Let's Talk Primalist - Auto Attack Skills

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Hi All,

I Figured I would repost this from Reddit as the community seems more centered here than there.

Let me preface this conversation by stating that I am fairly new, only scratching a couple hundred hours thus far fully centered on the Primalist, my experience with the other class is the many build videos and guides so I can fully see/understand their capabilities.

The Primalist is literally the only class I want to play as and the reason I bought this game as it’s been ages since I’ve been able to play a melee BeastMaster character, and if they would have included claw weapons it would be perfect.

I will be mostly only playing this class so I may be caring far too much about it’s details but though I can enjoy playing a weaker class with some fun builds, once this goes live and I can play with friends online I would prefer I am not the solid anchor dragging the team down just to have fun lol.

I feel not just the Primalist auto-skills but many of their skills in general have little to no payback on investment especially into late game with many lackluster SP sinks (skill points). With a limited investment pool of 20 points every move you make should make you feel stronger and have a purpose. With the Primalist many seem just like a mandatory sinkhole to progress into minor benefits.

That all out of the way, I wanted to open up the conversation on the Primalist as far as the auto-melee skills go.

On almost everyone’s builds I’ve ever seen it is always Swipe 99% of the time.

Clearly the devs. designed one geared towards each class: Druid - Swipe (synergy with Bear) Beastmaster - Serpent Strike (summons more pets) and Shaman - Tempest Strike.

What does each potentially bring to the table?

  • Swipe
    High Crit/Crit Damage, decent speed, fairly decent melee AoE, Leach, Armor Shred, and Bleed. (Other options I’ve never seen trained at all.)

  • Serpent Strike
    Very fast atk speed potential (minus polearm slower speed), Shred, Poison, Poison Aoe, Poison Shot, Bleed, Blind, and potential additional pets but never seen them trained.

  • Tempest Strike
    Three different potential elemental builds which mix can offer elemental aoes, shots, nukes, and minor heals. Attack speed = higher Crit meaning double sources for constant crits.

Short comings of each?

  • Swipe
    Very little really, can be comboed with dual wielding to have excessive speed, crits, and dual item increase to pet damage or elemental damage.

Though the tree does contain some more useless paths, Lightning seems only there if a Shaman wants to use swipe but still feel like an elementalist overall I haven’t really seen anyone dive into that chain nor do the point investments seem worth it.

The final 3 on the DPS path ending in Lupine Attunement I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone train because you lose the global dps you’ve already mandatorily trained on the bottom of the tree which seems redundant plus another redundant spirit wolf sink just because.

  • Serpent Strike
    Slower pole arm only, low crit/crit damage (intended to focus on Dot), lower leach. Seems to be by far the weaker of the three with an abundance of point sinks without much payback.

Plague in theory sounds amazing as a counter to Swipes increased aoe plus spirit wolves for a fully poison build but it plays out very lackluster the damage doesn’t appear to really scale or apply multiple stacks as poison does so not sure what is going on with this skill as more damage details on many of the Primalists skills are still masked.

Guardian Serpent is definitely not worth the spec, let alone the entire path of point sinks, It’s about as large as a regular Raptor would be cool visually if it could be the same size as a full sized full growth specced Scorpion (which should be at least as big as wild ones but sadly not lol) and maybe add a basilisk poison aoe or something - but overall would still be useless but the visual flair may attract some. If you really want one, just use Vipertail, which most are running anyways and save yourself the hassle and points.

The entire left side of the tree I want to like but you are splitting way too many points already into so many nodes for the damage essentials it’s not feasible.

The right side forces you to get spit if you want to invest into DoT damage but cuts your damage duration by a third for a poison shot that doesn’t do much damage, and has restricted scaling, which is sort of shooting yourself in the foot but is mandatory for the added damage of Chrono.

Blind is there and a neat idea and would help open it up for a blind + dodge build but you don’t have points to chase it due to the other extensive mandatory point sinks. Overall I think the least loved but could be fun to play.

  • Tempest Strike
    Seems like it could be a potentially fun build, but I have limited experience thus far with most of my focuses split between 2 werebear and 2 beastmaster characters thus far with only a minor lv30 Shaman - but the barrage of elements seems like it’s a fairly fun way of playing albeit slower. Dual wielding still seems the most viable to stack affixes due to lacking attack speed spam due to the slow attack speed for crit hindrance because you aren’t pumping out major damage even with that swap.

Summary
Overall I think Serpent seems the most lackluster especially since clearly you are supposed to train into training more snakes and spreading the plague/poison but I feel the skills are spread either too thin and need to either be combined or something to get the same job done that Swipe can accomplish with better stats/speed/survivability.

Not to mentioned plague bearer’s staff does the exact same and potentially better than a fully 20 point investment (or more) to this tree.

Tempest seems fun to mess with the combos but on dps it is the lowest of the three outright unless specifically geared towards it but I am not sure how much it will actually scale not being able to properly spam and there isn’t any over-crits in this game for exceeding the 100% cap.

What are everyone else’s thoughts and experiences?

Is Swipe just by far the true king and really only option for end game on all three classes? Or perhaps I am doing it wrong. From my research and digging it seems that Primalist is by far the least played character at the moment and least popular likely due to the many issues it has but I also heard the Devs are already focused on bringing them up to date so this analysis may be moot in a few weeks.

Thank you all for listening to my rant and I am interested in what you have experienced and your feed-back as well!

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A lot of these abilities Swipe/Serpent Strike/Tempest Strike are very old and in my opinion outdated. The devs really need to go back to old skills and rework them. Hopefully with a mix up of the skill tree these abilities can be more universal and feel more fleshed out to support more build variety. I think a lot of your complaints are very valid and mimic my own experiences as a lover of melee abilities.

I also use and enjoy Swipe the most (out of the three) and find it to be the most successful out of all of the melee abilities Primalist has. It feels the best out of all of them with how it looks, the feel of it and is just a “fine” melee ability. I would love in the future for there to be more spicy nodes it with lightning damage, the new lightning vfx update looks freakin’ amazing I want to use it consistently without a internal cd.

I dislike Tempest Strike, always have, even though I don’t want to dislike it because it seems right up my alley. The concept is great but it feels bland and not well executed. The vfx of the procs and rate of proc system within the tree feel lack luster. One of the biggest complains I have is, it just feels poor as a main ability because of no attack speed benefit and the inconsistent feel of procs not triggering when you want them to. This leads the ability to feel really bad early and can leads in a lot of cases to me feeling overwhelmed in fighting group battles without a large investment in proc uptime. It just feels uncomfortable to play, feels terrible when nothing procs and the vfx don’t grab me. I am curious what the devs plan for this ability in the future.

Serpent Strike is an ability I never been a fan of. Never cared for the vfx and how slow it felt to play or the animation of polearms with Primalist. The tree is OK, I primarily think the summoning serpents is the best part of the skill tree because it feels unique and fun which also synergizes well with BM. The ability just gets boring fast, it’s hard to say why. I’m not sure if its the fact that there is so many just increase damage nodes in the tree and not enough transformative nodes or the fact that the limitation of just polearms or little of both. I have this uncomfortable feeling whenever I play SS that I can get to lv30 and get my fill of it, that isn’t a good thing; I don’t get that vibe with other abilities/skill trees. If I were to change some stuff in this skill tree it would be to open it up to more weapons like swords then just polearm and rework the skill tree to remove just flat damaging nodes and more transformative nodes.

I also think claws as a weapon for Primalist or the ability to use bare hands to fight should be an option for this class. It sucks that it isn’t! Maybe in the future?

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The more I play SS the more I want it to be better. When Specced as a DoT build the atk speed can exceed that of my atk speed Swipe. I like the idea of spreading around poisons, plague, blindness, and am rather a fan of the animation. I run a poison beastmaster with a size specced scorpion for looks mostly it has babies which I got excited for but the limit is only 3 babies second node doesn’t get it up to 6. The babies are extremely weak all around, but fun enough to keep around for visual enhancements/rp value lol.

SS tears up early game with Vipertail and Draalsting but late game it starts to fall off fast against any swipe build and survivability falls through the floor without a leach item like bleeding heart. Again the amount of points all the trees want require too much of an investment for what it provides and the requires some counter productive nodes.

The Guardian Serpent is a great idea, but its tree is bad. For as much investment as it wants its payback is dismal both visually and effectively. Like I said, if you want the serpent use Vipertail, it seems the serpent only summons only after either a class advancement or perhaps only for beastmaster. It didn’t summon at all until after I changed classes but I haven’t tried it on my bears, ill have to test that later tonight.

Edit: ViperTail summon only works on Beastmaster - Druid & Shaman couldn’t trigger the spawn.

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I share some of the same sentiments you both have.

Swipe is perfectly serviceable and can carry all the way through the monolith, as lackluster and inoffensive as it is. It does the job.

Serpent Strike (like you pointed out @Faolchu) is glorious early on with Vipertail and Draalsting. It can carry you all the way, but the disappointing clear speed and options to improve it becomes a chore. Plague like the rest of the non-stacking ailments, can’t keep up with the HP scaling the higher we go. It feels great at first in the story content as it chips away at little nagging mobs, then it just ultimately might as well not be there. There should be other scaling options for those ailments if they aren’t to stack like Poison/Ignite/Bleed so they can stay somewhat competitive and worthwhile.

Tempest Strike… Ok Tempest Strike I have a lot of things to say about and was going to just make a post specifically for it, but I might as well discuss it here. Tempest Strike is one of the coolest themed abilities I’ve ever played in an ARPG, perhaps even RPGs in general. However it is so frustrating to play, because of reasons @KissingAiur mentioned, but also because how Last Epoch is built.

The Attack Speed -> Crit Conversion just isn’t enough to justify the penalties you suffer from not benefiting from any attack speed increases and no other benefits from the conversion.

  • The QoL you gain from being able to stick and move in boss fights cannot be undersold, especially a fight like the Emperor of Corpses.

  • Tempest Strike is an awful mana generator compared to it’s peers without ridiculous investment and gimmicks. Tempest Form in it’s current state just isn’t enough mana on return to compensate the lack of ASPD scaling. I can go from an empty globe to cap in under 3 secs on a Sentinel or Rogue, or in 2 hits with Manastrike on my Spellblade, with less investment in Passives and Skills. This is a problem when skill synergies can leave you with negative 1.5 globes of mana.

  • The dual element DoT nodes in the skill tree are counter intuitive to the ASPD > Crit conversion. As outright stated with an in-game tip, “Damage over Time effects do not benefit from Crit”. So I’m already at a penalty at my proc generation due to locked attacks per second, I’m also penalized that these nodes don’t benefit from one of the core gimmicks of the skill.

  • In a game where Crit Avoidance and Slow/Chill effects exists, Tempest Strike is hamstrung twice in this instance. You can’t benefit from crits as much and you swing even slower with no way to improve that penalty.

  • The spread of the 3 elemental damage types is a negative itself right now with how the Shaman passive tree is built. There isn’t enough adaptive spell damage, penetration, shred effects, unified damage nodes, etc. When there are nodes like Conviction in the Paladin tree that have everything you could want with an exponentially higher gain per passive point investment. You’re spread across so many different nodes it becomes apparent that you just cannot build to use all three, and with the scaling the DPS tooltips have provided, might as well dump the physical damage end of it and focus on Cold/Lightning.

I’m sure there’s more I could go into but I think I’ve made my long winded point. Unless there are some new doodads added to Tempest Strike, like Crit Vuln, more penetration, dmg dealt = mana generated like a mana leech (I know they want to avoid this but what can we do here?), and more damage scaling, it just feels like a slow hitting wet noodle that exists to proc storm totems unless we just scrap the ASPD conversion.

Right now making the attempt to be a melee Shaman is just laughable and my desire to make an Alluvion build has been left on the table because it just doesn’t work. The fact that my basic outline for the build performs better by orders of magnitude with using the Lightning converted Swipe than Tempest Strike shows how much of a victory Swipe ultimately is and failure Tempest Strike continues to be. I mean @EHG_Mike outright said it in the dev stream last week that Tempest Strike just doesn’t perform. I don’t know a more damning example of the faults of it’s current design.

TL;DR: Swipe is fine, needs more pieces of flair and the tree tightened up.
Serpent Strike needs a good tuning pass to bring it up-to-date.
Tempest Strike either needs it’s Attack Speed conversion removed, or more incentive needs to be added for it to be a successful skill. Either through exponentially higher mana generation, avenues for critical vulnerability investments, high penetrations/shred options, better scaling from all sources, much higher proccing %ages, or just be affected by Attack Speed. I get theme and class/skill identity is important, but in a situation like this the skill will be ignored by the masses when the game releases and the real build creating idiot savants jump in to micro analyze it’s shortcomings. I want this skill to succeed, unfortunately it can’t where it lies currently.

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I think people seem to be missing the massive 24% cull on Serpent Strike, that’s a 32% more multiplier on bosses.

For Tempest Strike, what if it had mana gain on crit and the proc chances were either doubled or guaranteed on crit? Then at least you could go all in on the high crit low attack speed and it feel less bad.

Also I think Serpent Strike needs to be useable with daggers.

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Serpent is a DoT vehicle though, ive tried it with a high damage wep and Draalsting always performs better because from memory theres nothing that multiplies hit damage in the Serpent tree - you also need ‘end game’ gear to clear high mono’s with it - you want Aspect of the Viper effect on all your idols and now Helm/Chest to pull good numbers. The biggest issue its slow and needs lots of attack speed and has no Multi Aoe.

My idea would be to remove the snakes on kill as they are useless and change it to some Aoe-chain attack so you hit one mob and spears chain between them doing damage - I played Serpent BM to 100 Mono’s with single Raptor pet for more single target, had approx 70% dodge, 2kHP with Maelstrom healing from the stacks, biggest issue is Raptor dies on high monoliths, only AoE clearing and the Raptor were an issue, with over 100% attack speed feels pretty fluent and Aspect of Viper buffs you can generally 1/2 shot most white mobs from poison ticks

Swipe and Tempest are generally pretty awful, they are way too slow, Tempest Strike has no Attack speed scaling from memory and no node that converts melee into spell damage/vice versa so your damage is all over the place. Swipe is not bad on Werebear but requires mega investment to use properly if you dont want to bounce back to human form

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Not if you DW Raider Axes (up to 5% crit chance implicit) with Slayer’s prefix (5% crit chance @ t5) for a total of 25% base crit chance without any increased crit. Then all you need is 300% increased crit chance which you can get 200% from Swipe’s Ambush node alone, then getting the other 100% isn’t going to be difficult.

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Ive done werebear a long time ago with a Poleaxe for that with 93% crit and without abusing Kermodes which I never did back then you eventually slowly run out of mana from missing attacks (controller), using charge, non crits still, having to keep casting entangling roots to restore mana if so

Also what you described is still a big investment, you just need what perfect implicit Raider Axe (2-5) x2 then T5 base crit rolls and then usually to get to the top of Druid tree for increased crit, now you are also taking increased damage, you also now either lose T5 Added or T5 attack speed on the weapon - Spriggan form solves all of this by a single unique belt

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Yeah I had this thought before. Perhaps some multiplier on Tempest Born’s mana generation or just a node on the skill tree doing something similar to help boost it up to it’s counterparts.

Absolutely agree. I’m having a better return with a Bleed Swipe dual wielding axes. Less investment needed and better clearing.

Late edit: I wanted to toss this in too. Another problem with having ASPD convert to Crit is Crit has a hard cap at 100% while ASPD has no cap which is another large negative against Tempest Strike.

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Thank you for posting this, I came to the forums to rant about tempest strike and its issues as a utility skill. Im mostly bummed about how much you lose even when you care about attacks speed.

I am doing an Earthquake build and needed a mana generator. I thought Tempest strike would be perfect but swipe actually gives so much utility and I think the generalist part of the tree needs a nerf.

Tempest strike Invest into as a mana generator and was almost happy with it but there was no way to guarantee no skills proc. You can spend 17 points out of 20 to get all the mana generation and the nodes that stop the procs, but the tree actually say you always need to be able to proc atleast one. I also invest 8 point in that passive tree but i would use those anyways for the chill and hp. The only benefit i found was that you didnt need to hit anything so you can gain mana anywhere.

Swipe on there other hand give mana and 200% inc crit and +75% multi (+100% if you can get a +1 to swipe). The skill is absolutely insane and needs to be toned down. Honestly cutting it half wouldn’t be enough of a nerf.

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I honestly don’t think nerfing swipe is the was to go. The primalist is so far behind the other classes the other skills need to be brought up to par.

The skills and the cohesive symmetry clearly show how dated it is as a whole.

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i agree the others need to brought up to par. But the generic utility is SO HARD to overcome. it gives 200% inc crit chance and +75 multi while generating mana. im fine with swipe itself keeping that power but making it global means that for the other skills to ever compete they need to give something of similar power.

IMO tempest should be best when you have no attack speed. Swipe when you do have attack speed. Serpent strike when you want to do dots/poison. Swipe is honestly a pretty boring skill tree and just has alot of generic power. Also because that power is global it limits power from be distributed to other skills the primalist has.

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Bear Swipe feels nice and powerful, particularly when you are levelling. When you start running hard monoliths and you encounter those massive health pools with other defences in the Empowered Timelines.
EHG has some nice options in there for your 20 points which you can build a few different ways to only support the skill from within the tree, or to synergise with other parts of your build (e.g. Swipe supports Bleed, but you’ll need to add investment to get the best value). The support of More damage against stunned is great and I love that you need to get to 22 for the best damage AND need to support that with your gear choices.
Then because there are no more ways to scale the attack by any great margin (you have all the multipliers and we are only looking at small changes from the various sources of Increased damage).
As other posters have said attack speed availability is very low for a Primalist/Druid. The only place I could see to find it in any amount to feel impactful was the attack speed with an active totem Shaman nodes which, placed at the bottom of the tree, I assumed were there exactly for this type of late-game min-maxing.
It isn’t perfect, but even as is I find it one of the nicest skill trees I’ve used in ages in any game.
Some of the other weakness are not directly related to the skills, but to other interactions which are unclear or possibly bugged. Ice Thorns (with the cast when hit build for a 1 second armour buff) helps out in the early game against those big packs of small ranged mobs that otherwise kill you in the first barrage of tiny missiles), but by the time you have a companion out and a pack of thorn totems it becomes mostly useless as it casts on your companions or totems randomly instead of you. Its very hard to judge the skill, and by extension the werebear as it looks like the devs consider this a core skill and it is currently “broken” as I see it. We have to see what is coming down the road in that direction.

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Ninja edit: Having done 100 and all the content I could find on my bear I spent the last few days grinding with a vague hope of gear to fit the perceived holes I saw in the late game build. If there are new bases coming with some different implicits specifically useful to bears it would resolve some more apparent problems which are only a result for itemisation.

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Im having trouble interpreting your post.
From what i understand you have been using swipe on werebear as your main dmg.
My issue with the skill was how globally powerful it is for other things. Specifically the GLOBAL 200% inc crit chance 100% multi while also being the best mana generator with attack speed.

The reason i say it is too powerful is if you just give the other skill that much power then you get with 2 skills that give a total of 400% inc crit and 200 multi. The bonuses needs to be more tailored or stay global but be weaker.
For refrence this is my build: EQ using swipe to recover mana.

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I’ve tested it on multiple builds and fully agree its the best auto attack skill hands down I am just saying compared to other classes primalist as a whole is still weak so rather than nerfing the most recent reworked skill we have we should focus in bringing the rest up to par.

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I’ve checked out your build and I can see why we are heading in different directions – I’, talking about things from a Druid/100pcWerebear build, whereas you are coming from Shaman (and are not transformed?).
I stand by my assessment from a Bear perspective and found yours very interesting from the other viewpoint.
The global crit buff from Swipe in Werebear form is needed to actually make a permanently transformed Bear, but the generous mana return isn’t a useful node as you only get that mana in human form. This part of the design seemed to support a more actively transforming playstyle. The recent dev stream said permanent bear/spriggan was part of the plan, but the actively changing needed more work, specifically for a third form to be revealed.
I re-read your comments now as specifically focused on NON-transformed, and how you use Swipe and Earthquake together.

While checking out your build I had two questions (if they derail the thread and you want to talk about them we cna take it to a new thread).
I saw you are using Titan Heart, I imagine in main part for the 15% damage reduction. I could not find a combination of defences (between nearly capped armour, overcapped all resists, Berserker, and Aspect of the Boar that took me through the hardest empowered mods. I needed Titan Heart’s additional 15% to survive. Was that your experience? I’m finding Bear survival dropping off the higher I go and only Titan Heart gets me up to a safe level.
Second was for attack speed. I found attack speed very heart to find. I had to always used gloves with a good tier of attack speed or my damage and proc rate were poor. I resorted to using Totemic Fury at the bottom of Shaman to find a bit more and that was it. How do you cope with none on your gear and using a 2-h with the lowest chance of proccing? When I am on ~1 attack per second, even with 14 seconds on my specialised Thorn Totem there are long periods it is absent with only a 10% chance to proc. It is my understanding there are no proc coefficients and that simply faster attacks will have the lowest downtime between procs.
I’m getting off track :slight_smile:

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Primalist is actually one of the strongest classes right now. So you are incorrect in that statement. Specifically, beastmaster and druid are the strongest, while shaman is the weakest.

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That’s not my feeling, so I would be interested by an explanation. Maybe in another topic, in order to keep this one focused?

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The only issue surrounding primalist and all classes is that range is superior to melee, and requires less gear to push father in arena