I guess one of the concerns too is scaling for early game though, particularly if you happen to get a 300% ASE anoint gun and you’re firing off phaseslam every 10-12 seconds or something. Which is a legit concern, but then maybe you leave the cooldown as it is, and then give that tree a phaseslam cooldown reset game changer near the bottom or in the capstone.
Something like… The more enemies you damage with phaseslam, x-amount of seconds come off your cooldown. Then you can slam again, get kills & rush stacks with Do Harm, then the next slam does more damage, and so on. That way you can actually get momentum. Sort of building the phasezerker into that tree, or just have the phasezerker give these effects specifically for phaseslam, rather.
As it is, it’s just hard to get momentum, and there’s no rush stack synergy built into the green tree. Dunno. It’s just too slow of a combat loop currently compared to TTB, which has indiscriminate and Sustainment right next to each other.
i specify changing not only base dmg, but also scaling, this way they can make it stronger but try to control its power growth so it doesnt just delete early game content with no effort but still does do good work in end-game with all the bonuses from skills, COMs, relics and what-not
i do also recommend a cooldown reduction bonus for Helping Hand(s), i do not think it should be near the bottom and it should not be slam-exclusive, this is why i recommended that it should proc on melee hits(including slams/slide kicks), with double the reduction on melee kills
i also propose a complete overhaul of rush stacks, that is, i recommend removing the ‘consumption’ of rush stacks, making them instead slowly decay after 2 seconds or so without new stacks, and then making rush-related skills give their bonuses based on the number of rush stacks, instead of the number of their own stacks obtained after ‘consuming’ the rush stacks, this would benefit all playstyles since rush skills are rather early into Mystical Assault and encourage usage of other COMs, specially in conjunction with the Helping Hand(s) change proposed that would make Phasezerker’s cooldown rate bonus less of a nigh-mandatory thing
yeah a lot of balance was thrown out the window when devs decided to buff a handful of weapons to match the few that could deal with end-game content instead of scaling back said content and appropriately tuning the few weapons that beat that
so now we just get a few legendaries buffed every other patch while generic purples and many uniques just become more and more useless
yesterdays patch that tried to adjust TTB ended up simply putting more weight on using phasezeker to stack Do Harm, we need a rework of rush and class mods ASAP
It still needs to be reworked I think, but I’ve been having a blast with a phaseslam/Dragon/facepuncher build, occasionally subbing the dragon out with a Stone. I’m sure the phasezerker would do better, but I’ve wrecked the Maliwan takedown multiples times with the build and never used it. At very least they’ve balanced things enough to where alternatives are more viable, but yeah, it’s still missing some synergies that would make it feel more cohesive.
u are willingly greatly reducing your dmg output by doing that unless you’re using like a red/green build with minimal Mystical Assault investment, which is okay everyone plays differently!
out of those 2 COMs, dragon only stands out, not due to its special effect, but due to being able to have remnant, allowing remnant on a red/green build
my call to rework rush(and her COMs to make them more competitive) is due to rush arguably being an objectably badly implemented mechanic: having to build up stacks, to THEN consume them to THEN get the effects of Do Harm/Tapestry for a few seconds while rush could is brought back down to 0(unless using the 1 COM) is just not good design, specially when the base/scaled dmg of action skills are still subpar compared to guns even with 99 5/5 do harm stacks
Sure, the point is that at no time in my playing did I think “this feels underpowered”, while tackling some of the hardest content. I’m clearly not forced into using a phasezerker, unless I’m just going for pure min-max. If I’m just specc-ing out for melee and plug a few pieces of sub-optimal gear in, I can kill things.
Again though, I agree that the rush stacks thing doesn’t fully work right now, for a lot of the reasons you laid out.
big disagree unless the playstyle is still focused on buffing elemental guns as much as possible as the main source of dmg, or if u are on really low mayhem levels
at many times i’ve felt straight up useless when trying to do builds focused around usage of damaging action skills(that arent Ties That Bind) or True melee, that is, punching
for action skill(slam/cast/fist over matter) focused set ups either u go for phasezeker for both dmg(only way to get 99 Do Harm stacks reliably) and cooldown or maybe with a niche golden-rule set up using low level guns to self dmg and proc it’s cooldown reduction, and even then its gonna struggle to compete with TTB + revelations +guns, and it’ll generally deal with longer cooldowns/more down time
for True melee, even fully stacked u wont be doing much on high mayhem, at all, unless you do gimmicky stuff with TTB which is less doing melee dmg and more making use of TTB… even with 400% melee bonuses from anointments, 175% from her skill tree and 300% from Ward shield, u’ll be tickling most enemies that arent shieldless mobs at m10, Unleash The Dragon allows u to do better dmg vs enemies that arent immune to fire/status tho, most of the dmg from melee attacks now comes from Ground Breaker which barely even feels like True melee since u’ll be doing mostly the same dmg without a melee build or any melee bonuses at all, could be a fl4k with Groundbreaker 0% bonus to melee dmg and have an easier time killing m10 enemies with melee than amara with all possible melee bonuses and no groundbreaker