3.25 retaliation skill is probably... bad

Before everyone get super excited about the damage and new play style all I can say is "conditional" attacks or spells are bait-ish.

I played flame wood chieftain at necropolis league. So I think it is fairly similar. (totem get hit (condition), then cast(result))

Flame wood (retaliation skills are super strong) but there are things that just can not be done with it.

Simply put, monsters that does not attack you and running away from you will crush its play style.

I will list a few situation that made me absolutely furious about the play style.

1. frog (frog does not attack and they generally just jump away. well they are not going to happened a lot in the future leagues, but in the necropolis it is just sad)

2. ultimatum (there is a type of monster that just teleport around and never hit you and kept on running away, so you will not able to run ultimatum.

3. legion. (all monsters are frozen... they won't be released.)

4. certain boss, such as elder last phase. (yes it does attack/cast at the very last phase, but it is unbelievable slow. it took me 4 min to the final stage and 25 min standing there to just wait for it to attack/cast.)

So unless there are something I missed I think retaliation skills are probably going to be bait-ish...

ps. I even got myself a vaal breach gem in necropolis, but it is still impossible to do those things.

To be honest, if the condition is to store let's say 30 attacks/casts each time it blocks up to 100, then it might be more useable.

You can always have a damage link..

Except for the fact that speccing into Gladiator gives you chance to continue to use retaliation skills once you've used them and another chance for other retaliation skills to become active on use.

In addition to this the new amulet from King of the Mists in 3.25 gives you access to a Penance Mark which spawn negligible ads that can hit you and activate you retaliation for you.

Slapping on penance mark (Pretty sure that's the name, skill that spawns ghosts that attack you) should take care of the slow attack speed of some bosses.

Vaal Breach also exists too aside from Penance Mark

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TheMoistLad wrote:

Except for the fact that speccing into Gladiator gives you chance to continue to use retaliation skills once you've used them and another chance for other retaliation skills to become active on use.

OK so I might be wrong, but here's how I interpret the wording on that new glad node "Measured Retaliation".

1. "Retaliation Skills become Usable for an additional 2 seconds", just increases the size of window you have to hit the skill. It doesn't mean you can hit it more than once in that window. So even if you invest heavily into CDR, you can't spam skills during this window, since the window will just close after you push the retaliation skill (until you block again).

2. "50% chance for used Retaliation Skills to remain Usable and not consume a Cooldown Use" is the only way you would get to use a retaliation skill more than once per block. So 50% chance or wait for another block.

Maybe I'm misreading the "Usable" keyword here and you can scale CDR and increase usable window so that you only need to block every few seconds and then spam the skill, but I don't think so.

If my take on this wording is right, then this is basically gonna suck on bosses. It'll feel like cast on stun in a wave 30 simulacrum where all the mobs are dead but Kosis is channeling his ES beam for 5 seconds while you do jackall. Basically making it a secondary skill. If that's the case, then it makes no sense to have a 100% conversion on Glacial Shield Swipe since no other shield skill has full conversion (requiring tree / watchers eye / gear investment).

I mean it's playable, but definitely not something I'm interested in playing. If I'm right, it's gonna be janky af.

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TheMoistLad wrote:

In addition to this the new amulet from King of the Mists in 3.25 gives you access to a Penance Mark which spawn negligible ads that can hit you and activate you retaliation for you.

How do you know about the amulet? i cant find anything about this. Can someone give me a link?