So had a chance to start my rogue finally. looking at the skills I really wanted to do a silent, whirling dervish. blades and shurikens everywhere. I went down the blade shield/floating blades path thinking that would be cool.
BUT. I’ve noticed that the moment the shurikens in your circle hit something they get consumed?
My question what is the point of having a duration. Is this intended because it seems like the duration is sort of wasted and thus Floating Blades is irrelevant? It also seems to be useless for the Blade Armor node because it says you get % Armor per Shuriken spinning around you.
Just seems the moment you hit melee all of this things drop almost immediately because they’re hitting stuff and getting consumed.
Yeah, I figured that out as I was tooling around with the skill.
It’s sort of intuitive and not intuitive given the game has other melee skills, like Ring of Shields that orbit you that don’t get consumed. I mean, I don’t think its a huge deal and might in the long run not really be worth it, but maybe the base skill could warrant a “each shuriken is consumed on strike unless it pierces” or something like it in the tool tip.
Or maybe I just need more coffee.
Anyway, digging my shadow assassin right now. Looking forward to hitting endgame with it.
Yeah, I know, but they have a similar mechanic/feel which doesn’t make it 100% intuitive that the shurikens when taking the circle node with duration don’t get burned out.
As I said, it’s a nitpick. I’m probably the only one that will ever have an issue (and a very minor one at that). It’s feedback and I have no problems if this one gets taken or left in the bin.
Frankly the bigger issue is that Blade Shield doesn’t stack like the tooltip says it does, and apparently can’t hit the same target more than once per shuriken if you spec for 100% pierce on top.
Well, I’m running with it so I’m going to try to keep an eye out for that happening. I hadn’t noticed but I was more intrigued by how to make it stay up. Thanks for the heads up. Has a bug report been filed about this?
Another thing, hopefully this is also rather not intended or bug, they get destroyed when they hit any obstacle like wall, barrel etc literally any object. It’s really annoying, I really would like it to be a kind of a PoE blade vortex playstyle, so you can sustain it with duration tag.
Would be also great if there was any indicator how many stacks do we have currently, again same as with PoE BV. I can’t even tell if it stacks properly just by looking at the visuals, I could swear I can only see three shurikens at most
I have the feeling that a bunch of interactions with this skill need an overhaul. I testet a lot of combinations and stumbled over the following things that seem buggy or atleast poorly communicated by tooltips.
-Blade Shield not stacking at all like the tooltip suggests
-Every Blade is only able to hit once even though i have 100% pierce
-If you throw blades with Shift they stack on Top of existing ones if you do it the other way around and have already Blades from Shift and cast Shuriken again they get overwritten (easy to see with chakram and same interaction with the small throwing stars).
-Same with the proc from Dancing Strikes (Cast first + proc from DS = they stack ; Proc first + Cast = proc blades vanish)
-Super annoying terrain interactions where blades dissapear or won’t even cast properly.
-Blade Shield and Ricochet not working together despite tooltip not saying so. Without any further information I would expect Blades that swirl around me to Ricochet to a nearby enemy after hitting another mob.
All in all I was pretty hyped when seeing the skill was able to be some kind of Blade Vortex and scales with duration and stacking blades but most points mentioned above just gut the ability. No stacking! Duration is useless if Blades only hit once! And walls eating my attack sucks!
To echo here that there seems to be some interaction problems with the skill. I went for the Ricochet nodes and noticed that once in a while I definitely have one of the shurikens ricochet to another target, but not all three. At first I thought it was due to the inherit drop off range of the skill, so I grabbed Aerodynamic, and it sadly didn’t really improve anything. I haven’t doubled up Ricochet and Ethereal Blades yet to see how the pierce/ricochet interaction works, hopefully that improves it some what.
As of right now the different interactions on the skill don’t feel good compared to other throwing skills like Hammer Throw and Shield Throw. Hopefully it’s just buggy and while I understand the desire to have a difference between Shurikens and Hammer/Shield Throw, as of this moment it feels weaker in functionality and therefore performance against it’s peers. Which is a bummer because I was looking forward to a Cobra Lash from Path of Exile type of equivalent and this is as close as I can get.
Unrelated to Blade Shield, I would say that Ricochet seems to be almost non-functional. It does ricochet sometimes, but it’s rare. I put in 2 points, wondering if the 2nd point would make it noticeable but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
A simple test: fire shurikens at a group of 4 or more enemies coming at you (using the default 3 shuriken shot). Almost every time, I only see life bars change on 3 of them. Some of that could be the ricochets going between the 3 initial targets, but since it happens nearly every time, there’s something really missing here. Possibly it’s not a bug, it’s just the ricochets all targeting the same nearest guy, and it just needs to be randomized more, but it does feel very weak, it’s not like it’s vaporizing one guy.
And I would agree with the OP, you’re not crazy. I expected Blade Shield, from the description, would keep spinning around you for the duration, hitting guys multiple times. I can kinda see the merit of the way they did it, since there is a piercing node, but that makes it awfully expensive in skill points. Without the piercing, all you’re really getting for your point into Blade Shield is greatly reduced range! Piercing being unable to hit the same guy twice on Blade Shield is also really bad, but that’s a separate issue (hopefully a bug!).
Hopefully we’ll see a major overhaul to all this stuff, since this is the first pass on the Rogue.
I can confirm this. A bit annoying and tooltip clearly lacking some description. And would be great if we could have the multi hit on shuriken as it’s a bit annoying to keep up with have to check if you should use it again or not. Stacking does not work as well.
i don’t think blade shield is terrible in its current implementation… you have to use it repeatedly to keep the damage up, and stay close to enemies, so it plays a little more like a melee skill than most throwing skills, but it’s incredibly strong for ailments. also seems viable for hit-based damage.
having to spam it is really not bad at all… you can take 2 of the “extra projectile” nodes and with the “throwing attack dmg and mana decrease” affix on both your rings, and 3 points in the mana cost node, it’s a 0 cost skill. (which can enable some of the upper bladedancer tree nodes that involve alternating between mana spenders and 0 cost skills).
doing this does cost a lot of skill points but if you’re going for blade shield there aren’t a lot of better options for it… the other nodes that change the way the skill works either don’t affect it or make it worse. it makes it feel a little pigeon-holed, but it’s VERY good so far in my experience.
it does seem like a bug that they don’t stack as the tooltip on the blade shield node indicates. if you have Shift set to throw shurikens, the ones it adds DO stack with the ones you’ve thrown manually, so something’s not working correctly there.
If they make it work correctly I think it’ll get heavily nerfed. In its current iteration it is an aura of decay on steroids. It is meant to be used in conjunction with the bomb. Focus on armor/physical resistance shred and those bleeds stack like no tomorrow. Add to that the fact that you don’t need crits so you can go with double swords for 50% glancing blow and suddenly its real tanky too.
I agree. For bleeds, the current state is already really good. I’ve been playing bleed blade shield with lethal mirage for burst and it plays super smooth. Instagib all trash, a couple blade shielda for big rares, a few shields and a lethal mileage to take down any monolith boss except the big end ones.
