Savage Assault: Why so Rare?

[SeraphimKensai]

I enjoy savage assault. I paired it with illusion control and ice mastery. my character concept is that of a vampiric demon that teleports in and out of combat and it feels pretty smooth. It's one of my fav dominators to be honest.

[Frosticus]

Hard to pick a set where some of the attacks show 0 damage and others are just flat out wrong.

 

Do you trust your eyes, or some forum putz (like me) telling you it is awesome?

 

 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

11 hours ago, Frosticus said:

Hard to pick a set where some of the attacks show 0 damage and others are just flat out wrong.

 

Do you trust your eyes, or some forum putz (like me) telling you it is awesome?

 

 

Previously looked at the damage numbers in Mids, the fact that feral charge only takes single target IOs, which implied that it probably did damage to just one target, and also considered the fuss and bother connected to maximizing the radius of rending flurry. Then I thought "nope" and looked at other doms instead for quite some time. Totally guilty of not previously digging deep enough to really understand the set. 

Still on the fence about the set, even after recently hearing good things about it. Really like the single target skills. Feral charge is a lot of fun. Also, really love the strength of the heal, with the caveat that the recharge even for an endgame build feels a bit too slow to set a high value on the heal. Don't love the cognitive load associated with monitoring the number of blood frenzy stacks to figure out when to begin repositioning to put rending flurry to its best use.

On that note, when experimenting with the set I found myself fairly often losing track of exactly how many blood frenzy stacks had accumulated, given all the other things to think about in combat. Thus, I often didn't know which attack(s) I could pick as the next attack to max out the number of blood frenzy stacks before using rending flurry. Also, the need to build up stacks to maximize rending flurry radius runs counter to how teams usually function. Usually teams alpha with AOEs and then clean up with single target damage. With savage assault you'll often want to build up charges with other attacks before using rending flurry. Thus, when on a team it was often no longer worth casting rending flurry by the time I had built up five stacks of blood frenzy. In the end, the need to build up five stacks to give rending flurry the same radius that other dom PbAOEs get by default, without any added bother, made the set less enjoyable to play. YMMV, FWIW. 

Maybe if blood frenzy only took three stacks to maximize it would be noticeably less bothersome. Or not, as even water blast's three stacks can be a bit of a pain to manage. At least for me, though, maxing blood frenzy stacks at three would probably have made it significantly easier to enjoy playing. 

Edited February 7 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Frosticus]

It is cumbersome to manage the blood system.

 

At the start if you feral charge from full range, then viscous, you will be at full blood for rending. After that I don't worry about it.

 

The plus side is that full blood rending does quite a bit more damage than the other pbaoes

 

For single target the lockout doesn't matter that much. 1@5 stack Hawk + 2@0 stack is within a few pts of damage as 3@4 stacks.

 

In a perfect world the blood  lockout would disappear, it isn't needed and spot prey would add stacks (and fix the perception boost)

[Kladyras]

On 2/6/2024 at 4:35 PM, SeraphimKensai said:

I enjoy savage assault. I paired it with illusion control and ice mastery. my character concept is that of a vampiric demon that teleports in and out of combat and it feels pretty smooth. It's one of my fav dominators to be honest.

Do you have a build for this? I'm building the same thing, but cant figure out how to slot it 😞

[SeraphimKensai]

31 minutes ago, Kladyras said:

Do you have a build for this? I'm building the same thing, but cant figure out how to slot it 😞

I don't publicly release my builds but I'm willing to help teach you how to make a build for it. Send me a message on the forums with your build goals (permadom, type of travel power, defense based (positional or typed), what kind of content you plan running with it, what difficulty, are you looking for advanced mode stuff or no, and if you are playing it organically or power leveling it?) and an attempt to make your own build aimed at your goals with mids.