Fix/Buff Assassin's Blaze

[Kaika]

I recently rebuilt my Fire/rad stalker, and I noticed that her single target damage left quite a bit to be desired when on paper she should be absolutely killing it. I did a little investigating and found out that Quick Assassin's blaze in particular has a 1.67s cast time, for what I can tell is no real reason, this cast time is shared with only Ice and BS, which honestly baffle me too, but I'm not as familiar with those sets. Every other quick AS in game has a 1 sec activation time (aside from KM which has a 0.6 for some reason, but kinda needs it). Keep in mind it deals exactly the same damage, it just takes 67% longer to cast for some reason, massively reducing it's effective DPS in a set that isn't dealing that insane DPS. One of the reasons I feel this impacts stalker Fire melee specifically is that it drops a very good attack in incinerate for Assassin's Blaze, effectively dropping the second best attack for the worst assassin's strike in the game, while most other sets seem to drop a cone or one of the weaker attacks, causing it to not get a major boost in single target damage vs the scrapper variant, removing much of the reason why you would choose the stalker version in the first place.

 

Edit: Just did a little more digging and, ignoring crits (which is admittedly a big part of stalker), incinerate and quick Assassin's blaze do almost the same DPA, as their activation time and damage are almost the exact same. I'm not sure why it was designed this way, as this basically removes any real reason to play the stalker version. As far as I can tell no other Stalker set is this way, every other set seems to trade for AS in a way that grants them much higher single target DPS.

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.fiery_melee.incinerate&at=scrapper

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=villain_pets.fiery_melee_assassins_blaze.assassins_blaze_quick&at=stalker

 

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by Riot Siren