Absolutely not the same.
If you look at the citation, i highlighted the part, where it explicitly says “discounts any targets killed with a clean weakspot hit”.
Discounting targets that were killed with a weakspot hit, would mean
no hit mass for those, who are killed with a weakspot hit
regular hit mass for all other enemies that you hit
The descriptions given by FS are often wrong, so this might not be how it will work. But going by the description that we got, this is what it would mean.
All that said, i hope that the explanation in the devpost is wrong, and that the blessing actually will be “if your attack does a weakspot kill, the hitmass of that enemy as well as all other further enemies hit by that attack, will be ignored.”.
You’re reading it the same way I am. Others have pointed out that some weapons may not reach the breakpoint required in one hit, so they’ll only cleave some of the time - tacaxes being the one I’ve seen mentioned most frequently. It doesn’t have the innate cleave to compensate for BM downtime (unlike the heavy sword), so not getting one-shot weakspot kills will impact it quite a bit
EDIT: Flawless’ post reminded me of the description above - if it only ignores the hit mass of the target you kill with a weakspot hit, your cleave will be significantly less for the most part (unless you can kill multiple enemies with a single hit, accounting for falloff). I keep forgetting about that mention, since the blessing text we saw reads like Devastating Strike’s current behaviour (which ignores hit mass for the entire attack).
I think giving axes the capability to be cleaving machines was a mistake from day 1 (since they’re pretty much exclusively Strikedown, for heavy-hitting single target damage), but the cat’s out of the bag now so… making BM ignore hit mass of just the enemy that dies is probably a bit too far in the other direction based on our current knowledge of cleave, weakspot damage, damage/HP values etc
Depends on what there will be on stat nodes and feats, maybe some cleave stuff. Doubt they will completely brick something (or should i say “i hope”), people will not forgive them that this time. However most people also don’t like to relearn stuff in games, so any gameplay changes will cause a drama.
Like if caxes will take some skill and learning to use but at the same time will reward you with great performance, some people still gonna say it’s complete trash, cause you need to learn push more buttons now.
@FatsharkCatfish I know that FS has expressed their stance on crafting locks recently enough (so I’m not going to go down that route), but has there been any consideration for a once-off reset of existing crafting locks to accompany patch 13 as a “fresh start”, seeing as how there are a lot of changes coming?
I mean, it isn’t unusual for some weapons to get vastly more benefit than others from particular blessings. It’s just part of how the meta is constructed.
If BM really will just ignore hit mass for the particular enemy that was killed by the headshot, the next best weapon will be whichever one has horizontal light strikes + enough damage to oneshot trash enemies.
I dunno even 1 enemy especially when it’s a bruiser or elite is a heck of a lot compared to the base cleave of Caxe. Then it also comes with a weak spot bonus to boot. Genuinely think people have been spoiled by how off the wall bonkers current BM on Caxe is.
Will have to wait and see obviously but from what we’ve heard so far I strongly doubt any of my Caxes are going in the bin. Heck if they fix Ogryn shovel body priority too and the weak point bonus helps hit breakpoints it might go from an unused blessing to a competitive one on the ol pooper scoop.
All this endeavour sounds really great… in theory! Hope the released product will reflect all this greatness (let’s do not forget this is FS we’ re talking about).
