Blade Skills Questions

[Jonaleth Irenicus]

Now that they have weapon damage added to them, I wonder if they can be useful to actually kill monsters. I went ahead to try an assasin using these but I wonder what effects work with which one.

Blade Sentinel: I know this one doesn't leech life/mana, but can it work with Critical Strike or Crushing Blow? It seems to work with cold poison damage if they are on the weapon, can it also work with charms? If someone has enhanced damage on their armour, does it effect the damage of Blade Sentinel, or is it only weapon damage based? Does it get bonuses from high strength?

Blade Fury: This apparently can leech life and mana, and works with Crushing Blow. The question I have is: Does the crushing blow have to be on the weapon, or can you use crushing blow from armour and other things? The questions above also apply to this one

[Jonaleth Irenicus]

Answering my own questions:

Blade Sentinel: Doesn't work with Critical Strike or Crushing Blow. Can't leech mana or life. Don't know about charms or damage bonuses on armour.

Blade Fury: Works with crushing blow bonuses on the armour and helms. Added to that the fact it does leech life/mana leads me to think that it works with charms as well as damage bonuses from items other than the weapon itself. I'll try enhanced damage armour when I get to a level high enough to use it and write my observations here.

Haven't exactly seen the full potential of Blade Fury yet, but somehow I fear it might be overpowered especially if you use a combo of crushing blow items. The skill is as good as it gets with just 1 point in it, is a fast ranged attack regardless of weapon speed, requires low mana (and can leech) and works with crushing blow just like a weapon.

[Jonaleth Irenicus]

Why didn't I think of this earlier. Apparently Blade of Fury calculates its damage in a very simple way. It takes the basic attack damage (normal attack damage), multiplies it with .75 and adds its own skill damage to it. So everything is included in the skill damage, Claw Mastery if you are wearing claws, bonuses from charms, etc... Everything passive that is, no bonuses from charging up and stuff (tried this, doesn't work). You can use Venom with it, which is a pretty good thing, since venom deals massive poison damage over a short period of time, and Blade of Fury attacks quite fast.

[Khan]

very interesting so it's 75% weapon damage. Well we will have to rebalance that skill thoroughly cause we made it nearly useable in the mod without this massive boost.

I guess that percentage is adjustable in skills.txt - well basically a matter of tweaking since now more properties are editable. Probably making it have 50% weapon damage and halved (modded) skill damage.

[Jonaleth Irenicus]

Maybe not give it half weapon damage right off the bat and lower its damage with more skill points, but remove the "adds X weapon damage" completely and approach it in a new way if possible.

It would certainly be much better to give it "+x% weapon damage per skill level" as well as its normal damage improvement to actually force people to max the skill if they plan to use it.

The problem of the skill as of 1.10 beta is that it is actually useful not to put more than one point into it. The damage increase is puny (compared to what you can achieve with Venom) and the mana cost increases (not a nice thing since the skill is 1 mana per blade at Slvl 1 and 3 mana per blade at Slvl 20, causing you to burn mana three times as fast).

As crushing blow is effective in ME, maybe you should also take another look at the speed of the skill (as far as I know, the skill has a certain speed that cannot be affected, the idea is like the inferno of the sorceress). The blades are quite fast now, maybe you should link the attack to the weapon speed or casting rate somehow (although I have a feeling this is hardcoded).