Trying to make a viable blade dancer, running into the following issues with what I’m doing:
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The Blade Dancer tree has a passive that causes stacks of “Rhythm” that increase attack speed by 5% each. Upon examination, this does appear to be working, however it does not have a buff bar icon. At all. I thought it wasn’t working at all at first until I put 5 points in it and played around with it.
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Passive Rhythm shares its name with Dancing Steel Rhythm, and this should probably be adjusted.
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Dancing Steel Rhythm just… doesn’t work. Importantly, it’s not bugged. It just doesn’t work. From what testing I’ve been doing there’s two major problems with it that are related:
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The ability is animation locked, but the proc for Rhythm continues running while we’re animation locked. We don’t actually have 2 seconds to reproc it. We have 2 seconds - (animation lock + cooldown) to reproc it.
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Because of point 1, the fact that the damage multiplier from Dancing Strikes Rhythm is global, you can’t capitalize on that except with ability procs directly from it. You simply can’t aim and cast one, much less two separate abilities in time.
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The animation from the fourth strike of Dancing Strikes takes so long and is so inaccurate that it is singlehandedly capable of dropping the DS Rhythm stack. There is a ~0.5 second roll forward, then a narrow thrust forward, then after both of those things, it blossoms into a side swing. The back aoe portion of the side swings are so late that they cannot maintain DS Rhythm.
I’ve been trying to really utilize Dancing Strikes as a viable way to carve through lower HP monsters and “charge” up for using the larger strikes with Sync + Shadow Cascade. This “feels” like the way the build should be used.
But since Dancing Strikes can’t be used to effectively regen mana (not a 0 cost skill), can’t reliably chain abilities (10% chance to proc Shadow Cascade with a set attack speed isn’t cutting it, no pun intended), and can’t pass one of its two main multipliers (in Rhythm) to other abilities, I can’t find a way to justify its usage. It eats too much time for too little gain over just dashing and cascading.
It needs something. I’m not 100% sure what it is. But it’s painful right now, which is a shame for a class that has such an otherwise good Press Button Receive Fun ratio.