so as i’ve been getting deeper into the blademaster experience today, i’ve noticed that each time i unlock a new ability, i try it out for a bit, then go back to slapping the crap out of things with flurry. the sheer disparity between both attack speed, and lack of disparity in damage, has made it just an overwhelmingly more powerful choice than alternative attacks (especially in bleed or poison related builds, which i went out the gate as it seemed to have a lot of support)
I don’t think it needs to be nerfed, per se, but perhaps the flat damage of dancing strikes and the fire smacker could be boosted a bit to compete since their present on-hit damage is only 20-30% higher than flurry’s baseline (a gap which closes more with the 3rd hit bonus damage on the base rogue tree, since flurry activates it far more often)
I’m not sure it does, since all 3 hits of Flurry count as 1 “use” for Lethal Cadence, so you’d need to attack with Flurry 3 times to get the buff from Lethal Cadence applied.
Dancing Strikes & Cinder Strike are meant for different things compared to Flurry, pure damage isn’t the be all & end all. Both skills have significantly more AoE than Flurry and can do other things (such as ignite) & Dancing Strikes has significantly more mobility than Flurry.
i’m not sure that that’s true, as i seem to recall the stacks building and falling faster than the reasonable cast speed of the skill itself, but even if that’s the case, wouldn’t that then go to mean that all 3 hits of flurry would recieve the bonus, and therefore be the same degree of damage increase?
1 skill cast increases the buff by 1 stack. I believe the damage increase isn’t working currently anyway, so there’s no way to test that.
Where flurry really shines for me though, is applying Crit Vulnerability. It’s per hit, so flurry’s 3 strikes is 15% higher crit chance. With a bow, I can maintain enough vulnerability to get 100% crits after 3-4 seconds of attacking.
Blockquote
“each time i unlock a new ability, i try it out for a bit, then go back to slapping the crap out of things with flurry. the sheer disparity between both attack speed, and lack of disparity in damage, has made it just an overwhelmingly more powerful choice than alternative attacks”
I totally agree with this statement and would like to translate this to the over all comparison between basic rogue and especially Bladedancer Mastery skills.
I was really hyped for the Bladedancer Mastery when i read the skills and passives. But on unlocking and using them for quite a while (i did a lot of respecs!) i found them rather underwhelming especially in the OP mentioned aspects attack speed, damage and overall “feel” i would like to add. The only skill i found “usable” from the mastery is shadow cascade and even that one is debatable imo.
Once mastered i immediately put dancing strikes on my right mouse button… - i must say, i felt a little betrayed. The movement part is way to slow, too little damage and a cooldown (although a really short one but still requires cooldown reduction somewhere to feel good and really “dance” quickly through mobs) - Flurry or Cinder Strike flat out felt way better to me and that’s just from the tree with no special affix rolls on gear.
Lethal Mirage and Synchronized Strike felt like “Finishing Moves” whit a fairly high mana cost and cooldown, especially on Lethal Mirage - so no skills to use in rather quick succession, emulation “dancing”, which is fine and might even work with the “Flow” passive from the Bladedancer tree where you use 4 to 5 different skills in sequence. But why do all of that, when Flurry, Cinder Strike, Smoke Bomb and to me especially Shift basically do the same thing (even a bit better) - those feel like the real Bladedancer Skills imo.
Other people also mentioned diversity of skills, meaning some skills can do what others can’t and one should use differnt skills for different situations, not always only considering the most possible damage output - thats true.
But in this case, especially considering the mastery skills in comparison to basic rogue skills, i feel like there is no skill or combination of them in the mastery class that cannot be done with just basic rogue skills - and often times even more effictve. I’m currently using none of my mastery skills and shredding everything in Monolith areas, not to mention that the main story was a joke with that setup - that’s not really the intetion of mastery class skills i think.
None of the Bladedancer skills feel really “bladedancy”, meaning quick, responsive, accurate, heavy hitting and usable in quick succession is what i want to say - but the basic rogue skills somehow do.
I wouldn’t go for a rogue skill nerf either, rather rework the mastery skills to be true MASTERY SKILLS, meaning more powerfull than the standard rogue ones so i would consider to substitute. I would love to use those skills, but for now i feel like the basics are just better - maybe Marksman is different…
Dancing Strikes is probably the most unique skill implemented in LE at the current time.
It is very different than any other skill and you definitely need to get used to it.
Dancing Strikes really is not that slow and you can even weave in Shift or Shuriken/Smoke Bomb with Backflip
But Dancing Strikes is really strong even early on without spoeccing to much into it.
Ya different skills have a different target audience. Dancing blades is amazing, but it’s primary target is groups. You bounce around, spot to spot, which I love to be honest, and just wack’m. Is the damage super-high? No, but it’s AoE-ish, I’m not expecting it to be.
I personally like the blade dancer, and find most of their skills at least in the ‘OK’ catagory.
Have you tried it in Solo SSF mode? Without proper gear it is not that powerful (particularly against solo targets). Especially when i compare it to Spellblade’s Mastery skill Shatter Strike…
Actually unspecced Flurry kills single targets faster than spec’ed Dancing Strikes ( the skill is lvl 11 currently on my character)
I really would like to see you skill spec tree, but this is probably getting way too off-topic. (Feel free to pm me if you are interested)
All i can say is, you might not specced the most efficient way for single target and also cooldown recovery on the helmet does boost your dps significantly.
If you don’t plan ahead and collect cooldown recovery shards ahead of unlocking Dancing Strikes (because you probably don’t have the experience for it) , i can understand it slightly feeling weaker, but it is really not.
But even without the cooldown recovery unspecced flurry most certainly does not do more damage than a 11 point dancing strikes.
The point is it should feel strong right ‘out -of - the box’. Like most other signature mastery skills. And again I compare UNSPEC’ED Flurry with SPEC’ED Dancing Strikes. WIth 11 skill points in the Dancing Strike tree. No matter if I made some mistakes the skill can’t be worse than an unspec’ed 1 lvl starter skill. Imho of course. Maybe the devs have a different opinion.
Baseline this skill is defintiely more AoE focused, as already mentioned.
One big issue potentially is, when you played flurry and you were going alot of Ailments and/or attack speed, those stats poorly/not at all scale with dancing strikes.
i feel like i should insert an addendum to clarify that there is a difference between calling something weak, and calling it not as good as something else.
dancing strikes is strong, unspecced it was still killing mob clusters in the same amount of time as flurry, but when one of those blasted name holding bosses with 100x more hp than a standard mob pops up, i’m not going to sit there and dance around it in circle until it’s eventual death when i could get 50 stacks of bleed and poison on it in 5 seconds then just leave and check my map later to see if it dropped a unique.
As i already stated, Dancing Strike baseline is more catered towards Aoe/Clear.
To make it really worthwhile using for single target you need a whole bunch points in the skill tree. (Which is ok)
Comparing baseline skills sometimes makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.
Baseline Flurry and baseline Dancing Strike are not made for the same situations.
But with the beauty of the LE skill system you can make skills worthwhile for multiple different situations.
I do like both, Flurry and Dancin Strike and Flurry definitely is strong, but i personally have achieved better results with Dancing Strike in terms of singletarget damage. (With Hit/Crit Build), for Ailments Flurry obviously has a clear advantage.
Having a skill, that has the ability to poistion yourself while dealing damage and moving out of telegraphed abilities is pretty huge. And it’s a baseline effect.
Dancing Strikes also has Rhythm. Fully speced Rhythm gets you 50% more damage to everything (not just DS) as well as 200% crit multi. With a +5 cost increase you can boost the Rhythm buff to 100% more to everything (not just DS).
DS also has 40% phys pen directly connected to its starting point. Connected to that node is a 1 point assured shadow dagger per hit. Give shadow daggers a try, its really good.
I didn’t wanted to point out specific routes/parts of the tree, because it probably is a bit off-topic, but you did certainly point out one of the directions iwas talking about, even through the Rhythm buff does give Dancing Strike a nice playstyle, where you can weave in other skills.
The physical penetration part you point out is one of the strongest penetrations in any skill tree.
Also Dancing Strikes has one specific node, which boost damage against rares/bosses by 75% (multipicative) for 5 points, which is insane
And you have the graceful arena which can give up to 40% more damage multiplier to your whole damage output as well.
Any of those skill tree paths or a combination of those, will make Dancing Strikes destroy bosses
I’ve been playing with dancing strikes for a while and I think it’s wonderful, but as Heavy and others have mentioned, it’s how you spec it. I have dancing strikes loaded for more AoE, damage, and a little defense as well (the nodes at the bottom are nice) and not just full-out damage. Could I do more damage with it? Probably. But my survivability is good and I can clear a very large area by bouncing around, which to me is worth the price of admission.
