Mercenary Witch Hunter problem

Im perfectly fine with witchbane and no mercy ascendancies because we dont really know how they work but im worried about culling strike and decimating strike. Culling strike with the buff gives rougly 7~cull on bosses which in practice does not really give you 7% cull because your hits will most likely go below that to lets say 4% and then you have to hit the boss again to actually cull it. The problem with decimating strike is that most bosses i dont know about poe 2 but in poe 1 they do literally nothing other than auto attacks and spells from time to time in the first 30%. I feel like both of them are kind of a dead nodes and i think the best way to fix it is to buff cull and completely remake decimating strike. I thought about base cull on bosses to be at least 10% for it to even be considered reasonable ascendancy point when decimating strike should be completely remade. I was thinking about "you have 5/10% chance to deal double damage" instead. So far i really want to play mercenary but 2 nodes being literally dead, 2 nodes that we dont really know if they are gonna be good or not and sorcery ward that gives you defense against elemental damage while cutting your other defenses in half. The only node i find "okay" atm with that ascendancy in 10% explosion. What do you guys think?

I don't really agree with the sentiment that '2 nodes are literally dead'. Those are pretty powerful nodes, with cull threshold being 30% on normal mobs and reverse cull being up to 30% on any mob, that's 60% of monster life effectively removed, and is quite a substantial clear speed increase.

In terms of bosses, 5% is completely fine for a regular cull, as raising the threshold any higher would prevent them from being able to design around boss enrage mechanics. We'll just have to see the actual numbers and interactions, but up to 30% reverse cull and 5% boss cull is still very good in terms of increasing raw clear speed.

Do remember that PoE2 is shaping up to ditch the zoomer meta of PoE1.

"

Hordecore#2855 wrote:

I don't really agree with the sentiment that '2 nodes are literally dead'. Those are pretty powerful nodes, with cull threshold being 30% on normal mobs and reverse cull being up to 30% on any mob, that's 60% of monster life effectively removed, and is quite a substantial clear speed increase.

In terms of bosses, 5% is completely fine for a regular cull, as raising the threshold any higher would prevent them from being able to design around boss enrage mechanics. We'll just have to see the actual numbers and interactions, but up to 30% reverse cull and 5% boss cull is still very good in terms of increasing raw clear speed.

Do remember that PoE2 is shaping up to ditch the zoomer meta of PoE1.

You are right that reverse 30% cull will be good at clearing mobs on maps but i find it quite bad on bosses because if you cant deal 30% of the boss first hp when at least in poe 1 they are doing nothing except auto attacks than the build wont survive the remaining 70%

with cull 5-6% is fine but you have to keep in mind you need to hit enemy below that % for it to proc and most of the time you will cull enemy when they have 2-3% hp left because you will deal lets say 4% hp per attack and you will hit them at 7% hp left (thats just random numbers for the point)

if i understand correctly they wanted to make a boss killer ascendancy when in reality it looks more like a map runner instead

"

if i understand correctly they wanted to make a boss killer ascendancy when in reality it looks more like a map runner instead

There's a lot we don't know about breaking concentration yet, which seems to be a big part of the Witch Hunter's identity. If it really does work in the sense that you can essentially avoid having to deal with some mechanics/casts altogether, then it would be far more powerful than the cull nodes we're discussing.

There also seems to be an RNG component to the reverse cull. In short, we'll have to do some field testing and see. Witch Hunter as a whole seems rather polarizing to me - it's either going to be extremely good or pretty mid. Either way, I'm sure they'll do very frequent balancing patches after the EA rolls out so most of it may be subject to change.