I want to talk about the balancing of Amaras Legendary Classmods today.
( All the tests were done with NEUTRAL Mayhem Mods on Mayhem 3 in TVHM)
-
- Phasezerker
-
- Breaker
-
- Nimbus
-
- Elementalist
-
- Dragon
Lets start with the most used and most broken COM in Amaras Arsenal:
1)Phasezerker.
The Skills that are boosted by the Phasezerker are: Conflux, Anima and Clarity
- Clarity gives 1% Missing Health Regen per point
- Anima gives 4% Status Effect Damage 20% Status Effect Duration and 8% Actionskill Status Effect damage per point
- Conflux gives a 7% per point chance to randomly aply a Fire,Shock or Corrosive DoT when applying a Status Effect.
At this point i assume everyone already knows how broken the effect of Amaras Phasezerker classmod is, especially in combination with the Phasegrasp bug which consumes Rushstacks and also triggers Phasezerkers effect to get max Rushstacks even if you dont hit anything and get the cooldown refunded, but for the people that dont know here is the reason:
Getting 99 Stacks of Do Harm for only about 10 second of setup if you didnt skill into Avatar and even less if you did skill into Avatar is broken beyond believe, especially since Do Harm does boost the shared damage from Ties That Bind.
Here is a quick comparison of the damage using a Monocle:
-
On the left we have a Monocle with no gunboosts and 0 Rushstacks so also no boost from the Phasezerker.
-
In the middle we have the same Monocle this time with 25 Rushstacks.
The damage is like the COM says increased by 75%. -
On the right we have again the same Monocle but this time before shooting the enemies i used Ties that Bind on nothing to get to 91 Do Harm the Rushstacks are at 25 again. (wanted to do 99 but i missed 3 shots on the stationary stunned targets cause i suck and the stacks decayed)
As is clearly visible on the right target that was Phasegrasped the damage is the same as on the previous example, exactly 1513 damage but on the linked enemy the damage is increased to 11K damage which is an insane damage increase of 7 times the damage.
Despite this bug that i hope gets fixed soon i think there are still other changes to this COM that should be made.
The boosted skills don’t support the Rushstack playstyleand honestly dont contribute that much, Clarity gets heavily outperformed by Sustainment (4% Lifesteal with Elemental damage per point), Anima only supports guns with already high DoT Damage and Conflux is both random and requires a DoT to even activate, don’t get me wrong both Anima and Conflux do have their legitimate spot in an Elemental or DoT build but thats not what Rush really focuses around, yes Violent Tapestry does boost Status Effect Chance but not a single other skill in the Mystical Assault tree has anything to do with Elemental damage or DoTs.
I get that you cant give a COM such a strong special ability (+75% Gundamage with 25 Rushstacks) and also give it perfect skill boosts but I think that the skills boosted by a COM should allways support the playstyle that the special effect of the COM is about, in this case gundamage or Rushstacks
2)Breaker:
Unlike the other COMs i dont really have a big problem with this one.
The Skills it boosts are: Find your Center, Jab Cross and Personal Space
- Find your Center +100% Meleedamage and +75% Meleerange after actionskill use (the second bonus does not get increased with multiple points in the skill)
- Jab Cross after using a Meleeattack on an enemy you get 3% more Gundamage and 25% more actionskilldamage for 10 seconds per point (the duration doesnt increase with more points)
- Personal Space up 12% more Gundamage per point depending on distance from the enemy, the closer the more damage
All are about closequarter combat and so is the special effect of this Classmod, if i had to mention a thing i would like to change is that 2 of the 3 skills are basicly useless for melee oriented builds, but that gets negated through the existance of the Face-puncher (The Face-Puncher gets increased damage from both Meleeboosts and gundamage boosts).
All in all a very nice COM with a consistent theme and execution.
3)Nimbus
Lets first talk about the positives:
The skills that are boosted by this COM are: Tempest, Conflux and Violent Tapestry
- Tempest boosts Elemental damage by 6% and Shock damage by an aditional 4% per point
- Conflux gives a 7% per point chance to randomly aply a Fire,Shock or Corrosive DoT when applying a Status Effect
- Violent Tapestry gives a 0.6% increased Status Effect chance per consumed Rushstack per point.
All 3 skills are great additions to an elemental build, yeah Violent Tapestry isn’t as good as the other 2, but it still contributes to the playstyle, aditionally all 3 skills synergize with the special effect of the COM as it is DoT focused.
Now to the bad parts:
The special effect of this COM creates a cloud that deals damage on action skill use, but sadly the damage of the cloud is terribly low, 25 damage per second is already not that great in normal mode and it doesnt get better in TVHM or Mayhem Mode.
With a fully DoT orriented build I got this:
This is a screenshot of a target that is linked to an enemy with Ties that Bind meaning that the 10 damage shown is 35% of the actual damage and also remember that Shock is only 65% effective against flesh so the actuall value without reduction would be 44 damage per second.
44 Damage per second is a laughable amount of damage, a green level 22 Maliwan pistol has double that as their base DoT damage and herein lies the main problem of the COM, the special effect basicly doesnt exist.
Sadly it doesnt stop there though, certain enemies taht have the ability to do big jumps or fly also interact weirdly with Phasegrasp abilitys.
As is visible with this Guardian in the Trial of Supremecy: Some Enemies are allways Phasegrasped in a way that they are outside of the cloud created by the Nimbus COM, regardless of if they stood on the ground or were in the air before, meaning that the special effect doesnt even apply at all to those enemies.
4)Elementalist
This COM revolves around Elemental damage the same way that the Nimbus does, it boosts: Violent Tapestry, Wildfire and Infusion.
- Violent Tapestry gives a 0.6% increased Status Effect chance per consumed Rushstack per point
- Wildfire gives 8% chance per point to make DoTs spread when applied to an enemy and
- Infusion converts 8% of your gundamage per point into your Actionskillelement.
Violent Tapestry and Wildfire both play along with the central theme of the COM and so does Infusion to a degree but in contrast to the other 2 skills it focuses more on impact damage instead of DoT, but its by no means a terrible addition to the COM.
Now on to the special effect: It spreads the Actionskill element as a DoT to all nearby enemies when you Phasegrasp an enemy, the COM itself doesnt mention the damage of that but with a fully DoT focused build you can test to see and what i got is this:
842 damage per second is the result on a shielded enemy, so if you look at the damage without Elemental weaknesses you will get 337 damage per second.
This is better then the damage that the Nimbus cloud does but its still nothing to write home about as most guns have that much DoT damage as base DoT damage, aditionally this COM restricts you into using only Phasegrasp abilitys which heavily limits the use of the COM.
The existance of this COM is rather questionable while it outdamages the Nimbus with its special effect it is heavily outclassed in terms of skillboosts as the Nimbus boosts Tempest which is the best Elementalboost at Amaras disposal.
All in all is the Elementalist just a worse Nimbus in practice, because of its limitations and worse skillboosts.
Last and certainly least:
5)Dragon
The Dragon COM boosts: Do Harm, Restless and Remnant.
The boosted skills all revolve around actionskills:
- Do Harm increases Actionskill damage by 0,9% per consumed Rushstack per point in it
- Restless gives 5% cooldownrate per point
- Remenant sends out a ball that deals damage if you kill something with an actionskill or gun, all overkill damage dealt to the dead enemy is added to the Remenant damage.
The special effect of this COM lets you trigger your Actionskill Augments by killing an enemy with a melee attack, and this sound all fine on paper until you realise one thing:
- Soul Sap gives your action skill Lifesteal, your melees don’t count as Actionskill damage and so you dont heal at all meaning that you dont get the effect.
- Stillness Of Mind the COM triggers on kills and dead enemies cant be Phaselocked, so it has to Phaselock something rather close, the range is terrible and sometimes the game jsut decides not to phaselock anything eventhough you litterally killed something right beside another enemy.
- Glamour the same deal as with Stillness Of Mind, as the enemy is already dead the effect has to apply something else, with pour range and random chance of not working at all (also the indicator is terrible for this augment).
- Revelation works the exact way you would expect, when you kill something with a melee attack an explosion triggers and here in lies the problem, the damage of the explosion is not altered in any way through the special effect meaning that the damage of the explosion is exactly the same as the card says 1301 damage which is not that much, it seems like this is increased by actionskill damage boosts but from my experience this augment is lackluster in any situation and the COM doesnt save it from that fate sadly.
- Allure seems to work perfectly fine at first and it does for the most part with only one downside, there is a cooldown on the ability to trigger the effect which is rather annoying.
There are 2 big problems with this COM, the first is the already mentioned bad interactions with the actual Augments and the second one is the paradoxical design.
To trigger the effects you need to kill something with melee attack, so you need a meleecentered build to take full advantage of that, but all the skillboosts are focused around an Actionskill build, sure skills like Jab Cross are in the melee tree and greatly help Actionskilldamage but you have to mostly give up on the best Actionskill skills.
The only real saving grace this COM has in my opinion is that it boosts Remenant, that skill alone is strong enough to make this COM usable but thats about it, the Breaker is a better Melee COM and a better Actionskill COM at the same time. The theoretical concept of the COM is not bad the execution just leaves more to be desired.
tl;dr:
- Phasezerkers: please fix the interaction with Phasegrasp and change the boosted skills to something usefull for the playstyle that the effect facilitates.
- Breaker: is fine
- Nimbus: just fix the Cloud damage on this COM and its going to be a mighty fine Elemental COM
- Elementalist: please rework this COM, as it stands right now its just a worse Nimbus
- Dragon: please fix the interactions with the augments and change the actiovation to something else instead of melee attacks killing an enemy as that leads to a paradoxical build design.