Dancing Strikes as a stand-alone skill feels lackluster

Feedback and Suggestions
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Trying in any way possible to make the bladedancer’s skill “Dancing Strikes” to work, however due to the nature of the skill, which is single attacks which do not scale with attack speed, instead you get 1/3 scaling increase of flat damage increase per attack speed.

This means that the numbers coming out of dancing strike on its own are just incredible thrash. Even when buffing yourself with as much things as possible and trying the “viper enhanced” attacks you deal barely any damage with this. It seems that this skill’s function is only to keep rhythm stacks up for other skills (which then trigger shadow blade in most cases), or to provide a fighting arena so that lethal mirage can actually deal some damage inside of that.

The whole skill tree as such feels lackluster due to the failed scaling built in. As a solution, I’d like to offer a couple of suggestions. Obviously the numbers on these aren’t 100% worked out, as we have little information to actual numbers under the hood. So if the numbers seem somewhat off, try to look for the idea behind the numbers, instead of focusing purely on the numbers.

  • The skill hits like a wet noodle, has mediocre dexterity scaling, scales horrible (1/3) with attack speed, and the base damage is almost none existent. The only way to make this whole skill do some damage is when it inevitably procs shadow dagger through the investment of 5 skill points. This doesn’t really make dancing strikes any better, it’s simply a testament to how broken shadow dagger is at the moment.
    No matter how much you focus on making this skill to do any damage, it is 100% a support skill that ends up moving you into places you’d rather not be. This is the bladedancer’s baseline skill, as such, it should have some oomph to it. Even if you spec into flow (passive investment) and somehow get 100% critical hit chance on hit (which you have to get through items or passives, because the skill tree provides nothing), it deals horrible damage. Simple suggestion to add crit scaling into this, allow it to double dip into crit mult somehow, or strongly increase the flat damage, and please, please improve the attack speed scaling.
  • Build in scaling for “on hit effects” into the core of the skill based on attack speed. This alone will make this a lot more fun to play around with. The formula doesn’t need to be 1-to-1 scaling, but increased attack speed should increase the chance of procs of this skill, since the attacks per seconds are almost static for this skill. Overall: more attack speed should mean more on-hit effects, including this skill, it even has on-hit chance skills built into the skill tree.
  • Poison and bleed scaling are horrible, mostly in part due to the above point in regards to on-hit abilities. To increase the viability of the poison build, I would suggest to modify the silent death’s node to simply add +100% poison chance for dancing strikes and swap the damage type from dancing strikes to poison, and make physical shred within the tree become poison shred. In regards to the bleeds, my point was made in the previous post, currently it just serves as a way to buff lethal mirage’s bleeds when you use that to actually do some damage.
  • Shadow daggers being a 1 point wonder: making every attack apply a stack of shadow dagger. And then throwing knives has a super weird 30% chance to apply throwing stars on a second and fourth hit. I’d much rather have this scale with attack speed as well, so it’s possible to get to 100%, or simply make it so that this has a guaranteed proc of throwing stars, but only comes out on the 4th attack.

That’s all, I’d love to love dancing strikes, but right now it’s such a 100% filler move that most of the time could be time better spent running around avoiding attacks that it’s a bit sad.
Something that has this great set of visual, which should be the “baseline” skill for rogues, but ends up being a wet noodle both in terms of straight up damage and chance to apply is very lackluster imho.

edit: fixes grammar and actually wrote sentences

2 Likes
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The positive here is that Dancing Strikes allows you to hit while maintaining the movement status, so 25% less damage with the proper passive. That’s quite decent, but doesn’t make up for all the skill flaws.

Even being conservative, the skill needs just a bit of love.

I agree is sad the skill is quite underwhelming, being Bladedancer’s signature skill.

The attack speed scaling, could be 1 each two attack speed at least. (BTW please fix base weapon attack speed not working in MP)

To reach Masaja’s Dagger you need to go through contaminate, that deletes your phys pen, also you need to build some stacks of poison elsewhere, not that easy.

Close Combat: even without downside, 10% more per point is a bit low. Then you have the downside to deal with… less move speed in a skill that you cannot boost the move speed…

Deadly Waltz: 10% shred per point. Just too low of a value to consider. Should be 15 or 20% per point at the very least…

Hidden Blade: cascade trigger is strong, but only 10% in a skill you cannot get below 0.5 secs…

Rhythm: 2 secs duration is very hard to maintain, in practice I got out of Rhythm all the time, so easily, and you are supposed to build 8-10 stacks… Should be 2.5 secs or 3.

Perfect Choreography and Shadow steps: 5 extra mana points is just too much, should be double the base (3) or something like that…

Cutting Corners: Same with deadly waltz, 15% shred is nothing, more so with lack of an effective way to speed up the attacks. 25-30% could be reasonable…

Resolute Technique: 15% increased per point… Seriously? increased, and in this magnitudes?

Invigorating moves: 25 health per point seems meh, but also only triggers on third attack, so meme perk.

I believe I did a similar feedback long time ago.

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Really? Getting poison chance as a Rogue is difficult?

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No is you use a dagger, still you need 2-3 full stacks per hit to get into somewhere with that perk… And you are gearing up only for a single perk.

Another great perk with a big “but”, IMO.

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Which is still trivial for a Rogue. My full poison exploding Umbral Blades build was getting ~11 stacks per hit.

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Well, maybe I’m missing something, let me know how you get those stacks without going out of your way.

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As I said, I was going balls to the wall on poison chance, but 200%-300% is easy. You are kinda shoehorned into going 1 or 2 daggers but if you’re willing to DW daggers you can get 150% from Weapon of Choice (which you’d probably want regardless & likely has a significant impact on your weapon choice), 50% per dagger from Blood Serpent’s Blades (up to 100%, these 2 nodes would get you 250% if DWing daggers) & 80% with Poison Tipped. That’s without using Chitin Daggers (20%-60% per dagger) or putting poison chance on your weapons (up to 52% at t5 so an additional ~100% for 2 affixes). There’s also a small amount from the Venom Phial relic (up to 22%), poison per dagger as a helm prefix (up to 40% per dagger) & poison chance on a 2x2 idol (up to 33% per dagger).

And to get to Majasa’s Dagger node you pass through the bleed to poison conversion node which effectively allows you to use swords as well/instead of daggers & there’s a massive amount of bleed chance for the Rogue with swords (especially if you go the Disembowel route which will give you up to 5 stacks for a few passive points which should be a viable route to benefit from Majasa’s Dagger.

If you don’t want to get as much poison/bleed chance as you can, it’s very easy to pick up some.

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Lectured. Ok I’ll buy it. Thanks.

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All of this is 100% true, however it fails to notice 2 things: dancing strikes still ends up dealing physical damage, and you’re speccing with everything into poison and you end up dealing barely damage with dancing strikes’ physical damage. The other thing is that dancing strikes, even with all the poison adding is a horribly slow move to use, so you end up doing barely any applications.

You can simply use a synchronized strike and then follow that up with umbral blades, and get much more poison application.

The exact same applies for bleeds. The only usecase for the dancing strikes is to prepare a setup: get a cage down, get some stacks (maybe ~6 at most) of your dot-empowered stacks with: trickling cuts.

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I think the skill is fine as it is since it provides nice defensive kit and shadow generation … but as a stand alone skill yes it’s laking … I think adding like 20 flat damage and +2 skill level to Gladiator’s Oath might make this skill much better on it’s own.

Edit: I didn’t notice Dancing Strikes have only 100% damage effectiveness … maybe make it 150% or something :frowning: .

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Dancing Strikes scales with CDR, which worked wonders before 0.9. (going from 0.5 to 0.4 seconds cooldown significantly made the skill better.

I am not sure how the game is rounding or if it’s just a display thing.

But with the new CDR affixes and helmet you should be able to get to 0.33 seconds cooldown which should make it feels waaaaaay faster

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They have said before that the game doesn’t round except for display purposes.

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I was astonished with how little you actually ‘dance’ with a skill called ‘dancing’ strikes. You move, what, two feet? I assumed it would be this skill where you could bounce from target to target, constantly letting you ‘dance’ out of range of the mobs counter attack. After three, it would go on cool down and would be a movement skill. Ideally applying some status effect with every hit. I’m thinking like ten feet with every jump. And a node to make me jump behind a target. (and a pony! with a single horn!)

And I’d be weaving in other attacks which would actually be doing damage.

But we got this.

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I tested CDR by recording video and playing it back frame by frame for various CDR from 0% to 90%.

The cooldown does not seem to round. It gets faster all the way up to 90%. So you would think more is always better. But after 50%, the animation becomes a bottleneck.

From 0% to 40%, the cooldown gets quicker and the animation more quickly changes to the next one.

40% to 50% is very little benefit and not worth it.

From 50% onwards, the cooldown recovers when you are still in the middle of an animation that cannot be canceled/transitioned into the next one. One of those animations is when you jump thru the air. You have to wait till you land.

So the time it takes to complete the 4 attack combo is the same at 50% and at 90% CDR.

4 Likes
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Never tested it since the addition of all these new CDR sources, but if this is true, this probably needs to be brought up to the devs attention.

Because this would be a shame.

Being able to scale Dancing Strieks with CDR is really neat and this would remove teh top end of investment.

1 Like
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Thanks for testing this out.

If anyone is interested in testing how cooldown recovery speed is calculates, is base speed divided by 1. + percent (well that’s the easy way). So if you have 40% total: 0.7 / 1.40, that is exactly 0.5 in this case. For display it rounds to the nearest one decimal.

The change from 0.6 that you could achieve before, to 0.5 is quite noticeable.

1 Like
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