Been doing a lot of testing on Echoing Strike as it seems to far outshine all the other Eldritch offensive skills.
Even though the skill has an Attack Rating buff and AR shows on the Character Sheet, I’m fairly confident it has a 100% hit rate right now.
I was Lvl 70 in the Pits on Hell, with one point in Echoing Strike. Sheet said 75% chance to hit, but I was hitting every single throw.
Paradoxically, Mirrored Blades shows no Attack Rating on the sheet… but is definitely capable of missing like a typical physical attacking skill.
Also seen reports of Deadly Strike\Crushing Blow not proccing on Echoing Strike… but tbh the damage scales so high I cannot tell.
Comparing the Skill Tooltip damage to Character Sheet damage shows a massively higher number.
With non-Eth Thresher Obedience at 27 points and maxed synergies I had ~1k - 2k with 360% increased damage in tooltip… but 10k - 20k+ in Sheet damage in town.
Eth Death Colossus Blade with Might/Fanaticism/Concentration that starts to reach 50k+ quick.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun skill and I think it should be good… but it feels too good to be true.
It’s a couple of things that are just too good in combination that make this skill a bit op in my opinion.
- Eth ignoring durability
I generally like it flavor wise because you are not hitting with the weapon but producing magical copies of it. Dmg buff from eth should then be factored into the scaling of the skill dmg. So that’ is just a number tweaking.
- Weapon attack scaling with FCR instead of ias.
This alone is insanly strong because it let’s you spam out those slow and heavy-hitting 2hnd weapons. I don’t see a way to easily tweak this balance wise and honestly I wouldn’t be mad at all if they just changed it to scale with weapon ias. That goes in canon with Assasins throwing traps and also the other skills on the warlock skill tree being based on ias and not fcr.
- Allowing the class to wield 2 handers in one hand without the dmg debuff, that for example the barb gets.
just feels unfair and also kind of unnecessary.
- Leech on a “Cast”
it’s just a problem due to the 2nd aspect and the other scaling issue of the skill. Being able to leech from such a strong + fast skill is just insane and wasnt possible in the game before. Also it’s a slippery slope because soon people will want to leech from all kinds of skills.
Summary:
I like the idea of “casting a weapon”, but the balancing is fine tuned around those two things not interacting together.
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It seems cleave and mirrored blades function/act as actual attack skills. They appear to take your AR/Weapon damage into account. I don’t believe echoing strike does.
Echoing Strike appears to function as a “spell” rather than an attack. Even to the point that I believe cleave and mirrored blades proc “on hit “ effects like life/mana steal but echoing strike does not.
Another observation is, cleave and mirrored blades appear to scale their speed with attack speed, whereas echoing strike seems to be effected by cast speed.
You are definitely right that it functions more like a spell to some degree as evidenced by the FCR application over IAS. I have specifically tested this and it is absolutely true. The part that is interesting to me is that it does specifically mention attack rating, so it is still somewhat physically calculated. That said, when you get additional “echoes” from mirror blades, I am trying to also understand if you are actually getting another +75% weapon damage or Just the additional base skill damage, I was under the initial impression it would just copy the weapon damage and that obviously would have been very strong, but I don’t notice a huge increase when I went from 2 to 3 and 3 to 4 echoes. If that were the case.. how would it split the damage across the echoes? My weapon right now is just an Honor Dimensional Blade, so the damage is only like 42-100 so perhaps it is truly reflecting/replicating and it is just still lower as with Hex:Bane active with about 7 skill points my tooltip damage is 400-1100, which is crazy considering that is stronger already than my other whirlwind barbarian at level 82. (I just started playing like two weeks before the announcement)
Another part I am still trying to understand is leech and other on hit effects. I was very clearly using like +11% mana stolen per hit and getting mana back after hitting enemies without killing them (for a mana on kill effect). I use a lot of mana when I am missing enemies and when I am hitting I have enough right now to not need mana potions, so I do think it is leeching still, I am just not sure how that is all calculated, especially factoring in the echoes. Or… is there a singular one that does the library damage and rest seems to be extra?
Again my ‘account’ is newer, but I do have the unique Axe Hellslayer you can equip at like 69 that gives a chance to cast volcano on hit or something with huge base weapon damage, I am curious to start using that and see how much that actually procs when I use echoing and also mirror blades.
While you guys are testing, anyne know if mirror blades lower durability? or is that only echoing strike that can bypass durability loss
i’ve lost durability with mirrored blades
Thx, guess both attacks have really wierd properties. If echoing strike doesnt proc onhit effect (atleast for things like lifetap, but leech works?) I’ve been trying to craft a build that uses echoing strike for general clear and small swap to mirrored blades + crushing blow + lifetap for uber type content. But both attacks might scale differently, FCR vs IAS, one seems to bypass attack rating, other requires, one can leech onhit other can’t. So many small details to work out.
Once I get to Hell with my Warlock (with higher mob hp pools, resistances, immunities etc) I am going to spend a lot of time with some ‘formal’ testing. It is interesting because you start to see some things like Hex Purge giving attack speed.. that means it is probably more meant for mirror blade/cleave, even though there are a lot of synergies in the tree with hex purge. Yeah- the Echoing strike does not lower durability but you will have some incidental loss if you use mirror blades and cleave, I suppose if you are careful about button setup/making sure you have mana you could set it up so you could always use an ethereal weapon. There is a part of me that has a burning desire to know all the intricacies NOW but also there is a great respect I have for the old-school game design philosophy of minimal ‘under the hood’ information being given and taking time to figure out how everything works, even with the large amount of Diablo 2 knowledge we have. It is a new puzzle to solve. Like I am pretty sure it adds on-hit elemental weapon damage by now as well, but what happens with ‘Ignores Defense’ mods? Open Wounds, Crushing Blow, Deadly Strike, Chance on hit casts.. Overall right now I like that echoing strike is a bit split from some of the other skills in the tree which allows a more defined build in that space (faster casting vs IAS gear) and that you aren’t simply “eldritch”.
I was able to get some offline testing in w/ Hero Editor.
Crushing Blow is definitely not applying on Echoing Strike.
I had 100% and had the skill at Level 1, never saw any big damage chunks.
Attack Rating on the other hand… super weird. With Miss Markers turned on, it very clearly can miss.
However, sometimes i’d get a Miss Marker and the target would still take damage? Perhaps its got a two-piece damage source situation going on.
I’m thinking there’s skill damage which acts like a spell, but then an additional weapon hit component that checks Attack Rating.
Sheet Damage must take both into account.
Having tested the build i can list quite a few things that do NOT work with echoing strike:
”on striking” procs (tested with reaper’s toll)
slow target (tested with kelpie’s snare)
probably crushing blow
probably critical/deadly strike
These work fine with mirrored blade though, so still worth having
What DOES work though :
”on kill” procs (tested with obediance, even without the CB it still is one of the best weapons for the build)
Additional elemental damage to weapon, including enchant and venow
Weird how most guides don’t include obedience but I’ve been using an Eth CV obedience and it absolutely destroys being cheap compared to other BiS. Hit 85k damage with all my buffs. Plus the 30 res is nice to have.
You’re someone who knows where it’s at. And this brings joy. Unlike most people here