Since Pillager’s Gold was introduced to the game, Burning Daggers have become a good, primary source of damage. Bossing feels fine but the echo clear feels awful. When you run into large packs of mobs, which will inevitably happen, you have to run around spamming Synchronized Strike and Cinder Strike in order to clear out the smaller mobs like spiders or beetles, until you can finally hit the Diamond Matron, who’s standing in the middle orchestrating the entire chaos.
I’m aware that some abilities/builds require more effort to clear packs than other builds do. And that’s fine in and of itself. But it just feels terrible to whittle down a pack like that IMO. And while the damage is good, it’s not broken or blowing up tanky rares/bosses in a single Synch/Cinder rotation. The build just becomes a slog to drag through echos, for me anyway.
So my suggestion would be for Burning Daggers to have pierce akin to Dagger Dance in the Shadow Cascade tree. Or perhaps add a node that gives pierce, if you want some kind of opportunity cost.
The massive flat damage scaling from the relic makes it strong. But using Burning Daggers without pierce becomes aggrevating. I quit at 66 and deleted the character because I couldn’t stomach it anymore.
You get 1 flat throwing for just burning daggers, I have a 180~% potion find legendary scavenger. with a maxed out 116% exalted potion find amulet, id get up to 296 potion find. Thats equal to 148 flat throwing. You can get 100~ fairly easily with normal gear. I understand you can use both in theory, or open up gear for other stats.
But you essentially are giving up an affix on belt/amulet, and relic slot for just burning daggers. You get 0 scaling towards say an exploding dummy, or other throwing attacks like shadow daggers or anything.
You build becomes extremely 1 dimensional. Every person ive seen play it into more serious end game has given up because you just dont get enough juice. Burning daggers only have 100% added effect, so even if you do a sync strike 4 shadow cinder strike you spend a bunch of mana/time to get 500% of that throwing damage.
I am interested to try the build again at somepoint, but it just feels so clunky and weak for how specific the relic is.
edit: that being said, pierce would help but only marginally lol. Especially since it feels like shadows cinder strike dagger cone does not “home”, where as if you use it, your cone daggers naturally aim at enemies. So often time my shadows just… dont hit anything. cause they dont actually aim.
Yeah the build will never scale as high as a Shadow Dagger build, but very few builds do due to the egregious scaling of that ailment. The problem with Cinder Strike and, as a result, Burning Daggers is that the Cinder Strike tree has like 1 multiplicative damage modifier. And even that only applies to the first strike. Burning Daggers get a 50% multiplier, but that and the 100% effectiveness of Burning Daggers itself just means you’ll never be able to scale it as high as other skills/sub-skills.
Still if it had innate pierce it would feel a whole lot better to play with.
I think they throw their daggers in the direction you aim your cinder strike at. I didn’t have any issues with targeting unless my mouse hand started spassing out.
Because I enjoy leveling through the campaign and watching a new build take shape. It’s preferable to me rather than rummaging through my stash to find new gear that fits a new build while also trying to balance resists and other defensive layers.
Same for me, I also happen to really enjoy twink leveling, its really fun to make legendaries just for speed running low level its just enjoyable to clear the campaign again.
I love doing that… heh heh… I can spend hours just looking at stashed items and reworking chars without even running a map. Yes yes, I am the kind of guy that spends two hours rerolling chars in Baldurs Gate while everyone has already started playing.
