Melee AoE, new mechanic: Overkilling

Cleave, Ground Slam, Leap Slam, and Sweep are standard area of effect -- some well defined radial shape (cone, cone, movement+circle, circle). Lightning Strike is the 'other' melee aoe using projectiles that grow off melee damage, and works fairly well. Infernal Blow is the 'other other' melee aoe that no one seems to talk about or use at high levels, and it's the focus of this idea.

Every melee character worth his salt needs to incorporate some kind of aoe. Even at 4aps and one hit killing anything you touch, large mobs are a huge hassle. Infernal Blow has the right idea: a single target attack that 'splashes' damage to nearby mobs. Sadly, this damage doesn't scale very well (fire/elemental (non WED) damage increases only, and based on enemy life).

The idea I'm suggesting is that (as a new support most likely, maybe a keystone or unique item effect) when you overkill a mob with a single target attack, you splash damage based on some fraction of your skill damage or possibly the excess damage of the mob that died. This allows for people to honestly run Heavy Strike, Dominating Blow, Glacial Hammer, Puncture, Shield Charge, Frenzy, Double Strike, Dual Strike, Elemental Hit, Flicker Strike, and Viper Strike as a 'main' skill instead of "that skill I use to kill bosses oh and it has increased rarity/quantity on it as supports of course".

Splashing overkill damage captures the lost damage for single targets and enhances it when there are more mobs around without making it do sky-high single target damage. The support slot that it takes up means you trade aoe for raw damage, which is the same tradeoff on LMP/GMP attacks which already exist.

+1

nice idea +1

+1

Also, I'd like to see explosions like the one from infernal blow dealing both, physical and fire damage. :)

Clever!

Great idea. I think the fraction of overkill damage is a better implementation than using a fraction of skill damage. That way it's a more effective aoe vs groups of squishies and less effective vs groups of stronger enemies.

Expanding on this you could do two mods:

Overkill Splash
A fraction of overkill damage is applied to all enemies within an area of effect.

Overkill Chain
100% of overkill damage is applied to a nearby enemy. If that enemy is overkilled the overkill damage continues to chain, diminishing with each jump.

For example:
5 enemies with 100 life each. Enemy 1 hit for 250 damage and overkilled. 150 damage chains to enemy 2 killing it also. 50 damage chains to enemy 3 which is left with 50 life. The chain stops.

It is a good idea. That being said, there are still many problems left:
- You "replace" Infernal Blow which becomes even more useless.
- The overall damage of an AoE is way higher than that of a single-target attack (because single-target attacks deal only ca. 2x the damage of AoE skills - but to single targets, not an area). Add to that the "great" hit-boxes and you'll see that they are still very weak.
- There isn't even a point to mix up single-target attacks and AoE attacks. They are different for the sake of being used on different occasions.

Sorry for the rant, now to the point: There need to be more strong monsters as opposed to crazy numbers of weak trash. Your idea is very good for increasing build diversity but it won't fully solve the problems. It's still an amazing idea that should be implemented (and Infernal Blow should be temporarily axed until it's redone) because it adds another utility bonus to otherwise rarely usable skills.

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LivingHell452 wrote:

- You "replace" Infernal Blow which becomes even more useless.

Infernal Blow still scales off enemy hp (and is innately very strong due to high damage effectiveness), which can be useful, and it also destroys the corpse so it can't be raised. It also is the only melee with fire conversion. It's different, not replaced.

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pneuma wrote:

"

LivingHell452 wrote:

- You "replace" Infernal Blow which becomes even more useless.

Infernal Blow still scales off enemy hp (and is innately very strong due to high damage effectiveness), which can be useful, and it also destroys the corpse so it can't be raised. It also is the only melee with fire conversion. It's different, not replaced.

For me, the 20% explosion didn't help with anything. Also the damage effectiveness (at least when I last played that stuff) was/is 112%; that was/is weak compared to Heavy Strike's 150%. Maybe I'm just a retarded newb and can't use that skill properly.

I still think that it's too weak, but I'm not going to fight for this opinion. So you just killed problem #1; 2 remaining.
If your idea is executed well (which I expect from GGG - they are the best out there), it won't cause any problems, but even then there is still work to be done in terms of single-target/aoe balance. I got the presumably mistaken impression that you wanted to address skill balance.

Infernal blow would still be very effective if used on strong enemies within groups of smaller ones, but as melee I inevitably kill all the smaller ones long before the big ones go down, so for me the skill has always felt useless but good for a laugh.

I would like to see infernal blow enabled for ranged attacks to make it more useful, significant and interesting. At least then you could kite while targeting the champs and be rewarded with a destructive and messy display for taking this riskier approach.

If this were done, interesting modifier supports like splashing or chaining overkill damage would not displace infernal blow, but would really open up fun possibilities for melee.