I think most people would agree Bash is a severely underperforming skill and probably the worst melee skill in the game. It’s rarely used past level 6 when Double Swing is available. With that said, I would like to propose a few buffs.
First, as the brute strength of the Barbarian is unrivaled, it would be great to see this skill have a chance to reduce weapon durability, but attack would now be uninterruptible and increases damage of 2-handed weapons. Secondly, the flat damage bonus needs to be improved to help viability during early playthrough. Lastly, remove the worthless Stun synergy and replace with a new Berserk synergy. In the end, these are modest improvements and keeps the signature knockback ability intact.
Bash Improvements
Now increases chance to reduce weapon durability, but attack is uninterruptible and increases damage of 2H-weapons by +3% per level
Flat damage starts at +3 (up from +1) and increases at +3 per level (up from +1)
Replace Stun synergy with new Berserk synergy as follows:
how is Bash not ruining ethereal weapons lore-friendly ? it doesn’t make any sense to me. a bash is a violent attack, not a finesse one.
if anything, it should be the other way around, high chance of ruining the weapon but un-interruptible attack and extremely high damage with a 2-hander, similar to Amazon’s Impale skill
it might finally give barbs a reason to use heavy, slow 2-handers, besides the Leap attack skill who becomes useless in ac2 NM.
I don’t get what the issue is. Most level 1 active offensive skills are meant to be quickly replaced with a stronger skill. If anything, bash has a pretty nice use for knockback-locking enemies in a corner, so it’s not useless.
If you want to make the skill more viable without rendering later skills obsolete, you need to do so by improving the synergies, not the base skill.
but why does it have to be like this? it would make sense to be like this if the bottom skills would become available towards the end-game like in other regular RPGs, but at lvl 30 you’re not even getting started.
why not make every skill unique in its own way and let the player choose how they want to play?
Character screen displays + Damage as being applied after +% Damage, but it is only applied after damage has been applied to the target. Consequently it does not increase damage but is still taken into account when calculating life returned by % Life Stolen per hit and Life Tap, and mana returned by % Mana Stolen per hit: this means life and mana can be returned even when attacking an Immune to Physical target (provided Life Tap is cast or the target has >0% drain effectiveness). [1]
This is still true in D2R, I tested it by increasing the base +damage value to 100 and the per level value to 100 in skills.txt but it wasn’t oneshotting anything in normal Act 1 like it should, it was clear that only the enhanced damage from Bash was taking effect.
You need a lot more than +20% magic damage to make the skill viable at endgame. You would need to have its synergies on-par with Concentrate at the very least. (Add +5% damage to the synergy giving it Attack Rating, increase the existing +8% damage and +5% damage synergies to +10%, and add the Berserk synergy.
The player won’t take all synergies, but those that the player takes will prove useful. Though stun would require a synergy improvement too.
If the part about flat damage not being dealt is true, then it should be patched regardless of any other change, simply because nobody understands the skill to function that way. The buff would make the skill more useful at early levels.