Where are the Axe skills?

This idea is based on the idea that skills drop as cool items. Unlike Diablo 2 your not setting a point either in a skill you already have OR getting a new skill every level. Instead your waiting to inspect that next skill drop, and unfortunately there just aren't that many DIFFERENT drops.

I get tons of common skills that I simply don't need, but I've never got certain skills that it would be fun to play with, and there is no way to exchange excess skills for even the chance of a good one.

So what replaces planning for certain skills, is looking for that one good drop that will totally change your standard character into something awesome.

So players are expecting more skills. The developers should understand this. Another game could get away with a lot less skills, but an axe wielder, or a dagger guy, or someone looking to use wands . . .

What that guy is looking for as a DROP is the next axe/dagger/wand skill he gets to inspect. It may not drop, but if it exists his eyes are open looking for it. If it doesn't exist that is a problem.

So which weapon needs skill buffs? ALL OF THEM. Starting with those with the least skills; wands, daggers, claws, axes in that order. Then going on to ones who share skills with another weapon type, staves, maces, and swords.

A skill that is specially designed for a given weapon gives you a reason to go for that weapon in the passives tree and lock yourself into using it. You can't use "Dagger delight" but your going to have tons of fun with "Staves of Doom" once it drops.

Now given that increasing the number of skills that can drop DECREASES the chance that I'm going to get a skill I can use we also are eagerly waiting for a couple other changes to make THAT work:

1) Quest skills for a give class need to somehow be special, and they can't be drops or traceable as it's WAY too easy to just start new characters, delete them, and fill your stash up. It's not fun to find yet ANOTHER dual strike or cleave. There also should be more such skills so I really feel I'm making a distinct choice when I choose one.

2) Regular skills need somewhere we can trade them in. There needs to be some sort of gem vendor who will turn a few duplicate DROP skills into a higher quality version, alter the color of the skill, or trade a few of them for another single random drop.

Who cares about all these silly sword users, become a Crazy Axe Beserker, my idea for an axe user gets some of that dual wield block (goes to 53% using passives), movespeed & lightning strike supported with faster attacks, mana leech & melee physical damage. Not 100% sure on Point blank skill, but Im assuming all projectiles are ranged so that increases the projectile damage from lightning strike. You are close enough to go for frenzy orbs build as well if you dont have enough attack speed & people arent calling you 'the berserker'. Now get out there and start smacking those mobs in the face with your axes!

NB. You can either use wrath & clarity or hatred & clarity depending on how much mana usage you have. Clarity isnt necessary if you can get yourself some mana leech mods or a quality mana leech gem. OH, and kill Oak every time, dont let that stupid non-axe user live any longer!

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Metronomy wrote:

Who cares about all these silly sword users, become a Crazy Axe Beserker, my idea for an axe user gets some of that dual wield block (goes to 53% using passives), movespeed & lightning strike supported with faster attacks, mana leech & melee physical damage. Not 100% sure on Point blank skill, but Im assuming all projectiles are ranged so that increases the projectile damage from lightning strike. You are close enough to go for frenzy orbs build as well if you dont have enough attack speed & people arent calling you 'the berserker'. Now get out there and start smacking those mobs in the face with your axes!

NB. You can either use wrath & clarity or hatred & clarity depending on how much mana usage you have. Clarity isnt necessary if you can get yourself some mana leech mods or a quality mana leech gem. OH, and kill Oak every time, dont let that stupid non-axe user live any longer!

Thanks, I was aiming for something very similar with dual wield blocking. Unfortunately dual wielding axes leaves you cold with just Flicker Strike for quick escape, unless I missed something.

No, point blank does not work with Lightning Strike, it was confirmed in the skills forum.

Otherwise, meh. I don't want to spam Dual Strike till level 80. I think Heavy Strike would alternate between each hand, with lots of attack speed that might look kinda cool.

But there's my issue, there is barely anything to make an exciting axe "berserker" (dual wield). And an axe + shield character is going to be just a sword and shield, with Shield Charge for survival, but forced to swap weapons to apply Viper Strike.

So for others it might be interesting enough using Cleave and Heavy Strike with IAS, for me having played a 1H + Shield on two Rangers already with those skills, plus Viper Strike, there is nothing that would make my "axe berseker" any different, and in fact it would feel gimped compared to my "sword 'n board" characters.

So yeah, we'll just have to wait for more skills I guess.

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DeF46 wrote:

Thanks, I was aiming for something very similar with dual wield blocking. Unfortunately dual wielding axes leaves you cold with just Flicker Strike for quick escape, unless I missed something.

You are right in thinking leap slam is difficult to use as an escape, but you can actually improve it pretty significantly from how it feels early in the game (which is probably how you first tried it).

So first, leap slam uses its own cast duration, similar to how a spell works. But that duration gets ratioed against your attack speed, so if you boost your APS really insanely high through some combo of modifiers your leapslam can actually also be lightning fast.

With my dual axe duelist I kept leapslam+phaserun for mobility, as these are more fitting for an axe duelist and I'm a bit sentimental like that. I want my characters to make sense. I typically use leap slam to close on archers, and phaserun for everything else. Anyway, when I *do* get surrounded and have to leap out, the leap is actually impressively quick since my APS was around 3.

By the way, dual strike is definitely stylistically fitting for axes. And it does some very cool things in a miniboss/boss setting that other skills do not. Most notably, with quality (+crit), high attack speed, reasonable crit rate, ice bite, added ice on a +ice weapon, you'll get frozen status effects constantly. Makes up for the loss of defensive utility for going with a pure-DPS weapon.

I know what you're saying though, to me it feels as if cleave+DS, leapslam for closing, is about the only "fitting" combo of attack skills for an axe character.

I hinted it before, the axes are kind of redundant in the spectrum of skills and stats. I made some quick picture about it, it just shows where do weapons belong in relation to their stat requirements. Axes are special.

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wiggin wrote:

I hinted it before, the axes are kind of redundant in the spectrum of skills and stats. I made some quick picture about it, it just shows where do weapons belong in relation to their stat requirements. Axes are special.

That's very true.

Screw it, let's stick axes in the middle.

Hack and chop fun for all!

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jvp wrote:

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Charan wrote:

But daggers and claws are well behind *everyone* with only three skills, so which weapon classes should we be buffing again?

Wands.

Although I was talking implicitly about melee weapons...

Your point hit true and is currently sticking out of my back, covered in the pathetic blood of my earlier argument. You win.

I read somewhere that devs are aware of the lack of wand attack skills. I'm not sure where it was and who said it though. Edit: I found it, it was just one Mark's reaction that I remembered.

About axes: it would only make sense if axes could use all skills that maces and swords have in common plus selected skills they don't have in common; some sword skills and some mace skills. At this moment axes don't use some sword skills, which is cool but they should get some mace skills in return. That might restore the balance. God my english sucks so badly I can't even describe it right.
I intentionally didn't mention specific skills because they will probably add some more of them.

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Charan wrote:

Screw it, let's stick axes in the middle.

Hack and chop fun for all!

In the middle of what? Wait, what? I don't get it. Or do I?

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Zakaluka wrote:

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DeF46 wrote:

Thanks, I was aiming for something very similar with dual wield blocking. Unfortunately dual wielding axes leaves you cold with just Flicker Strike for quick escape, unless I missed something.

You are right in thinking leap slam is difficult to use as an escape, but you can actually improve it pretty significantly from how it feels early in the game (which is probably how you first tried it).

So first, leap slam uses its own cast duration, similar to how a spell works. But that duration gets ratioed against your attack speed, so if you boost your APS really insanely high through some combo of modifiers your leapslam can actually also be lightning fast.

With my dual axe duelist I kept leapslam+phaserun for mobility, as these are more fitting for an axe duelist and I'm a bit sentimental like that. I want my characters to make sense. I typically use leap slam to close on archers, and phaserun for everything else. Anyway, when I *do* get surrounded and have to leap out, the leap is actually impressively quick since my APS was around 3.

By the way, dual strike is definitely stylistically fitting for axes. And it does some very cool things in a miniboss/boss setting that other skills do not. Most notably, with quality (+crit), high attack speed, reasonable crit rate, ice bite, added ice on a +ice weapon, you'll get frozen status effects constantly. Makes up for the loss of defensive utility for going with a pure-DPS weapon.

Thanks for an awesome post.

In what way did you mean Dual Strike to be especially helpful? Is that because you are using Cold Damage on both weapons?

Using chill and freeze definitely sounds like a good approach. I was just curious how different that would be from say, stacking IAS, cold damage and crit with Double Strike on my sword and board Ranger?

Have you considered Heavy Strike? I think it has IAS as the GCP bonus.

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Zakaluka wrote:

I know what you're saying though, to me it feels as if cleave+DS, leapslam for closing, is about the only "fitting" combo of attack skills for an axe character.

You nailed it. Guess we'll just have to be patient.

While its true that they have less usable skills, it is just as much about passive placment & the implicit mods of axes as it is about skills.. I admit it would be nice to at least have 1 skill for axes, but it still is a completely different weapon and there is no reason that if you use the passive tree that they cant turn out better than using some swords.

As you collect % increased physical damage/attack speed mods, the implicit mods of an item become more and more important (as someone already suggested). This means you can deal a tonne more damage with an axe than with a sword.

For simplicity's sake, I will ignore attack speed, but the sword was 1.3 and the axe is 1.4 (so the axe is better)

Base stats:
Vaal Blade (Sword lvl 64) 34 to 63 (Avg 48.5)
Vaal Hatchet (Axe lvl 65) 25 to 74 (Avg 49.5)

Now lets say you can get 120% increased physical damage from passives

Increased stats:
Vaal Blade (Sword lvl 64) 74.8 to 138.6 (Avg 106.7)
Vaal Hatchet (Axe lvl 65) 55 to 162.8 (Avg 108.9)

Its fairly easy to see in this situation that 1 extra point of damage increased the difference between the two weapons by 2.2 points of damage (120% from 1), and when you add the effect of the % increased physical damage that people get to affect the base stats of their items the effect only becomes more pronounced.

It seems silly to me that this axe had less minimum damage compared to its sword counterpart, but thats a different argument... Just because the axe has less skills doesnt mean you cant capitalise on its other advantages.