Assassin Skills Discussion

[Crystalion]

For the HC Trapper, Blade Sentinal is being treated as "a pre req, fun to mess with in Normal if you have some elemental/poison damage, but overcome immediately by Blade Fury."  Its technical shortcomings are part of the reason it is poo poohed in the Guide, though I have had a lot of fun with it in Nutty Variant Games.  :lol:

Blade Sentinel really is an uber-skill from a twink perspective. Because NextDelay doesn't have any effect until it successfully hits something it appears to be trying to hit repeatedly (no LastCollide set on this missile)--in other words it seems to have a really good chance to hit and it will hit whole bunches of things, potentially in a short period of time.

As such it is really good vs. massed concentrations of monsters (and I've always liked throwing them through doorways blocked by monster packs).

If emeralds (in weapon) or Envy Jewels have granted your lowbie a lot of poison (or if you've been enchanted) then BS is a great way for a single skill point and no mana to speak of to own the early game. A one second NextDelay or the slow hitting cycle of BS moving around is really of no concern when applying 2+ seconds of poison. At low clvls the amount of damage available by poison is very good relative to monster HPs (and often better than you can easily do with physical or other elements).

The icing on the cake, of course, is that Blade Fury is a one point wonder, even in the endgame, and Blade Sentinel is a prereq. Therefore all this early char level "goodness" I'm talking about is, in some real sense, "free".

As far as endgame use... if you're not a Venom user then it is worth a huge amount of damage vs. hell regen, esp. in high player count games, to have something out there doing PMH on packs of monsters without requiring much effort on your part.

As a trapper you're putting out damage (over quite some time per monster) that does not PMH and you are probably way too busy to try to touch very many things with PMH via Blade Fury. A BS is probably going to last ~6 seconds (as a trapper I assume you have at least +5 trap skills) and with 5 second duration poison charms you might expect to get up to 10 seconds worth of PMH on a pack with just one BS cast. That is a huge amount of "damage" (aka stopped regen).

So I think "fun to mess with" doesn't quite do it justice, eh?

OTOH, the other NextDelay tainted trapper skill, Shockweb, I feel is totally hopeless and pathetic. I think a good start for a modder would be to drop its NextDelay down to 5 (or up its damage five fold).