[SLAYER] What would make Giantslayer Tree useful again?

[Earthpac]

I think there is some pretty simple **** to be changed that will make Slayer 2h tree better.

Firstly, as has already been stated here, Breaking Point should have the 10% increased chance to be crit removed. Now, most Crit tactics in this game have some kind of trade off, but this tactic has 2. For example - the engi crit tactics requires you stay near your turret, and the Magus tactic limits the skills that get the bonus to 1 tree.

For Slayers & Choppas they have the limitation of slotting something that only benefits certain skills as well as significant increase in chance to be crit. Remove one of these limitations to make the tactic appealing - the increased chance to be crit yourself, in my opinion.

Now for a more complicated suggestion:

There is no getting past the need for Power Through for Giantslayer which is part of what makes it unviable - If you want to deal decent damage, you have to lock yourself into never being able to drop rage and ALSO your best damage is only able to be dealt in a small window before you hit full rage.

I see only two possible ways of circumventing this. The first would be to change Power Through so you CAN drop rage, but at a cost. It could be changed so that Exhausting Blow (a previously useless skill) STILL drops rage, but the crit debuff is increased to 25% for 5 seconds (or whatever numbers work best really). With this change Slayers can drop their rage but it also makes them potentially more vulnerable for a short period of time and hinder their ability to use exhaustive attacks. This would also make the talent more interesting for other Slayer builds, but I'm not quite sure if the devs want that.

The second change would be to modify Violent Impacts to 100% proc chance but add a similar caveat of it increasing chance to be crit when it procs, or possibly even giving the same armour/ resist debuff that fully enraged slayers get for a short window. This would make it so a Giantslayer spamming his damage skills at 75% bonus would be simillar levels of vulnerability to Slayers at the 50% all damage bonus.

As you can see each tactic would have a different pacing, but I suppose the devs wouldn't want to implement both. Power Through would keep intact the same Yellow-rage sweet-spot where Giantslayers do maximum ability damage and take no extra damage, but they could still escape being stuck in Red-rage at the cost of increasingly their vulnerability for a bit and removing their ability to use exhaustive blows (which is pretty significant for Giantslayers). Violent Impacts, on the other hand, would let Slayers stay in yellow-rage indefinitely but be constantly vulnerable, like a standard slayer in red-rage, unless they stop using exhaustive blows

Never played a Choppa so I'm not saying my suggestions should be mirrored, but I can't see any reason why they wouldn't be.

Also as a sidenote, even though it's not for Giantslayer - I think Runic Blessing should be changed not to give you res sickness. This doesn't really make it viable, but it doesn't need to be - yes, eveything is supposed to be balanced for group play - but that doesn't mean every one of the 20 Slayer tactics has to be an option suited to group RVR play in of itself. Making Runic Blessings not give ress sickness cements it's role as a FUN RvR pug-ish tactic. People will never slot a big RnG gamble tactic in serious play, that's just a fact (which is also why Violent Impacts is rarely used), but Runic Blessings does have a place as a fun tactic to use in non-serious or pug pvp where it can lead to funny black-knight moments. I once came back to life 3 times in a row with Runic Blessings slotted. It was awesome, but useless because ress sickness made my damage a tickle.

[eks]

Also as a sidenote, even though it's not for Giantslayer - I think Runic Blessing should be changed not to give you res sickness. This doesn't really make it viable, but it doesn't need to be - yes, eveything is supposed to be balanced for group play - but that doesn't mean every one of the 20 Slayer tactics has to be an option suited to group RVR play in of itself. Making Runic Blessings not give ress sickness cements it's role as a FUN RvR pug-ish tactic. People will never slot a big RnG gamble tactic in serious play, that's just a fact (which is also why Violent Impacts is rarely used), but Runic Blessings does have a place as a fun tactic to use in non-serious or pug pvp where it can lead to funny black-knight moments. I once came back to life 3 times in a row with Runic Blessings slotted. It was awesome, but useless because ress sickness made my damage a tickle.

I ran a Slayer with Runic Blessings on Live, and it was indeed not-super-effective but also hilarious. Rather than eliminate res sickness, I think I'd just have it give a temporary bonus on res to one or more of damage/Str/WS. This would make the newly-self-ressed Slayer still dangerous from a dps perspective but also slightly easier to kill with penalties to Toughness/Initiative (which would make some sense; the Slayer is fueled with rage but is also a bit fragile since they were just dead a second ago.)

[Grock]

Hey folks didn't read the whole topic and don't know if you discussed this, but basically what if Violent Impacts would cause exhaustive blows to cost 25 rage for each use? That means you'll have reliable number of empowered exhaustive uses without reliance on randomness and without limits/downsides of Power Through?

Another thought - what if exhaustive blows were doing 100% extra damage during Furious state? Or even more?

Some kinda math
Regular blow deal 100%, furious 125%, berserk 150%
Furious exhaustive 175%
Compared to berserk that is just ~16% increase in damage, absolutely nothing when considering that you trade whole rage on that.