I have a suggestion for a buff which I think is pretty reasonable.
At the end of the blue skill tree, Zane has a skill which activates all of his kill skills as soon as he deploys an active ability. I think that these kill skills should last for the duration of his ability, rather than the few seconds that they currently last. This is for a few reasons:
This skill is only good for boss fights, and can still be made redundant by bosses with minions. This is because with general mobbing you’re constantly getting kills. This means the only kill it will help with is the 1st one you get as you won’t already have the kill skills active.
It would give us a reason to try to extend our action skill uptime. At the moment, people try to keep the uptime down to be able to use this skill more often.
You’re sacrificing the ability to throw grenades in order to have 2 abilities active (not worth the trade). By implementing a change like the one I suggested, people would have more insentive to sacrifice their grenades because their actives can use grenades and they also get way more kill skill uptime.
Zane without kill skills active is pretty terrible, especially dps wise.
This buff really wouldn’t be a big deal to be totally honest. It would just make him better at killing bosses with these particular builds. Compared to other characters, he’d still be a lot weaker. In my opinion at lot of his skills need buffs as many are just pointless (that goes for the other characters with pointless skills, too).
Hmm… I’m kinda on the fence about this. On the one hand you’re right it’s not a bad idea to help him out in boss fights, but on the other hand I don’t really know if we need this change since many of us already can do 100% kill skill uptime builds. I think a better impact would be a little more power from Death Follows Close instead and letting kill skills themselves be stronger.
But the reality is, Kill Skill Zane’s the most common and arguably most powerful Zane playstyle out there. Maybe it could use a buff, but before we see that, I’d rather see some more buffs to Under Cover and Doubled Agent so there are more playstyles to use.
Point 3 my only qualm is that virtually any build should be able to throw grenades. Drone can throw grenades, although not as well, clone is basically a super grenade if you use Dopplebanger to easily reset its duration or purposefully get it killed, and if you use a shield you still have an option of doing any of the other 3 (drone/grenade/clone). You can’t SPAM grenades without having them directly equipped, but unless you are built around doing so anyways, there is no reason to. Sacrificing your grenades is already a decent idea because with Synchronicity you’re trading occasional grenades for +20% gun damage .
Point 4 is true more often than not, but he doesn’t really get much DAMAGE from his kill skills. If you’re using a strong enough weapon/build, you should do good damage anyways and even better damage after a kill. If you use grenades, it ultimately doesn’t matter as you will kill everything at the same rate.
The only character I consistently feel weaker than is Amara, as my friend has a Face Puncher build with just as much damage as my headshot build, with equal survivability, but he can just body shot and not think twice about it. Moze, I don’t really see to be that broken especially since the grenade build everyone runs was unintentional and getting a future nerf, and Fl4k is like a sheet of crisp computer paper. He cuts deep but is also is flimsy and bland.
IMO Zane could benefit from having more of his kill skills have passive effects that get better once you get a kill like his reload speed skill and not having to spec 25 points down his skill trees to get the skills worth having. That or changing his class mods so they have a better variety of skills so you have more options than just Infiltrator or Executioner.
At a quick glance comparing him to Moze (I only use these two), he has very little compared to her in terms of damage buffs and bonus’. Moze has 4 alone in just the 1st tier of all her trees (she has 13 total, some of which are pretty conditional). Zane has 5 total if you don’t count the shields amped shot or any of the skill augments. And the two damage bonus’ he does have are very conditional; Cold Bore requires swapping weapons, and Trick of the Light requires the Clone or SNTL to be out (unless playing MP) and enemies targeting them.
Maybe in the Hitman tree there could be a skill that you get either bonus damage or a multiplier for every active kill skill. Cause all in all, it seems they tried giving him every possible buff they could think of besides damage. Fire rate, reload speed, movement speed, weapon swap speed, and health steal are all nice, but you don’t NEED any of that to survive. You kinda need to do damage to survive.
