Dominating Blow

The skill feels very solid now.

To the people complaining about no sentinels on boss fights, you need to invest in 2 things: Skill effect duration and a Writhing Jar.

Writhing jar allows on demand sentinels to be deployed when you're at 0.

Skill effect duration increases the value of each sentinel. With all the skill effect duration on the tree and Chober Chairn, each sentinel lasts for 44 seconds for me. It'd be more with the Lab enchant affecting duration.

It's a very solid skill now. I prefer to scale pure physically along with a 6L Herald of Purity that has summon phantasm so there's a bit of ranged support.

With vulnerability curse, the minions themselves melt things and can apply a hefty bleed themselves for when it's necessary to recover.

Thank for a the rework but can you update the skill animation/sound and the hit box ? Weapon range seem to not work very well with it.

Also can you make it only using main hand weapon ? It feel very bad while dual wielding , need some QOL here thank !

Edit : the animation is a normal attack :(

I have an idea. Since you lose minions during long phases and it requires lots of attack speed and facetank to sustain. Instead of spawn chance on hit, how about 20% chance to spawn minion every .5 sec when a unique enemy is nearby? With this you wont lose minions during long phases and it will no longer require you to facetank or stack attack speed to sustain minions. Just a thought.

My setup:


Great skill now after the rework. I like it it a lot. I would just request that the proc rate for unique enemies like bosses gets increased as some users before me have mentioned and add some cool mtx.

I am using a fast brightbeak so i can only imagine what it's like with a slow weapon like chober chaber versus bosses.

Rating 4/5. Would get a 5 with a new animation, a few mtx choices and better proc rate vs uniques.

Dom blow has some issues right now with bossing. While when you come from the map and have sentinels up based on how fast you can burn the boss its "ok" (not great, ok). If the boss summons minions and adds its also ok since you can convert them.

Fights like the elder guardians or almost every high tier map boss without adds is however a pain in the ass.

First of all dom blow has to get into melee range. We are not talking about sunder melee range, but you have to be in the face of every boss. The risk here not really gets rewarded with your 10% to summon a sentinal on hitting a unique enemy with 10 attacks the second you summon 1 sentinal a second. While sentinels also despawn and get just killed it is extremly difficult to sustain more than 3-4 on every boss fight.

The need for extremly high atk speed weapons. Atm with the current setup of Dom blow you can´t really run a slow 2h weapon but almost all builds use stuff like bright beak to get the atk speed up to even summon enough sentinals in the first place. This doesn´t really give you variety for weapons etc. and also makes atk speed somewhat mandatory at all times.

Sentinel duration is fine, through using skill effect duration from the tree to ramp them up to 29 seconds actually makes them feel really good. To bad you have to waste 3 points to get that QoL.

In higher tier maps I do literally no damage, thus converting the first mobs in a map is really challenging. Thus I must run additional setups like specters or zombies that help to trigger the snowball effect. Also not ideal that I feel forced to use other minions to even make my skill start doing damage (through here I haven´t invested into physical notes to make myself stronger but only minion notes etc., so this point might not be as impactful if build differently).

Downtime in bosses or phases. When your sentinels run out in phases and you lose 90% of your dps until you rebuild it .. feels really bad.

For me the 10% proc chance for bosses is killing it. I do not undertand why there is not a 50% or 100% chance especially since every other minion gem is so more reliable regarding dps on bosses.

Is there something that I´m missing? I run skeletons in a 4l and mostly use them for bosses which works to some degree with me ofc as support and that 1 sentiel that I might spawn.


Last but not least the skill looks super unimpressive. Its non visible when you are fighting, just a fast auto attack. Some love here would help. Even if it looks like a smite it would make more sense.

Could developers at least post resistance value for sentinels, becouse compared to high end zombie build, my sentinels drops like flies against shaper and guardians. Atm i'm not even sure if it's resistance problem or low health pool.

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to chime in a little bit about the new Dominating Blow, and perhaps help with a few suggestions that might improve the quality of life while using this skill.

Before I list my ideas, and this isn't to brag or anything, I have cleared all content in the game with Dominating Blow. Guardians, Shaper, Red & Uber Elder. I am also currently sitting at delve level 410. I only wanted to state these things to show that I have a pretty decent bit of experience using this skill, and it's ups and downs.

To me, the new version of this skill feels wonderful. When you have your minions out it does very respectable damage. It's not like God-tier type of damage when it comes to PoE, but probably sits one tier below that (again WHEN you have your minions out).

Now onto the 'issues' with the skill. As you noticed in the last paragraph, I stated 'when you have your minions out' twice. Because to me, that is the biggest glaring issue with the skill. Not so much for clearing trash monsters, but when it directly relates to bosses. With no further delay, here are my ideas on how to tweak the skill so that it feels much better against the 'big baddies'.


--- 10% proc rate is far too low against unique monsters. Herald of Purity has a 20% proc rate and it 'feels' nice. HoP also has a 4 minion cap while Dom Blow has a 9 minion cap. I believe Dom Blow should be at least a 20% proc rate, if not 25% against uniques.

--- Again comparing with how Herald of Purity works. I believe for the 'normal' version of Dominating Blow minions, they should 'refresh' instead of 'respawn' once you begin to summon a minion above the cap. Magic and Rare Dom Blow minions should still follow the same 'rules' of respawning it has now due to modifiers. (Imagine having an infinitely refreshing Immunity Aura Rare minion. While that sounds great, that's absolutely absurdly broken and wouldn't be healthy for the game.)

--- Helm Enchants for the skill are in a very bad spot. The only 'mediocre' one is Dom Blow Duration...but even that is only a 6s buff to duration. Having 3 extra Magic, or 1 extra Rare is an absolute waste. Dominating Blow clears trash monsters absolutely fine how it is. Having extra Magic or Rare minions will not do anything. And to top it off, there is no way to summon Magic or Rare minions against bosses...so those 2 helm enchants are pretty much worthless.

--- Speaking of Magic and Rare minions. If you follow my suggestion of making 'normal' minions spawn at a ~20% proc rate against uniques...maybe Magic and Rare minions should also have a proc rate against bosses. Maybe something like 5% for Magic, 1% for rare. They would spawn with random modifiers and the only exception would be that 'proccing' a Rare minion against a unique can never spawn the Immunity Aura version. You can only get that type of Rare minion naturally. Including this would make the helm enchants a bit more relevant.

Anyway, I know this is a rather long post, but I'd love to hear feedback about my suggestions. I would really enjoy seeing at least the 1st and 2nd idea I posted get implimented into the game ASAP, just to make the skill 'feel' like it's in a good spot against bossing.

"

Mephos wrote:

Dom blow has some issues right now with bossing. While when you come from the map and have sentinels up based on how fast you can burn the boss its "ok" (not great, ok). If the boss summons minions and adds its also ok since you can convert them.

Fights like the elder guardians or almost every high tier map boss without adds is however a pain in the ass.

First of all dom blow has to get into melee range. We are not talking about sunder melee range, but you have to be in the face of every boss. The risk here not really gets rewarded with your 10% to summon a sentinal on hitting a unique enemy with 10 attacks the second you summon 1 sentinal a second. While sentinels also despawn and get just killed it is extremly difficult to sustain more than 3-4 on every boss fight.

The need for extremly high atk speed weapons. Atm with the current setup of Dom blow you can´t really run a slow 2h weapon but almost all builds use stuff like bright beak to get the atk speed up to even summon enough sentinals in the first place. This doesn´t really give you variety for weapons etc. and also makes atk speed somewhat mandatory at all times.

Sentinel duration is fine, through using skill effect duration from the tree to ramp them up to 29 seconds actually makes them feel really good. To bad you have to waste 3 points to get that QoL.

In higher tier maps I do literally no damage, thus converting the first mobs in a map is really challenging. Thus I must run additional setups like specters or zombies that help to trigger the snowball effect. Also not ideal that I feel forced to use other minions to even make my skill start doing damage (through here I haven´t invested into physical notes to make myself stronger but only minion notes etc., so this point might not be as impactful if build differently).

Downtime in bosses or phases. When your sentinels run out in phases and you lose 90% of your dps until you rebuild it .. feels really bad.

For me the 10% proc chance for bosses is killing it. I do not undertand why there is not a 50% or 100% chance especially since every other minion gem is so more reliable regarding dps on bosses.

Is there something that I´m missing? I run skeletons in a 4l and mostly use them for bosses which works to some degree with me ofc as support and that 1 sentiel that I might spawn.


Last but not least the skill looks super unimpressive. Its non visible when you are fighting, just a fast auto attack. Some love here would help. Even if it looks like a smite it would make more sense.

With HoP and proper setup it just wrecks content....

Minotaur test run - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0feXUbqmIYg
Uber Atziri - https://youtu.be/4X-pdtfatYQ
Red Elder - https://youtu.be/CN3FAjc4yJM

I am not sure if it is just me, but Dominating blow is causing immense in-game lags for me (latency) after the rework that came with Delve patch.

I am playing a Guardian with 8 zombies, 4 sentinels of purity, holy relic, 2 specters,animated guardian + Dom blow as my main skill effectively maintaining minions from Dom blow as well.

I have 0 lag with other characters and this is not a net problem on my side.
Also when I have all summons up and stand still while they mash things, everything is good.
I also tried several gateways but that isn't the problem either.

What is the actual problem is being flooded with small, quickly dying minions, like dozens of white spiders in Delve mine. I kill them all instantly and since I hit then all (splash), they are all converted into new minion from Dom Blow. This can happens many times a second and this is where the spikes happen leading to a short screen stalls and a quickly played animation afterwards where the game tries to catch up as if you had actual lag.
It also causes other people to lag heavily while in party with me.

Has anyone encountered similar problems?
Otherwise I am loving the mechanics of the skill but with this I tend to think they should rework it into something like herald of purity which keeps the amount of adds and prolongs their duration (maybe replacing auras on the rare one?) at least for blue and rare minion from Dom blow.

Hey GGG.

I think there must be a visual bug with dominating blow after the launch of betrayal.

The sentinels are black, with some yellowish stuff smeared on them.

It's honestly pretty cool, but i liked the old look aswell, so i would like this to be a skin or something, instead.

I didn't see you mention that you reworked the visuals so that's why i think its a bug.

I'm split because if it's a bug then i actually don't want it to be fixed, unless you add it as a skin. Because it actually looks pretty dope. xD

So what i'm saying is add it as a skin, or add the old one back as a skin :)


Many regards a happy poe player