Skills like blade trap, blade barrier, and horn of gandarr are fantastic skills, they’re useful, don’t take a lot of points, and blade trap has really high damage and unique mechanic as a whole, but these skills have very little support, for blade trap and horn, like, rimetongue? And still the set primarily focuses on cold grenado so they get pretty mid support, also would be cool if there was a blade trap set that kept it’s original damage types (vitality and bleeding) instead of rimetongue making it pierce cold, and for blade barrier, it saved my ass a million times, it’s such a great skill yet I genuinely found like 3 items supporting it, it’s arguably one of if not THE most undersupported skill in the game
I’ll appreciate any feedback and let me know if I missed another skill like this
I think there are a bunch of skills that need to be addressed in their base form before there can be much interest in any item support for them.
Skills like Olexra’s Flash Freeze and Blade Trap are mechanically awkward because they get less effective the tougher the enemy you fight, to the point of being useless against Nemesis and Superbosses because of their high CC resistance.
Blade Barrier is just a mess. The self-CC just kills the skill.
Horn of Gandarr has limited range and low damage so it kind of sucks as both a debuff and an attack skill.
Storm Box is just overall kind of too awkward. Its individual damage is not great and the whole schtick of having multiple active at once so the AoE’s and tethers overlap is just not a thing with its single target application and cooldown.
Trozan’s Sky Shard has quite a lot of support. But the skill is being held back by its mechanics and base damage.
Outside of these, there are some skills that are decent, but they just lack sets/support items to really use them:
Stun Jacks has almost nothing for alternate damage types.
Canister Bomb lacks much support outside of its 2 sets.
Mortar Trap is just a secondary in the single set it is featured in.
Ravenous Earth has little support (Why doesn’t it have a modifier on Dark One’s set? Why does it have almost 0 support for one of its innate damage types of Acid and instead being mostly FIRE support? Why does Foul Eruption exist?)
The mere fact you quoted this thread title right here might mean you are considering this issue?
( Although this might be the time to state that i disagree with about 50% of the spells the OT listed- and others hopefully as well)
Technically this could open a completely new possible direction of discussion. Because what ive, personally, always felt is that GrimDawn mainly not only enabled but rewarded exploration and experimentation Why not try to build upon e.g a certain constellation setup alone and find some items matching this style of play?
What might have worked to a certain degree 1-2 expansions before doesnt work at all nowerdays - what can upon my based opinion, at least partially, be blamed upon relying flat damage values for the damage calculation in the early days. It worked for quite a while but nowerdays the system falls somewhat apart.
Example:
Wendigo Devotion ( the principle can be applied to most other devotions)
Deals a flat amount of vitality damage - scaling only on your % vitality dmg.
The theoretical ceiling of this damage is only limited by your % vitality damage and crit damage / resistance shred. Even when you somehow maximize those stats, the skills participation in the overall damage dealt will be probably < 2% - the same percentage as in other, even high-end devotion proccs nowerdays.
But …
What if we recalculated every single devotion procc to be based to a certain degree upon the %WD - and in terms of power level matched to the FoA ascendant levels?
In a perfect world, id enjoy going doing the Light of Empyrion route and be rewarded for the procc by things around me evaporating from existance when i build accordingly. Right now, a single auto attack hit will deal WAY (im talking multitudes) more damage in 99% of the current builds - something which occurs several times per second instead of once every 2 seconds or so.
I’m not sure a forum moderator has a whole lot of input on game development…
Their concern is more about sorting the forums and promoting discussion (In this case by aggregating similar threads together)
Because we really need to shaft Casters more than they already are by the nature of not getting ADCtH unless it’s directly shoved onto their skills?
It’s already lame that the Ele RR from Viper constellation is based on WD%, we don’t need actual devotion procs to do the same.
The main thing with devo procs is that they’re free and cast alongside your actual skills.
It’d be pretty dumb if your actual skills were irrelevant and all your damage came from devo procs (Where the entire “Build” procedure is ignoring damage types and itemisation for any skills and just look at what maximises proc frequency - Namely things that multi-hit, especially in an AoE)
Maybe in GD2 they could have devos that grant activated skills that could be built around, with associated itemisation. But as is, the fact that every devo ability is a proc that occurs concurrently to your skills means they’re always going to be balanced as second fiddle.
Even more so when your average build gets like 2-4 damaging devo procs so their damage has to be watered down even more so that multi-procs still don’t overtake your actual skills.
