A Different Approach To Buffing The Silva & Aegis

[0xCAFE]

Most of the threads I've seen about buffing this weapon focus on its theme or its shield. My idea will focus on the mechanics of the game and the weapon's unique property. As of now, Silva & Aegis is the only melee weapon with pure fire damage. Combined with its good status chance (20%), it is the melee weapon with the highest chance to proc blast. Other melee weapons have a higher status chance, but due to proc distribution, Silva & Aegis has the highest chance to proc blast specifically (more on that later). Blast knocks enemies on their asses which exposes them to finishers. So my suggestion is to make the weapon focus on finishers by doing 2 things:

 

1. Increase its base status chance to 25% for an even higher chance to proc blast

2. Increase its finisher base damage to some obscene amount

 

This will give the weapon a different focus on doing high damage that will not overlap with other weapons. As far as I know, there isn't a melee weapon that focuses on finishers in the game which will give this weapon a unique position.

 

--

To elaborate on its chance to proc blast, it's important to understand the way procs are distributed when a weapon deals physical and elemental damage. If a weapon has a 100% status chance and does physical damage and some elemental damage, 60% of the procs will be physical and 40% will be elemental. In the case of multiple elemental damage types, the procs will be distributed in proportion of the elemental damage dealt. E.g. let's say a weapon has 100% status chance. It does 30 corrosive damage and 70 fire damage. 30% of the time, it will proc corrosive and 70% of the time, it will proc fire. There are other weapons with higher status chance than Silva & Aegis but none of them are pure fire or pure ice which disallows them from having a higher chance to proc blast.

[shut]

- We've already got Finisher-focused weapons. Fists and Sparring weapons completely obliterate enemies with multi-hit finishers, and, to my understanding, heavy weapons like hammers now have 24x Finisher multipliers (basically meaning that nothing has even the slightest chance of survival).

 

- Treating the S&A as a Status weapon is interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that you might as well wield a butterknife or a pair of boxing gloves to deflect bullets one by one for all the effect that its blocking has. People who buy it for platinum are expecting a sword and a shield-- and, at the moment, all they're getting is basically a mediocre sword.

[ProfessorRobledo]

The reason everybody focuses on the shield is because right now you're carrying the shield around as dead weight. It's there purely to look pretty and serves no actual purpose, but it's worse than a cosmetic item because one would actually expect to get some kind of defense from a shield. They might as well have just released the Silva and left the Aegis off because of the whole nothing that the shield does.

 

Come to think of it, maybe they should just make a stand alone Silva. They already split up a weapon once (Nami Skyla -> Nami Solo).

[Aspari]

I'd also like to suggest a Phalanx Stance mod.

[0xCAFE]

- We've already got Finisher-focused weapons. Fists and Sparring weapons completely obliterate enemies with multi-hit finishers, and, to my understanding, heavy weapons like hammers now have 24x Finisher multipliers (basically meaning that nothing has even the slightest chance of survival).

 

- Treating the S&A as a Status weapon is interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that you might as well wield a butterknife or a pair of boxing gloves to deflect bullets one by one for all the effect that its blocking has. People who buy it for platinum are expecting a sword and a shield-- and, at the moment, all they're getting is basically a mediocre sword.

Yes, heavy weapons have a higher multiplier (not 24x but 6x) and fist weapons have multi-hit ground finishers. But does the higher damage make them ground finisher focused or is that merely a feature of the weapon classes? Besides the extra damage, what other incentive is there to focus on performing ground finishers? Do they have first hit attacks in their combos that knock enemies down? What I'm suggesting will give the S&A over a 50% (properly modded of course) chance per hit to knock enemies down and higher ground finisher damage. This gives two reasons to focus the weapon on ground finishers: easier to knock down targets and high ground finisher damage.

 

To your second bullet, I understand that it's a shield and sword. As I've already stated, I'm not focusing on that; I'm focusing on game mechanics.

 

The reason everybody focuses on the shield is because right now you're carrying the shield around as dead weight. It's there purely to look pretty and serves no actual purpose, but it's worse than a cosmetic item because one would actually expect to get some kind of defense from a shield. They might as well have just released the Silva and left the Aegis off because of the whole nothing that the shield does.

 

Come to think of it, maybe they should just make a stand alone Silva. They already split up a weapon once (Nami Skyla -> Nami Solo).

Again, I get that people focus on the shield. Regardless of the validity of your stated reasons, I'm offering a different approach that focuses on game mechanics rather than concepts.

[shut]

Yes, heavy weapons have a higher multiplier (not 24x but 6x) and fist weapons have multi-hit ground finishers. But does the higher damage make them ground finisher focused or is that merely a feature of the weapon classes? Besides the extra damage, what other incentive is there to focus on performing ground finishers? Do they have first hit attacks in their combos that knock enemies down? What I'm suggesting will give the S&A over a 50% (properly modded of course) chance per hit to knock enemies down and higher ground finisher damage. This gives two reasons to focus the weapon on ground finishers: easier to knock down targets and high ground finisher damage.

 

To your second bullet, I understand that it's a shield and sword. As I've already stated, I'm not focusing on that; I'm focusing on game mechanics.

 

I think the 24x is coming from the 400% Stealth Multipliers being applied during finishers, but yeah, that hasn't been appearing too reliably as of late. Not on my Dragkana, anyways. XD

 

As for your main point: Heavy weapons have by far the largest knockdown capabilities in the game with jump attacks; incessant knockdowns don't have to be part of a regular EEEE combo or anything in order to have a huge role in your gameplay. It's not a focus, of course, but it's a very prominent feature and definitely worthy of noting if you want to use a weapon that's good with finishers.

Right now, if you want a "Finisher-focused" weapon, then your best choices by far are "Fists/Sparring" or "Heavy". The difficulty:effectiveness ratio of performing Ground Finishers with these weapons is already as low as we need it to be.

 

I'm not saying no to turning the S&A into a proc-based weapon, of course, but I'm just saying that focusing on its Finisher capabilities won't exactly turn it into anything special compared to other weapons that can already do the same job five times as efficiently (or more, depending on how many enemies are surrounding you). That, and the defensive capabilities of the S&A really need to be addressed before the offensive.

Edited November 8, 2014 by SortaRandom

[Otaiken]

That's pretty close to my idea. Though I would like the CC to be integrated into combos rather than status chance.

 

One thing is that thje finisher would have to be much, MUCH faster. Especially the ground finisher on SA is painfully slow. This could apply to all melee weapons to be honest, since finishers are too slow in general. I like the animations, but I would really love something simple (and maybe in a few variations) and quick than this whole dance. Until then finishers won't be very viable.

 

Also, finishing every low level grunt would be annoying. Imho the jump attack should get bonus damage to enemies that are already knocked down/stunned (by something OTHER than jump attack, so you don't get people spamming jump attack like crazy). This would give you a way to deal with groups.