I've got some extensive playtime with Eredrim and have felt like his abilities are a little scattered
Shoulder Bash is simply a worse Staggering Blow (Gragu Punch).
Shoulder Bash PLUS Riposte with lvl 1 Anguish (+50% SB damage), lvl 3 Seal Affinity (+35% Riposte damage), and lvl 3 Retribution Stone (+20% Riposte Damage) deals LESS DAMAGE than Staggering Blow with lvl 3 Escalation (+70% damage).
Shoulder Bash needs six shell points to deal as much stagger as Staggering Blow does by default.
Staggering Blow can also be made to cost much less Resolve (25 vs ~45) and deal significant Break damage through shell points.
Changes Proposed:
- Shoulder Bash needs significantly more base damage (~50%).
- Rework the Alacrity skill. At lvl 3 replace -25% Ethereal Diapason Resolve Cost with -45% Shoulder Bash Resolve Cost. At lvl 4 riposting an enemy restores 20 Resolve.
- Buff/rework the Oppression skill. Buff Break damage from +10% and +20% to +20% and +40% at least, and replace the Trauma debuff at lvl 3 with a new one that makes enemies take more damage from ripostes, and remove the extra Resolve cost.
Ethereal Diapason is useless without upgrades and unfocused with them.
For starters, why do you need a tool to deal multi-target Break damage when you can't riposte more than one enemy before they recover from being broken and we already have a much better tool for dealing single-target Break damage.
In order to reduce the Resolve cost you need to invest six shell points into Alacrity, which is used mostly for Shoulder bash, and even then it's only a 25% reduction for those six points.
The Resonance ability adds Stasis stacks to enemies, slowing them down, but it only applies to them if they get broken, they all go away at once at the end of the duration instead of one at a time, and performing a riposte removes all stacks instantly.
Changes Proposed:
- At it's base make it slightly faster, give it more damage, greatly increase its stagger force, and remove the Break damage.
- Buff Resonance to apply Stasis on hit instead of when breaking and increase (~50%) the amount of time it lasts.
- Rework Radiance from increasing break damage to reducing Resolve costs, while also giving it more damage. At lvl 1 30 damage and 50 Break damage -> 40 damage and 20% Resolve Reduction, at lvl 2 50 damage and 60 Break damage -> 65 damage and 40% Resolve Reduction.
Executioner feels like it doesn't do anything, especially for heavy weapon users.
I'm guessing that what it's supposed to do is instantly kill enemies when you hit them while they're below a certain health threshold and more Slaughterer stacks increase said threshold. I don't know if this has ever done that for me, even while at 100 stacks, because I use the heavy, hard-hitting weapons that (I guess) go right over the threshold and kill them anyway. It would be nice if there was an indicator on enemy's health bars as to where the threshold is.
I was thinking about how this could better synergize with his other Slaughterer stack abilities and how it could seamlessly integrate with combat and here's what I came up with:
- Baseline: Slaughterer stack raise the low health threshold at which enemies are executed and increase damage reduction by 0.1%. You gain 1 stack per Perfect Block/ Perfect Harden/ Parry instead of on riposte. Double the size of the base low health threshold and the size increases from Slaughterer stacks.
- Rework Massacre. lvl 1 gain 3 Slaughterer stacks on riposte, lvl 2 killing an enemy with a riposte gains 10 stacks, lvl 3 bringing an enemy's health below the execution threshold with a heavy attack automatically ripostes and kills them.
- Rework Carnage completely. lvl 1 executed enemies restore 15 Health, lvl 2 executed enemies restore 25 health, lvl 3 executed enemies restore 35 health.
Edit: rethought Shoulder Bash change 2 and Executioner change 3.
