Concern about current state of spellblade

Couple of things out of the way first

  1. Full game time is on spell blade and trying to make it work with any skill it offers. Flame reave is about the only thing I havne’t put in that much work on, due to a lack of supporting idols.
  2. Not here to complain about the overall ward nerf, it’s justified
  3. Can clear all monolith even empowered ones this is more of a “this feel terrible” to play with thread
  4. Around 2k ward at all time out of combat with 2 piece of conversion gear.

Concerns

  1. Damage is pretty bad on bosses, sure you can get it down, but with enough time every boss will fall without regen. The fights are just a dread at this point, it’s not fun nor is it challenging. The highest dmg I can pull out so far is forgoing any kind of defensive move (except teleport), stacking dot damage to high end of around 7k ticks on dummy. This still makes boss fight a slog at best if not outright sleep inducing.
  2. Mana efficiency of the class is horrible. It turns the whole class into a start/stop play (with focue) that’s very counter productive to melee game play. The travel time to the next pack for a melee class should be their “stop” time, the addition of standing there to channel + travel time makes it extremely clunky. And if we want to go back to mana strike playstyle, then point 1 is even more of an issue.
  3. Being melee is a lot more punishing than being range in most arpg, but it feels almost doublely so in this game when your dps is this low. some boss leaves homing ground aoe that makes you out of range of discharge’s lightning blast trigger (mana strike spec). Shatterstrike is normally fine but you are playing quite dangerously by hugging and stutter stepping around the homing aoe.
  4. A million ignite uniques and 0 frostbite ones (For spell blade, we don’t use str, and shatter strike is not a spell).

tl.dr: low diversity and a slog to play. Nerfing ward exposed the horrible damage issue.

4 Likes

Have you tried Boardman’s build/strategy? Use Mana Strike for mana regen and Shatterstrike for the main damage. I’m not even close to optimized and I can still regen to full mana in about 2 clicks, so the only stop/start is the recast time on Teleport, which is about 3.3 seconds. It would be nice to find another source of cooldown recovery but that’s another topic.

I have, I find the damage quite lacking and doesn’t clear as well as just shatterstrike. Reason being that you are still melee (unless you make manastrike range which slows down mana recovery to a crawl). You already have to move out of a lot of things to stop dps and having a mana gen that’s melee and tie to needing to hit something can give you a blanket of down time sometime.
Since the previous post. I’ve managed to push the frostbite dot to 12k and making it feel a lot better in all content. I’ve since rolled other classes to see how it feels in comparison. And it has only strengthen the feeling that spellblade is not in a good place. Where I can be doing 10 times the dps without worrying about defs at all because:

  1. I’m not melee (on some)
  2. everything’s dead I don’t need to worry about def ever (on most)
  3. most boss fights are telegraphed so they are mostly a “0 damage encounter” and with more dmg comes shorter fight time = less chance to screw up the fight.

But yeah, this really just brings me back to the whole “there isn’t much diversity in spellblade build” issue. I could understand if they are going with the “this game’s not meant to be a zoom zoom game and just need people to slow down.” However, this is not the case for other classes when they don’t have less surviability but have 10-100 times the damage (With a lot less specifically required pieces to make their build viable).

You 100% can clear everything with a spellbalde, just that there’s nothing that really make it stand out. The amount of people in general chat (from my interaction) that switched off spellblade as soon as they hit a wall in monolith or would never consider rolling one to start off is disheartening.

I’m more concern about the mage overall - the two classes rely almost entirely around Flame Ward - Teleport - Focus.

I’m 100% over this archetype by now. A rework is necessary. Passive mana regen need to be added to stop being forced to play with Focus all the time.

I hate this skill so much now, it break the gameplay and need to be use every 3s, what a joke

I play spellblade and prefer playing it rather than my acolyte or primalist - not played sentinel yet as I’m actually really enjoying spellblade!

I use Shatter Strike, Mana Strike, Teleport, Enchanted Weapon and Flame Ward, but currently trying out Ice Ward with a shield for defense. I have never used focus.

I’m at wave 198 in arena and keep dying to one-shot mechanics that bypass ward … but that’s another story. I have done all level 100 monolith bosses.

I’m not sure how “good dps” is measured - but I’m happy with the dps of my spellblade and have balanced that with defenses etc. Farming items now for a new variation to try.

Could you post your build and maybe your items so I and other spellblades could possibly help you out?

p.s., I don’t use Frostbite and most of my yellow items are sub-par or only just good enough to use (3 ok stats and a meh).

Bulk of my gear is dot dmg with 2 piece ward conversion + an eye of reen for ignite-> frostbite conversion. My gear’s decent with mostly T5s and some T6 mixed in. The damage is absolutely enough to clear anything monolith. But it doesn’t feel that great to play due to the points I listed above.
Can’t stress enough that this whole thing is more of a comment on the specialization feeling quite lackluster once you have played some other specs that are either autobombers (so you just focus on dodging mechanics) or doing so much damage (bosses are 10 ish seconds fights or your movement skill can clear without casting other skills). And let’s not even talk about almost unkillable low life builds from other class and 20k+ wards from a “squishy caster class/summoner lol”.
The biggest (And at this point probably the only thing I care about since dmg numbers can be easily changed) concern is still diversity. There’s close to none. like I’m pretty much using the same set up as you except focus for mana strike… and I focuses on dot dmg so damage is still ticking when I have to move out of the billionth close prosimity aoe that every boss seems to love so much (which once again, is no issue for range so they don’t have to interupt their game play / dps).

Ok, cool. I get you about build diversity, it is a bit lacking.

I also use Reen, but dropped all the nodes in shatter strike converting it to frostbite … for me, the damage output seemed poor at the target dummy so I kept it as ignite and I’m happy with the choice.

We have different builds with different items. None of my gear has increased dot damage.

What Idols do you use? Ward on hit is very useful with shatter strike. :wink:

I also took the extra mana blessing from Lagon - really helps and allows me to drop passive points in Scholar (health + mana) and use them elswhere.

Celestial Precision node in mana strike is nice for extra damage (although it is a low damage skill) as the bigger your mana pool then the more chance it has to crit. It needs some crit chance stats on items etc to really shine. With 250 mana - when it is full - and 300% increased crit chance = perma-crit mana strike. Nice extra damage.

Mana Strike

For shatter strike I went damage and mana efficiency. It is a huge mana drainer.

4 points in Icy Flow to bring mana cost to 30 (and ward on hit but it’s meh). With 250 mana I can get in 8 hits before needing to use mana strike.

Shatter Strike

I found increasing my melee damage and crit chance gave me a much better build and more satisfying than the dot route, whether ignite or frostbite. |I still have ignite, but it’s more of a bonus damage.

More crit chance = more procs of Eye of Reen. Getting mana strike to 100% crit chance and around 20% or more chance for shatter strike, increases in melee damage and crit chance instead of dot (which cannot crit) coupled with a huge mana pool for bulk dps unload while eye of reen stacks are getting to 200+ in high arena waves … see where this is going?

So when I first used dots, it wasn’t that great. But with a whole bunch of dot gear it’s consistently ticking for around 10 to 12k with fairly decent uptime. I used 2 frost bite chance idol with 2 elemental dmg / cold dot dmg idol. Survivability isn’t really an issue anymore with the amount of native ward gen and 2 piece conversion. I’m thinking about transition to mana strike/void combo and see how that plays. But will most likely be using the same lot of skills that mana strike build uses (which shares a lot with shatter spec too)

Trying new skills out should be quick to test at high levels. You can drop a skill and get it to level 20 in 30 arena waves.

I encourage you to test new skills, items and idols to adjust and improve your build(s).

It may seem a little lacklustre, but spellblade can be very fun to play.

Good luck and please let us know how you get on :smiley:

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.