Some of my builds have 1-2 free skill slots, where none of the skills are worth taking or useful. I just end up taking something for a minor boost, like Snap Freeze for +250 armor. Would be nice if there was some general passive skills that could be slotted for a boost to an area, like damage, defense, mana regen, health, ward etc.
I am surprised at the complaint. Just what standards do you have as to what skill to take?
If you take Sentinel, you have :
Lunge/Javelin/Shield Rush for movement, with the ability to take two different ones from among them to have alternative movement methods.
Rebuke for defense.
Smite for healing.
Shield Bash to stun a target.
If you take Rogue, you have :
Shift for movement.
Smoke Bomb to blind opponents and hide you.
Decoy to lure opponent attacks.
Ballista to be a separate source of damage and/or serve as extra targets for the opponents.
If you take Mage, you have :
Teleport for instant movement.
Snap Freeze to immobilize opponents.
Flame Ward as a damage reduction buff.
Mana Strike/Focus to regenerate mana after a burst.
If you take Primalist, you have :
Fury Leap for instant movement.
Summon Wolf/Summon Thorn Totem/Summon Storm Crows for extra bodies and sources of damage.
Eterra’s Blessing for healing.
Warcry for instant knockback and stun.
If you take Acolyte, you have :
Transplant for movement.
Bone Curse for PERMANENT damage increase on a target.
Various summoning skills for extra bodies and damage sources.
Various curses to dot or debuff opponents.
I am not saying there is no room for extra stuff, what I am saying is that I have a hard time believing that there’s nothing that fits in a build.
Remember, an extra skill doesn’t necessarily have to buff your build as a whole, situational skills can shine a lot if chosen carefully. Typically, Snap Freeze can interrupt a dangerous skill and immobilize opponents to give you time to either reposition yourself or kill the opponents before they can move again.
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Huh? That’s very confusing.
Seeing as you have a mage it usually goes one way. You have teleport/snap freeze/flame ward + 2 offensive skills, usually one which has no cooldown and one which has one or uses high mana.
The snap freeze is not only there to provide buffs but actively interrupt bosses during their dangerous attacks or generate higher damage uptime. The buffs are a nice bonus though.
Flame ward is a given, defensive measure.
Teleport as well, movement skill.
Mana strike is the go-to for high mana main skills.
And even if you go with Mana strike as the main one as a spellblade you use ‘enchant weapon’ together with it as it can auto-cast.
If you’re a ‘normal’ ranged mage then it’s your mana generator.
With this you have it handled, 5 skills, all useful, all also used commonly, unless you wanna inhibit yourself and make your character - at times vastly - weaker then it could be.
neither decoy nor ballista are particularly good. Outside of specific builds or possibly bosses it isnt worth the button press for smoke bomb because if your in a location for that long youre just dead.
What I mean to say is that, unless you have absurd standards for skills, you should be able to find 5 of them to fit in your build. That doesn’t mean you are always using all of them, just that you have a reasonable use for all of them.
Decoy is fairly useful as it increases your personal damage uptime, and yes, specifically against bosses. Same as smoke bomb which has a myriad of synergies and increases both your chance for survival as well as increasing your damage by quite a bit.
So still, even if they’re not always used they’ll nonetheless synergize with your build and have specific uses. Your skill choice isn’t solely ‘hold down all 5 buttons at once all the time’.
you wouldnt normally put decoy on the bar though unless your building around it, neither for ballista. And like i said besides maybe some bosses or specific builds there isnt even a need to spec smokebomb its at best an extra.
last i checked the game doesnt let you use two abilities at the same time.
I guess I understand the issue, now. You only see value in skills if they can let you rush through the content faster, rather than allow for more tactical gameplay. Maybe they need to think about how to make the value of situational skills more apparent.
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