I’m pursuing a build that goes down the melee tree, yet there are two major skills that increase melee damage, melee range, and shield regen/run speed that last either 20 or 15 seconds.
People complain that phase slam is pretty weak. The biggest weakness (in my opinion) is that it’s basically a 30 second cooldown. That means those main two abilities in that tree have a ton of downtime if you use the action skill that tree provides. Those melee tree bonus skills with 15 and 20 second durations that start at action skill activation benefit the most from a skill you can use every 16 seconds.
Am I the only one who keeps sticking with Phasegrasp just to proc those bonuses from the melee tree as often as possible?
Phasegrasp works well for control, though as someone going for an Amara melee build atm, I do think it needs to be tweaked to let normal melee attacks hit someone Phasegrasped, because right now it hovers them just out of range to do anything other than jab at their feet.
There are class mods with cooldown reduction and the Mystical Assault tree has a 25% cooldown skill at the second tier down, so with that and the tree focusing on using your Action Skill for all its skills and bonuses, that’d be a good pairing to work with. I’m going to be fleshing out Brawl and Mystical Assault to full if the DLCs allow enough of a level cap.
I don’t use Phasegrasp at all, Phaseslam all the way. 35 seconds is a long time, but as the highest damaging single hit action skill with a large AoE, Phaseslam benefits greatly from Jab Cross and Do Harm. It’s also a movement option to close a gap quickly and with it’s large radius you can cap out max Samsara stacks quite easily against dense mobs. Element matched it kills a lot of enemies at once, and heavily dents badasses, granting Samsara stacks for survivability and wiping trash mobs so you can easily finish the survivors with Blitz and tank badasses until they’re dead. IMO Phaseslam is integral to a melee Amara build, rarely will a mob live long after a Jab Lock and Rush boosted Phaseslam into a Blitz streak so the cooldown is hardly noticeable as everything’s dead by the time Samsara wears off and you’re at the next mob spawn with Rush stacks when it cools down.
TL;DR Phasegrasp doesn’t build Samsara stacks, and doesn’t benefit from Jab Lock or Do Harm, it holds one enemy in place where Phaseslam caps out Samsara and kills or heavily injures several enemies at once, then Blitz does the rest from there.
Actually, I do think that phasegrasp can trigger Samsara. The version that slams fists on the ground does, and maybe ties that bind? Haven’t tested ties that bind tho…
Correct, Fist Over Matter (Phasegrasp) triggers Samsara, sometimes even more reliable than Phaseslam. Ties That Bind does not, though. That’s odd because TTB does trigger other skills that are only active when your AS damages an enemy.
I think you may be right. Having used phaseslam the most and then trying to play around with a bunch of various combos or really is the best imo atleast with my play style. I wish there was a way to get that cooldown to less than 20 seconds more readily. Fracture doesn’t cut it and I tried ties that bind for a while and don’t like it for melee your better off with a gun build using that.
I’m only at guardian rank 20 something but have been tossing every point I can into survivor action skill cool down and it’s base with no boosts is done to 31 from 35 so eventually hopefully will be able to get to 20ish
Phasegrasp’s Fist Over Matter does deal damage, smacks 5 times, which means you can get all your samsara stacks from one enemy, pair it with singularity and you can bring everyone to you for quick melee hits.
Did you build 5 points into restless? 25% CDR, so down to 26 seconds off the bat. Find some items that give you +restless skill points will be greatly beneficial, you can get it down faster that way, in my opinion.
This is not how cooldown reduction works. It isn’t a linear function. Otherwise you could completely eliminate cooldowns by just stacking a few bonuses. Instead it is calculated like this:
ResultingCooldown = BaseCooldown / ( 1 + CooldownReductionBonus )
So, with no other cooldown bonus applied Restless reduces the cooldown of Phaseslam to 28 seconds, 7 second less. Every additional point of CDR will have even less of an effect.
With a +5 Restless class mod you’d decrease the cooldown by just another 4 seconds to 24.
I wish Fracture’s lingering area lasted longer and built up samsara but it seems that only the initial attack does. Samsara seems so necessary that I wish I had more options that worked with it effectively.
I use Phasegrasp because it reminds me so much of Phaselock and I abused the crap out of it once I realized what it did (yes. I was about level 20 when I started using Phaselock. I was expecting to be as disappointed with Maya’s power as I was with Lilith’s. WRONG). so now I use it all the time, switching between Ties That Bind and Fist Over Matter (the latter coming in very handy for me with Mayhem Mode).
13igTyme
(RIP Kevin - 11/21/19 - Gone but not forgotten.)
#14
I know this was a revived thread, but I honestly have a hard time using anything other than Ties That Bind.
I main Phasegrasp because I know its reliable (Maya), but I do intend to give the other 2 a shot. Phaseslam’s considerable cooldown is abit unappealing for action skill-integrated gameplay that I typically enjoy in Sirens tho.
Ties that Bind with Stillness of Mind is like Maya on crack. The fact that the “immune to phaselock” list of enemies is so much smaller than it was in BL2 feels great as well.
13igTyme
(RIP Kevin - 11/21/19 - Gone but not forgotten.)
#17
Plus skills like dread still work after the phasegrasp has ended and indiscriminate works all the time.
Phasegrasp’s crowd control greatly outweighed the damage of Phaseslam and Phasecast. We don’t want to remove the playstyle completely, but the overall playstyle rhythm had to be slightly adjusted because it was outperforming other builds. We’re monitoring the changes and may make further changes to Amara’s crowd control and damage transfer ability.
Phasegrasp duration reduced from 7 seconds to 4 seconds
Phasegrasp cooldown increased from 18 seconds to 35 seconds