I know Mike said in one of the dev streams that the balance is aimed at 300 corruption. As much as Dual Wield builds crush that level of difficulty compared to their 1h/shield counterparts, it starts falling flat very soon after. In a game where deffence is king, because of dynamic boss DR, dual wield builds draw the short end of the stick by default, as their damage is heavily infuenced by the mechanic (especially burst builds). The 9% more damage taken makes it increasingly difficult to stack enough DR layers on the character, if not impossible, to compensate. Even without that drawback, Dual Wield could never get enough defence layers compared to 1h/shield, so why should they get penalized to being with?
Once again I acknowledge that in the 300-350 corruption, dual wield crush 1h/shield in terms of map and boss clears, but as soon as the corruption is a bit higher, they start struggling to survive.
I think balancing the game around 300c is a bit wrong, since a lot of builds easily go up 500 and beyond. Unfortunately very few of the dual wield builds actually do so consistantly, which is a shame, because dual wielding have always been fun.
Some people could argue that a miss chance would be better then a dmg taken chance but I think people are happier with a dmg taken increase then a dmg made decrease.
The only class that is DW focused is the rogue and noone is forced to use DW so I can’t see a point in the whole thing from my point of view.
Not true. Sentinel have plenty of DW builds that exist in a counterpart of 1h/shield and they all suffer the same issue. They are better in 250-350 corruption and fall apart in the 400eds. Sentinel actually suffers more than rogue, when using DW, because the builds around it aren’t hit and run.
If balance around 300c is wrong, why balance around 500c then? I don’t see any point in going that high. A char that speedfarms 200c should be able to farm much more loot in the same time than someone slowly clearing 500c and there is no drops locked behind 500c to my knowledge.
Sentinel has ZERO skills that need DW to work. It’s a choice to use DW not an obligation like some Bladedancer skills. So if you CHOOSE to use DW that’s on you.
On top of that balancing is something EHG needs to work a lot so I’m sure stuff will change but making DW even stronger is a bad choice from my point of view. I miss the good old days when DW came with 15% more dmg taken .
Rogue also has 0 skills that needs DW to work… The only skills that “requiers” DW is Shadow Cascade and yet no build, that uses it, casts it manually. It feels like you are not aware of Rogue mechanics very well.
Well, I can agree to some degree, I didn’t like the damage taken penalty of DW, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
You’ll take 10% more damage than a two handed as default (1/0.91), also you don’t have a titan heart to aim for more defensive value (not to mention Bastion…).
To me the problem doesn’t lie in DW in particular, but how damage scales in arena and high corruption. This is a big, general issue, and minor differences like 10% are enhanced due to it.
I hope they address their scaling before they re-implement leaderboards.
You do more dmg you take more dmg as a tradeoff. You might dislike it but it’s one way to balance the most damaging weapon choice. On top of it it started out at 15% more damage taken and the devs already backpadle for whatever reason so it might get reduced even more over time who knows.
Yeah, I understand the trade, and on a vacuum, taking 10% more damage than other options in exchange of more offensive power is fine, that’s why I say I can agree to some degree.
The real problem is how damage scales, that little tradeoff becomes a big issue, making DW builds quite inferior for pushing your limits (arena, high corruption).
Again, is not a problem with DW specifically but with how insane the damage scales.
It’s not 10%. It’s much more, because you are forgoing shields, which are 20+% flat DR, or 40%+ for Bastion of Hope in close range. Because of that the 9% more damage taken is kind of useless, becase you already are forgoing 40% DR.
Yeah, titan heart and bastion are strong opportunity costs also. Still I’m focusing on what you’re losing against not dual wielding, but yeah, we see a very similar picture.
Agreed, many of Sentinel’s skills and passives even heavily favour two-handed over one-handed/dual wield. There’s nothing that specifically favours dual wield - except maybe for a niche dual wield fire penetration crit Warpath - to compensate for that loss in survivability. I see no reason to ever go for dual wield when I can have the same if not better damage output with a 2h option. That way I also don’t have to deal with that painful damage taken penalty. Dual wield seems to be worse in every aspect for Sentinels.
I can’t see a point in the whole thing from my point of view.
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