So I tinkered around with builds using Erasing Strike or Void Cleave as a “main damage skill”.
And I two things were reallying annoying me. There is an imbalance of very similar nodes between those two very similar skills.
Both skills have a base cooldown and a mana cost, but ES has a higher base cooldown and mana cost with the same damage effectiveness and the possibilty to reduce the cooldown to a lower amount than VC with the skill spec tree (at the price of massive mana cost).
Also the damage projection of these two skills is very similar and I think it is totally warranted to compare them directly.
Here are the nodes that are imbalanced IMO:
1. Void Shred Nodes
(ES) “Mark Of The End” 25% void shred/point 0/4
vs.
(VC) “Fraying Strikes”, which gives 1 stack/point 0/5
Why on earth does ES only got 25%/point. ES has the potential to get a lower cooldown compared to VC, even though its base cooldown is higher and there are some other crazy nodes that make it hit a lot of times, but all of that comes with massive mana cost.
When I want to utilize ES as a main spammable damage skill you would expect resistance shred to be one of the most desireable things you want to have, but at a staggering 25%/point I just can’t justify getting it.
Even when speccing into all the possible CDR nodes in ES, which gives it 1,369 seconds cooldown, you only could stack 2 rotations of void resistance shred, so thats 2 stacks with 4/4 points investment.
Void Cleave can sustain like 3-4x as much void resistance shred stacks with roughly the same investment (all the cdr and void shred nodes)
Both skills have similar damage projections baseline and for me there is no reason why ES is inferior in this regard.
The only reason and situation where I can see use for the void resistance shred node on ES would be some Time Loop build, but even that is probably not optimal and pretty niche already anyway.
2. Crit Multiplier Nodes
(ES) “Certain Erasure” 25% crit multi/point 0/2
vs.
(VC) “Champion of the Void” 50% crit multi + +1 mana on crit 0/4
Both of the comparison nodes have similar cost of entry (skill points you need to invest until you reach them) and none of them is gated by weaker travel nodes or behind any other nodes that would justify this imbalance.
I totally understand that not every skill should have everything and that some skills excel at certain things, but if there is a nodes in the skill spec tree, at least make it so that there is a reason to use it.
Both of these nodes are not very desireable in ES, even when looking at them in a vacuum, but they look even more useless when comparing them against those insanely strong VC nodes.