Spellblade and Dodge

[SpykeMH]

After running around as a spellblade main for awhile I’ve finally noticed something that seemed odd to me about a spellblade’s synergies. While the class itself scales with Int and Dex, there is basically no synergy that is apparently obvious for the class to make use of dodge as a defensive stat. Inside the class most of our survivability is obviously focused on ward. Int is clearly the preferred scaling stat here due to that, but beyond it we need some form of reduction via armor or dodge.

Currently passives and skills lead a player to believe armor is the preferred method. Things like flame ward, teleport, firebrand, and shatter strike can give a nice buff to the stat if you take the right skill nodes. Shattered Aegis gives us a percent boost so long as we’re maintaining stacks. Gear of course gives armor, and notably no mage specific gear gives dodge at all. But we don’t scale off strength, so going that direction isn’t the most ideal.

Once you get a little further and finally get rarer shards to start dropping you may stumble across that %dodge is affixable to, of all things, swords…Which we can wield two of, and are incentivized to do so in some skills as they get bonuses “per equipped sword”. Now suddenly stacking dex and dodge to make use of two extra slots that can carry %dodge affixes suddenly becomes a more viable option. We can even have a massive health pool due to ward so that when a hit lands on us through our dodge, we don’t insta-die from a low armor stat. Up until that point though, there is basically nothing in both the spellblade’s passives, or their skill trees that grants even a single point of dodge, outside of the 8 dex you can get from prismatic blade.

I guess my point here isn’t so much that we can’t use the stat, it’s more that it isn’t obvious to a newer player that it is an option so they may forgo dodge as a defensive option altogether like I did originally. I feel like the class could use a few passives or skill tree nodes that give the option to invest into dodge a little, even if only to incentivize the stat more to newer players.

[SolidMetalKnight]

This is one of the problems in general is that the game is tuned to where defense stats are balanced, strangely, to say the least. And how you get certain ones on certain slots without it being baked into set / unique items or idols without being uber lucky on gear or it costing you an arm and a leg on your passives is awkward. Consequently, most of the bonuses you really want and need are backloaded at the tail-end of the game. And damage scaling is all over the place, to the point that things you’d think would be great just don’t do enough to matter by the time you’re playing Monolith. If you’ve played Primalist recently, you’ve probably noticed these issues quite a bit on it also.

You’re putting your finger on the main thing that the is going to be hard to do, and that’s to balance the game to give you more options to do things early and mid game that you don’t get to do until late game. Well and, keep the variety of the builds that are actually viable by level 90 from being only the ones that the nicest items support. This is true of Acolyte but other classes seem to suffer greatly from this, getting pigeonholed in the final stretch of the content to conform to certain abilities or specs that are obviously the most useful ones.

What I would propose would be to overhaul the passive system to where there’s lots more nodes that give you defensive stats and options early in each tree, and give you 2 passive points every say 4 levels so you have extra ones to invest in them. Maybe some of them could be mutually exclusive also, where you can either get this or that, and the other node gets blocked off when you invest in one of them. This would push the damage you can achieve on certain classes quite a bit higher but it would also make every build more flexible in general. That’s how I’d go about it, anyways.