Cyclone

Siding with the rest of the posts here - The desync is higher with this skill than any other in the game, by a long shot. The minimum distance, high mana cost, and movement clunkiness makes me really not like the skill. I know GGG wants to put their own twist on things but.... can we just have Whirlwind? Good ol' tried-and-true Whirlwind... hold the button down, drain mana per second, move along with the mouse. It worked, and has always been a favorite among players. Does it really need to be different?

Finally one AoE skill for the unarmed !

but then the radius is ridiculously small,
and you do put yourself in great danger when you use this skill,
you can't turn or stop after the skill's activated,
you can't control how far you wanna go.

But still appreciate that the skill can be used unarmed :)
It was better than nothing.

Damage is much more about delivery than displayed numbers. The numbers actually mean almost nothing in most cases and can only really be used to compare pieces of gear while swapping back and forth, comparing two characters with the same build, and things like that. It's completely irrelevant which skill has a higher displayed DPS, it's about the mechanics and delivery. This is why Freezing Pulse is the best spell in the game, for instance, despite having considerably lower numerical damage than most other spells. Cyclone has very poor delivery and mechanics, the numbers mean nothing.

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Fluttershypony wrote:

That's how it worked in D2 as well(except it only divided it's hits per second, it won't hit everything around you at 2x rate), though it didn't suck ass there for some reason.

I think in terms of ability mechanics for Diablo 2's whirlwind, your weapon speed + whether you were dual wielding determined how many attacks a whirlwind could do to a target. As with seemingly everything else in that game, there were breakpoints. Once you came into contact with a mob's hitbox, the game would initiate the set number of attacks and roll hit/miss/crit into that specific enemy. How quickly you were moving, how long you spent on the target, and whether or not you ran through it dead center did not matter. You casted whirlwind, you connected with the mob, and you subsequently hit it a specific number of times, as with every other enemy you connected with.

This version seems to be a series of AoE melee casts, kind of like pulsing damage. Like casting a miniature ice nova every X seconds, where a mob will either be inside of the radius and potentially be damaged, or it won't. This model suits the D3 version of whirlwind, where you can dictate where your pulsing damage will be, as opposed to the D2 mechanic where you only need to cross paths with your target for a moment. GGG took the worst of both worlds, and rolled it into an already VERY low damage ability.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

[...]

Cyclone spins at your attack speed, and deals damage twice per spin - so deals double DPS compared to the regular attack.


[...]

huh???

are you sure with your "double DPS compared to the regular attack"... that implies 100% damage effectiveness with doubled attack speed?

but i saw that it has 35% damage effecttiveness

when assuming doubleattackspeed because of 2hits per spin it is around (less than) 70%effectivenes (neglecting armor reduction!)

so cleave would deal more damage right?
so whats the the point of the skill?


first i thought its good for 2h weapons (because they have highest base range). but the point of 2h weapons is dealing HIGH dmg per HIT, so "ignoring" a lot of %-armor reduction this way and therefore one dont have to stack elemental damage like ALL other "attack"-builds
the 0.35 dmg effectiveness makes it very bad for physical damage. because damage per hit is too low to be comparable with cleave for example


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but i am not dissapointed because i just stayed pessimistic

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ok i just tested it and i was right.

if you can use any other AOE, use it.
cyclone is definitely made for unarmed and maybe (dont know if it sucks more than whirlingblades) for claws.
for any other weapon its just far inferior

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Khastro wrote:

so cleave would deal more damage right?
so whats the the point of the skill?

If u play dw swords and have endgame high dps weapons
cleave=instadeath if crit to reflect dont matter how many hp and armor u have, but in other situations cleave better.
cyclone also instadeath if u hit 2+ mobs with buffed lightning thorns, but u can easy kill reflect aura mobs with it.

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ykyshaeq wrote:

"

Khastro wrote:

so cleave would deal more damage right?
so whats the the point of the skill?

If u play dw swords and have endgame high dps weapons
cleave=instadeath if crit to reflect dont matter how many hp and armor u have, but in other situations cleave better.
cyclone also instadeath if u hit 2+ mobs with buffed lightning thorns, but u can easy kill reflect aura mobs with it.

i)
no it does alwys more damage i think
2*35% is LESS than 1*70% for physical damage
ii)
you can crit with cleave? ever heard of RT?

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Khastro wrote:

you can crit with cleave? ever heard of RT?

Why i need rt with 94% to hit and crit damage implict on rapiers?
I rather swap dual strike with cyclone for kill reflect and keep cleave for other mobs.
And in dw build cleave deal not 70% its close to 70% phys and 140% ele.

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zanam00 wrote:

Siding with the rest of the posts here - The desync is higher with this skill than any other in the game, by a long shot. The minimum distance, high mana cost, and movement clunkiness makes me really not like the skill. I know GGG wants to put their own twist on things but.... can we just have Whirlwind? Good ol' tried-and-true Whirlwind... hold the button down, drain mana per second, move along with the mouse. It worked, and has always been a favorite among players. Does it really need to be different?

qft. all of this. Please make this skill decent and worth using or remove it and add a viable physical melee aoe skill. (esp for dagger/claw wielders and dual wield, LS is our only viable option.)

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Jakabov wrote:

Damage is much more about delivery than displayed numbers. The numbers actually mean almost nothing in most cases and can only really be used to compare pieces of gear while swapping back and forth, comparing two characters with the same build, and things like that. It's completely irrelevant which skill has a higher displayed DPS, it's about the mechanics and delivery. This is why Freezing Pulse is the best spell in the game, for instance, despite having considerably lower numerical damage than most other spells. Cyclone has very poor delivery and mechanics, the numbers mean nothing.

QFT and another reason Whirling Blades is so much better; with WB you zip right to where you click and there isn't time for stuff to move away. With WB you have better ability to control how the damage is distributed in the pack that you are attacking; you can zip back and forth across certain mobs that you want dead first.

Another odd difference is that WB works across stairs, while I was unable to get Cyclone to activate across stairs the few times I tried (and even just trying it seemed to cause a lot of desync).

Based on the few developer comments I have read the intent was for Cyclone to function as an AoE attack for all melee, and specifically to fulfill that role for dagger/claw users who up until now had no skill to use for that. Other comments lead me to believe that the dangerous nature of using it is intended so that, unlike WB, Cyclone is not intended to provide defensive benefits.

The problem is that the implementation not only removes the defensive benefits that the speedy movement of WB gives, but makes the desync worse while doing even less applied damage in the actual game (as opposed to fabricated test conditions or tool tip numbers).

I just died in HC to desync from WB which was amazingly enough the first time desync actually caused my death; next run through I will not be taking Cyclone as my quest reward because Grace is so much more useful and WB is so much better in applying AoE damage (even though it sucks at it) and desyncs less.

If they got the desync down to even just WB levels they would still have to up the damage quite a bit for me to use this skill, and even then they would probably have to offer it earlier as well (it currently coincides with the Shadow's one chance to get Grace from a quest). Rather than the 40-45% Damage effectiveness that I suggested I am currently leaning towards 50% being needed.

The best thing of all I think is to just remove it from the game like they did with Phase Run and come up with a melee AoE that daggers/claws (and I guess unarmed too) can use that isn't weak desync inducing crap. The visuals are great and all that, but it's clear that skills like this and WB et al that affect your movement aren't handled well by the game engine and just lead to desync issues.

I just looked at the Wiki to see how Cyclone's leveling scales compared to WB and while the data is incomplete it looks like higher level Cyclone may be OK with just a 40-45% effectiveness - but no way with the current 35%; and that just highlights that the gem should be given out much earlier as a quest reward (I mean like 10 levels earlier or more in the case of Shadow and Ranger).