Figured I’d sink my teeth into something about the most popular class right now, the knight!
Most notably there’s little choice to be made when picking between a 2H vs 1H and shield. Shields offer great benefits while the extra damage of a 2H just isn’t enough. So let’s look at Tempest and its passives:
Dark Nexus could use a buff. Against Unbound Storm it’s clearly a weaker passive.
Increase it’s damage gained to 25 or 30% pp. Or Make it global mana regen (while not holding a shield).
Tempest not being affected by weapon range seems weird. This also acts as a buff to 1h vs 2H.
Reckless Combatant and generally any of the non-shield passives appear very weak considering the above. Perhaps R.C. can additionally reduce the damage bonus nerf per point that tempest has by default?
My biggest problem with that part of the Tempest tree is the lack of defense and the number of points required.
Here is the breakdown of the cost and benefits.
Costs
You lose your shield including:
4 affixes
The ability to increase Block Chance, Block Protection, Block Armor, and Reduced Damage Taken on Block.
It costs 11 points to get the full benefit to Block, leaving only 9 points left for the rest of the skill tree
Benefits:
45% increased Damage
20% added Block Chance
400 added Block Armor
800 added Block Protection
That really does not seem worth when you compare it to what you can get with a shield. A white Ancient Shield will give a minimum of 25% Block Chance and 450 Block Protection.
I would rather see it structured like Devouring Orb’s Dark Moon where there is a gateway node for 1 point that is used to unlock the rest of the branch. As far as bonuses go, I would think something more in line with the bonuses you can get from the left side of Ice Ward’s tree would make it more enticing.
Speaking from a purely real life perspective, if you aren’t swinging around a heavy shield then you should spin faster. So faster attack and movement speed would make sense but are not currently available in this part of the tree.
In general, it would also make sense to have a node where you exchange area of effect for attack speed.
I am still working my way through the Tempest tree and trying different combinations. I am sure more ideas will come to me as I try different things.
So far I’ve tried a ton of different combinations and definitely agree that the 2H passives are in a poor spot currently, though I feel like 2H in general is quite a bit worse than 1h + shield for every class right now.
The biggest issue to me is how necessary the mana cost reduction nodes feel. Really with every skill, in my experience it seems working to make the skill sustainable is key to usability and viability. This coupled with the current power of VK’s future strikes passive really limits choice, I feel, as you don’t really need to scale the skill itself, you just maximize the number of hits it provides and then scale future strikes and damage over time applied through the massive number of hits. Though, the alternatives just feel bad to use, in my opinion and I would suggest mechanics changes to them as opposed to only nerfs to hammers/tempest/future strikes. Notably, using Vengeance and Erasing Strike feels bad. Erasing Strike due to mana sustainability issues leading to large downtime, and Vengeance just because its damage seems to scale very poorly into endgame.
Hammers and Tempest both feel really good to use and are the most powerful options for maximizing your number of hits for DoTs and future strikes, but require a ton of passsive investment to make their mana costs sustainable which is especially important as you push higher arena waves and need more casts and time to kill enemies.
Currently- I’ve had the best results with Temporal Cascade, Reckless Spin, Unbound Storm, and Endless Vortex. This provides a high number of hits/second that scales exponentially with number of enemies while also making it drain ~1 mana per second, and giving the pull-in effect a large range. This greatly increases the speed at which you can clear waves, especially those with ranged enemies.
This build sadly lacks a bit in single target, but even with almost no gear investment and no passive tree investment, Hammer Throw can fill that gap, providing very high base single target damage.
