Whirling Blades

Can it be made so that when you hold down shift while whirling, your character moves towards where your mouse is, no matter if you have an enemy targeted?

I just hate it when I'm trying to take 2 whirling blades to get out of harm, but it just happens that my mouse is hovering one of the 30 mobs on screen and I keep getting sent back in.

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Britannicus wrote:

This skill has a great visual style, but the damage is totally underwhelming. Needs to do more damage, I think.

Link to Culling Strike, to turn Whirling Blades into a nifty boss-finishing blow.

I've been thinking about this skill lately. In my opinion it should be reworked in some ways to make it more controllable as a movement skill and have actual damage potential. Consider the following solution:

Make so that when your character whirls, it whirls to the location your cursor was on, not just in the direction of it. Turn it into an area of effect skill akin to the ways Glacial Cascade/Upheaval and Frost Wall work except, instead of the distances/length being a fixed rate, area of effect modifiers would scale the maximum unit distance you can whirl.

This would make the skill a lot more controllable and supportable with gems such as Increased Area of Effect and Concentrated Effect. It would also open for the viable use of Multistrike, because the targeting wouldn't be nearly as bad.

As for giving the skill damage potential, when you target the whirl on an enemy and you hit it, the hit could count as a single target hit.

This allows the base damage to be scaled differently between the single target hit and the area of effect hits and/or separate chances to do something. For example, the single target deals more damage and/or the single target hit has additional chance to blind or cause bleeding.

It also allows you to use Melee Splash with the skill. The area of effect of the single target hit would splash and hit the enemies you whirled through another time. Interestingly because the skill would then be an area of effect skill, you'd already be scaling the radius and damage, for long whirl range and with Concentrated Effect respectively. The shotgun effect could be pretty effective and fun.

Anyways I hope my conceptual implementation sounds feasible and appropriate. As I've said, I think these changes would allow for a much more usable, viable, and customizable skill which seems a lot like what GGG is going for these days. Even if my suggestion sounds like too much change, consider that this skill is one of the oldest ones in the game and it really shows.

It's been said many times. Allow WB scale/attack with both weapons. so many people want to make a build that is more fun with this skill but it is lack luster cause of it.

Made a suggestion thread, thought I'd post here too:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1063458

Here is a tl;dr version of the more interesting ideas imo:

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ZaM wrote:

* Have whirling blades be a projectile skill as well as a melee skill: lmp/gmp (splitting up and recombining at the end of the duration), projectile speed (you can finally travel more than 10 pixels), physical projectile damage, etc.

* Leave a trail of smoke behind you that temporarily blinds the enemies caught inside it (have that part of the skill be a duration). Without any other changes to the skill, this alone would make it excellent as a support skill.

* Converts all elemental damage to physical: Honestly this would be pretty cool to see on a gem in general so I think this gem would be as good as any to get that.

* Corrupting blood if hit during the duration of the skill: It would make sense in that you've got blades all over the place and if someone tries to attack you, they'd get a nasty papercut.

Is it just me, or does Whirling Blades simply suck in comparison to Leap Slam or Lightning Warp? Both Leap Slam and Lightning Warp can get you over a cliff or staircase. Whirling Blades can't go over any obstacles; you need a perfectly clear path for it to get you anywhere. It also stinks as a damage dealing ability, unlike Leap Slam. I just don't understand its place in the game. We need a better movement skill for dex/evasion users.

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So if somebody is still reading this. I am planning to do a build around Whirling blades with crit and the goddess scorned. But I feel that the skill is very underwhelming damage wise.

I have two request that would make Whirling blades very interesting and different from other melee skills. One is to make it have the projectiles tag. What I mean with this, is not being able to put GMP and adding multiply clones of yourself, but instead make the damage scale with inc projectile damage, inc distance and speed with projectile speed etc. Would be cool if this would be possible and make the skill easier to scale. (desync issues?)

One other option I can see is that whirling blades could have the ability to never miss (like RT but can still crit). This could justify the low base damage and high animation time.

Other not that revolutionary would be to increase the base damage. We are talking about doing damage from one one handed weapon having a low base damage done is lowering the possible of doing decent damage even more.

I use this as a mobility skill. It is just crap compared to leap slam. Sometimes I don't unclick my mouse fast enough, and I end up whirling right back into my original position and end up getting vaal slammed or something dumb because I have such ludicrous attack speed and I accidently click a monster instead of ground when I need to whirl away. I link whirling blades w/ foritfy, stun, end charge on melee stun. Damage is crap too.

Leap slam does more damage and you can leap across and onto platforms. Whirling blades does neither.

Leap slam can leap anywhere and whirling blades you either don't whirl far enough, or you whirl WAY past the enemy. Pain in the ass again.


Solutions:
Remove minimum whirl distance.
Make whirling blades target ground like cyclone does.
Allow us to whirl to our target location.

Main frustrations with whirling blades:

1. It does not go where I tell it to. I agree with the previous poster who said to have it target the ground rather than an enemy. (Although also removing minimum distance would be nice, I understand having that be one limiting aspect of it). This would also fix the "double in-and-out" movement that people are talking about

2. It gets stuck on EVERYTHING. It is a movement skill, but ironically I cannot move with it half the time. I hit a candle and PoE is like "oh shit, you're stuck, enjoy your death". This also happens with walls, it can actually get you stuck inside a wall temporarily so that you cannot whirling blades out of it, only run out. Could the skill please be made to path around small objects (within reason). I'm sick of trying to whirling blades down a narrow corridor and getting stuck on tiny textures. This shouldn't be counter-strike where our characters are boxes and one pixel can arrest our momentum.

Other than those two modifications I think that it is a great skill. For those complaining about damage, it is primarily a movement skill not a damage skill. It is also WAY faster than leap slam which gives it an advantage during boss fights and other fights. This is more than enough to make it viable without those buggy aspect mentioned above being polished. I really hope PoE chooses not to ignore this thread.