Alright, here’s my 2 cents on a Dancing Strikes rework, cause it feels abysmal to play atm (But is very cool as a concept).
Make Attack speed scale the skill’s cooldown recovery at the core, it’s way too slow atm.
Make it a 0 mana cost skill
Rework the Hidden Blade node to “Cast Shadow Cascade on every 2nd or 3rd strike”
Make the base cooldown (Speed) of the skill 0.4, this will make it feel a lot better, especially at endgame and with the attack speed scaling it can go down to 0.2 or something, which will make it awesome to use.
Change the procs themselves to be proper AOE with a larger AOE radius by default. Something Like 90, 180, 360, very large 360-degree attacks on the 4 strikes.
Completely rework the poison section.
Remove the Mana cost from Shadow Steps, make it a mana gainer skill proper for the Bladedancer.
That’s just my two cents, but I am sure a lot of people will be happy with such a rework.
I feel like the reason Dancing Strikes sucks so much ass is because of Gladiators, honestly. 100% Melee Crit chance (not increased, just flat +100%) seems strong, but it’s really just incredibly mehdiocre.
I think this would remove a lot of the uniqueness of the skill. You can scale its “speed” already by investing into Cooldown Recovery Rate, which has a lot of opportunities (Ring base Types, Belt/Boot Suffix, Gloves, Helmet)
Even with some of the +5 mana nodes you can easily sustain this skill with some investment.
This would make the skill feel better baseline but investment would feel worse
Again, you can make DS very good with investment.
I think you want DS to be crazy good without any form of investment.
Same as above, you cna make the +mana cost work… with investment.
The 0 mana cost thing about DS is not about sustaining DS, that’s easy.
It’s about turning it into a mana gainer for other heavy hitters and sustaining the -25% damage taken while moving. Flurry absolutely destroys DS in terms of damage, but it’s not a moving skill and is an awesome gainer. Currently, DS feels almost like it has no place and that’s the problem. That’s why I am addressing these things in the first place.
If I would invest in DS, it would be as a gainer only. It’s the mastery skill, it falls short tbh.
It’s almost like you don’t want the skill to shine.
Come on, we both know it falls short currently and these changes would make it better both with and without investment.
tbh i played dancing strikes this season and i kinda agree with OP in a lot of ways, not the mana one in fact id be down to up DS mana cost by 10 to 15 if it meant making it a viable skill. DS 100% needs way more base radius, like 2x or even triple damage and scale it with attack speed. Even after investing into the radius it still felt very small (helmet mod and skill lvls). CDR did make a massive difference but it still feels really weird for gearing that attack speed doesnt scale its attack speed so you cant even attempt to build attack speed to weave in other abilities, to actually make a “blade dancer” IIRC devs wanted you to push more than one button with builds but this is counter intuitive in that regard. I feel like in its current state it just pigeon holes itself to either a shadow dagger/ailment stacking build and even then we have better options. Also ds does very little damage by itself, even with 150+added 400 multi and lots of shred/pen it has never dealt any damage close to like a measly 100 stacks of bleeds or maybe 1/8th of a shadow dagger proc. Also you are losing a lot of HP/defenses by taking CDR to scale your attack speed with it instead of just attack speed. Literally costs 1-2 defensive rolls for a nearly mandatory stat for DS and you get a very mediocre skill in return.
the only thing its actually good for is padding your stats with a 1 second buff. Which we can easily drop for an entire extra skill. its useless on nearly any build trying to be strong. I pushed to 700 corruption in cof with it and can unfortunately say i wish i spent that time on any other class because the build sucks ass for pushing any further. got 7k ward set up and a normal hp build both super sweaty while other builds just casually clear it with worse gear.
Don’t speak for me. I don’t think it falls short. It is a very unique skill with different scaling opportunities.
It has several ways to play all of which are totally viable.
I made several successful builds with it that were super fun, despise me not being a Rogue fan. I hate most Rogue builds/skills. Dancing Strikes reminds me a lot of Movementdamage builds in Marvel Heroes, particularly X-23.
Is it popular? No. Why? I think because it is different. Not because it is falling short.
If you think it falls short, that is fine. I did push it to 300 corruption without any issues. Especially compared to other builds I never had the feeling it falls short. Your stat priorities are just different (getting %Inc. CDR as early as possible is important)
But Attack Speed does scale it. It gets %more dmg from attack speed.
CDR is incredibly strong for other skills as well, defensive skills to be precise.
Smoke Bomb, Decoy. Having just 40% CDR from the 2 suffixes feels good already but you can go even more with the helmet and glove implicits + Opal Rings. The last few CDR you can get don’t do anything for Dancing Strikes so going all in is little less worth it, but for Decoy and Smoke Bomb it is definitely worth it.
It really falls short late game.
Heavy and another guy around here don’t think so, and I don’t know why they bother being against it every time someone asks for a rework or to tune it up.
In a game with hundreds of OP things and builds and other skills they are worried about making dancing strikes a little bit better.
Don’t need to take away it’s uniqueness, but it actually sucks big time being a specific skill of a so cool class. Bladedancer deserves better.
And late game is? Arround level 70? Or do you talk about endgame 300C according to EHG?
Right now everything that isn’t a meta build because of insane numbers, bugs, or unique interactions seems weak when it isn’t in reality. Mike said it so often that EHG is aiming for 300C as endgame and a lot of builds are simply overperforming like crazy.
around 200~300c I would say. When the build could be done and start min/max to challenge yourself and maybe achieve better corruption/rewards, trying 500c, maybe a bit more.
I know there are others, but Dancing strikes is really in a bad spot
it underperforms against most of the new skills and interactions in the game.
Every new patch shines this.
Were you against the new OP warlock skills ? Are they balanced around 300c ?
Makes no sense your strictness to this skill.
Same as above
I bother to tweak things up to the power they deserve.
I bother that Dancing Strikes is so clunky when trying to interact with other rogue skills it definitely needs a rework/ overhaul.
The same way runic invocation is powerfull and has great sinergies to make other skills better. The same way every falconer skill has good sinergies and feels good to use.
I think dancing strike and few other rogue abilities require “shadow do something” or “shadow dagger proc” to do damage. May be I am wrong. How much damage from crits you got from dancing? Kinda like it, but switched to shadow daggers.
reasons why I switched:
they are slow
small aoe
mirage have invul, thats huge
you are correct technically in both cases but in reality it just doesnt work. any % increase in damage on something that does no damage already is worthless. besides its also a fraction of your attack speed, and yes CDR is nice for smoke bomb but can you really justify taking it over a hybrid health roll or hybrid armor/crit reduc? or ward bases on rings for any build that uses ward? it just feels like a trap not only on paper but in game as well. you literally lose like 350+hp for maybe 3 seconds of smoke bomb and .2 off dancing strikes. DS literally just needs more stats than is available on your gear to be good it seems or perfect 3lp+ legendary items.
Try DS in higher level monos 300 is not end game at all, i am pretty sure every build can do 300s with decent gear, even cursed ones. If thats the case why would the ever balance classes since 300 corruption is attainable by anything. I would say that is like 75% to end game, end game being at 500+ where the bonus unique chance u get from pushing corruption falls off. Even then DS is fine, the problem is that compared to other skills, like literally any other rogue skill in particular it is bad and every build with it is a meme, because its bad, and with the same investment any other build would be doing much higher corruption, faster and safer.
After playing a bleed version, poison version, cold dmg frostbite health regen version, and ward/shadow dagger version( felt by far the best) I could have just made a literally any other melee build and been much better off like 1000 more corruption better off.
