Reave

I'm pretty sure (hope) Reave will get buffed soon. Like Multistrike, you release it, see how it's used, hear feedback, and then buff it up. It's easier to buff it up than tear it down, later.

It's not a bad skill at all, btw. AoE is a bit small at base (it can't even hit 2 enemies without stacks), the Q should be Increased AoE (20 = 20%) instead of Attack Speed, and it would be much more useful if you kept the stacks if you use a Curse / Spell.

Another option, is have it increase by 40% per stack, and limit it to 4 Stacks. That would make it useful to people who don't run Multistrike.

And it would make a ton of sense if it got either Increased AoE or Attack Speed (faster Stacks...) with levels, like Cyclone. I'd vote for more AoE, so it's not a different form of Cyclone :)

I use Reave with my shadow CI + claw +shield and it made my play faster. I got good life leach and can deal with nice packs of mobs quite fast. Only charges go down too quick. I use flicker or whirling bladesto go from one pack to another and if charges won't drop during it I would be very happy. Comparing dual/double strike with melle splash and reave it's also not good. What gives quality to reave?

skill is ok in a desync-free environment

without fixing desync no skill that has effectiveness based on manual-aiming at several enemies will work as well as skills that auto-aim (like melee splash does) for you. because they aim on the server side, not the client side.

probably ggg tested it on some local servers where desync is not a factor and decided - ok, it works (or havent tested it really that much at all - seeing their general attitude for melee builds..)

with desync as a factor area spells, totems (they aim server side) or skills not requiring any precise aiming (like sweep, cyclone, infernal blow, flickerstrike (to a point)) will always be better than Reave - no matter how absurd paper dps would be

play with it some and do /oos repeatedly to see how monsters dance around your screen. and you want to exploit the AOE by aiming at cluster of mobs? in most cases these are nowhere near you see them on the screen..

You know, I originally was willing to let this go, but after thinking about it further this is really messed up. You guys REALLY screwed up with reave. It doesn't only suck, it has VERY MAJOR DESIGN PROBLEMS.

So what are these design problems? You gave the dex/int melee aoe ability, really the ONLY melee dex aoe ability in the game (whirling blades is a moveskill, not a damage aoe and cyclone is a generalist skill, requiring all 3 stats), essentially a shield requirement. What in the burning hells could possibly possess anyone to do something that blatantly retarded? Did you put a big ES bonus on two handed mauls? Did you put a big melee damage bonus on quivers? Did you put a big evasion bonus on wands? I mean honestly that shit doesn't even make fucking sense.

Let's think about that for a second, and even look at it from your game's own perspective - a dex/int melee skill. What are the dex/int melee weapons? Claws and daggers. What is the dex/int class? Shadow. What is in the shadow tree? Dual wield bonuses. DUAL WIELD. How many shield bonuses are in the shadow tree? ZERO. How many dual wield bonuses in are the tree? FIVE.
I mean it doesn't even make sense from a common sense perspective. When is the last time you heard of anyone, ever in the history of the world... USE A DAGGER WITH A SHIELD? Or use A CLAW WITH A SHIELD?
Let's even look at the swords... there's the strength swords and the dex swords. What is the dex sword? A rapier (thrusting/fencing sword). When's the last time you saw someone use A RAPIER WITH A SHIELD? YO BRAH LET'S LETS GO FENCING... WITH OUR SHIELDS. Wait what?????

It doesn't stop there. You got your duelist tree, 3 nodes in you've got guess what... DUAL WIELD BONUSES. Ok you're in the ranger tree... right at level 7, you've got guess what... DUAL WIELD BONUSES!

So um, yeah. How about we not penalize our duel wield classes for dual wielding? How about we not make a shadow/assassin use a freaking shield. Cuz yo man, when Ezio is running around on those rooftops with his daggers and knives and shit... he didn't carry around a big fucking shield.

And then there's the other MAJOR DESIGN ISSUE. In a game where you pride yourselves on flexibility on what you can do with your character, you created an ability that was INTENTIONALLY DESIGNED to be used ONLY BY ITSELF. No curses, no endurance charges, no frenzy charges, no power charges, no traps in between, no movement skills... because you want reave to only be effective when you are standing there holding shift and reave. Why are you penalizing people for using more than 1 skill?

I was really looking forward to this ability so that claws and daggers users could finally have an aoe that doesn't suck, and you completely screwed it up. And I don't feel there was any justification for making this ability the way it is.

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If the cone was replaced with a 180 degree wave effect that ends with a dome, I would probably be satisfied with the skill. I am not asking for the reave AOE to be extended, just widened.

As I noticed, the cone is already very wide, hard to say for certain with all the desync but certainly more then 120°, probably the same as cleave which has quite a nice, wide cone.
EDIT: Just remembered Cleave actually has 180° cone, as confirmed by Mark, Reave probably has the same or sligtly less.

About radius, (or maybe it's better to talk about rough area diameter as this is cone versus circle), on vanilla it has quite a bit more then splash. I took a couple dozens of pictures with vanilla AoE on both skills. As we all know, melee splash has a radius of 14 which amounts to a diameter of 28. From looking at those pictures you can estimate the splash radius relative to enemy health bar centers (which should accurately show position) to be about as big as on the upper pic. Now, calibrating the width of that ellipse (ellipse because of view angle) to be 28 units wide we come to a number of about 35 for 8-stage Reave.

It should be noticed those who complain about the damage didn't use conc effect which reduces the area to a little less than splash but actually does MORE 'area' damage than Dual Strike splash, as my calculations couple of pages back show. And that's two gems vs two, as it shuld be, the rest of supports are up to you.
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/504537/page/15#p4492020

Here are the most representative of both pic groups, others show similar coverage.

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raics wrote:

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If the cone was replaced with a 180 degree wave effect that ends with a dome, I would probably be satisfied with the skill. I am not asking for the reave AOE to be extended, just widened.

As I noticed, the cone is already very wide, hard to say for certain with all the desync but certainly more then 120°, probably the same as cleave which has quite a nice, wide cone.

About radius, (or maybe it's better to talk about rough area diameter as this is cone versus circle), on vanilla it has quite a bit more then splash. I took a couple dozens of pictures with vanilla AoE on both skills. As we all know, melee splash has a radius of 14 which amounts to a diameter of 28. From looking at those pictures you can estimate the splash radius relative to enemy health bar centers (which should accurately show position) to be about as big as on the upper pic. Now, calibrating the width of that ellipse (ellipse because of view angle) to be 28 units wide we come to a number of about 35 for 8-stage Reave.

It should be noticed those who complain about the damage didn't use conc effect which reduces the area to a little less than splash but actually does MORE 'area' damage than Dual Strike splash, as my calculations couple of pages back show. And that's two gems vs two, as it shuld be, the rest of supports are up to you.
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/504537/page/15#p4492020

Here are the most representative of both pic groups.

Spoiler

Not at all the point. You're comparing a single target skill to an aoe skill. This just goes to show how bullshit this skill's design is. With cleave, sweep, freezing pulse, fire trap, whatever the aoe you choose to go with is... it doesn't require two gems to do so. You're comparing a SINGLE TARGET ABILITY with an AOE ability, in dps for AOE with the same number of gems. You're also forgetting that dual strike doesn't require EIGHT HITS to reach that level of aoe.

The only thing I agree with here is that the actual area of the ability and it's scaling area is fine. It needs to work with dual wielding and it needs to work with other abilities in between.

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Legatus1982 wrote:

Not at all the point. You're comparing a single target skill to an aoe skill. This just goes to show how bullshit this skill's design is. With cleave, sweep, freezing pulse, fire trap, whatever the aoe you choose to go with is... it doesn't require two gems to do so. You're comparing a SINGLE TARGET ABILITY with an AOE ability, in dps for AOE with the same number of gems.
The only thing I agree with here is that the actual area of the ability is fine.

A very good observation, I'm not comparing skills, I'm comparing skill setups and for a reason. You can't really use conc effect with splash as the area will get too gimped while anyone can put it on reave without losing much. So it's two commonly used gems vs two commonly used gems for area asskicking, fair and square.

Now, if we took some AoE nodes, that would enable us to put conc on splash but at the same it would make Reave trump it heavily area-wise even if it heavily loses in damage. Unfortunately, AoE nodes are pretty far away from dex part of the tree (master of arena presumably doesn't work with reave as the skill has its own base area radius).

The thing that kills the skill right now is desync, not bad design. Funny, it's exactly the same kind of bug/desync I noticed on playing Puncture-Splash, you get a muffled hit sound. like a thud and nothing happens. On Reave it's not such a big issue but on puncturer which hits slow and moves a lot you're already at other enemy cluster when you notice the first one isn't hit at all, hence not bleeding as much as a finger cut.

Can I get some clarification from GGG?

Does Reave use your normal attack range like Cyclone or does it has it's own radius and scales from there? I plan on rolling a Reave Duelist with Master of the Arena and Daresso's Salute so I would like to know before I ended up wasting effort. :x

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Obscurin wrote:

Can I get some clarification from GGG?

Does Reave use your normal attack range like Cyclone or does it has it's own radius and scales from there? I plan on rolling a Reave Duelist with Master of the Arena and Daresso's Salute so I would like to know before I ended up wasting effort. :x

It's not hard to test it yourself, One-handed weapons have a base range of 4. Daresso or arena would increase the base to 6 making the resulting area 50% larger, it would be fairly easy to tell so big of an increase.

Which is why I don't think it uses weapon range, it would be too easy to effectively double or even triple and quadruple (with AoE passives) an already fairly large radius. You would probably be able to hit offscreen that way. Just to mention there's no such danger on cyclone, by using a 2h weapon, stacking all area nodes, quality gems and gear at the expense of other stats, it can get around 22 units radius, which is probably a bit larger then ice nova.

I tried it on my Cleave Duelist just now. Looks like it does nothing for Reave, neither the Amulet, not the Master of the Arena node. That's not very fair, imo, but that's the way it is right now. Increased AoE from Nodes / Gems / Items works just fine, though.

At least I know now, before I get my Shadow all the way there...

So, what do you think is the best set-up for a Reave Dagger Shadow?
I was thinking using Bringer of Rain with Reave-Multistrike-Increased AoE-Concentrated AoE-Faster Attacks-Melee Physical. Or just use Increased AoE with IIQ gem?

Single target / Rare farming would be Double Strike/Crit Damage/IIQ/IIR on a 4L.