Ruthless

"

e1337donkey wrote:

I was planning on this being my 6th link for my bleed blade flurry build and after some testing.. I don't think it works while you just channel. I also tried it with vengeance and didn't see it stun anything. Nor with shield charge.

Now this could be because I still need to meet a Stun Threshold to actually stun a target. If that's the case then ughh.. I figured I could get those juicy 120%ish more hit and bleed damage and stuns going off but it doesn't seem to work well with blade flurry. May have to switch in maim instead. Had that on my warchief totem.

Kind of wish they would discuss gems like this a little more.

Yes you do need to meet a threshold. Description is saying base stun duration. Compared to vaal slam that states stun and will always apply stun.

Actualy i need to see how Vaal slam and ruthless work

This gem is broken with channeling skills like Blade Flurry. Both in a good and bad way.

The bad...
Every third use of the skill = players have no clue which activation of the channeled skill is going to get the damage boost. There's no visible indication. No one will know which usage of the skill they're on unless they change areas/portal in somewhere and count.

The good...
If only on the third use of a skill, then you can channel all day long on a boss with the damage boost. That sort of defeats the intention of the support gem in that it was supposed to boost damage roughly one third of the time. Instead on that third channel it's doing the boosted damage all the time.

Feedback...
GGG, please give us visible indication on when this support gem is active when using channeled skills. Alternatively, you could just have a buff icon with an attack count, where 1 and 2 are grayed out icons and 3 is highlighted, then resets to 1 on next use of the affected skill.

Ruthless should recieve the multistrike treatment.
It shouldn't work with cyclone,bladeflurry or charged dash at all, please have a look into it.

I don't think the matter about channeling skills even matters. Channeling attacks already get bonus damage from releasing, so you aren't getting that much more damage for channeling with pure ruthless strikes repeatedly.

Yeah you can make 2 quick channels and 3rd one 6 stack and repeat but it's not a huge abuse. It's not more broken than stuff like additional projectiles where you can hit five times with one cast/attack aoe and do like 350% damage.

Stuff that makes you change the way you play the game I will always welcome. Not the same rmb spam but with this gem u do 40% more damage each click lul

"

Shinyness wrote:

Ruthless should recieve the multistrike treatment.
It shouldn't work with cyclone,bladeflurry or charged dash at all, please have a look into it.

I agree, it feels very gimmicky and abusive when u time the spins before a boss fight and channel the third spin for an unbalanced dps boost

This skill scales best with bleed and heavy hitters like heavy strike, on fast attacking builds I think it's better to get a more smooth damage output and use melee phys, maim, more damage on full life or brutality which over 3 hits will do a similar amount or more dps then with ruthless

So, I assume I understand roughly how this support works.
But, maybe I just don't quite know for sure yet how earthquake works.
I assume that every third hit will proc the extra damage.
I also assume that the extra damage will also apply to the quake, though I'm not 100% on that one.
If that is the case, the question for me remains:
Which hit is the quake of? The first one, or the last one before the quake triggers?

The gem is mostly frustrating because based on the wording I can't tell if the current behavior is bugged or not (in relation to cyclone and multistrike). If it is working as intended, then my feedback is that it's an incredibly clumsy and wonky gem since the game no indication of where you are in your "skill use" counter. Like others have said, a buff that is a counter and glows when the next skill use will be a ruthless one would go a long way. Ideally a character animation when you are primed for a ruthless skill use.

That being said, I assume the current behavior is not what is intended by GGG (impossible to tell since GGG doesn't want to say). I'd prefer the gem just work on every 3rd hit instead of skill use so it functions as expected with cyclone/multistrike, and then it wouldn't need any indicators at all.

Well, I think it isn't a great situation either way.
Every third hit would mean that on cyclone it's basically just a damage increase.
Other channelled skills would be the same.
Also, doublestrike having extra damage on the first hit of the second skill use and the second hit of the third?
That'd just feel off.

The current mechanic at least gives you some control over it (that the game doesn't let you know about), but I admit it is kind of silly.
Any idea on how I'd best go about testing this with earthquake?

I got a question regarding the stun on the gem.

"Ruthless Blows with Supported Skills have a base Stun Duration of 0.8 seconds"

How does this interact with things that affect stun duration?
Like the slayer's Overwhelm, the passive Executioner, or the item Cragfall.