Dominating Blow

GGG definitely have to rework this skill so it can be playable. At its current state it's like Elemental Hit or Double Strike.

I tried this skill this league and it does not work on breach, harbinger, perandus and beyond monsters. I can understand that it does not work on unique monsters or exiles or minions of other players, but why it does not work on the core elements of the three most rewarding and also the last two leagues is a mystery to me. It's like GGG does not want anybody to use this skill anymore.

Edit: I would even say, for the sake of server stability, give this skill a minion limit and nerf it, but don't leave it in the current state, where you cannot use it in a new league (harbinger league, breach league). Maybe a threshold jewel could help...

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Constraint wrote:

GGG definitely have to rework this skill so it can be playable. At its current state it's like Elemental Hit or Double Strike.

Even Double Strike is still usable though.

maybe a way of fixing the skill could be a cap on how much units u can take over, buff the strenght of minions and let also get small league specific monsters get overtaken like harbinger/beyond/breach up to magic monsters.
also to push the biggest downside the singletarget bossdamage without creeps like in lab the skill could do more damage the less creatures u have taken over, and less damage the more u have taken.
so it balances out between clearspeed and singletarget

Lol, dominating blow is not even mentioned in the patch notes for 3.1. So i guess business as usual, we cannot dominate the abyss monsters. Did the Dev who created this skill die or does he only create mtx nowadays?

my 2 cents: make it a support gem so it can be used with "ranged" melee in conjunction with other minion skills. ie: srs, and then sunder into the pack to create DB minions also. if thats op, then some variation of this. floating the idea.

Playing a Dominating Blow-based character in Bestiary SSF right now. According to the statistics that GGG released today, I'm one of the very few.

I am going to write a series of posts about it, since I have actually seriously played this skill as my primary skill from level 28 in 3.2. It seems unlikely that many other people can make that claim. I am far from an expert PoE player, though; I'm pretty much entirely ignorant of the meta, create my own builds, and play SSF. I've beaten most of the maps in the game, but never beaten the Shaper, red-tier Elder (to say nothing of Uber Elder), the Alluring Abyss, or Vaal Temple. Actually, I've only tried the Shaper and Vaal Temple once each, and the others I've never even had the opportunity to try. And most of that success was on an almost-writes-itself Oni-Goroshi build. The vast majority of my characters peter out somewhere in yellow-tier maps. Just so you know where I'm coming from.

Now then, this post is going to be just a kind of review of Dominating Blow as it has seemed to me, in my play:

As it currently stands, Dominating Blow should probably have been removed from the game. That would be better than misleading players into thinking this skill gem was useful for any purpose. And I say that as someone who has played, and to an extent, enjoyed the damn thing.

Dominating Blow is literally useless through substantial portions of the game. Kaom's Dream was a particularly brutal area, where damn near everything was useless to dominate (because they were stationary and even Convocation couldn't move them). The Labyrinth, obviously, just sucks; have to switch to something else since you lose your army when you enter Aspirant's Trial and none of the adds can be dominated. Plenty of other bosses have similar problems.

And then there are Abyss, Breach, Harbinger, Perandus—all those adds, all those white, blue, or yellow adds, that nonetheless you cannot touch. Skills says you should, but no. Why no? Probably because they can't be raised as spectres and the code overlaps: that's seriously my suspicion. Because it just doesn't seem credible that GGG would have looked at them and said "oh, it'd be way too powerful if you could dominate these."

(GGG, if you did think that, you're wrong.)

Even when not literally prevented from functioning, there isn't really any viable way that I could find to actually use Dominating Blow to defeat add-less bosses—of which there are a whole lot. Most of the gods in the Pantheon, for examples, along with Innocence (and the related fights). Plenty of maps. Most of the big end-game bosses. My character relies on Animated Weapon to fight those bosses—and if that runs out, just dying until the boss is dead. Obviously doesn't work for the Labyrinth or maps.

On the other hand, the skill can be really fun when it works. The Brine King was a great fight: hard, but constant adds meant I could at least fight back. Arakaali worked too; adds were less frequent, but they existed.

Those kinds of fights, though, seem to be the exception more than the rule. Far too often, the skill simply cannot be used as a main.

But it's an awkward, difficult skill to use, which makes it really dubious as a secondary skill. It's not worth having sit on your skill bar, nor investing in accuracy for, nor choosing a melee weapon for, nor closing to melee. I can imagine no way you could do a "regular" minion-based character and then actually want to use Dominating Blow from time to time. There just aren't enough opportunities where it really shines. At best, you dominate some rare with a great aura—awesome when it works, doesn't happen often enough to justify having the skill.

Even if you ignore the times it can't work, and just suck it up and accept the weaknesses it has when it does work, the quality of life issues are massive, too. Can't go back to town without losing your entire army. Always start new zones with nothing, which is a problem when you go investing in minions.

It's hard to imagine fixes for it, too, that won't cause it to just become an awkward form of Raise Spectre. The only serious advantage it has over Raise Spectre is the ability to get rare (and magic, but that's nearly inconsequential) monsters on your side. Occasionally, that's very nice. In Bestiary, a lot of those bestiary mods are pretty juicy (it does mean not capturing the damn thing, though). Nemesis, too, obviously. But the biggest winners are the auras—including the maybe kinda unfair Other Allies Cannot Die. Which applies to you. Which is awesome. But only somewhat more common than Divine Shrines.

Getting a huge army is nice, too, admittedly, but it seems kind of win-more for situations where you're doing well anyway and the game isn't all that difficult for most builds. It doesn't feel like a huge advantage over Raise Spectre. I mean, I'm also wielding The Dancing Dervish—that does way more in those situations since having a huge army usually also means I have Rampage, and the sword kills most things long before my army even really gets there.

A second post now, separate because it seemed more neatly organized. This one's about Dominating Blow's biggest problem:

It literally does not function on far too much of the game.

If this isn't fixed, then there is a very strong case for just removing the skill from the game altogether. It just feels punitive to try to use it. It honestly feels like a trap, like false advertising. The skill exists—that implies it's supposed to be used, doesn't it? Well, no, as it currently exists, it is not meant to be used. Because it's unusable on far too much of the game.

As far as the skill itself is concerned, this would cease to be a problem if all bosses had adds, and those adds could be dominated. That is obviously a massive change to the game (and in light of the number of things that key off of killing things that are completely useless on add-less bosses, it might be worth considering, but not here), and I'm going to just assume it'll never happen and say no more about it.

But at least some bosses (and league events like Abysses) already have adds, that for no apparent reason are immune to being dominated. Why? Some of them are even white/blue/yellow, rather than orange, so it seems like you should be able to dominate them. This much, I think, can and absolutely should be fixed. There is no reason why Dominating Blow in particular should get screwed on those.

Beyond that, I think the skill could use to borrow some from a similar skill with similar issues: Animated Weapon. Like Dominating Blow, Animated Weapon produces time-limited minions. Like Dominating Blow, Animated Weapon's minions cannot change zones. Like Dominating Blow, Animated Weapon is prevented from creating more minions in add-less situations (because no new items are dropping).

But Animated Weapon isn't a bad skill at all. Animated Weapon, frankly, is pretty awesome, if a bit tedious. And the big reason why is because you can pick up a bunch of extra weapons in your inventory, and carry them with you into the boss fight. For some fights (Labyrinth), you could theoretically animate a huge number of weapons before you go in, far beyond the limits of your inventory.

So what if Dominating Blow had some cap on the number of monsters you could dominate, and if you would dominate a monster over that cap, it gets stored for later? Could be automatically summoned when dominated monsters die/time out, including when you change zones. That could even let you go to town, and when you go back, poof, there are your over-cap monsters waiting for you. Massive improvement in both playability and quality of life.

Third post, again for organization's sake.

This one is about some ideas for improving Dominating Blow's actual functionality, since even when it works it isn't all that great.

The big thing for me here is that there is no way in the game to meaningfully be a hybrid minion/self-attack build, and that's what Dominating Blow desperately wants in order to carve out a niche for itself. It forces you to go into melee with you minions—and as the game currently stands, one or the other of you is going to suck, if not both, because nothing in the game supports you both at the same time.

Nothing, that is, other than The Scourge. I am intentionally discounting that because if the skill is going to be useless unless you have a particular unique, the skill should just be granted by that unique rather than be a skill gem.

However, The Scourge does present an interesting idea: what if Dominating Blow applied (some fraction of) your minion stats to your own Dominating Blow attack? I have suggested this idea before, and was shot down on the basis of there being weapons with way higher damage than The Scourge that would be abusive with this, but.... would it really? I mean, Dominating Blow is still a single-target, no-area, extremely-high-mana-cost attack. And it doesn't have to be 100% of your minion damage applied. Currently, it's 0%. There's room there, it seems to me.

Could go the other way, though. Could allow dominated minions to benefit from your stats. If nothing else, I strongly suggest aura radius—getting an aura monster is awesome, but most of them have really small radii and so you don't actually benefit from the aura when you're moving quickly through the map.

On that subject, my own attempt at a solution to the hybrid problem was to try to focus on auras: after all, those do work equally-well on both my minions and myself. But auras are, and probably have to be, balanced around parties. A Guardian or Ascendant who gets Champion of the Cause, Charisma, Influence, Leadership, and Sovereignty—that is, every aura node in the game—doesn't become suddenly awesome themselves because of all their auras, they just become a support bot for party members. And that's if they run Victario's Influence, i.e. gain little to nothing for themselves. Otherwise it's rather difficult to run more than 2-3 real auras.

So some kind of way to boost solo-play aurabots would also help Dominating Blow.

But really, what I think should actually happen, is for there to just actually be nodes on the tree that improve you and your minions. For that to be a legitimate thing you can actually spec into. And that would improve more than just Dominating Blow—it would open up a whole array of builds, because hybrid minion builds would be possible. Currently, you have to either be all-in on minions, or you're only using them for utility or maybe a decoy/meatshield.