Cull the Weak is a catch 22 skill.

If what they said that Cull the Weak is the same as killing palm, but for spears, then it is a catch 22 kinda thing.

Killing palm works by bringing the mob to a certain low hp threshold so you can cull then. Sounds good.

But how are you going to bring mobs to a low hp threshold if your dmg is still horrible and locked behind parry mechs, so you can get frenzy, in the early game?

Instead of a new skill, the charges should be given by the act of parry itself, instead of parrying + weird to hit skill.

It would lower the amount of input you need to do okish dmg and speed up the gameplay.

Also, by doing that, you open more builds later on that dont rely on glacial spear to get frenzy charges with combat frenzy. Incentivizing or at least making somewhat viable a more melee focused or even hybrid build

It will help against mobs either for those who don't like using parry or when there are groups that don't do any moves you can parry. You only need to get 1 enemy to culling point then you're good.

I'm more concerned about bosses / boss stages where there are no good parry opportunities and also no mobs.

The issue, when compared to e.g. Warrior Power charges, is that it's entirely dependent on the enemy's moveset. Warrior can get charges from any enemy by breaking armour, which can happen multiple times against bosses. It might not be amazing but combined with Perfect Strike for example it's fun and effective.

For parry, the enemy has to do certain things. It has to do certain attacks or spawn minions.

I'm enjoying it so far don't get me wrong, it's good to see they are trying to address it. I'm just concerned how this is going to work well going into endgame.

People who don't want to use a buckler want other options for frenzy generation. Your suggestion is not an alternative to using a buckler.

In boss fights where parrying/culling is limited then you will still struggle, but spear has enough options that you needn't pigeon hole yourself into JUST frenzy charge usage. Some fights will be slower as a result, but that's a fair trade off for the versatility of hybrid melee ranged.

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The_Sane#6573 wrote:

People who don't want to use a buckler want other options for frenzy generation. Your suggestion is not an alternative to using a buckler.

You are correct, I had meant to point this out but forgot.

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In boss fights where parrying/culling is limited then you will still struggle, but spear has enough options that you needn't pigeon hole yourself into JUST frenzy charge usage. Some fights will be slower as a result, but that's a fair trade off for the versatility of hybrid melee ranged.

Also agreed - once I figured out it wasn't worth trying to parry Doggy Geonor and stuck with avoiding mechanics while using un-boosted skills I got it done. So yes the versatility is there to deal with the no-frenzy situation.

But these limitations do seem to heavily discourage heavy investment into Frenzy Engines. I supposed once Combat Frenzy becomes available that will help a lot.

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People who don't want to use a buckler want other options for frenzy generation. Your suggestion is not an alternative to using a buckler.

True, but i wonder how many does not want to use a buckler is because it sucks or because it's just a playstyle choice. The parry mechanic is nice actually, but it's the gate keeper to most of the huntress dmg, which sucks. Yeah, you can (and probably have to) use unempowered attacks to get things done. But it takes a bunch of the flavor out, not only because of the animation/effects you aint having, but also, at least for me, knowing there is a more powerful version of the skill that is just too much of a hassle to execute it.

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In boss fights where parrying/culling is limited then you will still struggle, but spear has enough options that you needn't pigeon hole yourself into JUST frenzy charge usage. Some fights will be slower as a result, but that's a fair trade off for the versatility of hybrid melee ranged.

That only works in early game, when gets to mapping, it sincerely becomes an horrible slog if you are not using any kinda of charge.

While, later in the game, you have the combat frenzy (which sucks right now with the 5s nerf) and sniper mark, it takes away a lot of what would have made spear unique/buckle unique and makes it into a bow with extra steps.

The current builds that i'm seeing working, are the twister and glacial spear ones, both which are range, mostly because the passive tree seems to favor a lot more range nodes than melee, so you ain't getting a fair trade out of slower fights for the melee/range versatility. You are just getting slower fights because the melee part is handicapped against the range one.

At the end, Cull the Weak is not a real good fix to the problem, the problem that parry is not bad, but the payout for parrying isn't worth it, with the big setup, slower clearing, limited vs bosses and ok dmg at most. Things that having Cull the Weak doesn't really solve much, even in the early game.

I had a monk at the last league, it was horrible early game and i used killing palm more out of necessity than to accumulate charges, because it sucked using it for charges almost as bad as parry does.

Then again, those are my opinions with my experience in the game. The fact that my huntress game just started feeling decent after i got rid of the buckler for the one handed attack speed node is actually sad.

Also, all of spear animations takes way too long to execute, which makes generating charges even worst.

I sincerely believe that, if those things are addressed, many complains against the huntress/spear/parry will go away.