I was curious about the actual effectiveness of cleave blessings such as Wrath (+40% cleave on hit) and the other one (+200% cleave on hitting 3 targets) on normal swords.
With a Catachan Sword Mk1 it seemed to me that cleave bonuses only affect the max number of targets hit. Cleave damage distribution and stagger distribution are completely unaffected.
So what does this mean ? Cleave bonuses aren’t as good as I thought, especially on weapons with already decent cleave.
For example, with Cat swords, horde-clearing isn’t that much improved, because the additional targets hit thanks to the cleave bonus only take the minimum damage (about 48-50 on Poxwalkers).
It is still useful to better control mixed hordes, which have greater hitmass.
I haven’t tested it in depth with other weapons, but basically if the minimum damage of the weapon is low, cleave bonuses are kinda bad…
Honestly I feel like rampage being changed to power throws blessing balance a bit out of whack on some weapons. Heavy sword and DC Sword as you pointed out already have respectable base cleave so having access to some power boosters generally puts you into “good enough to not want to invest more” levels of cleave.
I dunno I guess it’s also another case of mainly defensive utility (not small bonus either, tripling cleave sounds pretty crazy on paper) where focusing on offence is generally preferred both due to player psychological and also because the game itself favours that approach.
Perhaps giving the bonus effect of reducing cleave damage dropoff would cement a horde clearing niche for these blessings.
Despite the confusing name, cleave damage/stagger distribution is the amount of hit mass your attack can cleave through.
I think the devs have mentioned at one point that altering the damage falloff profile dynamically isn’t possible with the current system (the closest thing is BM, where it stays at the current falloff % when it procs instead of stepping down to the next falloff %)
The only cleave that is actually meaningful is “ignore hit mass bonus from armor” on critical hit, on weapons such as Evis. It allows you to just swing blindly into mixed groups (including bulwarks and crushers), and hit and stagger everything.
No amount of +% cleave will allow you to pass through a crusher or a bulwark, but ignoring hit mass will.
At the moment, the only utility I can think of for plain old +Cleave is for proccing Zealot’s Invocation of Death. Helps with Scourge procs too, but that doesn’t scale on enemy density anywhere near as effectively as Invocation of Death does
Does Ignore Hit Mass Bonus From Armour treat armoured enemies as zero hit mass, or does it just remove most of their hit mass? The description makes it sound like the latter but it wouldn’t be the first time a blessing’s description has been wrong
So… it’s plausible that Perfect Strike (Ignore Hit Mass From Armor) behaves the same way as Devastating Strike did prior to patch 13 (Ignore Hit Mass). Some days, it’s hard to tell if things are a simple mistake or if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
I’m not sure how Perfect Strike behaved before patch 13, so I can’t say for sure - I don’t recall it being as effective as Devastating Strike was, even though the proc condition is the same.
