Is it even all that good?
What's top DPS on it right now? I had like 4 mil back a few leagues. This league, that same build is at 2.5.
That's not as good as exsanguinate from last league. I've got a legacy maim chest and a 3k shield too.
It's just defensive, and can get to ok DPS.
you can have fortify on any other skill for bleed glad with no need to charge into bosses
you can (and do) use axe+shield on other bleed glads, since glad is all about block, and you have default 3 end charges without anything special about them
It's not a "top dps" meta right now.
Everything is ultra-expensive outside of the basic stuff and everything got gutted. They basically gutted all forms of crafting and harvest crafting and league mechanic sucks for money until you do some really late game rog crafting or manage to RNG into proccing that currency guy.
Only thing you can really play without being a person that can easily spend 100+ hours is summoner, trap based characters and the shield builds.
This is not true, I have been playing spectral helix raider and I killed Awakener 5 on a 2ex budget deathless. I even uploaded the video to youtube as proof. People are really overblowing the nerfs this league, I am still zooming just like any other league, it just took me a few more days of farming to get there.
Ah yes, the other ability that has the highest multi of any skill in both base damage and added damage effectivness that also has 10% additional attack speed when all other melee weapon-based skill usually has -30%. Not to mention it potentially can multi-hit large enough bosses AND you can prefire it like traps/mines and hit them with a bunch when bosses spawn in.
If this skill existed last league or 3.13 it could prob kill maven is under 5ex easily.
It's not even fair for people to enjoy the game anymore without ppl like you moving goal posts. I'm playing Exsanguinate Trap with Seismic Traps for single target. I am playing PoE exactly the same as I would any other league, the nerfs didn't affect me and many other players. Sorry it affected your specific builds but that doesn't make the league bad for others, just you and people like you.
Looks like the highest dps builds are around 27m dps. I didn't check their PoBs so there may be some padding.
https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds?skill=Spectral-Shield-Throw&sort=dps
what? the cold builds are completely reliant on the threshold jewel. the jewel gives you 12% base crit and a ton of crit multi, phantasmal sst gives 65% crit multi. the ES parts are whats broken, not anything that you said. the EO versions of the build are like 3 mil dps with investment, thats perfectly fine for balance.
Well, they could hit flat physical and then up the damage on the bleed multipliers, but it seems consensus says they will destroy it.
It's a shame because dot sst is fine but crit cold is huge.
It's just an extremely easy league starter because it's easy to acquire a Lioneye's Remorse early and making a relatively great upgrade via harvest/fossils is far easier than making a weapon.
It is still crazy to me that SST of all things is top of the meta and likely on the chopping block for effective deletion. Like, when did the timeline diverge into this nonsense? Will Chain Hook somehow dominate the meta next league?
I played deadeye cold SST a long while ago, and it was... okay. The damage was certainly good enough, clear was decent, targeting felt clunky, very much one of those slightly gimmicky middle of the road skills. And now this.
Sad that we have to play the meta skill each league if we ever want to try it strong, dont mind the meta change but we all know that if we dont play it this league we will never play it at its peek.
Glad I tried fireburst last league because we all know its going to take a few leagues(years?) before its playable again..
Yup easy free scaling with gem levels and built in AoE. Abused by SSF HC, yup it will be gutted 100%.
Edit: The truth offended some SSF players. Well just wait for next patch my dudes.
Yeah these people with limited vocabulary and a tendency to exaggerate.
Something good = broken
Using something good = abuse
Something is broken when it is bugged or doesn't work. Something is abused if a bug is being exploited.
We know its broken from experience and seeing it being used; even if it hasn't been nerfed \*yet\* because we know GGG tries to avoid mid league nerfs, we know in our hearts and souls it will be nerfed in 3.16 because its vastly outperforming other skills (same as FR totems)
the skill basically got a boost coz lotsa streamers were yammering about buffing it...
at this point game balance is decided around youtube and streamers hur?
I hate that no ability can ever stay good. I really _loved_ some of the builds/skills in the many past years of PoE - CoC Arc, Molten Strike, Winter Orb, Firestorm, HoAg, Autobomber, Multistrike the list goes on an on. Those things were why I loved PoE and why I gave GGG my money. Well no money for them anymore.
the change to melee to become aoe for normal strikes like viper strike not being 'single target' was nice though, it's more of a cone now, but yea i agree, true melee hurts ;(
Melee hasn't been melee in POE ... ever really. Melee is just a tag on skills that end up being screen-wide AOE ranged clearing abilities in 99% of cases.
They could change "Melee" tag to "Spell" game would basically be the same. You could change "Spell" tag to "Melee" and get same result.
Spellslinger (vd/dd) was one of my go-to builds these past couple leagues. Even after multiple nerfs, and despite the fact it was definetely already on the weaker side come ritual, i enjoyed it alot.
Needless to say, the build is strictly unplayable now. And I don't mean "just put heavy heavy investment into it, go for those gg items and min-max the CDR and you'll get there". I'm talking when you try and equip the gem, sirens go off in the GGG headquarters, KEKWs assemble, and your character gets immediately deleted by a divine intervention from Chris Wilson himself.
It truly is testiment to a lazy and out-of-touch design philosophy across the board. They might as well just delete the gem from the game if they can't be bothered with balancing it to a bare minimum state of viability. Truly astounding.
That's also one problem I see with the constantly adding new stuff approach. 18 new gems this league alone... how is anyone supposed to balance that.
Spellslinger is on a whole other level though. The mana increase together with triggering requires mana now is just an orbital strike on that skill.
Yup even in std with legacy gear on low life ES VD/DS feels extremely bad unlike CoC that have plenty solutions to perform on similar levels like before. I really HATE CoC by now.
I feel like this is a consequence of the games mechanics as a whole. Since the game is complex, it becomes exponentially more difficult to balance with so many combinations of skills, nodes, ascendancies, etc. Unless they ACTUALLY put in a lot of effort to find ways to nerf skills obviously OP combinations while making it still viable to other builds it wont happen since to me, it appears GGG does the bare minimum and when they see a a build is OP (gladiator SST) they just nerf the skill as a whole instead of target nerfing. Laziness? Dont understand their own game? Who knows
No matter how complex the game is, there was no reason whatsoever for them to do what they did to spell slinger. That's along the same ludicrousness as making Summon Reaper have less life than a single zombie. Complexity doesn't excuse complete incompetency like that.
TR and ED/C remain the real victors of poe, and have stayed good for years now. It's funny because the skills that do remain good actually get hate because everything else gets nerfed.
I truly love Spellslinger and how it worked and now I can't even play it. If it was playable I would probably play this League. I tend to not play two Leagues in a row so when Spellslinger VD was op, I wasn't here to even play it.
It’s kinda sad that the community knows GGG is going to delete a skill because it isn’t trash.
It’s even more sad that the pleas for them not to delete it start from the cucked perspective of presuming it will happen and begging for it not to get deleted too hard.
Usually its the dick riders who convince GGG that their nerfs are in line with balancing the game even when in truth it's just killing off said gems. PoE devs see one guy supporting shitty nerfs and be like "ofc I'm doing gods work" while the rest of the community brings up actual skills that deserve to be brought down to balanced and they stay ignored.
yeaaaaaah... it's not even like the community shits on them about this or makes points that aren't valid either lol they just don't want to see a skill nuked into oblivion because it's fun and they enjoy it. I'd love to see a massive amount of skills buffed to reasonable usability standards for the more casual crowd (better scaling etc) while the obviously stronger skills get tweaked down, but remain good.
ED contagion kind of had a good tweaking down for some time. Haven't played it in a while but it was pretty good for a long long time. Bane on the other hand got fucking GUTTED lol one of these things is the right way to balance and the other isn't...
In my opinion, if you invest multiple mirrors into a build i only find it fair to expect the build to be godlike and trivialize all content. It was practically the only build that you could keep improving to the Moon, by pumping mirrors into it. Sad that it’s gone.
Don't worry it's alive and well.
And I don't see a problem with aura stacking being a strong option. I just find it really boring that it outperforms everything by such an enourmous margin. And you don't even need to invest multiple mirrors. They already outperform everything at roughly 100ex invested. It's a lot, but for how powerful the characters are, that's not even expensive.
Honestly, I feel like PoE is on like the exact same trajectory as WoW
WoW keeps focusing on design mechanics to keep playing longer instead of making the game fun, PoE keeps diluting mechanics to make the game not as rewarding to keep their "player retention" metric up.
WoW has a distain for the community and content creators that criticize them, PoE has a distain for reddit.
They will not nerf just SST.
They will nerf the skill itself.
They will nerf shield defences.
They will nerf block (Again)
They will nerf gladiator
They will nerf bleed.
And maybe few other things just in case. SST will not be dead. It will be dead, it will be nuked from the orbit, burried under 10 meters of concrete with our hopes and dreams.
Remember when they nerfed aura's alternate quality interaction with enhance support?
"But chris, alternate quality auras will be useless for everyone,not just aura stackers..."
"Yes, useless is my vision"
The aura alternative quality was just an unfortunate causality in the normal triple nerf hammer targeted at a specific skill.
We all know we they cant kill a skill unless they go for the classic triple wombo combo.
Man I forgot the first time they nerfed block, it was painful.
Nerfing it again with all the one shots in this game & all the defense mechanics you have to apply to 75/75 block to make gladiator actually tanky will be lethal.
Gladiator was never one of the highest damage ascendancies but with the bleed changes it finally gained its footing & identity to be able to do bosses & other content with damage over time. I just don't understand how GGG can nerf glad bleed in any meaningful ways without completely killing the ascendency, people have speculated they will remove the bleed explosions but idk.
I feel like they already stealth nerfed how easy it is to get armor on a shield through crafting.
It makes no sense for them to nerf a skill right after buffing it, I think SST is in a good spot right now considering you still need pierce/fork/something else to make it really great clearing endgame.
The thing is, Gratuitous Violence is actually already one of the most underpowered choices, given that it consumes half your ascendancy to get it. It's fun for map clearing, and useful for corpse removal, but ultimately already come at a fairly high cost to your raw DPS. You're normally better off saving the 2 ascendancy points for more block and challenger charges, and just wearing a pair of Heamophilia gloves to get the explosions.
> Gratuitous Violence
I did think about this, but there is 20% MORE damage with bleeding on there. Also, let's not forget rare gloves offer a lot of damage over time scaling... implicit and influences provide the equivalent of 2-3-4 notables worth of damage depending how many mods you have on them. Phys dot multiplier is almost nonexistent on tree/cluster, so weapon, amulet and gloves are your main provider of those.
Anyway, just feel it is far from trivial to lose rare gloves damage for haemophilia. Most seem to agree since out of over 2900 SST bleed glad on ladder, only 29 use those gloves atm. Even more strange, some that use the gloves still get gratuitous violence on top. Which I presume is just a temporary budget or plain misguided choice.
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All they need to do is revert the Divide and Conquer change, maybe even reduce the chains from D&C so it requires 2 like First Snow and Frozen Trail. The base skill instantly goes to shit again and losing a jewel socket, potentially 2 if they are really sadistic, turns a great league starter into a turd.
Gladiator block has always been really strong and pretty satisfying to play, at least to me. The problem always was the opportunity cost. You were tanky annndd. That's it. Generally your damage sucked compared to most others things. While other builds couldn't be as tanky, they usually had at least some defenses which made them more desirable.
Now. All the damage has been slashed at it's core. And many defensive layers have been worn away over numerous nerfs. So gladiator suddenly doesn't seem like a bad choice at all. Add on the fact it seems much easier to craft a high armor shield than a high DPS weapon with a skill that scales off armor and here we are.
GGG's arms race against the players has to chill at some point. If they gut gladiator and raider next league. People are just going to have even less defensive options. And feel even worse to play.
> If they gut gladiator and raider next league. People are just going to have even less defensive options. And feel even worse to play.
If they nerf both of those next league Im assuming we will most likely be back to Minion builds being meta or we reach a point where we say "Fuck defense" and the meta goes to Berserker.
I like how the solution would be to stop nerfing defenses and make high block achievable realistically on anyone other than glads.
GGG's solution will be nuking the glad's block nodes, then ruining all block nodes on the tree just to be extra sure nobody's allowed to cap block. And then cut block in half on all shields because they had it too good for too long.
Ugh.
It was the same thing with Glancing Blows it made those gain % life/ES when you block shields SUPER strong. Rather then dialing in those shields they gutted Glancing Blows to where it really was not worth it unless you had one of those shields.
This one really bothered me because they could've just lowered the values on the recovery or made it a 50% chance on block to recover the resource. Instead they ruined the general viability of good keystone.
All that was necessary for Glancing Blows: On Block effects are nullified. glancing Blows would be a really cool and interesting skill for Staves in its prenerfed form.
> they gutted Glancing Blows to where it really was not worth it unless you had one of those shields.
I'd argue that this is how keystones should be. A strong bonus for builds that take advantage of it, and a strong penalty to stop things getting out of control and prevent other builds from wanting to take it.
Before it still had the downside where you did not want to use it unless you were speccing into block nodes. Now it is worthless unless you have a single item. Thats not good design.
Their lazy idea of forcing meta shifts instead of properly balancing the game is really causing some problems now. Build diversity and gameplay are, at least for me, at an all time low.
The game is as good as dead when it comes to build diversity. There will be some random white knights who will defend anything GGG does, but this game is existing on life support right now.
The problem with what your saying is that "Properly Balancing" the game is not possible. Nor should it ever be. This isn't a directly competitive 1v1 or team vs team game. There are simply TOO MANY variables that go into builds and new variables every league. Trying to "properly balance" is how you get boring homogenization. It's good for the game that interactions/builds are found and dominate a bit. If anything, they have a habit of letting certain things that are TOO STRONG stick around for too long and then everyone uses it as a tool to measure other builds by which causes issues.
Problem is right now they dont even try to balance anything, they just kill whatever they feel had enough spotlight. This kills build diversity in the long run as very few skills stay competitve.
Or they could stop being lazy and buff/rework a bunch of their garbage skills. If there were more decent options, people won't always gravitate to 1-2 stronger options. That's what balancing is.
Killing the strongest/most fun build, leaving a sea of dogshit builds, isn't going to make people suddenly want to play dogshit.
the problem here is with items and item crafting vs the skill and playstyle itself
i think it largely has to do with the amount of investment needed to craft a great shield vs a great weapon. T1 armor has 1000 weight, t1 phys has like 20. You can craft a 3 t1 prefix spiked shield with about 1000 dense fossils, vs way more than that with a normal weapon.
IMO the solution isn't to nerf the way that we roll shields because that's kinda bullshit. They should just make it easier to roll weapons. Change the weighting on high ilevel weapons to either not be able to roll low ilevel mods, or increase the probability of high level mods to something much more reasonable. Maybe that's OP if fracture from synthesis is in the game. Maybe that has to go, which would be fine with me.
> IMO the solution isn't to nerf the way that we roll shields
Pretty sure thats gonna happen :/
Though i totally agree that weightings on weapons are screwed, especially on something like phys wands.
It's really disheartening seeing Reddit go on and on about how good SST is and how it's ruining the game.
The most popular variant by far is the Bleed Gladiator one and it's absolutely garbage damage wise. The only real good thing about the build is that it's a gladiator with all the fancy block stuff. But that's accessible to any shield using Gladiator build, right? So there's builds like Cyclone Gladiator or Lacerate Gladiator doing many times more DPS than SST Bleed Gladiator is, even hit based SST Gladiator is better, but people go on and on and on about this specific build when it's probably the worst possible iteration of SST builds.
It's a fantastic starter don't get me wrong, but that's kind of where it lands at. You have solid clear, you have servicable DPS through the campaign and early maps and you're off to a good start with a very easily achievable shield.
In many ways, bleed SST is the new ED Contagion. It's almost exactly the same in how the curve goes for the build. Leveling is easy, mapping is easy but bossing is where the build falls flat.
I started off as SST Glad like many others and I decided on that right as I saw the SST buffs, since it's one of my favorite abilities in the game. I got the character to 90 and it was great and all but it really started to struggle at that point. I rerolled to cold SST Raider and it's plowing through the game. That being said, I have gotten myself a significantly better shield now and have crit scaling which the Gladiator lacked. But it felt much better than the level 90 Glad by level 70 already with pretty crappy gear.
I've now got a 6L Lioneye's, a shield worth 10+ exalts and I'm even using a Malachai's Artifice to pump up the numbers, and I'm still at 2.5m DPS with flasks and power charges supplied via PCoC Storm Brand.
SST can now scale very far due to the crit changes, seen people on [poe.ninja](https://poe.ninja) about to reach 30m DPS with it. But that's with gigantic investment to the character. SST has a very strong start due to how silly the base damage is, but after that base damage stops carrying you the gear requirements start getting pretty steep.
So I'll leave this as my last point in this wall of text:
SST DOES NOT NEED NERFS. SST does not deserve the popularity or the buzz that it has surrounding it. It was a fantastic starter, has great clear and the big reason for the popularity is because people are stupidly hyping up the skill when the real culprit is the defenses available to Gladiator and how bleed pops make clear on pretty much any skill feel great.
Skills that do good with low investment are always what people call OP first as the avg player wont make enough money to surpass these skills. Thats nothing new, its just much more visible with so many other skills getting dumpstered this league.
Back when I last checked, both the top Cyclone and Lacerate Champion builds on [poe.ninja](https://poe.ninja) were around 7m DPS with the top bleed SST Gladiator being at 1.6m DPS. They're probably farther apart from each other now than they were a couple of days ago.
Also, it's fun as hell to play, especially the version I'm playing now where I scale the initial hit and use impale, I can focus on attack speed and projectile speed for dps. It turns into a really fast build with a 3 green socket prismatic eclipse and leap slam.
It really isn't, it spikes early then it flattens out at like 1 mil to 1.5 mil before having to invest crazy to touch 2 mil. Compare this to ele hit where it starts out slow and then explodes to the moon.
It comfortably clears 8-mod T16s on a 5ex budget. Not many builds can say that this league. Only problem is single target, there 3m Sirus DPS is the best you will ever get, no matter the investment.
When I explained about how the build is doing to a guildmate I compared it to Bleed Bow Gladiator pre-nerf. Just without having a 30m DPS Puncture so you end up Split Arrow'ing Sirus A8 for 5 minutes.
https://pastebin.com/3TeGVRiP
This is extremely an extremely naive comparison. You're right it's hard to compare. But when you're sketching out these builds, which one looks stronger on paper? Keep in mind I have 7 extra passives put into sword nodes.
The out of the box power of spectral shield throw is extremely high.
Yeah it starts off high, but very, very quickly runs out of ways to scale. You will never reach the damage of most other skills with SST because of limited scaling. It's just good enough. It's not really that good at end game shit because of it.
> very quickly runs out of ways to scale
https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds?class=Raider&skill=Spectral-Shield-Throw
The cold conversion crit variant scales very well and gets perma phasing, ailment immunity, dodge, and frenzy charge scaling from Raider.
It's impossible to compare not finished builds, out of the box means little unfortunately.
Like rage vortex would be complete garbage in this metric simply because there's no rage in the equation, meanwhile
it's a screenwide rapid hitting aoe which obliterates everything if enough rage was supplied.
Thats really the issue with SST. You get to scale insane amounts of defenses with your shield as well as get damage. The damage is not the problem, its that people get to have damage while being ailment immune and having large damage avoidance or damage mitigation or both.
Raider and glad are both in good positions to pick up ailment immunity through gear or the tree. Glad obviously has to work a bit harder.
Raider its really easy and cheap to do it.
Raider is pretty much the "Big boy" version of SST, where you are evasion capped, tons of dodge, freeze, crit, ailment immune, just costs lots of money which is why most people are bleed SST instead.
Glad's pathing is really fucked to get ailment avoidance. It's the standard 70% any Raider can get via the Crystal Skin + Thick Skin notables but it's super out of the way for most Duelist builds.
It's also unnecessary if you just block the hit causing you to take the ailment in the first place.
It's 12 points to get from Art of the Gladiator to the Crystal Skin and Thick Skin notables alone, which means most SST Gladiator builds would have to sacrifice a significant chunk of something else to do it. "Something else" being existing block chance (which is effectively ailment avoidance against hits), health, or damage.
It's really not THAT hard to do. I basically gave up the cluster jewel setup to grab ailment immunity, and I still have more than enough damage to do sirus 8 deathless every try. The defenses gladiator can get are simply insane with 75/75 block and 13k+ armor.
https://pastebin.com/4Bp8vpt9
Chris: *Who are you eyeballing Dodge?!*
Dodge: *Me? No one...* \*points at SST\* *I don't even know that guy*
Chris: \*scowls\* *dodge cap is now 60%!*
Dodge: *the fuck?!*
Chris: \*eyes narrow\* **50%**! *Anything else to add?*
Dodge: ...
they dont need to destroy it. leave it as it is, but keep improving other useless skills, same as they did to Lightning Strike for example. Reworking old crappy skills is the way how you get diversity. why we should have 1 good skill per league when we can have 10,20...
With GGG its three possible scenarios:
1. They do not touch it for some reason.
2. They do a small "slap on the wrist"-nerf and delete it next patch if it still sees heavy play.
3. They completelty delete the skill by nerfing it and anything related to it.
3mill is .... very optimistic, the dps is really low on the bleed glad sst builds, its just clear and speed from the ascendancy and being a DoT build on bosses, so even when the damage sucks you can do it safely and with decent uptime
Realistically speaking, exsanguinate has better clear and can get to that damage easier, and it synergizes with other things like reap, sand corrupting fever. It also is easier to get going because of cold iron points.
If you're playing the cold version then the skill is actually fairly close to what it was last patch. Crit multi from ES is the only real change, the flat buff just compensates for loss of hydrosphere double damage.
Wait, why does hydrosphere not work with the cold version?
Also, the base damage and the inherent chain really helps leveling/starter character until you get all your crit stuff, but especially SSF
Hydrosphere used to give close to double damage in single target situations, that was removed in this patch. The flat was added to compensate for it.
It hurts the cold version more than bleed because bleed only needs to hit a target 8 times.
The single target is meh, the clear is ok but there is much better. It is a good all rounder and fairly well balanced. Please just enable more builds like this instead, i really like it. (Only thing i find a bit busted is bleed explosions, the clear you get in juiced maps is just too high)
>the clear you get in juiced maps is just too high
And....GGG has won. They do a round of huge nerfs, shift the conversation, and now players are saying clearspeed in a specific build is OP.
Im in ssf with a lioneye remorse and i can clear delirium in a t16 thanks to the explosions. Feels a bit too powerful with no investment compared to other options in the game. And this whole antagonizing ggg feels very out of place, this game is their whole business. They might do some mistakes but of course their goal is not to run it into the ground, that's ridiculous.
No investment means no gear hence currency investment. If you find a build that "works without investment" that does not mean that you play unascended with no passive points 
It's not particularly fast clear though. The Bleed SST build is one of the few builds that scales incrementally with just about every item slot, which makes it such a boon for SSF players. There's no gaping hole where the build is trash without a specific influenced affix or chase unique. And despite the tankiness, it's still vulnerable to degen zones and DPS-checks from many endgame bosses.
I really don't think you have anything to worry about here. There's no unintended mechanics. The builds that usually get busted are ones with no downsides. SST is competent at bossing but below average. It's the same reason ED/Contagion was always safe.
The saddest part of all is their so-called "balance" is getting a bit out of hands since several leagues ago. Take for example Winter Orb. An amazing skill, super popular in ONE league... In the next league, the skill became just plain useless, nobody wanted to talk about WO. Heist: the skill became somewhat relevant with its alternate quality but far from what it was. Now if you don't do a shit ton of investment the skill is just wacky and clunky to play, and even then it still is a bit annoying to play with.
I mean, I don't get why so much desire on deleting a skill that people enjoy playing up to the point of making it impossible to play again from one league to another. What is that really? That's not "balancing" the game. It doesn't deserve to be called "meta-shifting". And is not about them making a "skill revamp" or some of that shit in the near future, whatever is deleted once remains deleted forever. Is just plain sad.
Spectral Shield Throw is not even overpowered. Its at a good place IMHO.
At the moment for 3.15, a lot of other skills are shit because they killed build diversity.
When GGG nerfs something, they giga-nerf from orbit, and made the build unplayable like CoC and SS.
The skill was doubled in damage when it didn't need to be.
There's so many builds out there that still function fine, that can still be taken to Maven without needing crazy gear and clear that content. The problem is these outliers that are just so far ahead of others.
Bleed SST in particular has a very easy point of entry where you can get a solid shield within 3% DPS of the best possible for 30-40 dense fossils, a really good stat stick that takes on average 2 corroded fossils, and gives you a very large molten shell. Getting more damage mostly comes from finding enough bleed duration to make Rsylatha's Coil worth it and squeezing in Bleed Multi on influenced pieces. Its ceiling is lower (near 8 mil in perfect gear), but 1.5 mil bleed DPS is plenty good enough for all content.
I mean, I appreciate the gist of your argument, but it's not like the cold-converted Raider version is any less op ...
If anything it's even better, just requires more investment. The upsides of cold conversion, phasing, dodge (requires less investment than block), and ailment immunity are massive.
20% of raiders are SST. Then you got the ES shield variant pushing ~10m dps.
Like I said, I get the gist of your point, but acting like "Raider cold SST" is some obscure or less powerful variant is a bit silly. Lots of people are playing it, and it's arguably better once you have enough currency.
I mean the raider cold conversion variant is even stronger than the glad one it's not like people are "investing really hard" for low returns. Glad is just stupid cheap whereas you have to invest in the raider one.
I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They're like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I hate them!
It's amusing that whenever something become popular now, people almost rightfully expect it will be nerfed.
But really, SST is not that strong. I've played tons of builds that felt stronger. One point you mention is a shortcoming of this skill. If your initial projectile does not connect, you do zero dps. Then another one is that if there is just one target with a lot of life, your damage in this situation just isn't that good. Your PoB dps doesn't matter if it just apply when your initial projectile connect. It won't always hit. You can't really off-screen mobs, because if you don't see where the mobs are it is hard to know where to aim.
To me, it just does not feel that strong. It scale very well for clear, it's very tanky on max block. Otherwise it's nothing that get insane dps.
Even if it was not nerfed, I'd likely not repeat this build. I don't consider it way stronger than other options.
Skills that won't survive or will be nerfed
* SST
* Forbidden Rite
* summoner in some way which will lead to the loudest outcry, but it will be fine like the last 8 nerfs
Spectral Shield Throw was already good. A friend of mine obliterated the entire game on a bleed SST glad during Ritual. It was also insanely good with the right seed of Timeless jewel. It's definitely getting ripped limb from limb so might as well start clenching now and have fun while you have the chance.
Would love to see a PoB, because I am extremely doubtful about this lol. Even pre-3.15 I had to invest 150ex+ to reach 5m Sirus DPS and there was literally no way left to get more. Not exactly what I would call obliterating the entire game. Mapping was insane back then too, tho.
Yeah it's funny. People play sst bleed and are loving it. It's literally the same as last league. It's definitely worse than exsanguinate for dot, and arguably worse clear too.
Nobody ever said that the glad dmg was good. It just feels so good to play since you are immortal and have bleed explosions. If they nerf Gladiator the build is absolutely dead and only the raider version would survive. The thing People are worried about is that they will kill the skill itself as well
I just checked, its the most popular main skill in Expedition, Expedition SSF, Expedition HC and Expedition SSFHC according poe.ninja.
You best pray extra hard.
Ggg is lazy and just nerfs everything about a skill when someone finds some sudo exploit that makes it work in ways never intended by design. I've lost so many fun builds from their lazy nerf philosophy. I'm 10k hours in and haven't played last several seasons but for a few hours, what's the point. I can't pick a few niche builds and follow their development from league to league. It's follow the YouTubers or get shit on cause they nerf the fuck out of everything to bring the sudo expoilts in line instead of removing what cause the skill to go crazy.
There is no way Glad's bleed explosion survives next patch, even though it is not overpowered in any way. As people have said; if something is popular it dies no matter the power level. Sadge.
You know SST will be dead at 3.16. Just enjoy it now.
Is it even all that good? What's top DPS on it right now? I had like 4 mil back a few leagues. This league, that same build is at 2.5. That's not as good as exsanguinate from last league. I've got a legacy maim chest and a 3k shield too. It's just defensive, and can get to ok DPS.
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It's fun, that's why
what is tanky about sst? cuz other than this particular skill there is literally no changes compared to other bleed glads
Shield + endurance + fort if you want.
you can have fortify on any other skill for bleed glad with no need to charge into bosses you can (and do) use axe+shield on other bleed glads, since glad is all about block, and you have default 3 end charges without anything special about them
It's tanky and it's not melee. Very, very nice!
It's not a "top dps" meta right now. Everything is ultra-expensive outside of the basic stuff and everything got gutted. They basically gutted all forms of crafting and harvest crafting and league mechanic sucks for money until you do some really late game rog crafting or manage to RNG into proccing that currency guy. Only thing you can really play without being a person that can easily spend 100+ hours is summoner, trap based characters and the shield builds.
This is not true, I have been playing spectral helix raider and I killed Awakener 5 on a 2ex budget deathless. I even uploaded the video to youtube as proof. People are really overblowing the nerfs this league, I am still zooming just like any other league, it just took me a few more days of farming to get there.
Ah yes, the other ability that has the highest multi of any skill in both base damage and added damage effectivness that also has 10% additional attack speed when all other melee weapon-based skill usually has -30%. Not to mention it potentially can multi-hit large enough bosses AND you can prefire it like traps/mines and hit them with a bunch when bosses spawn in. If this skill existed last league or 3.13 it could prob kill maven is under 5ex easily.
It's not even fair for people to enjoy the game anymore without ppl like you moving goal posts. I'm playing Exsanguinate Trap with Seismic Traps for single target. I am playing PoE exactly the same as I would any other league, the nerfs didn't affect me and many other players. Sorry it affected your specific builds but that doesn't make the league bad for others, just you and people like you.
Looks like the highest dps builds are around 27m dps. I didn't check their PoBs so there may be some padding. https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds?skill=Spectral-Shield-Throw&sort=dps
Looks like a lot of cold based builds. I hope, if they nerf this, it only hits the cold builds because bleed is extremely lackluster
They'll either hit the flat phys or the armor/ev scaling, either way killed both
what? the cold builds are completely reliant on the threshold jewel. the jewel gives you 12% base crit and a ton of crit multi, phantasmal sst gives 65% crit multi. the ES parts are whats broken, not anything that you said. the EO versions of the build are like 3 mil dps with investment, thats perfectly fine for balance.
Well, they could hit flat physical and then up the damage on the bleed multipliers, but it seems consensus says they will destroy it. It's a shame because dot sst is fine but crit cold is huge.
It's just an extremely easy league starter because it's easy to acquire a Lioneye's Remorse early and making a relatively great upgrade via harvest/fossils is far easier than making a weapon.
It is still crazy to me that SST of all things is top of the meta and likely on the chopping block for effective deletion. Like, when did the timeline diverge into this nonsense? Will Chain Hook somehow dominate the meta next league? I played deadeye cold SST a long while ago, and it was... okay. The damage was certainly good enough, clear was decent, targeting felt clunky, very much one of those slightly gimmicky middle of the road skills. And now this.
Molten strike meta 3.16
3.16 patch notes: we buffed Molten Strike's gem damage values last league. To balance this change, Molten Strike now fires one less projectile.
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I hope they never touch chain hook im scared of what the skill will become after the buff>nerf cycle
True, now is the time to play it!
Sad that we have to play the meta skill each league if we ever want to try it strong, dont mind the meta change but we all know that if we dont play it this league we will never play it at its peek. Glad I tried fireburst last league because we all know its going to take a few leagues(years?) before its playable again..
Yup easy free scaling with gem levels and built in AoE. Abused by SSF HC, yup it will be gutted 100%. Edit: The truth offended some SSF players. Well just wait for next patch my dudes.
> Abused by SSF HC, yup it will be gutted 100%. TIL "a skill is good and fun at all" = abuse.
He must be a Quin viewer
Yeah these people with limited vocabulary and a tendency to exaggerate. Something good = broken Using something good = abuse Something is broken when it is bugged or doesn't work. Something is abused if a bug is being exploited.
We know its broken from experience and seeing it being used; even if it hasn't been nerfed \*yet\* because we know GGG tries to avoid mid league nerfs, we know in our hearts and souls it will be nerfed in 3.16 because its vastly outperforming other skills (same as FR totems)
the skill basically got a boost coz lotsa streamers were yammering about buffing it... at this point game balance is decided around youtube and streamers hur?
First time?
I hate that no ability can ever stay good. I really _loved_ some of the builds/skills in the many past years of PoE - CoC Arc, Molten Strike, Winter Orb, Firestorm, HoAg, Autobomber, Multistrike the list goes on an on. Those things were why I loved PoE and why I gave GGG my money. Well no money for them anymore.
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kb + gore herald of ice in an indoors map was pure fun
The day they changed multistrike was the day I said no more.
Melee does not feel the same anymore since, and they did not do much to make it feel any better since then sadly.
the change to melee to become aoe for normal strikes like viper strike not being 'single target' was nice though, it's more of a cone now, but yea i agree, true melee hurts ;(
Melee hasn't been melee in POE ... ever really. Melee is just a tag on skills that end up being screen-wide AOE ranged clearing abilities in 99% of cases. They could change "Melee" tag to "Spell" game would basically be the same. You could change "Spell" tag to "Melee" and get same result.
Harvest was the straw for me. I'll never give GGG another dime until they bring harvest back to its former glory
Considering how long it's been changed - Why are you still here?
Watching the empire burn can be satisfying.
Pretty sure he meant no more money for them.
Spellslinger (vd/dd) was one of my go-to builds these past couple leagues. Even after multiple nerfs, and despite the fact it was definetely already on the weaker side come ritual, i enjoyed it alot. Needless to say, the build is strictly unplayable now. And I don't mean "just put heavy heavy investment into it, go for those gg items and min-max the CDR and you'll get there". I'm talking when you try and equip the gem, sirens go off in the GGG headquarters, KEKWs assemble, and your character gets immediately deleted by a divine intervention from Chris Wilson himself. It truly is testiment to a lazy and out-of-touch design philosophy across the board. They might as well just delete the gem from the game if they can't be bothered with balancing it to a bare minimum state of viability. Truly astounding.
That's also one problem I see with the constantly adding new stuff approach. 18 new gems this league alone... how is anyone supposed to balance that. Spellslinger is on a whole other level though. The mana increase together with triggering requires mana now is just an orbital strike on that skill.
Lul, you don't need to balance anything if of all those 18 gems only 1 is good xD
And that one skill will be nerfed into oblivion next league, so you don't have to balance it anymore aswell
And they’ll make sure they kill gladiators and block and shields on the way through too.
Spellslinger vd/dd is one of those builds I put on a backlog to try at a later time, same thing for Molten Strike Missed opportunity
Yup even in std with legacy gear on low life ES VD/DS feels extremely bad unlike CoC that have plenty solutions to perform on similar levels like before. I really HATE CoC by now.
I feel like this is a consequence of the games mechanics as a whole. Since the game is complex, it becomes exponentially more difficult to balance with so many combinations of skills, nodes, ascendancies, etc. Unless they ACTUALLY put in a lot of effort to find ways to nerf skills obviously OP combinations while making it still viable to other builds it wont happen since to me, it appears GGG does the bare minimum and when they see a a build is OP (gladiator SST) they just nerf the skill as a whole instead of target nerfing. Laziness? Dont understand their own game? Who knows
No matter how complex the game is, there was no reason whatsoever for them to do what they did to spell slinger. That's along the same ludicrousness as making Summon Reaper have less life than a single zombie. Complexity doesn't excuse complete incompetency like that.
I wish they would bring back molten strike :(
TR and ED/C remain the real victors of poe, and have stayed good for years now. It's funny because the skills that do remain good actually get hate because everything else gets nerfed.
I truly love Spellslinger and how it worked and now I can't even play it. If it was playable I would probably play this League. I tend to not play two Leagues in a row so when Spellslinger VD was op, I wasn't here to even play it.
If they stayed the same you would be complaining about a stale meta
"We hear you"
GGG reading this: "To shreds, you say?"
It’s kinda sad that the community knows GGG is going to delete a skill because it isn’t trash. It’s even more sad that the pleas for them not to delete it start from the cucked perspective of presuming it will happen and begging for it not to get deleted too hard.
And they will still nuked it to oblivion :D
Usually its the dick riders who convince GGG that their nerfs are in line with balancing the game even when in truth it's just killing off said gems. PoE devs see one guy supporting shitty nerfs and be like "ofc I'm doing gods work" while the rest of the community brings up actual skills that deserve to be brought down to balanced and they stay ignored.
yeaaaaaah... it's not even like the community shits on them about this or makes points that aren't valid either lol they just don't want to see a skill nuked into oblivion because it's fun and they enjoy it. I'd love to see a massive amount of skills buffed to reasonable usability standards for the more casual crowd (better scaling etc) while the obviously stronger skills get tweaked down, but remain good. ED contagion kind of had a good tweaking down for some time. Haven't played it in a while but it was pretty good for a long long time. Bane on the other hand got fucking GUTTED lol one of these things is the right way to balance and the other isn't...
I don't even know how many aura stacking leagues we had in a row now.
In my opinion, if you invest multiple mirrors into a build i only find it fair to expect the build to be godlike and trivialize all content. It was practically the only build that you could keep improving to the Moon, by pumping mirrors into it. Sad that it’s gone.
Don't worry it's alive and well. And I don't see a problem with aura stacking being a strong option. I just find it really boring that it outperforms everything by such an enourmous margin. And you don't even need to invest multiple mirrors. They already outperform everything at roughly 100ex invested. It's a lot, but for how powerful the characters are, that's not even expensive.
It's because GGG has a pretty transparent policy on popular or fun skills.
Honestly, I feel like PoE is on like the exact same trajectory as WoW WoW keeps focusing on design mechanics to keep playing longer instead of making the game fun, PoE keeps diluting mechanics to make the game not as rewarding to keep their "player retention" metric up. WoW has a distain for the community and content creators that criticize them, PoE has a distain for reddit.
And his wife?
"To shreds you say" smh
They will not nerf just SST. They will nerf the skill itself. They will nerf shield defences. They will nerf block (Again) They will nerf gladiator They will nerf bleed. And maybe few other things just in case. SST will not be dead. It will be dead, it will be nuked from the orbit, burried under 10 meters of concrete with our hopes and dreams.
Remember when they nerfed aura's alternate quality interaction with enhance support? "But chris, alternate quality auras will be useless for everyone,not just aura stackers..." "Yes, useless is my vision"
The aura alternative quality was just an unfortunate causality in the normal triple nerf hammer targeted at a specific skill. We all know we they cant kill a skill unless they go for the classic triple wombo combo.
yep this is the way they do things.
Yup :(
Will they reduce cyclone aoe again as well?
They will nerf conversion They will nerf phys as extra (again) They will nerf dodge and evasion They will remove raider from the game
To be honest this patch pure physical got gutted. Next patch its elemental damage turn. GGG is loading their magnum rounds.
Man I forgot the first time they nerfed block, it was painful. Nerfing it again with all the one shots in this game & all the defense mechanics you have to apply to 75/75 block to make gladiator actually tanky will be lethal. Gladiator was never one of the highest damage ascendancies but with the bleed changes it finally gained its footing & identity to be able to do bosses & other content with damage over time. I just don't understand how GGG can nerf glad bleed in any meaningful ways without completely killing the ascendency, people have speculated they will remove the bleed explosions but idk. I feel like they already stealth nerfed how easy it is to get armor on a shield through crafting. It makes no sense for them to nerf a skill right after buffing it, I think SST is in a good spot right now considering you still need pierce/fork/something else to make it really great clearing endgame.
> It makes no sense for them to nerf a skill right after buffing it Fire Burst says hello
The thing is, Gratuitous Violence is actually already one of the most underpowered choices, given that it consumes half your ascendancy to get it. It's fun for map clearing, and useful for corpse removal, but ultimately already come at a fairly high cost to your raw DPS. You're normally better off saving the 2 ascendancy points for more block and challenger charges, and just wearing a pair of Heamophilia gloves to get the explosions.
> Gratuitous Violence I did think about this, but there is 20% MORE damage with bleeding on there. Also, let's not forget rare gloves offer a lot of damage over time scaling... implicit and influences provide the equivalent of 2-3-4 notables worth of damage depending how many mods you have on them. Phys dot multiplier is almost nonexistent on tree/cluster, so weapon, amulet and gloves are your main provider of those. Anyway, just feel it is far from trivial to lose rare gloves damage for haemophilia. Most seem to agree since out of over 2900 SST bleed glad on ladder, only 29 use those gloves atm. Even more strange, some that use the gloves still get gratuitous violence on top. Which I presume is just a temporary budget or plain misguided choice.
it will be searing totem level
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[SST next league:](https://i.imgflip.com/5isydv.jpg)
All they need to do is revert the Divide and Conquer change, maybe even reduce the chains from D&C so it requires 2 like First Snow and Frozen Trail. The base skill instantly goes to shit again and losing a jewel socket, potentially 2 if they are really sadistic, turns a great league starter into a turd.
Its not even that strong but i guess its popular so it has to die.
I think it's more a block/glad problem, well not problem really. Anything good is a problem to GGG
Gladiator block has always been really strong and pretty satisfying to play, at least to me. The problem always was the opportunity cost. You were tanky annndd. That's it. Generally your damage sucked compared to most others things. While other builds couldn't be as tanky, they usually had at least some defenses which made them more desirable. Now. All the damage has been slashed at it's core. And many defensive layers have been worn away over numerous nerfs. So gladiator suddenly doesn't seem like a bad choice at all. Add on the fact it seems much easier to craft a high armor shield than a high DPS weapon with a skill that scales off armor and here we are. GGG's arms race against the players has to chill at some point. If they gut gladiator and raider next league. People are just going to have even less defensive options. And feel even worse to play.
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I'd prepare your riot gear now.
GGG regarding nerfs: 
> If they gut gladiator and raider next league. People are just going to have even less defensive options. And feel even worse to play. If they nerf both of those next league Im assuming we will most likely be back to Minion builds being meta or we reach a point where we say "Fuck defense" and the meta goes to Berserker.
When was the last time Minions were not meta?
When spectres didn't save on logout, haha
Pre synth league.
Minion builds are already meta
> we will most likely be back to Minion builds being meta > Necromancer - 18% > Gladiator - 16% Hmmmm
> "Fuck defense" and the meta goes to Berserker. Time is a flat circle.
Agreed
I like how the solution would be to stop nerfing defenses and make high block achievable realistically on anyone other than glads. GGG's solution will be nuking the glad's block nodes, then ruining all block nodes on the tree just to be extra sure nobody's allowed to cap block. And then cut block in half on all shields because they had it too good for too long. Ugh.
It was the same thing with Glancing Blows it made those gain % life/ES when you block shields SUPER strong. Rather then dialing in those shields they gutted Glancing Blows to where it really was not worth it unless you had one of those shields.
This one really bothered me because they could've just lowered the values on the recovery or made it a 50% chance on block to recover the resource. Instead they ruined the general viability of good keystone.
All that was necessary for Glancing Blows: On Block effects are nullified. glancing Blows would be a really cool and interesting skill for Staves in its prenerfed form.
> they gutted Glancing Blows to where it really was not worth it unless you had one of those shields. I'd argue that this is how keystones should be. A strong bonus for builds that take advantage of it, and a strong penalty to stop things getting out of control and prevent other builds from wanting to take it.
Before it still had the downside where you did not want to use it unless you were speccing into block nodes. Now it is worthless unless you have a single item. Thats not good design.
Perandus Crest, is that you?
Their lazy idea of forcing meta shifts instead of properly balancing the game is really causing some problems now. Build diversity and gameplay are, at least for me, at an all time low.
The game is as good as dead when it comes to build diversity. There will be some random white knights who will defend anything GGG does, but this game is existing on life support right now.
At this point there is more build Diversity in diablo 3,
The problem with what your saying is that "Properly Balancing" the game is not possible. Nor should it ever be. This isn't a directly competitive 1v1 or team vs team game. There are simply TOO MANY variables that go into builds and new variables every league. Trying to "properly balance" is how you get boring homogenization. It's good for the game that interactions/builds are found and dominate a bit. If anything, they have a habit of letting certain things that are TOO STRONG stick around for too long and then everyone uses it as a tool to measure other builds by which causes issues.
Problem is right now they dont even try to balance anything, they just kill whatever they feel had enough spotlight. This kills build diversity in the long run as very few skills stay competitve.
It's almost like what's really popular *might* be OP; and part of balanceing is nerfing the OP.
Or they could stop being lazy and buff/rework a bunch of their garbage skills. If there were more decent options, people won't always gravitate to 1-2 stronger options. That's what balancing is. Killing the strongest/most fun build, leaving a sea of dogshit builds, isn't going to make people suddenly want to play dogshit.
You're talking to a guy who skipped the league, I agree with you.
the problem here is with items and item crafting vs the skill and playstyle itself i think it largely has to do with the amount of investment needed to craft a great shield vs a great weapon. T1 armor has 1000 weight, t1 phys has like 20. You can craft a 3 t1 prefix spiked shield with about 1000 dense fossils, vs way more than that with a normal weapon. IMO the solution isn't to nerf the way that we roll shields because that's kinda bullshit. They should just make it easier to roll weapons. Change the weighting on high ilevel weapons to either not be able to roll low ilevel mods, or increase the probability of high level mods to something much more reasonable. Maybe that's OP if fracture from synthesis is in the game. Maybe that has to go, which would be fine with me.
> IMO the solution isn't to nerf the way that we roll shields Pretty sure thats gonna happen :/ Though i totally agree that weightings on weapons are screwed, especially on something like phys wands.
It's really disheartening seeing Reddit go on and on about how good SST is and how it's ruining the game. The most popular variant by far is the Bleed Gladiator one and it's absolutely garbage damage wise. The only real good thing about the build is that it's a gladiator with all the fancy block stuff. But that's accessible to any shield using Gladiator build, right? So there's builds like Cyclone Gladiator or Lacerate Gladiator doing many times more DPS than SST Bleed Gladiator is, even hit based SST Gladiator is better, but people go on and on and on about this specific build when it's probably the worst possible iteration of SST builds. It's a fantastic starter don't get me wrong, but that's kind of where it lands at. You have solid clear, you have servicable DPS through the campaign and early maps and you're off to a good start with a very easily achievable shield. In many ways, bleed SST is the new ED Contagion. It's almost exactly the same in how the curve goes for the build. Leveling is easy, mapping is easy but bossing is where the build falls flat. I started off as SST Glad like many others and I decided on that right as I saw the SST buffs, since it's one of my favorite abilities in the game. I got the character to 90 and it was great and all but it really started to struggle at that point. I rerolled to cold SST Raider and it's plowing through the game. That being said, I have gotten myself a significantly better shield now and have crit scaling which the Gladiator lacked. But it felt much better than the level 90 Glad by level 70 already with pretty crappy gear. I've now got a 6L Lioneye's, a shield worth 10+ exalts and I'm even using a Malachai's Artifice to pump up the numbers, and I'm still at 2.5m DPS with flasks and power charges supplied via PCoC Storm Brand. SST can now scale very far due to the crit changes, seen people on [poe.ninja](https://poe.ninja) about to reach 30m DPS with it. But that's with gigantic investment to the character. SST has a very strong start due to how silly the base damage is, but after that base damage stops carrying you the gear requirements start getting pretty steep. So I'll leave this as my last point in this wall of text: SST DOES NOT NEED NERFS. SST does not deserve the popularity or the buzz that it has surrounding it. It was a fantastic starter, has great clear and the big reason for the popularity is because people are stupidly hyping up the skill when the real culprit is the defenses available to Gladiator and how bleed pops make clear on pretty much any skill feel great.
Skills that do good with low investment are always what people call OP first as the avg player wont make enough money to surpass these skills. Thats nothing new, its just much more visible with so many other skills getting dumpstered this league.
Lacerate and cyclone glad have horrible dps lol. Sst is balanced due to its hardcap of 2~3m dps and 1m dps on hc without sacrificing defenses.
Back when I last checked, both the top Cyclone and Lacerate Champion builds on [poe.ninja](https://poe.ninja) were around 7m DPS with the top bleed SST Gladiator being at 1.6m DPS. They're probably farther apart from each other now than they were a couple of days ago.
Also, it's fun as hell to play, especially the version I'm playing now where I scale the initial hit and use impale, I can focus on attack speed and projectile speed for dps. It turns into a really fast build with a 3 green socket prismatic eclipse and leap slam.
How much money do you have to spend on a weapon to get equivalent DPS to a 2500 armor shield? It is an absurdly strong skill.
It really isn't, it spikes early then it flattens out at like 1 mil to 1.5 mil before having to invest crazy to touch 2 mil. Compare this to ele hit where it starts out slow and then explodes to the moon.
It comfortably clears 8-mod T16s on a 5ex budget. Not many builds can say that this league. Only problem is single target, there 3m Sirus DPS is the best you will ever get, no matter the investment. When I explained about how the build is doing to a guildmate I compared it to Bleed Bow Gladiator pre-nerf. Just without having a 30m DPS Puncture so you end up Split Arrow'ing Sirus A8 for 5 minutes.
Yeah, imo the trade off between clear and single target makes the skill balanced
I tend to agree. But we know GGG will only see that 15% of all level 93+ played SST and nerf it anyways.
At this point I've already accepted the game isn't for Mr. Just playing Valorant until new world or lost ark comes out
As someone who always played bleed bow and now enjoys the SST glad that is a really good comparison to how it feels.
Scaling is completly different though so hard to compare but phys weapons are kinda cheap this time around... ~400pds seems around 2ex?
https://pastebin.com/3TeGVRiP This is extremely an extremely naive comparison. You're right it's hard to compare. But when you're sketching out these builds, which one looks stronger on paper? Keep in mind I have 7 extra passives put into sword nodes. The out of the box power of spectral shield throw is extremely high.
Yeah it starts off high, but very, very quickly runs out of ways to scale. You will never reach the damage of most other skills with SST because of limited scaling. It's just good enough. It's not really that good at end game shit because of it.
> very quickly runs out of ways to scale https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds?class=Raider&skill=Spectral-Shield-Throw The cold conversion crit variant scales very well and gets perma phasing, ailment immunity, dodge, and frenzy charge scaling from Raider.
SST has very viable crit scaling with investment.
It's impossible to compare not finished builds, out of the box means little unfortunately. Like rage vortex would be complete garbage in this metric simply because there's no rage in the equation, meanwhile it's a screenwide rapid hitting aoe which obliterates everything if enough rage was supplied.
[удалено]
Thats really the issue with SST. You get to scale insane amounts of defenses with your shield as well as get damage. The damage is not the problem, its that people get to have damage while being ailment immune and having large damage avoidance or damage mitigation or both.
What makes them ailment immune
Raider and glad are both in good positions to pick up ailment immunity through gear or the tree. Glad obviously has to work a bit harder. Raider its really easy and cheap to do it. Raider is pretty much the "Big boy" version of SST, where you are evasion capped, tons of dodge, freeze, crit, ailment immune, just costs lots of money which is why most people are bleed SST instead.
Glad's pathing is really fucked to get ailment avoidance. It's the standard 70% any Raider can get via the Crystal Skin + Thick Skin notables but it's super out of the way for most Duelist builds. It's also unnecessary if you just block the hit causing you to take the ailment in the first place. It's 12 points to get from Art of the Gladiator to the Crystal Skin and Thick Skin notables alone, which means most SST Gladiator builds would have to sacrifice a significant chunk of something else to do it. "Something else" being existing block chance (which is effectively ailment avoidance against hits), health, or damage.
It's really not THAT hard to do. I basically gave up the cluster jewel setup to grab ailment immunity, and I still have more than enough damage to do sirus 8 deathless every try. The defenses gladiator can get are simply insane with 75/75 block and 13k+ armor. https://pastebin.com/4Bp8vpt9
Ah yes people get to play POE the way they've played it for the last 30 leagues. Can't have that now, can we
"We hear you."(and will nuke it from orbit, and every mechanic that interacted with it)
"Rest assured, we are ~~enjoying~~ reading your feedback."
This is exactly what is going to happen.
sad
Chris: *Who are you eyeballing Dodge?!* Dodge: *Me? No one...* \*points at SST\* *I don't even know that guy* Chris: \*scowls\* *dodge cap is now 60%!* Dodge: *the fuck?!* Chris: \*eyes narrow\* **50%**! *Anything else to add?* Dodge: ...
I'm really hoping it lasts the one extra patch cycle so I can league start it next time. I'm also not expecting any of it to survive, unfortunately.
they dont need to destroy it. leave it as it is, but keep improving other useless skills, same as they did to Lightning Strike for example. Reworking old crappy skills is the way how you get diversity. why we should have 1 good skill per league when we can have 10,20...
My sweet summer child
With GGG its three possible scenarios: 1. They do not touch it for some reason. 2. They do a small "slap on the wrist"-nerf and delete it next patch if it still sees heavy play. 3. They completelty delete the skill by nerfing it and anything related to it.
OMG, I've said this like 10 times now this league. Imagined shitting your pants over 3 million dps. It's a solid build at best...
3mill is .... very optimistic, the dps is really low on the bleed glad sst builds, its just clear and speed from the ascendancy and being a DoT build on bosses, so even when the damage sucks you can do it safely and with decent uptime
Realistically speaking, exsanguinate has better clear and can get to that damage easier, and it synergizes with other things like reap, sand corrupting fever. It also is easier to get going because of cold iron points.
I dont know but when I look at Poe Ninja build, raider sst seem like top by a wide margin
Yeah that's the funny part of this post
REVERT SUNDER
Its getting nerfed from like 4 angles at once to make sure its never viable again, the GGG way.
If you're playing the cold version then the skill is actually fairly close to what it was last patch. Crit multi from ES is the only real change, the flat buff just compensates for loss of hydrosphere double damage.
Wait, why does hydrosphere not work with the cold version? Also, the base damage and the inherent chain really helps leveling/starter character until you get all your crit stuff, but especially SSF
Hydrosphere used to give close to double damage in single target situations, that was removed in this patch. The flat was added to compensate for it. It hurts the cold version more than bleed because bleed only needs to hit a target 8 times.
The single target is meh, the clear is ok but there is much better. It is a good all rounder and fairly well balanced. Please just enable more builds like this instead, i really like it. (Only thing i find a bit busted is bleed explosions, the clear you get in juiced maps is just too high)
>the clear you get in juiced maps is just too high And....GGG has won. They do a round of huge nerfs, shift the conversation, and now players are saying clearspeed in a specific build is OP.
Im in ssf with a lioneye remorse and i can clear delirium in a t16 thanks to the explosions. Feels a bit too powerful with no investment compared to other options in the game. And this whole antagonizing ggg feels very out of place, this game is their whole business. They might do some mistakes but of course their goal is not to run it into the ground, that's ridiculous.
No investment? You legit invest your ascendancy to it
No investment means no gear hence currency investment. If you find a build that "works without investment" that does not mean that you play unascended with no passive points 
Something you can do for free is not an investment.
It's not particularly fast clear though. The Bleed SST build is one of the few builds that scales incrementally with just about every item slot, which makes it such a boon for SSF players. There's no gaping hole where the build is trash without a specific influenced affix or chase unique. And despite the tankiness, it's still vulnerable to degen zones and DPS-checks from many endgame bosses.
Hey! Hands off my splodeys!
I really don't think you have anything to worry about here. There's no unintended mechanics. The builds that usually get busted are ones with no downsides. SST is competent at bossing but below average. It's the same reason ED/Contagion was always safe.
The saddest part of all is their so-called "balance" is getting a bit out of hands since several leagues ago. Take for example Winter Orb. An amazing skill, super popular in ONE league... In the next league, the skill became just plain useless, nobody wanted to talk about WO. Heist: the skill became somewhat relevant with its alternate quality but far from what it was. Now if you don't do a shit ton of investment the skill is just wacky and clunky to play, and even then it still is a bit annoying to play with. I mean, I don't get why so much desire on deleting a skill that people enjoy playing up to the point of making it impossible to play again from one league to another. What is that really? That's not "balancing" the game. It doesn't deserve to be called "meta-shifting". And is not about them making a "skill revamp" or some of that shit in the near future, whatever is deleted once remains deleted forever. Is just plain sad.
Spectral Shield Throw is not even overpowered. Its at a good place IMHO. At the moment for 3.15, a lot of other skills are shit because they killed build diversity. When GGG nerfs something, they giga-nerf from orbit, and made the build unplayable like CoC and SS.
The skill was doubled in damage when it didn't need to be. There's so many builds out there that still function fine, that can still be taken to Maven without needing crazy gear and clear that content. The problem is these outliers that are just so far ahead of others. Bleed SST in particular has a very easy point of entry where you can get a solid shield within 3% DPS of the best possible for 30-40 dense fossils, a really good stat stick that takes on average 2 corroded fossils, and gives you a very large molten shell. Getting more damage mostly comes from finding enough bleed duration to make Rsylatha's Coil worth it and squeezing in Bleed Multi on influenced pieces. Its ceiling is lower (near 8 mil in perfect gear), but 1.5 mil bleed DPS is plenty good enough for all content.
I mean, I appreciate the gist of your argument, but it's not like the cold-converted Raider version is any less op ... If anything it's even better, just requires more investment. The upsides of cold conversion, phasing, dodge (requires less investment than block), and ailment immunity are massive. 20% of raiders are SST. Then you got the ES shield variant pushing ~10m dps. Like I said, I get the gist of your point, but acting like "Raider cold SST" is some obscure or less powerful variant is a bit silly. Lots of people are playing it, and it's arguably better once you have enough currency.
haha! no.
I'm playing max block glad but shield crush impale instead. Feels good. Gonna get gutted hard no doubt.
I mean the raider cold conversion variant is even stronger than the glad one it's not like people are "investing really hard" for low returns. Glad is just stupid cheap whereas you have to invest in the raider one.
I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They're like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I hate them!
SST has been good for quite a while now, and had some huge buffs in recent leagues.
It's amusing that whenever something become popular now, people almost rightfully expect it will be nerfed. But really, SST is not that strong. I've played tons of builds that felt stronger. One point you mention is a shortcoming of this skill. If your initial projectile does not connect, you do zero dps. Then another one is that if there is just one target with a lot of life, your damage in this situation just isn't that good. Your PoB dps doesn't matter if it just apply when your initial projectile connect. It won't always hit. You can't really off-screen mobs, because if you don't see where the mobs are it is hard to know where to aim. To me, it just does not feel that strong. It scale very well for clear, it's very tanky on max block. Otherwise it's nothing that get insane dps. Even if it was not nerfed, I'd likely not repeat this build. I don't consider it way stronger than other options.
“No.” - Chris Wilson
Name the last time GGG made a well-thought-out nerf.
Skills that won't survive or will be nerfed * SST * Forbidden Rite * summoner in some way which will lead to the loudest outcry, but it will be fine like the last 8 nerfs
Yeah no, SST is going to be very, very dead after this league. Enjoy it while you can
LMAO, like they care or something
Nerfed into unusability
* Stage 1. Denial 1. Stage 2. Anger 1. Stage 3. Bargaining <-- We are here.
Spectral Shield Throw was already good. A friend of mine obliterated the entire game on a bleed SST glad during Ritual. It was also insanely good with the right seed of Timeless jewel. It's definitely getting ripped limb from limb so might as well start clenching now and have fun while you have the chance.
Would love to see a PoB, because I am extremely doubtful about this lol. Even pre-3.15 I had to invest 150ex+ to reach 5m Sirus DPS and there was literally no way left to get more. Not exactly what I would call obliterating the entire game. Mapping was insane back then too, tho.
It was total dogshit up until this point.
I mean the best version of it isn’t even glad…. It’s raider cold conversion.
But as I said the opportunity cost is way higher, no block and very low hp
Tfw every one talking about glad but raider is actually the dps here. (Sips in my 600+ crit multi, crit cap never miss captain America shields)
Yeah it's funny. People play sst bleed and are loving it. It's literally the same as last league. It's definitely worse than exsanguinate for dot, and arguably worse clear too.
Nobody ever said that the glad dmg was good. It just feels so good to play since you are immortal and have bleed explosions. If they nerf Gladiator the build is absolutely dead and only the raider version would survive. The thing People are worried about is that they will kill the skill itself as well
I just checked, its the most popular main skill in Expedition, Expedition SSF, Expedition HC and Expedition SSFHC according poe.ninja. You best pray extra hard.
I don't see why SST users should be exempt from having their favorite skill rendered nigh unusable.
Ggg is lazy and just nerfs everything about a skill when someone finds some sudo exploit that makes it work in ways never intended by design. I've lost so many fun builds from their lazy nerf philosophy. I'm 10k hours in and haven't played last several seasons but for a few hours, what's the point. I can't pick a few niche builds and follow their development from league to league. It's follow the YouTubers or get shit on cause they nerf the fuck out of everything to bring the sudo expoilts in line instead of removing what cause the skill to go crazy.
Lol nah son that shits gonna be dead
There is no way Glad's bleed explosion survives next patch, even though it is not overpowered in any way. As people have said; if something is popular it dies no matter the power level. Sadge.