Dominating Blow

I haven't used dominating blow for a very long time. The biggest reason i can remember that i stopped using it was when challenge leagues ceased to be compatible with it.

Harbinger
Warbands
Perandus
Breach
Essence
Anarchy

That and the surprising nerf in 2.00 when it needed a buff instead.

It might have been good in abyss league. If it worked on abyss monsters. Did it?

Need to try this skill again. It's the only way together with headhunter and inspired learning to get rare monster special buffs.

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Honsales wrote:

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?

Let's hope it's one of the skills of the upcoming skill revamp.

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kompaniet wrote:

Need to try this skill again. It's the only way together with headhunter and inspired learning to get rare monster special buffs.

I strongly recommend against it, unless maybe if you go with The Scourge, maybe (don't have one to try, play SSF). While Dominating Blow works on Bestiary critters (and some of those effects are quite nice), the simple fact that many of the leagues you listed became core gameplay so you still run across all of those things, coupled with the fact that it simply does not work for much of the bosses in the game, make it an exercise in frustration.

One way to make this skill somewhat practical against bosses without losing its flavour would be to add:

"While you have less than X dominated minions, hitting an enemy that cannot be dominated summons a random dominated minion beside you."

The pool of possible minions could be drawn from the Desecrate table and there would probably need to be some sort of cooldown for this effect.

And since future threshold jewels are being designed to change rather than simply buff a skill's functionality, the threshold jewel for this could reduce the number of dominated minions you can maintain but transform all white/blue minions into rares.

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Some more information on the delve changes to how your completele destroying this skill gem would be nice. 13 max dominated from uncapped is a huge nerf only 1 rare mob... okay... and then they are some kinda dominate seninels? are they minions or sentinels. do they take minion dmg modifiers? just leave the spell as is. this is really about to make me quit playing, you go and nerf a skill that is doing really bad? why? do you hate summoners? this new change on the delve page to dominating blow skill is HORRIBLE. the worst changes possible. just leave it be. i have a functioning build around it now but you are going and messing with its core mechanics and just leaving it unusable. who would want 13 minions... you really lost me here. why even modify the skill at all. just delete it at this rate its a smack in the face if you really gonna upload that doodoo skill gem on the delve page. im sure this is a huge laugh at ggg and dominating blow was always a gag gem and a few people learned how to work it too well and it got your servers too laggy so you nerfed it to death like every other summoner. just remove summoners all together if u cant manage the lag.

you know what. its because it competes with the headhunter and we cant have that can we. better nerf it so people still like headhunter. i hate the headhunter i get 60second dominations on rares and get them into the boss fight. but now. almost nothing. and are these sentinels even the things i dominate or are they just preset mininons like summon skeleton. if you removed the actual DOMINATION from the skill why not just rename it to "summon random guys on hit" cuz thats all u do at that point

whats left to play now that they butchered even dominating blow? open to suggestions of interesting builds that havent been nerfed. cant seem to even get to lvl 50 without using a twitch streamers guide

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whatever they do, at least they buffed the melee damage so i can kill with that better. i never focused the build on the minions killing. my mechanic focused on the real domination and how they retain ignites on dominate. using this forcing them to take my fire damage after i own them allowed me to force minion instability on lesser mobs and keep rare mobs alive. now this whole idea is out the window as these sentinels will be fresh spawns without my fire damage retained on dominate. this will mess with a lot of how builds function with dominating blow. i have some ideas for the new skill setup but its not looking as fun.

pros: minion damage negative 30% removed.
base damage boost of i believe 15%
sentinels on unique boss
duration added to mark allowing you to dominate targets easier. (this is great but you should be smacking hard enough to dominate and also who cares? you only get a limited ammount so dominating more is pointless... so nice fix but too late)

cons: mega army disabled.
taking time to dominate a tanky rare mob will offer you no cool effects like having a badass guy doing its own spells and taking hits because if its own monster traits.
sentinels unclear on how they function with spells and attacks.
losing supports to many gems and effects gmp spell echo faster casting fork chain, all unique supports that the monsters would apply to their skills will now be vague and probably half of them wont apply to the sentinels chosen combat style (most likely melee to match the melee build)

i have hit up to 200 dominated in a map so this feels like a huge smack in the face to what i was doing before even if we can dream of hitting 50 dominated this was small numbers for me, i average in the 120+ dominated at all times during map clearing or pushing without stopping.