Wild Strike

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zephiroth3 wrote:

change the fires burst sound.
its a neat skill, but every time i try it out i quit in five minutes.
CHANGE THE FIRE BURST SOUND.

yes, please ! That fire sound is truly annoying and MUCH louder than the cold/lightning sounds.

You can do better, GGG ! We know it =)

Playing a Wildstrike Inquisitor in SSF Synthesis (gear below for whoever is interested). First time I tried this skill I was playing the Bestiary race in SSF and wasn't impressed, and I'm still not sold on it.

The issue I have with this skill can be summarised in a few points:

1) Unlike its big brother Elemental Hit, it is completely random which element is chosen, so you can attack 5 times in a row with one element. This means Elemental Equilibrium can be great or absolutely terrible depending on your luck. This inconsistency is very annoying and ruined my original plan to build entirely around penetration with, say, Shroud of the Lightless and a 5-link Wild Strike.

2) Unlike its big brother Elemental Hit, Wildstrike doesn't have threshold jewels supporting it. I get that it's a different skill (WS converts phys to elemental, EH adds elemental damage). You can do shenanigans like focussing on a single element with Avatar of Fire, Call of the Brotherhood, Pyre and Cold to Fire support, but other than that you are very limited in options.

3) The fire explosion sound is annoying. I've played this character for about 20 hours and it's grown more and more annoying to me. Actually considering just switching to Infernal Blow or Molten Strike at this point.

4) Without Ancestral Call map clearing is really awkward and tedious, but doesn't help at all with bosses. On lower tiers you can get away with not switching, later on you'll have to switch to Multistrike, though.

Gear in spoilers:

The problem with Wild Strike is that it does not have good clear speed because of its name lock nature (i.e. you have to hit a monster to release the secondary part, meaning you have to be real close to the monsters in the first place) and due to the fact that the fire explosion has a particular small AOE. The design of the fire element is really dumb - given the fact that the initial hit and the secondary hit will NOT hit the same target, the fire explosion neither helps to clear packs nor does it help during boss fight. It would make sense if the secondary effect can hit the same target as the initial hit and the fire explosion has slightly higher damage than the cold/lightning element to make up the small AOE, but this is obviously not the case here. The positioning of Wild Strike as a skill is just confusing - it clearly would not be considered a good clearing skill but at the same time its single target output isn't that good compared with Molten Strike or Blade Flurry etc, despite its high damage effectiveness on the surface. To improve the skill, I would suggest that:

1)Rework the fire element so that it can clear packs properly

2)The enchantment of "Wild Strike Chains an additional 6 times" and "36% increased Wild Strike Area of Effect" be combined and in addition, add "Wild Strike has 3 additional projectiles" (Wild strike is already bad enough, why would you give it an enchantment that is only useful 1/3 of the time)

3)The secondary effect be able to hit the initial target. It's just dumb now that it cannot do so when the animation clearly shows it does and some other melee skills do (molten strike for example). You can turn down a bit the value, say if the enemy was hit by the initial hit, they take X% less damage from the secondary hit.

4)Make the secondary hit be based on MELEE damage, so that it would not be so difficult to scale. The fact that there are THREE different elements already make it very difficult to scale the damage. And now you have to split it up even to Melee, Projectile, AOE. And even better, the lightning chain, which is the best of all for clearing, has one less keyword than the others making it even more difficult to scale (There is just no way to scale "Chaining").

5)Make the secondary hit goes off whether or not the first hit hits. Name locking just doesn't make sense anymore, especially playing in teams. Where there are 6 players, the screen can be so chaotic that renders us impossible to locate monsters. Maybe the skills can be changed to a three-hit model (?) - "the initial hit and a secondary hit that goes off together with the first hit, and a third hit that goes off no matter the initial hit hits or not". Then the third hit can be focused on some kind of projectiles/chaining/AOE for clearing, and it would give players incentive to still get close to the boss to hit the initial hit to release the second hit.

6) Make ancestral call/melee splash implicit in the melee skills - this is not just for Wild Strike but other single target melee skills as well. I think it is time GGG admits the fact that no matter how good a single target skill is, they will not be used by anyone unless it can clear maps fast enough. The fact that AOE skills' DPS have basically caught up with the single target skills makes it no sense for single target skills to give up one socket for Ancestral Call/Melee Splash, when players can just go for the AOE skills and get similar or even higher DPS. So just make it inherent in the skills and I believe it will bring back many skills for people to use. Another thing that it is good to make it inherent is that GGG can balance different single target skills by adjusting how many additional target the skills will hit, as it is obvious that some single target skills have even worse clearing than some others. Say, double strike, it would seem fair to give it like 5-6+ additional target for clearing.

The above are the suggestions. You may see that some suggestions conflicts with one another, because it is not intended that all of the above are to be adopted as this will make wild strike way too OP. These are just options that GGG can think about to balance and make wild strike somewhat viable.

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ScorpiusXI wrote:

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Good feedback!

I think if we are going towards the idea of a skill rework, the problem lies in that the three elements are so different mechanically from each other.

- If all of them chained, you could work with that.
- If all of them were projectiles, you could work with that.
- If all of them were AoE, you could work with that.

Everything about the skill is random, which I am sure is the creator's intention and I admire the effort, but it's just a tad too much.

If we are to approach this subject, I want to digress from my original feedback post.

Quick idea: What if there was a melee and a spell damage component to the skill? Would shine bright with Crown of Eyes, Mark of the Shaper and Cast on Crit.

In general, the problem seems to be that elemental damage nodes aside it's unclear what to specc into. Even running triple Herald with Shroud of the Lightless (for 3x elemental penetration) is bad. This has to be changed.

I like this skill because it's decent enough and kinda-sorta reminds me of the Assassin's skill Phoenix Strike from Diablo 2 LoD.

Mechanically, I like that its 100% conversion to elemental -- something easy to just throw on enemies that reflect physical and what makes it different from Elemental Hit.

I think the sound effects are just fine -- I personally think the fire blast sounds cool on my headphones... yet I find Static Strikes' sound effects to be unbearable, so I guess it's a matter of opinion.

It is a really good thing that Combat Focus finally works with Wild Strike to block out the unwanted element(s). But the thing is, why Wild Strike should suffer the 50% less damage consequences as Elemental Hit, when the mechanism of the two skills are not the same? The purpose of the modifier was to prevent Elemental HIt from getting 300% of the damage as all three elements are present on the gem before conversion. But this does not apply to Wild Strike.

I was just fiddling around with some build ideas for the heist flashback and decided to try out wild strike, I enjoyed the concept and idea of the skill and had some fun playing with it.



The build I made was using EE to get that -50% sweet resistance on the enemy to make inquisitors cry on their bed for their useless "ignore elemental resistance" ascendancy, the thought was, wild strike picks 1 out of 3 elements and converts all the physical damage to the element, at first I thought it worked out like elemental hit which converted all damage to an element and only dealing that type of damage only, which I was horribly mistaken and had to remove all sorts of "added X elemental damage" of the build, and then for my second mistake was thinking that it wouldn't pick the same element twice in a row just like elemental hit...BIG. NO.



This second problem I believe is the worst, EE becomes RNG as in you can either deal damage when the enemy has -50% elemental resistance or it has +25%, this on bosses becomes wether 0% elemental resistance or a whopping 75% as we help Sirus, Shaper, Elder and boss family cap their resistances.



The first part is understandable, wild strike has a big "added damage effectiveness" modifier, which is probably the reason why lightning wild strike is so strong on it but the second part is uncalled for, elemental hit which is a skill that usually deals more damage and has an easier time building for it doesn't repeat the same element twice in a row, so why should wild strike, a MELEE. STRIKE. WITH DIFFERENT TAGS FOR ITS ATTACKS. have this problem while still sharing threshold jewels with elemental hit?



With this I ask of GGG to take a look into wild strike and make EE wild strike a viable option instead of lightning and lightning only wild strike since frost blades is better for cold damage and even molten strike might be better than fire wild strike.

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T;dr: Wild strike should have a mechanic similar to Elemental Hit as in it cannot choose the same element twice in a row so that Elemental Equilibrium builds can work at 100% uptime.

I've been using / experimenting with Wild Strike over several leagues now.

Previous Characters:
lvl 91 Raider (lightning)
Lvl 85 Gladiator (Cold)

Current Characters (Ultimatum League)
lvl 92 Gladiator (Avatar of Fire)
lvl 87 Slayer (Trinity)


In past leagues I've used Malachai's Artifice to apply EE discriminately. Pretty much in every attempt Wild Strike putters out getting into the T16 content .. specifically bossing. (Though after this season I have some new ideas).

But ultimately I feel like Wild Strike is a lie. I feel like it's a joke skill that looks really cool - but the devs secretly sabotaged.

1st) The Combat Focus threshold jewels are balanced for Elemental Hit - and it seems like Wild Strike was thrown in there as an afterthought. These jewels are horrible for WS. No other Skill gets a global 50% Less damage modifier for additive damage from it's threshold jewel. Aside from this, just the loss of a Jewel socket is detrimental. Any other melee jewel is a dps gain for WS vs the best rolled threshold jewel, and the fact that you have to waste 2 sockets is a huge handicap.

2nd) The Secondary Effect of Wild Strike doesn't hit a target that was hit by the melee strike. I can't tell how disgusted I was when I learned that, this season. I suppose that I'm naive, to think that if there is an effect on the screen - that it is actually doing something. I thought WS should be a great bossing skill / since it had two separate effects (the melee hit followed by random elemental effect) they would both hit the boss.

Even the fire explosion doesn't hit - when explosions are the one mechanic that are allowed to muli-hit!


Recommendations: I feel that all effects of WS should be effectual - the initial melee strike and the resulting proc. Honestly I feel like it's damage would remain inline with other skills without any further tweaking. However if the developers intent for WS is specifically map clearing vs. bossing - then yes, this would appear to be a significant power step. Maybe incorporate - the secondary effect does 30% less damage if the target was hit by the melee strike.

The Combat Focus threshold jewel should be tweaked so that only 1 jewel is required (but 2 are still required for EH). Basically, instead of saying
"Wild Strike cannot choose Lightning" the Viridian Combat Focus jewel will say "With 40 total Dexterity and Strength in Radius, Elemental Hit cannot choose Lightning and Wild Strike can only choose Cold"

WS does not receive 'free' additive damage from it's own skill gem like EH does - so the last line should only apply to Elemental Hit: "With 40 total Dexterity and Strength in Radius, Elemental Hit deals 50% less Lightning Damage"

However if you feel like there should still be some additional cost / consequence, I would suggest the following:
(viridian combat focus)
With 40 total Dexterity and Strength in Radius, Elemental Hit deals 50% less Lightning Damage.
With 40 total Dexterity and Strength in Radius, Wild Strike deals 50% less Lightning and Fire Damage - Wild Strike deals 7% more Melee Damage

My build 3.15
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3185701 (20~30ish ex version 10mil dps)

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3183418 (couple mirror version 30mil)

My build in previous league
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2738744 (first build doing 1~2mil)


I have tested out wild strike build on the new skill tree (pob alpha)
I understand there are still some values that are not calculated

Long story short my dps was 1/4 of what I used to do

I know 0.1 % play this build and other builds needed EE nerfed for tuning numbers on their dps but honestly I'm hoping for three element wild strike build to work
lower end or high end if you take your time to research the build (with 3 element wild strike) there are none that operates properly (since you gotta give up the defensive to get offensive due to the wild spread nods to scale the damage properly.)

I'm just hoping (3element)wild-strike skill becomes playable in 3.16
To state the truth I started two month before meta-morph league and I felt in love with the skill but was unable to find a single build on any of the youtubers(most of them saying it was not viable 'period')
Which is why I even started building on my own

I'll be sad to see this build sink down again, when it has never seen it's peak at all since the release of the skill.

Hope to hear something from you guys
P.S (only way for it to scale better now is to boost up the base damage) or tweak the value of penetration with the skill(or exposure)
thank you for your time and your hard work.

TL:DR Why would you make Multistrike cause Wild Strike to use the same element 3 times in a row when the whole purpose of the (minor, sort of) rework was to ensure that it DOESN'T use the same element twice in a row?????? Makes no freaking sense. You do play melee strike characters, right? You understand how irreplaceable you've made MultiSTRIKE, right? Com on...

The only issue I have right now with Wild Strike is the way it works with Multistrike. (although, don't get me wrong... so much can still be worked on by you guys with this skill, and myself and other players are still holding our breath waiting season after season)

MTX Skill Effect? Ever?

Anyways... moving back to the point, the new version of Wild Strike states that it won't choose the same element twice in a row and we all know what purpose that serves; Elemental Equilibrium. Great! Now we have an awesome reason to use Wild Strike without any stupid Combat Focus jewels and we can incorporate EE (especially because it's so close to the Melee area of the Skill Tree) AWESOME STUFF!

Oh... wait... But, for some dumb as f___ reason Multistrike causes is to use the same element 3 times in a row. R... I... P...

Seriously. You guys see how people play your game, right? Autoboming Walking Simulators, CoC Spam, etc.. etc.. Builds that completely obliterate your game content and then some. But, we can't get Wild Strike to not work like ass?

Come on guys. Please, don't let it work this way with Multitrike. If the gem change was to make it never use the same element twice, THEN MAKE IT NOT USE THE SAME ELEMENT TWICE! Right? it really is game breaking, and stupid.