New poster here. I wanted to share something that never quite sat right with me in terms of the Assassin’s Blade Sentinel skill - the reliance on the player’s attack rating. I bring this up now, because Blizzard seems to be heavily invested into expanding on the “fantasy” of the game.
The purpose of attack rating with this skill doesn’t make sense with the behavior of the skill, as the Assassin isn’t persistently controlling these “Ouch Roombas” - rather, its more of a ‘set it and forget it’ type of ability. The idea of attack rating to me always made sense as a player’s general accuracy, or the ability to hit a target with a bow, sword, axe, whatever. But with a skill like this, there’s less of a need to aim and more of a ‘Push to Start’ with these Tazmanian Devils. Other traps follow the same behavior of drop-and-go, but aren’t faced with this hurdle. Is it purely because Blade Sentinel is based on weapon damage? Because it does some kind of physical damage? It never made sense to me.
With Blade Fury, attack rating makes sense since the player is actively throwing these blades at a target, so aim actually matters here. Blade Fury is also a lot less fun to play in my opinion, since you are required to do your best statue impression whilst attacking.
There are so many setbacks to this skill already, I don’t understand the intent of making it also possible to ‘miss’ as well. Pulling from the skill page on the Amazon Basin website (apologies if any of this is inaccurate, I don’t have quite as much free time to test as I did when LoD came out and puberty was setting in):
Max of 5 sentinels possible at a time, counts against other traps
Cannot hit an enemy more than once every 26 frames (or slightly longer than 1 second between hits)
Cannot trigger % on striking, % on attack
Does not trigger life/mana leech, or mana on kill (just confirmed this on PlugY)
Already suffers from a partial weapon damage penalty, even with the PTR buff, and the bonus damage from putting points into the skill is marginal at best
Does not trigger Open Wounds (haven’t confirmed if Crushing Blow works)
My suggestion is to at least remove the attack rating dependency to stay more in line with the ‘fantasy’ of how this skill behaves, and give a bit more build diversity to a trapsin. It is a genuinely fun skill to use, like setting some Indiana Jones-style temple traps to lure monsters into. It just needs a bit of love to make it more feasible beyond Normal/early Nightmare.
I’m not sure how/if this would affect PvP in any meaningful way, since these mini-whirlwind barbs would be very easy to spot and avoid. This would need input from someone who actively participated in the PvP community.
Let me know your thoughts on all of this. Maybe some of you share my opinion, maybe I’m a complete buffoon for suggesting it.