Not sure if this is common knowledge by now but today I tried Falconer and discovered interesting ‘‘combo’’.
Unique amulet Gambler’s Fallacy (quest reward from Act 2) makes it so your crit chance is 140% or something like that and ‘‘Go For The Eyes’’ Falconry node applies 75% total crit you have to Falcon. This results in Falcon having permanent 100% crit as long as you don’t crit yourself. Falcon Strikes attack does not count as your own hit.
I am just running around and Falcon 1 shots everything by itself. Falcon Strikes with all hits critting obliterates any rare/big pack.
Not sure if this is working as intended but just putting it out there.
It’s not a snapshot that is set on spawn though. At least from what I observed so far. If you do crit yourself - you lose amulet buff, Falcon updates dynamically and will not have 100% crit anymore.
Problem is that Falcon Strike (and I assume same goes for Aerial Assault and Dive Bomb) does not count as your own hit. So you basically have double damage the moment you unlock Mastery and equip Falcon + Amulet (as long as you don’t hit yourself which is absolutely doable by picking these 3 skills).
Perhaps this is how minions worked with Amulet before Falconer but there is no way this is intended for 1.0 version of the game.
I am hitting for 9-12 k at lvl 40 with a Movement skill (Aerial Assault, half skill points still left to boost dmg scaling). Any attack done by Falcon always crits including skill specific ‘‘special skills’’ like Feather Knives, Featherstorm etc. This is my 3rd character in 1.0 after Runemaster and Warlock. Experience is like playing another game. Don’t even get me started on power level of Beastmaster companions compared to Falcon.
Absolutely degenerate mechanics and playstyle but I am loving it . Fully expect this to be nerfed.
The issue partially is Amulet itself imo. I played in early beta, leveled all available classes (besides Paladin and Forge Guard) and never understood why your crit with this Amulet goes over 100%. Obviously there should be a simple cap on it of 100% (still would be broken now 1.0 with things like ‘‘75% of your total crit gets added’’ etc).
Amulet is just too damn strong in general for leveling imo. I always feel like it’s best to equip it on 90% of builds (obviously builds that can crit to begin with). Guaranteed crits every few seconds obviously promotes picking high cost/high damage skills and just gathering 2-3 packs and blowing them up. So Glacier type of skills will always outclass any other alternative. Couple it with how Campaign is in LE with mob density and placement/aggro of monsters (actually not just Campaign but entire game). At least that’s been my experience.
I believe much better solution would be to use the concept of ‘‘increase critical chance until you crit’’ mechanic. That would still play into ‘‘fantasy’’ of that unique and fullfill it’s role. And ofc fix all the other issues with Falconer at the same time.
Yeah, the Falcon’s version of snaphotiing is a but different in that it periodically updates. Falcon Strikes, Dive Bomb and Aerial Assault all have the minion tag so they aren’t you hitting.
Only if the minion received some amount of the player crit chance, which I think is only the case for Ballista. But given how the skills & amulet work, yes, this is intended. Whether it’s balanced or not is a different kettle of fish…
Possibly, or everything else gets lifted up & then mobs balanced around the new normal. Or somewhere in between.
Only for slow hitting builds. For fast hitting builds it’ll be a net loss, the balancing point is what % of your hits fall into the “downtime” of the 100% crit buff, if its more than half (which it will likely be for the majority of builds) then it’s a net loss.
If the amulet was as strong as you feel it is then it would receive far more widespread use than it does.
That would make Disintegrate even worse than it currently is, but that skill likely needs a rework/buff anyway. Just adding a flat 100% base crit was the easiest way they could make things effectively auto-crit in the past.
I think the devs know about this. I’ve been running this as a Pure Falconer build and avoiding crit chance as much as possible on my gear and added decoy + remote detonation which kinda avoids resetting the crit.
It’s fun, and I crit for over 1 million with dive bomb easily every time. But there’s a lot of synergies I’m missing out on. The devs likely built all this synergy around the falcon and ballistas and ways of giving crit chance + crit multiplier and + added flat damage to your pets because otherwise it would be a no brainer to use the amulet.
Since I’m not hitting I am not speccing into Avian Arsenal nor Exposed Weakness. I also dropped the Talon of Valor since it’s not possible to proc it. But it’s more powerful with Merophage as a stat stick. I think it would easily be an S tier build with the Flow stacks as a combo but they are currently bugged for falcon skills.
it is, because you give up a lot to do it actually.
Minions dont have terrible amulet options, deathrattle exists, as do just good exalted amulets.
You can farm up the soulfire gamblers fallacy to get some lp, but thats a lot of work.
I used the amulet with ballistas in 0.9 and it was a challenge because I couldnt use a mana gen skill or id brick my fallacy crit rate.
Many of the falcon nodes give generous amounts of buffs/damage/cooldown recovered when you fight along side the falcon, with gamblers you cant. You have to make sure you get no random procs that will hit either!
I think its balanced unlike say disintegrate, because falconer is more then viable without gamblers cheese. Gamblers cheese is just an option.
Is there an easier way to hit 100% crit chance than equipping 1 piece of gear? I wasn’t talking about whether or not there were opportunity costs with that (as there should be & are).
Unfortunately Disintegrate is garbage without it (& the other item), unless they’ve reworked it recently.
Well you can skill the falcon to get 75% of your crit chance while it has inital crit chance by itself so 100% crit chance 24/7 comes naturaly if you play a crit build. Yes the amulet is nice to have 100% crit half the time but I realy don’t see a need for it given how easy it is to get 100% crit chance anyway.
Ye I ‘‘chanced’’ Talon of Valor with my first rune yesterday and was super happy to swap from Umbral Blades to Explosive Trap to buff up Falcon. Only to realize you actually nerf your damage even with this bow specifically tailored for Falconer (purely due to Gambler’s Fallacy interaction).
I don’t believe for a second there were any synergies built within skills or passives to ‘‘counter’’ one Unique item. It’s just suuuuuper old beta unique, probably one of earliest one along with leech gloves from same quest and Falconer was added as last class that wasn’t given enough time to be properly tested. There is A LOT of weird stuff with it’s skills/passives/bugs etc. Infinite and multiply Smoking Bombs with Shadow Falcons were discovered like 2 days after release.
Though tbh lots of bugs with skills from beta are still not fixed - including stuff that got reported on forums with devs response in a thread - for example Flame Ward on Mage can proc while stunned and bypass cooldown completely; was super surprised to still see that while leveling a Runemaster.
What is this Merophage tech exactly? I am not familiar with how this unique works. Or do you just use it for generic 100-170 increased damage?
Yes, the 170% global damage increase, combined with 4 other pure damage increase stats you can put onto it. You need to be incredibly lucky to have a good one though because it can randomly roll any tiers of the aspects you want on it.
In the end I found it’s even better to go dual weild due to the “Talon Knives” node in Dive Bomb especially.
. Fully expect this to be nerfed.