Right, I want to discuss useless skills, modifiers, passives or otherwise. They might be busted from design standpoint or from a simple numerical standpoint(weak).
So, which are your picks for useless skills?
Useless to me in general:
Any pet skill, Lightning Totem, Mortar Trap, DW Nightblade Line
Actually Useless IMO none as they all have a purpose. Some are just obviously stronger then others, but that doesn’t make them useless.
Yes, that’s why I mentioned the statistical malus. Because, everything can be useful, especially in a game as open minded as GD. But some skills are just…either 1pt wonders, filler or largely /meh(often time useless too)
Judging some skills is hard at the moment as I get the feeling some of them could be good but they’re being held back by other things such as a lack of itemisation. I’de like to see how Mortar Trap does with more gear devoted to it for example before throwing buffs/nerfs it’s way.
I don’t consider any skill useless, but i consider some of the passives that scale badly to be pretty horrible. Like Decorated Soldier and Veterancy.
There aren’t any completely useless skills, because they all do what they say on the surface, but there are certainly some very weak or uninteresting ones. There’s a lot of crap in pet skills but I don’t play pet builds so I’m not gonna comment on that bit even though there’s some pretty ripe garbage in there.
Mechanically broken, needs a rework to be practical at all: Blade Trap and Bloody Pox.
Underpowered: Storm Totem, Canister Bomb, Mortar Trap, Markovian’s Defense, untransmuted Phantasmal Blades, Primal Strike, Ulzuin’s Wrath, Terrifying Gaze, Supercharged.
Not really underpowered but just rarely useful: Ulzuin’s Chosen, Counter Strike, Veterancy, Terrify transmuter for War Cry, Whirling Death, Absolute Zero.
Bad but useful for proccing Devotions: Grasping Vines, Blade Spirit, Wind Devil
So useless it’s actually a top tier troll move: Fevered Rage in Multiplayer.
A lot of this is subjective, and the categories are kinda porous, as some of those could fit in several. There’s a lot of underpowered stuff in this game that would escape the list with a bit of a numbers tuneup or better itemisation to support it, but the stuff in the “rarely useful” and “broken” categories approaches legit useless status. And Fevered Rage takes the cake for making a shit tier skill into something that can harm you.
blade crap… an active skill that is so bad that assassins will never be proud of using :rolleyes:
This list below is a huge imho
Shaman - 0
Arcanist - manifestation, overload, supercharged
Nightblade - blade trap, blade spirit, belgiothian’s shears, merceles repertoire
Occultist - terrifying gaze
Demolitionist - mortar trap, concussive bomb, statick strike
Soldier - markovian’s defense, terrify, counter strike, veterancy
I’d just like to point out that 26/26 counter strike is actually good especially on a physical build not retaliation. Although physical builds in general are kinda down the drain these days
Blade Spirit is good with procs like meteors, until expansion hits at least, after that you can delete it if BS isn’t changed somehow.
Also Merciless Repertoire DOT is good on WH
For the rest it’s all quite true.
The Occultist’s pets don’t support his damage types apart from a little chaos damage. I’m sure any Occultist worth his salt would pick different pets to support him in battle.
Id like to use Bloody Pox as an alternative but its strange, its not a LMB skill, its animation is vague and there is little support for bleed within his skill set
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I know it, but, honestly, i want a little more, then a good prock machine.
In the day when i make a “false” pet build (blademaster with pets that based on character’s damage such as blade spirit, nemesis, living shadows and skeletons from revenant) I many times caught myself thinking that BS could deal a little (or not) more damage. -
Sure it good 4 poison WH, i just find unfair that situation than MR give only flat acid damage (besides % to various damage’s types), i just want more types of flat
Bloody Pox has nothing going for it… Terribly low damage values aside from maybe the poison modifier that can’t even make good use of OA because of short duration ticks, very low casting range, unreliable AoE, absurdly high energy consumption… Only the transmuter has some legit uses, Wasting is also halfway decent but then you take a look at BWC and can’t help but laugh… Even the items that support Pox are laughably bad aside from Mark of the Apostate and Signet of the Damned…
Player scaled pet skills aside from Thermite Mines are also kinda bad, and only saved for now because they can abuse celestial skill CDs. They also need ramp-up time, CDR and a slot for pet attack on the skill bar if you want to reach their not-so-impressive max potential. I’ll still use totems as one-point wonders to delete enemy AI but the others are getting off my skill bar after the xpac is released if they don’t get tremendous buffs to their damage. 
PRM is far from useless but it could still use a little help imo, like at least having it’s itemization realize the skill isn’t exclusively elemental based…
Bloody Pox is very misunderstood; it’s a Vitality damage skill first and foremost with some Bleed and some Poison. In addition, it’s meant to CC/trash clear and debuffs boss OA (or even do damage to them if you’re specced high enough and have huge -% Vit resistance).
This is because health reduction damage is dealt as Vitality damage, and can be increased/decreased depending on resistances. Bosses are highly resistant to health reduction (I think up to 95%? Can anyone confirm?), but none are completely immune AFAIK. Doing some math…
12/12 BP = 9-13% health per tick
22/12 BP = 14-18% health per tick
22/12 BP with FR = 33.75-46.25% health per tick (because total damage modified by 25%)
Since 1 cast of BP is 5 ticks, that means…
12/12 BP = leaves target at 52.7%-64.2% HP before Vitality resistance checked
22/12 BP = leaves target at 37%-47% HP before Vitality resistance checked
22/12 BP with FR = leaves target at 4.5%-12.8% HP before Vitality resistance checked.
And also, assuming used against Nemesis with 1M HP and 95% health reduction resist, but -50% Vit resistance…
12/12 BP = 33000 - 47800 damage per 5 second cast (pretty meh but not worthless)
22/12 BP = 51000 - 65700 damage per 5 second cast (still not amazing but not meh either)
22/12 BP with FR = 120300 - 161800 per 5 second cast (much more noticeable).
Keep in mind different sources of health reduction can be happening at once, and that this damage is just health reduction and not including the base vitality/bleed/poison.
The main issue with health reduction is that the bosses are a little too resistant to it. Setting boss health reduction resistance cap to 90% or even 92% would make it quite acceptable.
I think Safarel, Sober and Fluff’s posts sum it up nicely
Overall the skills that need some more love are
-Blood Pox
-Blade Trap (rework it into a trap based skill)
-Canister Bomb (damage buff and reduce the CD)
-Primal Strike (increase damage and make Torrent add to single target)
-PRM (not useless but like Sober mentioned could use some buff)
-Storm Totem (ahahahaha!!)
-Mortar Trap (could use a damage buff)
These are the active skills that i mentioned, i’d rather have the active ones fixed first for build diversity. The passives I can live without for now (though i don’t recall a lot of passives that are overly bad)
Some other threads-
Canister Bomb - http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53064
Blade Trap - http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53130
Your wish might just be granted after the SB nerf comes:p
IIRC they don’t plan to release a patch and will do whatever residual balancing is required in the expansion
Am i wrong?
From what i read in the streams is that they will release a patch right before the expansion to prepare the game for it.
Prepare it you say?
Am I the only one who thinks both the pseudo pets and the devotions commonly bound to them will need to be buffed post fix ? To tell the truth the idea of single Tempests and Whirlpools sounds incredibly underwhelming with their current values.
PRM gets the dick because Crate forgot that the skill line is actually Aether based.
@Ryzel, you can’t only look at heroboss resist values to determine resistance to hp reduction, the global resistance scaling by difficulty gives every enemy 18% health reduction resist that is additive with the heroboss value, pushing basically every boss over 100%. Now I believe that “all resist” reduction works on it, enabling the effects to work a little, but I haven’t verified it.
Blade Trap is useless for its intended purpose… And not great outside that.
Canister Bomb is so woefully weak, even before that poorly designed transmuter, that it’s almost useless.
Bloody Pox is being held back by the ever-useless health reduction stat, and a massive lack of bleed casting support. Hopefully necromancer’s items will at least fix the itemization issue, but I doubt Pox will be good until Crate reworks or removes health reduction.
People have already mentioned various “proc” skills… I can’t call those skills useful for that. Being useful as a trigger for something else doesn’t really make the skill itself useful, IMO. So all of those things people take for just proccing? Should probably be looked at as to why that’s the case.
Arcane Will, Mirror, and Nullification are all one pointers… Why? Because they just aren’t very good. Not useless, but also not good past one point. And frankly, Mirror is usually used as a better potion. I can face tank with Mirror, or a Potion, or take one point in Mirror and do both. It’s not too spectacular because of that, IMO.
The last piece of PRM makes ZERO sense to be there. Elemental is hard to gear for as is… Elemental/Aether? That drags you into the Nightblade issue, where you either use PRM specific gear, or only use part of your damage and suffer for it. Any skill that only works well with the gear that specifically supports that skill, has an issue IMO, especially in a game that strives to provide so much diversity in skills, items, and devotions. It’s also not got a T3 that works well for it, being Elemental primarily… But then, we’re lacking good T3s for multiple types.