserker
Blades of Nadaan
Bull
Crab
Crane
Fox
Gallows
Ghoul
Harvestman’s Scythe
Hound
Hydra
Imp
Light of Empyrion
Messenger of War
Shieldmaiden
Solemn Watcher
Targo the Builder
Tsunami
Wolverine
As a side note my most frequently used devotions were:
Scythe is actually amazing, even before the patch’s buff, but it’s got odd requirements, so it’s rarely taken. The few builds where I have it, it’s providing a measurable difference. Another large chunk of those are what I think of as “Resistance Constellations”.
If you’re hurting for resistances, you can pick up things like Crane or Watcher and make life easier on that.
Hourglass has a very niche use, in builds that specifically have multiple cooldown skills, no non-CD skills, and the CDs are long enough that they can specifically benefit from that proc. That said, niche or not it’s very potent in those rotation style caster builds, and makes a large difference on bosses.
There are a few that I do think need a little changing…Off that list specifically, I’d name Gallows, Hydra, and Tsunami. But there are ones that aren’t on that list that I would never take, like say Wraith…Aether/Lightning? Is that a thing, and I’ve missed it? More importantly, why would you want that to be a thing over going one or the other? Maybe an odd Panetti’s variant? Who knows. Generally, Crate accepts that not every constellation can be the best, and Crate chooses to make some constellations for niche uses.
If you can look at those constellations and tell me that there is NO build that you can ever imagine using that, THEN we might have an issue. But as far as I can see, they all have uses, just not always popular uses.
All have Chariot, though.