This is generally true, but not in its entirety. You always run BM on Caxe5 but on Zealot I found shred pretty interchangeable with headtaker. You can say it also increases your “damage” yes, but the point of taking it is to have better DR uptime.
You have a point, and I’m not in general against nerfing damage blessings, I just like how impactful they are, and I want to see utility blessings having the same level of impact. Currently, they are pretty useless due to them either being weak or redundant. Glory hunter is a very good example of something that is overkill on Veteran and doesn’t do enough on Zealot to be useful (at least on 5+).
I think this is also where it’s important to differentiate balancing blessings against other available blessings, and balancing a weapon without blessings against the same weapon with blessings. Autopistol is definitely a pretty extreme but by no means solitary example of a weapon being absolutely night and day with vs without having optimal blessings.
In general I’m a bit more bothered by the latter balance issue than the former. I don’t think it’s healthy in any respect for a grey version of a weapon you get while leveling to paint such a varying and often inaccurate picture of what that weapon CAN do.
I am for sure heavily in favour of tuning down blessings like pinning fire, heavy sword head taker, slaughterer etc while tuning up the base stats on the weapons that get those blessings where appropriate. I think that’s the most sensible place to start and will incidentally help balancing blessings against each other by making the power blessings especially feel a bit less mandatory. From there it would be a bit easier to see a path to ensuring each weapon has its own set of potential competitive blessing loadouts.
It definitely does need to be tuned carefully though. For instance you could nerf slaughterer values across the board and probably not need to tweak power sword damage up much if at all to compensate (obviously depending on how big a nerf to slaughterer we are talking). Meanwhile nerf slaughterer across the board then don’t heavily tweak chain axe base damage, cleave, and stagger values up to compensate and you’ve effectively just deleted that weapon from the game.
Kinda a lot of work but especially if the crafting system isn’t going to be improved much from here I think narrowing the gap in damage potential between weapons with and without blessings in many cases is kinda critical to making more weapons accessible to trying out.
I’ve been noticing this again and again in the last days, it feels like the blessings were made by different teams and then all thrown in at the same time without reviewing them.
Some of them are fantastic, some do absolutely nothing, some just don’t work.
Like Blazing spirit on a force sword that has such an abysmal critical chance that I only ever actually notice 1 or 2 enemies catch fire during a round, only for them to then die because my sword hit them again, not because they were on fire.
Come on, why so stingy?
We have machine pistols that can literally wipe out dozens of enemies in seconds; for a blazing force sword to keep up with that with its current critical chance, it would have to catch all enemies in front of you on fire with enough stacks to kill them outright, and even then it would be such a rare and unreliable occurrence that you’d be better off with slaughterer + deflector anyways.
Blessings in this game are going to have to be a BIG target of future balance patches, because the current state is just idiotic.