All Zane mains know that seein dead is literally the most powerful class mod Zane has. But that’s the problem. It completely wrecks the other class mods cause his other ones just suck, they have a VERY nice concept but sadly they don’t deliver.
One class mod I absolutely would love to use is his Antifreeze. The problem is that you have to be airborne and sliding, which is like the useless annointments. I think this should be changed to “When zane moves faster than 25%, he gains 40% more damage” with sliding and airborne giving 20% damage reduction with the 25% more speed from slows.
The buff I gave is really nice, but seein dead still wins. You can’t beat having your action skills activated by just shooting and have a 25% increased effect. Honestly seein dead should be changed to “seein red” which is his capstone cause it just makes sense, along with underperforming class mods buffed like the antifreeze so he can really be diverse.
Seein dead should still have the 25% bonus effect for kill skills, but with a different bonus instead of the shoot to activate so Zane mains can use other buffed class mods.
Seein red should now be “Zane has a chance to automatically activate all his kill skills when damaging an enemy. His kill skills gain a +25% effect bonus. Activating action skills automatically activates all of Zane’s kill skills.” This is a TRUE capstone.
I can go on how Zane needs changes, like his green tree needs to give him a lot of bonus damage for slowing and freezing enemies, how “almighty ordinance” and the other drone augments need buffs, and so on, but that’s for another time.
Y’all keep picking at the edges of the problem. Zane is fundamentally broken and there’s hints all over his skill tree and structure that what he ended up wasn’t what was intended.
He’s so broken that they had to create a class mod to turn KS’s into merely damage skills and even then added a 25% buff. With this com he’s still under powered unless he’s moving at maximum speed plus equipping relics/anoints to boost that speed even higher than what he gets from his skill tree.
Speed is the only way to get his damage up to a level equal to that of the other VH’s (just try walking around or even standing still!), and doing so essentially eliminates the core game mechanic of crits because at that speed they are more luck than skill - certainly while using a gamepad.
Zane doesn’t need class mod adjustments, he needs a complete skill tree rebuild. He should be deadly sitting off in the distance, behind his shield, sniping crits while the SNTL debuffs and bombs enemies. But he can’t. Because his base damage is too low. Base damage is still too low even with KS active. It needs KS constantly active plus increased by 25% plus all of the movement bonuses.
Broken. But his dialogue is the best in the game, so there’s that.
Just tried Executor class mod in Maliwan takedown. Unlike Seein’ Dead you have to chain kills and i kinda like this gameplay loop. Works pretty well on m10. But Seein’ Dead is still better and easier:)))
Sadly this is very true. I’ve been running a challenge build with dome/drone - all Jakobs based around crits and doubling projectiles with playin dirty and using rowans/kings/seventh sense etc.
Less emphasis on move speed and more on aiming for crits and it was just below average before the recent changes and is completely dead now.
I don’t think he’s fundamentally broken. There are things with his kit that just didn’t work out how they planned it to.
There are three things that I suspect happened:
They thought the atlas gimmick would be way better received. Maybe that could work if you wouldn’t have to switch modes and instead the smart bullets would just follow your first hit until you kill or reload.
They build his kit with old frozen buffs in mind. It’s very weird/suspicious that he’s not getting buffs against frozen enemies.
They planned 4 trees from the beginning and took one out for content longevity reasons. Think about the new tree (shoulder cannon maybe) with having short cooldown and multiple charges. Suddenly you don’t even need Seein Dead anymore and just take it for the 25% increased KS effect.
Still, I think if he had a way of maintaining KS and AS in very tree would be better for build diversity.
The short cooldown shoulder cannon would make seein red together with good misfortune an alternative to seein dead. You can make infinite KS uptime already without seein dead with Doppelbanger, but with the shoulder cannon it wouldn’t feel that artificial and more organic and synergistic. Not to mention having easy access to ASE.
The atlas gimmick can/would/should make sure that you don’t miss your target when moving lightning fast. Hit desired target once and the rest will home in. But unfortunately, switching modes for every enemy is a terrible way to play.
Also maybe shoulder cannon will have insane damage bonuses against frozen enemies. Who knows. I just don’t believe they pulled the 4th skill tree out of their rear ends and have planned things ahead. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
And hey, at least we have two ways of playing right now with one being the high speed builds and the other the clone builds. (+fun builds)
I mean I did say there’s more Zane needs at the last bit but I was just talking about his class mods so of course I do agree with you. Sad how he has to move to get the damage he needs and I can’t just comfortably sit behind my barrier and snipe. Like I said, I’m going to do another topic cause I feel like they just pulled Zane’s skills out of their ass and didn’t test crud.
There’s a plethora of those threads already. Maybe you can find and revive one of those.
I’m all for buffing though, leave seein dead as is and buff the hell out of the others.
I played Zane on day one and mained him for the first 3 months of the game until I picked up Fl4k. So I have played Zane a lot - 150 hours worth or so, but almost all before Seein Dead came out.
Your explanation in post 2 above is about the best articulation of how I feel about Zane. The only disagreement I would have is with the characterization of Zane’s broken-ness as “fundamental.”
I actually think that there were a few changes made in the late-stages of the development process:
I think radiation originally was the new slag, and the ability of SNTL to apply it was really powerful.
I think cryo originally provided the TPS buff to (IIRC) specifically crit damage, and Zane’s ability to apply it via SNTL as well also was powerful, but combined with Brain Freeze, CCC, and Refreshment it became ridiculously powerful.
I think that amp shields worked with Distributed Denial originally (been awhile, but I’m pretty sure they don’t) and that there was a Bee Shield of some description. And that you got the amp 100% of the time and it was broke as hell.
I think the percentages for many of Zane’s skills were reduced significantly.
I don’t have any evidence of this, other than the fact that there was more than one streamer I heard talk about how super-powerful Zane was, probably not more than a few months before release, and the fact that what Zane’s skill tree says and what it does can be quite a bit different.
This is a conspiracy we had a list and his values are now higher than pre launch due to double satcking. Also he was not nerfed that hard before release he would still be miles worse than rest. Dd can not work with amp drains and bee being in game is a conspiracy i dno where you get the ideas they intended tps cryo devs might not be proficient players but they knew very well what they wanted with elements and their effects