A Review of Spear Skills

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raV#3445 написал:

since you seem to have played around with spears alot

do you know if the spearheads of rapid assault stack into 1 big bleed if you detonate them?

It will be egg on my face if it does, since that's my primary complaint, and my best idea for fixing the skill.

(Sighs)

Guess, I'm going to have to stick some spears in silverfists butt.

Alright, testing is in, it seems like rapid assault does in fact combine the damage of the individual spears into one, for a massive bleed and a single hit.

The easy way to test this is by running impale, and instead of seeing your impale stacks tick up by 4 on detonation (detonating hit removes 1), you will not see it tick up at all.

I of course tested the bleeding to make sure that also combines into one big bleed, and it sure does, though the methodology was a massive pain here.

This gives rapid assault a solid identity as a boss killer, as it's going to do almost double rakes effective bleed damage (though you have to stack it up 5 times).

Amazing read! Keep up the great work, OP!

Personally, I hope block/parry and spears see better days. I loved the concepts, but I eventually switched from spears to bows, last league. I kept the Rhoa though, because it's awesome.

I felt one awkwardness, that you pointed out earlier, but I was hoping you could talk a bit more about, and maybe offer some possible solutions? I like the idea of parrying. However what I often found was that I was just standing around with the buckler up, waiting for the parry to happen. The enemy was just standing there, waiting for me to attack. So... we are both just standing there, lol. I feel like THAT makes it much better to just attack instead of parry.

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ac429#4687 написал:

Amazing read! Keep up the great work, OP!

Personally, I hope block/parry and spears see better days. I loved the concepts, but I eventually switched from spears to bows, last league. I kept the Rhoa though, because it's awesome.

I felt one awkwardness, that you pointed out earlier, but I was hoping you could talk a bit more about, and maybe offer some possible solutions? I like the idea of parrying. However what I often found was that I was just standing around with the buckler up, waiting for the parry to happen. The enemy was just standing there, waiting for me to attack. So... we are both just standing there, lol. I feel like THAT makes it much better to just attack instead of parry.

Yeah, I like the idea of using parry, at least in boss fights, but there's many boss fights where you'd be insane to try to parry.

Now, to your question, I don't know if any bosses actually wait around and attack reactively, but there are a bunch of boss fights where they don't do much auto attacking, and cycle between big cooldown abilities. I actually think that as long as you're standing near the boss, you can parry (as long as it's not one of the red abilities obviously) any projectile or attack. I have admittedly not experimented with the infinite parry range buckler, but that seems promising.

You could experiment with the see red support gem. In fact, one way to make parry better is to have the ability to put enemies into a state in which they attack more frequently, but do less damage (or some other tradeoff).

The parry mechanic mirrors some of the issues you'd experience in Sekiro or Lies of P, where enemies that attack fast are far more manageable than ones which do infrequent large hits.

Oh, those are some really good points. I guess I meant more for regular mobs, not bosses. Personally, I don't enjoy bossing. I've beaten some pinnacle bosses in SSF (I only play SSF), but my go-to is to just basic bow attack them to death. :| I feel like that's a huge elephant in the room. Why should I put all this effort for setting up these skills, when 0 mana-cost basic skills are so good (not that I'm complaining)? Is it just me, or do you find that very few skills give as much simple DPS as basic attacks, without some tricks and set up?

I like that point about Sekiro. I love Dark Souls, I think Bloodbourne was alright (love the story, but didn't click with the mechanics), and really didn't like Sekiro. Maybe that's shining through here. I like bosses - like the candle guy in act 1 - who have a hit-wait-hit pattern, giving you a lot of time to breathe. I felt like many DS boss fights were like a rhythm dance. But, I don't really like bosses who put too much pressure, like that teleport guy in the interludes.

Sorry, another question if I may. Have you tried No Rest For The Wicked? Do you have any thoughts on it? I tried it when it first came out, and haven't really tried it since. But I felt it did the "meaningful combat" and mechanical bosses much more deeply. I like it, but I just like PoE2 more, and I only have so much gaming time, lol.