Spears are wholly underwhelming, and parry is a meme

0.5 UPDATE, PRE PATCH NOTES

Spears are in an abysmal state at right before 0.5 with many skills being extremely counterintuitive and the whole package just being held up by very few proper skills.

In the same breath, we need to take a look at parry. It is still overly complicated, requires forced combo playstyle instead of rewarding combo playstyle, and most of all: it gives no agency to the players.
Nobody in their right mind wants to go read up poedb to learn that the certain attacks are parry-able, where others aren't, have no indication of estimated incoming damage to our stun bar, or have to fiddle with angles just to get the parry right.

God forbid you play a build with temporal chains or chill on the enemy, enjoy waiting 5 business days until the mobs decide to hit you.


1. Early game

Level 1 & Level 3 skill gems, swap around fangs of frost and disengage + explosive spear.
Reasoning: if a brand new player wants to do damage before level 6 (when you unlock tier 3 skill gems) the proper damage rotation is:
1. Parry (this is already a problem)
2. Disengage --> obtain frenzy charge
3. Explosive spear --> consume frenzy charge for ignited ground)
4. Whirling Slash *3
5. Twister

This requires 3 uncut skill gems and double combo playstyle, what the hell.
And we wonder why early players turn away from spears so fast ...

2. Frenzy charges & detonator skills

Very simple: if you go through the steps of manually detonating ranged spears (storm lance, explosive spear) give them the full benefit of damage and all the other good things that come with it.

Secondly under this point, make it so that if you consume a parry (or swashbuckle as motioned below) debuff it counts as a detonator ability.


3. Base numbers of skills & spears

So talismans get 8% base critical hit, and the quick and nimble spears get 5% base critical hit. Eeeerm?
Either bake in a buff specific to melee spear skills to boost their critical hit chance or just overall buff spears.

Secondly: attack speed of spear skills, why does every melee skill under the sun attack slower than default stab?
- primal strikes 80%
- fangs of frost 85%
- whirling slash 70%
- disengage +0.2 total attack time
- rapid assault 40%
- spearfield 70%
- thunderous leap +1.1 total attack time
- elemental sundering 55% + the time it takes for the explosions to trigger after they're procced
- wind serpent's fury 40% (does anybody use this?)

Surely feels extremely quick and nimble set of skills.


4. Parry, the meme

Again, it seems that this cannot die, so instead of begging for a rework (even though it needs it), just add the following skill to bucklers.

It fixes pretty much everything, but most importantly: it gives agency to players.

"

Swashbuckle:

Sweep your buckler in an arch in front of you
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Upon hitting enemies interrupts their attack swing and forces a reset of the attack swing. Secondly, applies the "off balance" debuff.
Off balance debuff by default lasts 10 seconds on normal mobs, 8 seconds on magic mobs, 6 seconds on rare mobs, and 4 seconds on unique mobs.
Off balance enemies have their attacks automatically deflected.
Projectiles in range count as deflected
Builds light stun up based on the total power of the enemies affected.
Empowers your next melee attacks based on the enemies affected.
Normal enemies empower 1 attack, Magic enemies empower 2 attacks, Rare enemies empower 3 attacks, Unique enemies empower 4 attacks.
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This skill cannot be used when light stun bar is over 75% full
Stun bar buildup is based on the assumed incoming damage of the affected enemy's deflected attack.

Finally remove block chance off bucklers and just give them a baseline flat deflection chance to be in line with the whole evasion mindset.


5. Random tidbits

- bleed & incision need a rework, but this is hardly the post about that
- elemental sundering should sum up all the ailment damage explosions and then do them as one singular one. I asked a dev what the order of explosions was and they couldn't even answer it. Good luck trying to theorycraft things if devs don't even know which explosions come first
- elemental sundering, this is a melee skill, but by the time the explosions happen we're miles away, so evasion on mobs messes us up, either make the explosions instantly (oh no the animation) or just make this impossible to evade
- elemental sundering: it's pretty shit unless you use the gimped version of running 20 self-shocked temp minions and then blow up a boss instantly. Just make it work only on enemies and simplify everyone's life


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--- OLD POST BELOW, written during 0.3 ---

Pretty much every spear skill is dogshit, that's it, that's the whole post.

Only decent spear skills are:
- lightning spear, now it's just OK
- whirling slash + twisters, just because the new supports seem built for it, and filling a room with 200 elemental twisters does seem to work
- rake for boss bleeding on a blood mage setup

Everything else is a joke, and parry is the clown telling them.

A random picking:
- fangs of frost, requires you to parry --> nope
- primal strikes, requires a shock constantly on a target to do anything, cannot shock itself, consumes shock --> nope
- elemental sundering, more consumption bullshit
- disengage, meme
- spear of solaris, hahahaha, only works on a stunned boss, if you were to ever try it on a rare, it takes 5 business days to launch it, and then the rare just walks out of it

Why is every ranged spear better with frenzy charges, even if they're a detonator skill. If I go through your obnoxious "vision" of throwing a spear in the ground and then jumping on it, the least you can do is give me the full fucking benefit of exploding it.

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Parry: just delete this shit or rework it to the following:

Sweep your buckler in front of you, destabilizing enemies hit (scales with melee strike range), dealing damage and applying the parried debuff. Parried debuff causes enemies to have 50% less accuracy for the next attack. This attack builds up stun buildup on yourself.
Counts all power of the enemies hit, for every 5 power you gain 1 stack of parry buff.
--> Parry buff does the same as it currently does.

Tadaa, now it's at least somewhat usable, and not every spear build will just run an armoured shield because it's 5000000x better, or a sceptre for more damage.

I use Primal Strikes a lot against rares, uniques, and bosses. It's far stronger than LS once the enemy is shocked.

My LS can shock. My Voltaic Mark can shock. My Thunder Lance can shock. Onve I see the shock, Culling Strike to dash and drop the Primal Strike. Rinse and repeat.

I agree with the parry though. It's way way way less efficient. It's better to just run away or continue attacking. It would be nice if Parry is just like a big bubble. When enemy attacks you it auto parries 360

The issue with parry is that's a duel mechanic. And you duel only bosses that have nothing to parry (most of them and the most dangerous ones).

My vision of a good parry would be : if you parry a projectile, you are teleported behind the attacker and if you parry melee it AOE stun in front of you. And add a cooldown on it if it's too powerfull mechanic to spam.

I don't know the current state of frenzy generation so i won't suggest anything about.

The current state of frenzy generation is: take resonance and break armour for an endurance charge which becomes a frenzy charge.

Extremely healthy, nobody is using the generic way of generating frenzy charges, which is pretty hilarious.

I can't even imagine how many potential players they lost on the free weekend because they picked huntress. Early spear is the worst impression you can possibly make.

I find Disengage good in a bleeding setup with Incision support gem that accelerates the bleeding.

Vision Disengage was a meme yeah.

Well I am playing Bleeding setup that heavily utilizes Life Leech, Magnitude of Bleeding and Rage stacking.
Elemental Spear skills just boring af. Maybe none of us saw the potential of those outside of braindead Lightning Spear.

And yeah Bucklers are meme as well

"

default_mp3#9394 wrote:

I find Disengage good in a bleeding setup with Incision support gem that accelerates the bleeding.

Vision Disengage was a meme yeah.

Well I am playing Bleeding setup that heavily utilizes Life Leech, Magnitude of Bleeding and Rage stacking.
Elemental Spear skills just boring af. Maybe none of us saw the potential of those outside of braindead Lightning Spear.

And yeah Bucklers are meme as well

Incision does not accelerate the bleeding FYI. If you use incision support, then it just applies a stack of incision after it has done its thing. If the skill also inflict bleeds it'll first consume all incision, apply the bleed, and then apply a single stack of incision.

It's a whole other point that incision is pretty much thrash in its current implementation and probably also needs a rework. Or a support like: Incision II, same as current incision I + reapplies all stacks incision on the target if it consumes them.

Suggested changed for some, which numbers wouldn't make any better at all:

1. Primal Strikes

First 2 attacks always send out a single spirit, refreshes shock duration. Upon hitting a shocked target with the melee attack, or standing on shocked ground yourself, the spirit will apply the shock to all targets hit.

Final attack: stampede of spirits, consumes the shock on the target hit, counts as a detonator skill.


2. Fangs of Frost

Boosted attack counts as a detonator (and rework parry)

3. Storm Lance

Explosion from detonating the lodged spear now deals the same damage as the frenzy boosted one, also leaves shocked ground, bolts now have a +200% chance to shock targets, can just take this off lightning spear.

4. Explosive Spear

Explosion from manually detonating the spear now does the same as a frenzy charged spear. Timed explosion remains the same as it currently is.

5. Ice-Tipped Arrows

Now works with the thrown spears which lodge in the ground (not with the following lodged effects), this is probably a bug, but the skill is so garbage/useless atm, could as well bug-fix it.

The sad thing is that what they did to Sorc in 0.3 is an indication that this is exactly what they want so I wouldn't hold my breath about spear being fixed.

Edit: brain farted

Fangs of Frost is totally fine and pretty good, too bad they nerfed the range.