Soul pierce kinda sucks...

[marshyds]

So, you want AOE for dealing with hordes, huh?

Well, instead of taking the 4 point skill that deals 34 damage for a soul at MAX COVETOUS COLLECTOR, you could choose the 3 point skill decoy bomb, which deals 51 base AOE damage.

Its simply easier to farm hordes (which are often 150 or 100 health enemies) using two decoy explosions.

In general its also less clunky to use soul decoys for bonus damage, as you can reset the cooldown by opening a soul jar, while the soul pierce needs enemies to die.

Covetous collector is a bit awful too, the bonus damage is not large enough to make that big of a difference for either decoys or soul pierce.

Do not nerf decoys, instead please make the soul pierce more pleasant to use.

My suggestion is making it so that soul pierce deals more damage the longer it travels, rewarding players who know how to soul hop and chain damage constantly.

 

 

 

[asdsaax]

I agree it feels like an overkill on top of decoys
and it's not even that great against bee queen
instead of bothering with decoys to trigger soul pierce I returned to tanking her as usual

I hope they rework covetous collector so investing into offense feels worth it

though the worst thing is that... soul pierce has op use
like shown here:

but bees aren't really functional right now and butterflies take forever to catch... + their limited spawn rate
at this point I would rather establish gun powder production if I wanted to burst everything

[Echsrick]

i would not mind a bit of more damage given you have to do some very spesific things to realy do damage with it

[Soul7k]

I want to live in a world where I can overload myself by uncorking all my soul jars in either the normal or extended naughty inclination window and then the explosion benefits off of covetous collector or does increased damage based on the number of souls held during the window

[IAmAFurrz]

its a fun skill, and still a bunch of cool things you can do with it, and makes day to day combat real easy for soul collection purposes. i really think this skill is just based on player playstyle

[Mysterious box]

5 minutes ago, IAmAFurrz said:

its a fun skill, and still a bunch of cool things you can do with it, and makes day to day combat real easy for soul collection purposes. i really think this skill is just based on player playstyle

Personally I feel like the shadow affinity completely replaces it's usefulness post rift but I guess that might be enough of a reason for people to consider it.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

Yep. I love to say I told you so, so, I told you so. It's one of the things I complained about during my first post during this beta, but others didn't agree at the time. It's inherently just redundant in the skill tree and I'm not a big fan of it either. It doesn't matter in all but 2 boss fights and it feels like overkill because it's only good at farming Souls from weak mobs, which can be done pretty easily anyways without it, or just made a faster chore by asking an AoE friend to help.

A good Bug Net Nabsack might help a little bit to give some better agency over the skill but... I don't really like the cheese to begin with and would rather we just had better damage on Soul Pierce by default, independent of Covetous Collector, with the Butterfly cheese patched out (they can just drop in a line like Bees do I think. I don't foresee issues with making them consistent but maybe I'm missing something? I don't think any other insect stacks in place like Butterflies.)

Outside of the Butterfly cheese, I experimented a little with other uses for Soul Pierce and I really like it in an arena full of a bunch of Moleworms. It ends up doing a chain reaction that keeps Soul Pierce covering the battlefield pretty well for a little bit. I think this is only really useful in Fuelweaver, though, but I suppose it would be fine for managing Hound attacks too, I guess. Butterflies work for this too, though, but don't set up shop permanently and respawn like Moleworms do.

The Butterfly cheese itself is seriously a waste of time and I don't know why anyone would bother with it without console commands. It takes way too much time to set up and you can just kill every boss the normal way and save loads of time and 5 Insight. Your server has to be REALLY boring for you to want to waste that much time catching Butterflies... I might try an automated farm later to see if this can be done with quicker prep time, but it's just not viable if you're doing all the catching the traditional way. And, no, I'm not about to beg a Wendy player for 120 Morning Glories for 60 Butterflies to do 80% to an Armored Bearger that I can just kill in 1.5 minutes or so the normal way. I just don't see how this is useful at all in practice. If anyone finds a way that it's actually worthwhile in a real server, let me know, but I just don't see how it does anything against any important bosses that's worth the time it takes to catch all the Butterflies.

Anyways, has anyone experimented with Soul Pierce I only + Covetous Collector? It seems... much less functional without the rebound, so I've never tried. But it could allow me to retain the Lifted Spirits branch in full. I absolutely hate sacrificing Capricious Movement because its sacrifice cuts into my Soul supply so hard.

But I'm not really sure why a skill in another branch is interacting with Soul Pierce at all, especially such an optional one. I'd rather see Soul Pierce buffed in damage with the Butterfly cheese removed, and Covetous Collector is reworked to make the Nabsack a decent DPS alternative with post-rift resources to carrying both Brightshade and Void gear simultaneously, for convenience. (Also please reduce the durability loss for picking up items, but we're getting off topic here.) I'd really rather see the Nabsack/Covetous Collector reworked and damage of Soul Pierce kept on the Soul Pierce branch.

I dunno. Overall it's nice to have for Bee/Spider farming but it just saves a little time at the sacrifice of too many Insight, especially if you want Covetous Collector for the reliable 2 hit kill on Spiders/Bees. I've been skipping Soul Pierce + Covetous Collector lately entirely and I haven't really looked back. You kinda have to give up Soul Decoy III to abuse it with Pleasant Pastorale and I just don't see this as a worthwhile trade. I can't even run a proper Varg farm with this skill unlocked and utilize it for Souls, and it unintentionally aggros things at the worst times. I'm sorry, Saladmanders, it's not my fault CC shredded a stupid bird.

I don't know how to fix this skill without completely reworking it other than upping the damage, making producing Souls for offense easier, and removing the cheese, and it would still have a redundancy/niche-ness issue. But I just don't see it being worth the investment anymore as it stands. I'd literally rather have all 3 Neutral skills + Covetous Collector for the Nabsack at this point and, yes, that's an insult.

Why are both of the straight, 4-skill branches on Wortox so bad...

[DVGMedia]

Ive always thought of like using it for an overload bomb but it sadly doesn't work would be funny though

 

 

[Echsrick]

1 hour ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

But I'm not really sure why a skill in another branch is interacting with Soul Pierce at all,

honestly yea, its kind of realy stupid, why sould a skill from a differend branch make a differend skill from a differend branch stronger? i dont think any other character has that weird design choice, and i do think there some realy missed opportunity with his skill tree

[Koomin]

Bringing up again that a lot of this would be solved if soul thief 1 and 2 were combined.  Soul pierce is actually a really cool ability, and I would never skip it since it feels like the most fun and creative and thematic ability that Wortox got with his skill tree.  However, it really only helps for farming mobs, bee queen, and fuelweaver, which is a pretty low percentage of playtime.  4 insight points, especially with soul thief 2 basically being useless alone, is a lot to invest in something that doesn't come up much, even if it is really fun. Combining soul thief 1 and 2 would make it less build limiting and let you get access to the cool capstones that they designed without investing almost a third of your points.  If it's too powerful like that, reducing the power of soul thief 1 and 2 would absolutely be acceptable for me in return.  I'd rather the ability was less powerful and not take up so much of my skill points if I had the choice.  Soul bastion, soul decoy, and twintail also have this same issue.

[IAmAFurrz]

5 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

Personally I feel like the shadow affinity completely replaces it's usefulness post rift but I guess that might be enough of a reason for people to consider it.

its good early game, prerift. and its also fun to use

[marshyds]

1 hour ago, Koomin said:

Bringing up again that a lot of this would be solved if soul thief 1 and 2 were combined.  Soul pierce is actually a really cool ability, and I would never skip it since it feels like the most fun and creative and thematic ability that Wortox got with his skill tree.  However, it really only helps for farming mobs, bee queen, and fuelweaver, which is a pretty low percentage of playtime.  4 insight points, especially with soul thief 2 basically being useless alone, is a lot to invest in something that doesn't come up much, even if it is really fun. Combining soul thief 1 and 2 would make it less build limiting and let you get access to the cool capstones that they designed without investing almost a third of your points.  If it's too powerful like that, reducing the power of soul thief 1 and 2 would absolutely be acceptable for me in return.  I'd rather the ability was less powerful and not take up so much of my skill points if I had the choice.  Soul bastion, soul decoy, and twintail also have this same issue.

i still find decoys to be better due to the fact that they deal a clean 51 damage, meaning a one two punch can destroy most weak hordes. in addition to that its less of a hassle to control. having 50 souls moving around piercing bees ising that impressive when you realise they only have 100 health.

[Koomin]

25 minutes ago, marshyds said:

i still find decoys to be better due to the fact that they deal a clean 51 damage, meaning a one two punch can destroy most weak hordes. in addition to that its less of a hassle to control. having 50 souls moving around piercing bees ising that impressive when you realise they only have 100 health.

I totally agree with you.  Soul decoy explosion comes up more often.  I just think that soul pierce is really cool and fun and well designed, so want to pick it.  It would be sad to not select the most interesting skill Wortox got with his skill tree, even if it is not objectively the best option.  I also feel slightly demeaned whenever I click on soul decoy 2 because of how useless it is, so am influenced not to take it.
I go into it more in the post linked below, but the summary is just that the first two skills on twintailed heart, soul bastion, soul pierce, and soul decoy chains should be combined (with whatever appropriate power trimming is needed).  It would give the ability to choose and play with more of the fun capstones that they designed, even if you find them only impressive at hunting down 100 hp bees.

 

[flamboyant wolf]

I like it