I just posted this and saw how long it is. TL;DR: Bread and butter spammable skills shouldnât be part of a buff rotation (e.g. rotating vengeance and rive). Grim dawn has that and itâs bad. Offensive skills used for buffs should have noticeable battlefield impact when used. Specific feedback on sentinel skills below.
I just finished the campaign content for the first time with a double slash ignite Paladin (felt super strong, deathless until Lagon, who wasnât tough once I knew to dodge the big beam). Even though things felt much too easy until the divine era, and pretty easy there once I started to make compromises for defense in my skills, I felt the pace and variety of combat was for the most part very good. But I agree with Boardman that it could be greatly improved by slowing it down a little and working to make it more interactive.
In general thereâs an important point on which I disagree with Boardman. While I think buff durations on a lot of skills could stand to be a little longer, I donât think itâs necessarily bad for most builds to have a single âspamâ skill, and I think it could, in fact, be quite bad to encourage rotating in a weak, low damage spammable skill in order to maintain a buff. Thatâs a common feature of Shaman builds in Grim Dawn, for example, and itâs generally considered painful by the community.
Rather, players should be encouraged to pick multiple offensive skills, but each skill they use should 1) have a sense of battlefield impact, either through high damage or strong control, 2) should for the most part demand attention to positioning, and 3) should have their own gameplay niches. Alternating between vengeance for damage reduction and rive for damage, for example, would only really be a matter of managing a timer. Vengeance would lack its own sense of impact, it would only be as a button you would occasionally need to press, but there would be no decision making about when to press it, or immediate, visceral feedback as a result of using the skill.
Now for some more specific feedback. On my paladin, I tried a few different ways to work different offensive skills into my play style, but couldnât escape rive as a main damage skill backed up by a rotation of buffs. But I think with some modest changes to the skill trees, a more complex, active play style would work. Here are some thoughts on three of the skills I used.
Rive: I tried the node that consumes ignite stacks to boost physical damage, but couldnât make it work for what I wanted to do. First of all, taking that node was an immediate and dramatic loss of damage compared with just sticking with ignite, though the leach node after it was pretty nice. That might have just been an issue with my build, though. The main problem I had with it was that I was thinking I could use it to boost other damage skills like shield throw or smite with descend. But the damage boost was underwhelming. I think if the duration where longer, but the bonus smaller per stack, it would give you time to apply a higher damage bonus to other skills. As it is, the full bonus mostly only applies to riveâs third hit itself.
Smite: This was only a buff for me, which feels like a waste. I tried descend, but the node is just too awkward in its current state. Itâs buggy with idol procs on shield throw, the cooldown is too long, and it should be an instant cast. Also, I think there should be a node connected to fissure that removes the damage from fissure, but applies some kind of non-stacking debuff to enemies. That would transform the skill from just a button you press every 4 seconds to something that has noticeable battlefield impact and encourages careful positioning.
Sigils of hope: At first I found this annoying busy work, but it grew on me. However, for my character, I found block chance too important for any of the offensive buffs to make sense. Of course, thatâs probably tied to larger balance issues than just this skill. I think it would be nice to see a little more integration between the divine flare branch of the skill and buffs, though. Particularly, maybe the global melee damage node could be partially reworked and moved over to that part of the tree.
Overall, I think a lot of the skills I tried were halfway there to allowing a more complex play style, and the gameâs combat is overall very good. I hope with a little more work, there can be a good number of offensive, high impact rotational skills that better supplement bread and butter attack skills like rive or vengeance.
