suchbalance wrote:- Earthquake: again, damage buffed to make it better for farming (even tho it's not the best skill mechanically, it has its uses) and it is now the best Snake Stance spread melee skill.
Nice, that's what I always wanted from EQ. The AoE spread was perfect for applying SS, but the low WDM made it pointless.
Only problem now is that you can't EQ and TSlam without dual wielding... that's a tough choice. One nice thing about SS builds is that you don't need to stack STR, so you could easily go for max block on them. That's probably still the best choice, but now you have to give up TSlam. Then again you could also weapon swap to an axe + shield every time TSlam is off CD, but that sounds horribly tedious.
suchbalance wrote:And regarding the whole requirements situation - I don't believe there really is a big problem. Yes now you can't use Yaggai with stormblast to double dip on the lightning pierce, but that doesn't make this axe trash and secondly items are always secondary to skills so changing something just to optimise melee for 1 item is silly. As counter intuitive as it sounds putting the weapon restrictions actually now gives more choices as far as gear and melee skill plans are concerned, because if there wasn't a restriction it's pretty obvious that stormblast>iceburst and iron spiral>death gaze & thunder clap > ww & axes>swords for general gameplay so you always end up with with the same optimal build. Now each weapon path has some downsides. You can also choose to have your cake and eat it by dual wielding, but then you give up survivability & GD.
Yeah, I always liked the decision to split the melee tree depending on weapon type. It also feels very "barb".