Spears are wholly underwhelming, and parry is a meme

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Kage#1250 wrote:

Twister is insane, of course it's lacking variety but that's like most of the classes rn.

For twister, parry is very important until the end game. Parry into fang of frost, you create a frozen ground which makes your whirlwind slash and twisters extra ice damage + freeze build up. You can easily kill hard packs / bosses in the campaign with this setup. I use it for rare mobs + boss mobs. It's not clunky as well, all you have to do is holding parry button for few second until you get hit once, then fang of frost follow up with many whirlwind + twisters. Takes long for frozen ground to disappear.

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Druidenjoyer#0031 wrote:

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Kage#1250 wrote:

Twister is insane, of course it's lacking variety but that's like most of the classes rn.

For twister, parry is very important until the end game. Parry into fang of frost, you create a frozen ground which makes your whirlwind slash and twisters extra ice damage + freeze build up. You can easily kill hard packs / bosses in the campaign with this setup. I use it for rare mobs + boss mobs. It's not clunky as well, all you have to do is holding parry button for few second until you get hit once, then fang of frost follow up with many whirlwind + twisters. Takes long for frozen ground to disappear.

do you really need to play keyboard piano like that just to do damage?

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Kage#1250 wrote:

Twister is insane, of course it's lacking variety but that's like most of the classes rn.

For twister, parry is very important until the end game. Parry into fang of frost, you create a frozen ground which makes your whirlwind slash and twisters extra ice damage + freeze build up. You can easily kill hard packs / bosses in the campaign with this setup. I use it for rare mobs + boss mobs. It's not clunky as well, all you have to do is holding parry button for few second until you get hit once, then fang of frost follow up with many whirlwind + twisters. Takes long for frozen ground to disappear.

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MattiKettu#3535 wrote:

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.

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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.