A Review of Spear Skills

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Mank7#6701 schrieb:

Right, looking in PoB, I can see that this would be decent damage (alternating storm lance and explosive spear), a little less than primal strikes

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Mank7#6701 schrieb:

I guess my problem with storm lance, and explosive spear, and the reason I'm not jumping up and down and saying the combo is great, is that weapon swapping shockburst rounds would probably get you much higher DPS with minimal effort.

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avatarlc#6229 schrieb:

I tried to make a primal strike build, here is my experience:

The damage of the skill is really good e and it builds stun pretty well as well, the only downside, that cripples the skill, is the need of constantly apply shock

My best try was using the unique boot Wake of Destruction...

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Mank7#6701 schrieb:

I've tried pretty hard to make many of the spear skills work in 0.3, I didn't play at al in 0.2, so I wanted to try the huntress on for size. Figured I'd post some thoughts / feedback on specific skills.

Parry: I'm including this since so much of spear is dependent on it. Currently, with mob densities the way they are, using this in maps is a death sentence without a very specific build around it which makes you super survivable. On bosses, it's super easy to get stunned, even to auto attacks, so you have to invest in stun threshold to prevent that from happening, but the returns are ultimately sub-par, even if it's kinda fun (the playstyle). Many bosses also don't really do much in the way of auto-attacks, so it can be a weird waiting game. Long story short, I like the mechanic, but it's way too much investment, for little return, so why bother?

Disengage: A fun skill, the hop back is quite nice, though it feels pretty underwhelming late game when attack speed (and general speed) are higher (due to the cooldown). That said, the hop back isn't really larger than a dodge roll, and it's not high enough that you could use it to selectively evade attacks from bosses / enemies. It's just not clear to me what the identity / point of the skill is. If it's intended to capitalize on a parried debuff to deal decent chunks of damage and generate frenzy charges, then I think the only thing it's achieving is the frenzy charge generation, and in this way it's outclassed by the support gem.

Explosive Spear: Simply doesn't perform well enough to justify its place on a skill bar. In terms of raw DPS, you need to use the skill, then immediately follow it up with a detonator (due to the limit of 1). Given that the only detonator available to the spear is thunderous leap, and this has +1.1 seconds to attack time, you would be vastly better off using auto attack for single target damage. If frenzy charges were more readily available, I could see justification as a clear skill, except it's directly competing with glacial lance / lightning spear.

Some math:
- Explosion + spear = 645% damage, 0.8X multiplier on attack speed.
- Thunderouse leap = 449% damage, +1.1s to attack time.
- Assuming your character has a base attack time of 0.5s (incredibly easy to achieve with spears), this works out to (645 + 449)/[0.5/0.8 + 0.5+1.1] = 491% base weapon attack damage per second, where autoattack does 312 / 0.5 = 624%.

You would need to double the base explosion damage, increase the base limit by two, and increase the explosion radius to 3.5m for me to even think about including this in a rotation.

Cull the Weak: Not a particularly bad skill, however at higher mob densities and with general enemy speed, I found myself running into some major issues, where mobs would run between me and the enemy I'm trying to cull, or the enemy I'm trying to cull ends up deep in a pack. At this point, the skill becomes unusable for its intended purpose, and just becomes a dash. I'd find myself strafing around hunting for angles to get a cull the weak off, which obviously makes the skill wildly inefficient. The base attack speed could also be lowered a bit so people don't have to prioritize attack speed to make the skill feel good / snappy.

Fangs of Frost: The skill is entirely dependent on parry to be worth using (obviously). The increased freeze buildup is nice, but hardly enough to sell anyone on the skill when glacial lance exists. Even when you consider parrying, the only major upside is the freeze buildup, and considering it consumes the parried debuff, it creates this awkward tradeoff surrounding consuming the parried debuff (and losing out on the additional damage), and getting your freeze buildup.

Lightning Spear: I feel like this skill is in a decent place right now, though it might require some tuning if the ability to acquire frenzy charges gets improved. It's a great combo vector with elemental sundering / primal strikes as a shock builder.

Rake: Skill seems kind of awful for clear right now / feels clunky where you target an mob and something walks between you, blocking the skill. While this is useful against bosses / single target, there's this awkward trying to get the spacing right, which I don't love. At present the best use for the skill is capitalizing off impales and getting massive bleed magnitudes.

Rapid Assault: The skill seems incredibly bad for its intended purpose. Sure I can use this skill to build up spearheads in a target, then explode them with a detonator, but the damage resulting from doing so is incredibly mediocre, and there's no real benefit to the attached bleed at all. You will get more bleed DPS off default spear thrust + rake by a landslide, and that will be far better for both clear and single target.

All that being said, the skill is actually useful right now as a combo generator, since it hits with an effective attack speed of 2.4X.

Spearfield: I'm not sure about this skill, it's seemingly passable for clear, and decent against bosses works quite well when you combo it with knockback. That said, the game in general doesn't really lend itself well to setting up traps at present, many bosses are almost entirely knockback immune, which makes things a mess when they don't move around, which happens more often than you'd think.

Storm Lance: Not a great skill, has some utility for single target damage, ties with lightning spear for shock ability, while requiring the enemy to stay in a single location. On paper it does 600% weapon damage per second, but you're limited to 3 in the ground, so it's not actually going to do much to improve your top end DPS. I think this skill would feel fine if frenzy charges weren't so arduous to get.

Blood Hunt: Since this can no longer crit, it's no longer really necessary or even particularly helpful for single target damage. I think it's largely fine, though with how low enemy health is, it's kind of hard to use it for clear.

Glacial Lance: This is pretty solid, if frenzy charges were more readily available, it would be pretty much perfect.

Primal Strikes: Very solid single target damage, the fact that the third strike consumes the shock is a big pain though.

Thunderous Leap: If there were more skills to detonate, perhaps there would be justification for using the skill, and justification for its extended wind up time. As things stand, the skill does paltry damage, and has extended windup time, and if most spear build users were serious about detonating abilities frequently, they'd probably weapon swap explosive shot. Either the skills +1.1s to attack time needs to be significantly reduced, or there needs to be some actual payoff for detonating things (not some 30% chance to create shocked ground).

Elemental Sundering: Skill is perfect as is, it can be a bit clunky to use at time when you're getting swarmed, but that's not a problem of the skill, and can be solved by ramping up attack speed.

Spear of Solaris: Is just kind of underwhelming, there are ways to stun enemies quickly to get decent uptime on this, but the ignited ground doesn't end up being that useful (but this is more just an issue of ignite at the moment). The biggest issue I've found is getting enemies to stay near the spear. I guess if you were using a build that focused on pin / stun, the skill would be decent. Just increasing the base radius would go a long way towards making the skill viable, as well as providing another mechanism in addition to stun to build glory.

Wind Serpent's Fury: Is technically usable, if you make it the central point of your build. If frenzy charges were more readily available, I guess it would be fine, but as it stands, the knockback component of the skill should be dropped in favour of something like more damage from the serpents. It's a worse version of falling thunder right now.

If anyone wants to correct me on these, or point out something obvious I'm missing, I'm happy to be corrected.

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OrphanMutilator#5189 schrieb:

Rake; I want to love this skill so bad, but it's targeting is complete garbage. Having it's damage tied to distance covered is THE WORST when there are countless instances of the skill simply ignoring my target, so there is no dash and the resulting damage is non-existent. If this would just friking work properly and have me dash to my target 80% of the time instead of 40% I feel like I would be demolishing maps no problem, as it stands I slowly spearfield my way around and wait for enemies to kill themselves instead of zooming >.>