You’re taking it literal again on one aspect rather than the whole comment that covers that Rend USED to be a break in the rotation. Now it is no longer there as an additional use and it’s applied by Cleave something you’re hitting practically on cooldown either way in AoE unless you’re overloaded with SD procs. Even if you’re not hitting Cleave on CD you’re hitting it one GCD after it’s available at max stacks of Collateral Damage which is still every 4.5-6s (2 stack-3stack). Rend used to be a breaker in the rotation every ~18s.
Rend was also a fantastic button to utilise when you wanted to smuggle a Heroic Strike and delay it by a GCD in ST and AoE which sometimes bought you time to get that last bit of CDR for a CS window to have a higher dmg event out of it. Now? Yeah no chance of smuggling a HS proc without risking to overcap it unless you avoid pressing buttons entirely in both situations. This leads to less caveats of players being able to distinguish themselves in an already simplified gameplay loop.
Yes Slayer cycles between Cleave, OP and Execute most often and then Slam with the 4p however pending keybind allocation this can make things extremely one sided and ruin the flow of gameplay compared to what we had enjoyed during MN’s S1 which flowed somewhat nicer with the additional keybind required.
Even though we hit Rend 3 times per minute beforehand and that 3 CPM has been redistributed elsewhere between other abilities it still feels bad. Mind you the cadence of which you’re slamming SD procs is also borderline degenerate due to the increased proc rate of slaying strikes alongside the forced SD proc on CS cast. Would not be surprised in the slightest if they reduce Slaying Strikes back to 15% proc rate instead of 25% in the upcoming weeks of tuning amongst other changes.
By all means it’s a positive to the lower skill portion of the playerbase but as an actual gameplay element? With all due respect you’re off your rocker if you think it’s actually a good change to make the baseline ability useless when it was more than fine the way it was beforehand.
Rend doesn’t even have value in 1 or 2 target moments as on ST it’s outclassed by Cleave on DPR due to other talents you pickup along the way make it a better ability numerically by default and then on 2 target why would you bother pressing Rend itself when it’s going to soak up a precious Sweeping Strikes charge when you can just press Cleave instead and do over double it’s damage to both targets while also applying Rend’s debuff.
At this point they would’ve been much better off with a proper rework making Rend Arms exclusive as an AoE attack that also auto applied a stack of deep wounds as an uncapped AoE driver and remove it as a maintenance bleed entirely as it no longer has any maintenance at all to it in AoE as it is kept up passively and overwritten without a single care in the world. This half baked nonsense aint it.