Not AAR lol. Falmes of ingnaffar or Drain Essence. AAR needs a buff
Any 2 Handed Ranged build then? I tried a lvl 15 Shaman with 2H ranged, but the autoattack is just so boring. Doesnt seem to be good at clearing packs.
EDIT:
I currently play one, and it is my best performing char evar.
It’s disproportionate because the ‘other builds’ did not have as much of a foundation as Cold/Frostburn SB did. Pierce did not have a major source of Flat Damage from an Exclusive Skill like Star Pact (which actually gives a DoT, which Pierce outright totally lacks). Pierce did not have a bunch of flat damage available on hands, rings, or helmets. It didn’t have too much flat damage in Devotions. And, therefore, Pierce SS was hit a lot harder than Cold/FB SS.
The nerfs to Shadow Strike were still entirely justified/healthy for the game.
If you want Pierce SS to be good, you don’t buff Shadow Strike, because then Cold SS gets even better, relatively speaking, and so Pierce SS falls further behind. Instead, you offer Pierce SS the foundation that Cold has. You give it flat Pierce damage on an Exclusive Skill…like Aura of Conviction. You improve sources of flat Pierce in Devotion and itemization. You finally bloody make Bleed the DoT component to Pierce and scatter it around accordingly.
What if I told you I tried a pierce SS infiltrator already long ago (kinda like kidpids from recently) and a fully polished pierce SS did less dmg than the one geared for cold but with pierce devos remained(lazy tired testing), followed by dedicating to cold devos too and getting 50% more total dmg out of the cold version than the pierce one. All of this basically because you can do loads of pierce>cold conversion
Very healthy:D
Joking aside i’m fine with more pierce SS mods(DM helm doesn’t cut it) to route this whole issue. Sounds fair to all aspects discussed
@eisprinzessin. sure it’s perfectly fine while you level. But at lvl 100? 
To be perfectly honest, I think it is shitty that the devs nerfed it this hard. You are saying its for the health of the game but then ask yourself this. The health of what? This isnt an mmo, there is no competition, no market, there isnt any “health”. I play purely solo self found single player. Reading through the comments it seems like they were trying e-sport balance it ( 
) and in the process completely ruined the skill. Im not happy.
EDIT: And before somebody suggests, oh yeah the cold version still rocks, no, Im not interested in the cold version whatever that is. I wanted to make my own build. Well remake sort of (not entirely I was a Blademaster back then now Im a Spellbreaker)
From one of my reddit posts:
This gets brought up a lot.
“It’s a single player game, why does it need to be balanced?!?!”
Well, for sales, mostly. Suppose a prospective buyer starts poking around in the community, asking how build diversity is. If something is wildly overpowered and everyone is using it, that’s all they’re gonna see and that doesn’t look too good. Likewise, it may lead some to leave bad reviews on Steam due to a lack of build diversity.
Thankfully, this isn’t the case with GD. The vast majority of changes Crate has made (95%+) have, in my opinion, been very healthy for the game, and build diversity is the game’s greatest feature.
That’s what I’m referring to when I say ‘health’. If people look at the game and see there’s not much build diversity and everyone is funneled into one avenue of play, they probably won’t pick the game up. Fewer sales in turn means less content as the game becomes less profitable. So even you, as a singleplayer…player…ought to be concerned with and appreciate how balanced various things are in GD.
Edit:
And no one’s stopping you, not even those evil developers at Crate. Just because something is not as powerful as it once was does not mean that that something is no longer viable.
But it is stopping me! Im lvl 84 and my build isnt working. It used to be good and strong now I barely make by. Sometimes dying like 2-3 times in 10 minutes.
According to the wiki it used to be 420% Weapon Damage at lvl 25/16. Now its only 354%! Thats a huge drop!
This is by no means a fast kill and I haven’t touched this build in a while but Pierce Shadow Strike is still good
So go for it if you want to.
ur confusing the guy:D
Huh? But he thinks SS pierce is too weak. It’s only relatively weak. Performance wise nothing is weak in this game.
Okay maybe Spectral Strike but besides that I can’t think of any
I have no other level 100 char to compare it with, but this is by far my best char.
I don’t know anything about pre-nerf Spellbreakers, never played them. But I made what turned out to be sub-godtier spellbreaker with Soulrend (apparently weaker than dw with sickly rolled daggers), and it’s pretty ridiculous.
Here is the character.
Yes, 12 seconds Mad Queen kill as opposed to Korba Trickster’s with insanely rolled MI swords 6 seconds, but I bet my ass it’s a faster farmer than a trickster (because trickster has much less mobility and got couple of seconds of wind-up with Savagery and Wind Devils). 1.3 seconds cooldown on SS, I just blink my thru any area and everything dies in 1-2 hits. And it’s literally immortal in Main Campaign, you shit on every nemesis and boss with double mirror and 16% adtch + ghoul.
I would say it’s a god-tier build still, and I have 6 polished and min-maxed builds of all kinds and purposes.
So complaining about how spellbreakers were nerfed is really silly, imo, and unfair to literally every other build in-game.
How do you have 11k hp? I have only 5.2k at 84 
Such a struggle And I dont have the dmg now to compensate. I guess RNG doesnt like me in gear? I guess so. I have shitty gear I guess.
Still SS could use some love! Buf buff buff 
Well it’s good that you like it and congrats on working it vs nemeses:p
If you would compare it to acid SS or cold infiltrator SS, then those would again be by far your best chars again as far as SS goes
The reason cold SS got so powerul so suddenly was conversion from alkamos rings, that’s basically it. Now in Aom we have even more of that conversion.
No matter how much we talk about health of the game and SS we are pointing in the wrong direction basically
Anyway, idk why i’m writing about it, need sleep, it’s been discussed and exhausted looong ago:)
@OP. Here is an old pierce SS build You can easily adapt it to AoM provided you get the gear. sry i can’t help more but I dropped trying to update pierce SS after testing infiltrator version
I guess I should record a video to showcase how SS does not need a buff.
eisprinzessin’s character actually has 12,6k hp.
How do you have 5,2k hp at level 84? That’s the hp of a level 50. Even with subpar gear, most of my characters get like 9k at level 60, more depending on the masteries. The absolute low i can get with a character at leve 60 is 7k and that’s with a Warlock. And Warlock is the combination of the two masteries with the lowest hp potential.
This seems like more of a case of an unoptimized build than a skill being underpowered.
we’re talking about pierce here:p
Didn’t Chton made a build (because Chton made a lot of builds), pierce-SS infiltrator in a blue set that has ridiculous damage?