I tried out this game with a pure strength based build with great weapons, mostly greatswords for the early campaign and a great axe in the end. I’ve enjoyed many aspects of the gameplay but one thing stuck out in terms of ‘build design’ when it came to selecting runes:
Drop Kick and Reverse Kick are by far the most efficient attack moves I have available to me and it isn’t even close. Drop kick deals more damage than most charged attacks with way less attack time and reverse kick deals nearly as much but even faster. None of my stamina based weapon attacks can come close to competing with their damage and utility. The only advantage any weapon skill in the greatweapon movesets is range but being in ‘fast’ carry weight means you have no problem getting into range when you need to.
Ever since I found out that Drop kick was my best dps, every boss after the bear just died to 4-5 dropkick attacks and made the combat boring.
I don’t know if this is a unique interaction with pure strength scaling and great weapons giving the kick attacks more damage than intended as I heard from others than the kicks had low damage and were just good for utility like knocking enemies off cliffs.
In general I think the way you choose and modify your moveset/skills in this game are very subpar and need serious overhaul. I know the utility runes slots are coming and I hope that comes with a major revision of the rune system.
It’s not an anomaly. A lot of OP builds use a greatsword for extra scaling on rune attacks.
There’s another where you can use the monk overhead kick slam rune with a greatsword and it also bullies targets.
Rune attacks were balanced to be powerful, perhaps too generously on account of being something that the devs designed to not be spammed.
But then the ring came in and certain plague affixes that still ruined the focus economy, and allowed for hyperscaling damage on top of plentiful focus.
Nice catch. This hasn’t been touched much so far. A frontflip kick was also waiting to be slotted in one of my lockers. I ran around with it on my 2H hand for a while yesterday evening and it does indeed do damage like a charged attack, all just using some stamina and landing an almost instant hit without big windup.
But then considering the animation, classic runes are more fun to use, as those instant martial art hits just look a bit out of place when done while carrying a 2H weapon. So yes, yet another way to output massive damage which also chains very well in between other runes. We should maybe open up an Echo Knight preservation funds, not that he goes on strike for his right not to be farmed anymore…
The frontflip kick i slotted had only have little range. So comparing to a quick 2H stab, this still tends to have more range in most variants and thus keeps it advantages.
So nice find you have here and thanks for sharing. Will be looking forward how Moon integrates that in the next iteration of the combat system.
If you use them on fists and other fast low damage weapons they are balanced for their samina cost and can be used to interrupt attacks or as running attacks for those weapons that have running attacks with animations that you don’t like.
