#21

Just a quick FYI. Some of Amara’s skills were shown to have changed at Guardian Con:

One With Nature (Tier 1) has been replaced with Root to Rise
Root to Rise (Tier 2) has been replaced with Samsara
Samsara (Tier 4) has been replaced with One With Nature.

Find Your Center (Tier 3) Duration from 8 -> 20sec
One With Nature (Now Tier 4) Elemental Damage Reduction from 12% -> 8%
Do Unto Others (Tier 5) Cooldown from 8 -> 5 seconds

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#22

Thanks for the info. I did think that 20 seconds on Find Your Center seemed a little extreme lol. This shouldn’t change the way I intend to build her.

Samsara tier 2, seriously!? This skill sounds absolutely ■■■■■■■ insane, and now you can get it as early as level 9!? That. Is. AWESOME!

#23

Am I misunderstanding you here? Find Your Center was increased from 8sec duration to 20sec. The way you phrased yourself it sounds like you think it went from 20 to 8.

Do you think we could effectively get close to 25 Samara stacks that early with Slam or Cast? Would the corrosive damage from Blight Tiger count as Action Skill damage? I could easily see Grasp --> Shoot with SMG to get stacks. When it was tier 4 you’d have Revelation’s Nova damage at least to add more damage.

#24

I love most of the changes made, except some of the ones you didn’t mention: Damage values have been changed. “Do Unto Others” does almost double the damage now. Also, all variants of Phasecast/Phaseslam have been weakened, the slams a bit more so, but it isn’t too bad. I think it was 10% less damage on Phasecast and 15% less damage on Phaseslam, but I could be wrong here.

The change to “Find your Center” seems to indicate that melee is supposed to be a permanent and convenient part of her playstyle. Increasing her range for the vast majority of playtime will do wonders, especially for her Capstone (which makes me wonder: How far will Amara be able to dash forward with “Blitz”?).

#25

Poor wording on my part, I’d just woken up lol.

Even if you can’t get max stacks consistently at early levels, just having access to high bursts of damage and healing so early on sounds absurd.

Not only that, but for any non-melee build you can invest a mere 8 points into Brawl to reap the benefits of an otherwise very potent skill. Think of how well it will synergise with Avatar on Rush builds for huge bursts, when several skills in MYSTICAL ASSAULT already activate on using an action skill. Don’t get me wrong I love it, just surprises me that such a great sounding skill would be available so early in a skill tree.

#26

I’m so confused why they chose 25 as a cap. That seems like a ludicrously high number of enemies to manage to hit at once at all :joy:

I don’t think you can hit twenty five varkids in a single fire button

#27

You can’t even get 25 enemies to spawn in BL2 :joy:

It states while dealing damage, not for each enemy damaged, so maybe lingering action skills like Downfall and Fist Over Matter will accumulate more stacks, and we still don’t know how it’ll interact with action skill augments and elements. Either way, my go to will be to chuck a singularity grenade before popping an action skill to inflict mass casualties and build stacks.

2 Likes
#28

Well, thinking about the possibility of double-casting Amara’s action skills with “Avatar”, then it might be easier to get more “Samsara” stacks than we think. Also, we haven’t seen “Tandava” and “Deliverance” yet. Both could stack up “Samsara” quite easily (in the case of “Deliverance” it depends on the orbs and if they count as Action Skill Damage or just as regular DoT’s).

My guess is that Gearbox doesn’t even want us to hit the cap of 25 stack often, if at all. There might very well be situations when we can get to the cap, at which point Amara will basically become invincible. But for the most part even a single stack of “Samsara” is a good boost to survivability. If we control the battlefield well, then we might get 3 stacks on average, maybe more if we use skills like “Downfall” efficiently. But even just 2 stacks is 6% health regen + 12% gun damage. Pretty good, but more so in the hands of skilled players. I like that.

#29

This wouldn’t surprise me TBH. Instead of a skill that we can easily hit the cap of, one that we have to strategise to use efficiently and really work for. And one that doesn’t have a silly cap of 999 that, if we have methods of massively reducing cooldown and somehow finding a way to prolong stacks, can’t be abused.

This a thousand times. Samsara to me looks like one of the better skills in the game that we’ve seen so far. If you can find ways to maintain stacks longer than intended or build them quickly enough to hit the cap and do so consistently, it could get disgusting.

Or maybe I’m very wrong, but we don’t know for sure yet and on paper it’s mental. I hope no COM boosts it. I mean, I do, but I don’t lol. It looks like a tier 5 skill not tier 2 lol. I can’t wait to see non-Brawl builds using it efficiently.

#30

It feels quite like Athena’s Maelstrom: Good skill for basically everyone, but when used by a good player with a build that compliments the skill, then it’s potential gets unlocked. The only conceptual difference is that Samsara isn’t meant to be used 100% of the time, but the right build (or just “Avatar” for that matter) reduces the downtime drastically and/or gets more mileage out of the regular uptimes.

Personal anecdote: I remember using Wilhelms “Zero Hour” pretty often as the 8% health regen was worth the wait (I ran an “Overcharge”-spamming build). Now we basically have the same function and more in a skill that let’s us move freely. There is just a bit more of a skill gap involved.

#31

I didn’t mention any skill damages because base damage scales to levels. So what you see in the skill builder site is based on a level 10 character. Phaseslam for example starts at 100 damage at level 6 and increases to 109 at level 7. At level 25 its 512.

#32

This was my Wilhelm build too. Mag size and explosive damage, and the Laser Disker all day :grin: It was so dumb lol, I cleared the Holodome Badass Round with a Cryo Taser (my favourite freezing gun), Laser Disker, and Shock IVF. IVF for heavy shields of course. Froze and one shot most enemies, it was just silly to be able to chuck Tediores throughout that whole arena. Overcharge was so broken lol