Oxlazr
02-08-2017, 02:28 AM
I just figured I'd jot down some thoughts I've had while leveling the knife skill - I don't intend to level it any further at this stage, and I'll explain why in a moment. For reference, I leveled it largely solo with animal handling - I stopped at level 20ish awhile ago, and revisited it recently and leveled it up to 43.
It'd be good if others could chip in what they think as well, especially if you've played it at max level, as I don't ever recall seeing much information on knife fighting in general.
By in large, knife seems to be more effective if you don't have aggro. Even at low levels, this is difficult to achieve (i.e. level 25 knife + level 50+ Animal handling pet) - if you were leveling in a group, I'm sure this would be more efficient.
It seems to try utilise a lot of mechanics as well - rage reduction, damage over time, evasion, healing, ranged utility attacks, snares, bonus damage to vulnerable targets - and the modifiers seem to work by either directly increasing damage, or by creating synergy between "cut" and non cut abilities. "A jack of all trades and a master of none" comes to mind with dagger. In order to utilise it as a solo-build, you're essentially going to have to use animal-handling or, perhaps now, psychology. Even the modifiers that buff other skills either A) buff their damage insignificantly, or B) only offer a chance for those abilities to deal bonus damage.
I realise that last paragraph was a mess of words, but what it amounts to is quite simple - spam your abilities when you can. There's no strategy to it. All those various mechanics, even in combination with each other, don't achieve a whole lot. It ends up playing like sword - but sword seems to consistently deal more damage & reduce rage more effectively.
It just feels too inconsistent, too conditional, to be considered a good skillset right now. It's really difficult to justify building a character around skills that are "sometimes" going to be useful - i.e. the ones that require mobs to not be attacking you. If you were leveling with a friend, I think knife fighting would be infinitely more enjoyable, but I cannot confirm this myself.
As for the specifics -
Fending Blade - doesn't really reduce rage enough to be useful. Healing for "3" heal on some modifiers is often irrelevant.
Opening Thrust - 10% bonus damage to your next knife attack - you may as well spam this between every attack due to the cooldown lock knife fighting suffers from.
Blur Cut - By itself, x% evasion never seems particularly useful. It seems being able to heal/restore armour would be more useful then "potentially" having an ability do something. I'd personally think this skill would be more useful if the evasion amount and duration were significantly higher - though I haven't seen many modifiers for this skill.
Venomstrike - This skill is pretty good. Nothing to mention here.
Gut - Couldn't ever be utilised fully, so I never used it.
Surge Cut - This is a good skill, don't get me wrong - but I think it raises an issue with how the game works in general, so I really want to draw attention to this skill. It seems every combat skill has self-healing - and that really reduces the significance of healing & support builds going forward, when everyone is expected to be able to self-heal anyway. This is just my opinion, and I'm not sure what the philosophy here is, but some builds should be able to maintain their health as a resource to be preserved - not one to replenish frequently. It just seems odd to me that so many offensive skills have healing built into them.
Poisoner's Cut - I'm not entirely sure how this works, but it seemed to boost overall damage significantly. The modifiers I did see for it always increased its damage by a slight amount - which, considering it was more of a chain-skill to buff other abilities, really didn't do all that much for it.
Slice - Another situational skill - It seems really good "if" a monster is vulnerable.
I didn't get to play around with a lot of the other skills - the increasing gold cost of abilities makes leveling skills like this just to test - or on the off-chance they'll become more viable later on, increasingly restrictive. It really makes it difficult to actually fully test the game when the economy keeps getting tighter.
I did try to test what I could, though - I.e. the delayed rage reduction, the poison procs and such - and everything (beyond what I reported) seems to be working as intended.
Overall, though, regarding abilities - the modifiers on gear (at least levels 10-40) aren't strong enough to have knife fighting as a competitive option.
I'd really like to see another resource used to unlock skills & combat levels, though - I'd like to more fully test aspects of the game, but I can't justify farming a bunch of gold to do so given I'm not particularly fond of the skill as is.
As for the throwing knives - I didn't bother. I was hoping to utilise them at max level - but I feel it's important to mention just what's required to create these - namely, toolcrafting and blacksmithing - specifically, the hammers from toolcrafting - which won't easily be accessible to new players (i.e. fairies, if they're still starting with knives) - I think it might be good to see knives occasionally drop on monsters if you have the knife skill active.
All in all, I feel knife is really only good if you're playing with a dedicated group of friends. Everything about it is inconsistent, and you have very little control over how it plays given you're likely just using abilities when they're off cooldown anyway. It's focus is split, and it doesn't cover what you'd normally expect from dagger-type weapons.
If you could use daggers in the off-hand, that might give the skillset a lot more flexibility - though, I feel the skill would be tremendously powerful if combined with druid skills.
I'd like to finish up by saying this is just a "first impression" of the knife skill - as I can't really justify carrying on with it for the reasons above - I might be miles off with this information, and maybe it does get better - but as it stands I think it could use a significant buff to its abilities, at least in the lower level ranges.
Apologies is this comes off as a bit of a rant - it's not meant to be, and I realise I won't be right on every point I've listed here. But I do want to end on a positive note - and that's that crossbows are fantastic; I really like the crossbow skills.
It'd be good if others could chip in what they think as well, especially if you've played it at max level, as I don't ever recall seeing much information on knife fighting in general.
By in large, knife seems to be more effective if you don't have aggro. Even at low levels, this is difficult to achieve (i.e. level 25 knife + level 50+ Animal handling pet) - if you were leveling in a group, I'm sure this would be more efficient.
It seems to try utilise a lot of mechanics as well - rage reduction, damage over time, evasion, healing, ranged utility attacks, snares, bonus damage to vulnerable targets - and the modifiers seem to work by either directly increasing damage, or by creating synergy between "cut" and non cut abilities. "A jack of all trades and a master of none" comes to mind with dagger. In order to utilise it as a solo-build, you're essentially going to have to use animal-handling or, perhaps now, psychology. Even the modifiers that buff other skills either A) buff their damage insignificantly, or B) only offer a chance for those abilities to deal bonus damage.
I realise that last paragraph was a mess of words, but what it amounts to is quite simple - spam your abilities when you can. There's no strategy to it. All those various mechanics, even in combination with each other, don't achieve a whole lot. It ends up playing like sword - but sword seems to consistently deal more damage & reduce rage more effectively.
It just feels too inconsistent, too conditional, to be considered a good skillset right now. It's really difficult to justify building a character around skills that are "sometimes" going to be useful - i.e. the ones that require mobs to not be attacking you. If you were leveling with a friend, I think knife fighting would be infinitely more enjoyable, but I cannot confirm this myself.
As for the specifics -
Fending Blade - doesn't really reduce rage enough to be useful. Healing for "3" heal on some modifiers is often irrelevant.
Opening Thrust - 10% bonus damage to your next knife attack - you may as well spam this between every attack due to the cooldown lock knife fighting suffers from.
Blur Cut - By itself, x% evasion never seems particularly useful. It seems being able to heal/restore armour would be more useful then "potentially" having an ability do something. I'd personally think this skill would be more useful if the evasion amount and duration were significantly higher - though I haven't seen many modifiers for this skill.
Venomstrike - This skill is pretty good. Nothing to mention here.
Gut - Couldn't ever be utilised fully, so I never used it.
Surge Cut - This is a good skill, don't get me wrong - but I think it raises an issue with how the game works in general, so I really want to draw attention to this skill. It seems every combat skill has self-healing - and that really reduces the significance of healing & support builds going forward, when everyone is expected to be able to self-heal anyway. This is just my opinion, and I'm not sure what the philosophy here is, but some builds should be able to maintain their health as a resource to be preserved - not one to replenish frequently. It just seems odd to me that so many offensive skills have healing built into them.
Poisoner's Cut - I'm not entirely sure how this works, but it seemed to boost overall damage significantly. The modifiers I did see for it always increased its damage by a slight amount - which, considering it was more of a chain-skill to buff other abilities, really didn't do all that much for it.
Slice - Another situational skill - It seems really good "if" a monster is vulnerable.
I didn't get to play around with a lot of the other skills - the increasing gold cost of abilities makes leveling skills like this just to test - or on the off-chance they'll become more viable later on, increasingly restrictive. It really makes it difficult to actually fully test the game when the economy keeps getting tighter.
I did try to test what I could, though - I.e. the delayed rage reduction, the poison procs and such - and everything (beyond what I reported) seems to be working as intended.
Overall, though, regarding abilities - the modifiers on gear (at least levels 10-40) aren't strong enough to have knife fighting as a competitive option.
I'd really like to see another resource used to unlock skills & combat levels, though - I'd like to more fully test aspects of the game, but I can't justify farming a bunch of gold to do so given I'm not particularly fond of the skill as is.
As for the throwing knives - I didn't bother. I was hoping to utilise them at max level - but I feel it's important to mention just what's required to create these - namely, toolcrafting and blacksmithing - specifically, the hammers from toolcrafting - which won't easily be accessible to new players (i.e. fairies, if they're still starting with knives) - I think it might be good to see knives occasionally drop on monsters if you have the knife skill active.
All in all, I feel knife is really only good if you're playing with a dedicated group of friends. Everything about it is inconsistent, and you have very little control over how it plays given you're likely just using abilities when they're off cooldown anyway. It's focus is split, and it doesn't cover what you'd normally expect from dagger-type weapons.
If you could use daggers in the off-hand, that might give the skillset a lot more flexibility - though, I feel the skill would be tremendously powerful if combined with druid skills.
I'd like to finish up by saying this is just a "first impression" of the knife skill - as I can't really justify carrying on with it for the reasons above - I might be miles off with this information, and maybe it does get better - but as it stands I think it could use a significant buff to its abilities, at least in the lower level ranges.
Apologies is this comes off as a bit of a rant - it's not meant to be, and I realise I won't be right on every point I've listed here. But I do want to end on a positive note - and that's that crossbows are fantastic; I really like the crossbow skills.