Spellblade is in a bit of a confusing state. It’s been my favorite class(because I usually just commit to the first class that obsesses me and spellblade happened to be it).
Why do I think spellblade is in a confusing state? Many reasons. First being the lack of built in survivability mechanics the class has to work with. They have nerfed nearly all of the ward on hit mechanics from items(capping their generation per second) and spellblade especially suffered from this. Basically your only true defensive option(speaking solely from the classes existing tech options not items) is to hit as fast as you possibly can to generate ward. This makes spellblade often feel like you are in a constant ward per hit Race vs incoming dmg. This makes spellblade extremely vulnerable to dot damage that occurs when you can’t hit anything, as well as any boss invulnerability phase that still puts out damage. Now that they fixed the overleech bug, spellblade has few ways to fix the above dilemma and zero built in ways from its own passives. With the overleech bug you could just use that and handle all persistent massive dots that lasted a few seconds after combat. Currently the ward per second from intelligence on the spellblade tree is nowhere near effective enough.
The result is you have to almost entirely solve defense with gear, while many other classes have built in effective defensive solutions that are amplified by gear.
Spellbades biggest plus is how it basically comes with door dash delivery crit cap. However, getting crit capped in this game is actually not difficult at all. Making this a rather minute advantage over other classes.
The other dilemma with spellblade is the massive imbalance that exists between its own skills. I’ve put over 600 hours in the class, I’ve done spreadsheets, I’ve tested every variation I could think of with every spellblade skill. The result is that no matter how the cookie crumbles if you place shatter strike at S tier, then the other spellblade skills are d tier. Now before people come at me in arms saying they managed to kill abberoth with flame reave and that it’s not D tier. I’m simply talking about its strength relative to shatter strike. It’s just not even close. The most dps optimized flame reave build cannot, and does not compete with an equivalently optimized shatter strike build. The gap is significant to say the least.
Why is that an issue? It makes players feel forced to play shatterstrike when they play the class. Ok fine you are not truly forced, you can choose to do less than half the dps of shatter strike if you want to(facts), but the massive gap still puts pressure on player freedom specifically for players that want their character to perform the best it can.
Lastly, the class has a built in conflict on its passive tree where it leads the player to believe they need to use a sub 10 mana skill, and above 10 mana skill in tandem to do damage. Contrary to what the tree may lead you to believe this is not the case sadly. That dangled carrot of incredible “more” damage to your high mana skill for each time you use your low mana skill is just straight up worse than itemizing to use your high mana skill repeatedly. Why??? Well a major reason is your low mana skills suck and do no damage compared to shatter strike remember? Using a shit skill 10 times to do a single massive hit of shatter strike/flame reave is just worse than using your strong skill all 10 times.
They will eventually need to rework this class again defensively and probably nerf shatter strike if they buff the classes passive tree in any way offensively. But even more so they need to rework the class mechanically. The build up of low cost skill use and high cost spend mechanics that the class is going for doesn’t actually work meaningfully by comparison and it feels bad to have your far right(ultimate like passive nodes) sit empty and useless. Sorry for the rant for any victim that actually read all this.