This topic is about helbore’s blessings ONLY. Not the marks or how good the weapon itself is.
Please keep that in mind.
As it currently stands even with the addition of 2 new blessings in the newest patch, helbore only has 2 viable blessings, everything else just doesnt compare.
In this thread i intend to breakdown the available blessings and advise how it should be improved.
The problem with most of the blessings is that they are not compatible with the role of helbore which is a precision 1 shot-1 kill ranged assassin gun. And also they do not make use of the helbore’s unique charged shots way of firing.
Armoursbane - Adds 20% Brittleness based on charged shot - very bad blessing because the brittleness only sees value on the 2nd shot you take. This would be a very good blessing if only the “brittleness” was changed to “rending”. Brittleness is about a team taking down an opponent together, helbore is supposed to be a high damage assassin weapon, not fast firing chip damage one.
Problem - Value applies only on the second hit, while it should apply on the 1st.
Solution - Change Brittleness to Rending - “+5-20% rending based on charge level”
Hot-Shot - Weakspot hits gain 50 Cleave - Very bad blessing because Helbore already has innate weakspot cleave and adding more to that would be pointless as the number of times you will come across more then 2 lined up headshots is extremely low even on auric hi-gauntlet. Also doesnt use the “charge” of helbore, making it lose its identity.
Problem - The useful attribute “cleave” is locked behind a very rare situation (headshots only) Also cleave stat does not depend on charge of the weapon.
Solution - Change the conditional from “weakspot hit” to “critical hit” - "+5-15 cleave on critical hit, based on charge level.
No Respite + Falter - Up to 20% damage on hit (staggered enemy), scaling with stagger.
And increased stagger on enemies on weakspot hit.
The problem is that this blessing depends on a 2nd blessing “Falter” which increases stagger to mildly useful levels, considering the only enemies you will ever need to headshot more then once are ragers (if you dont have MF stacks) and carapace enemies this is another blessing that is far too situational to be properly useful.
Problem - takes 2 different blessings to be useful and its value is useful too rarely
Solution - Combine the 2 blessings into 1 and add the charge : “increased stagger on enemies by 50-100% and increases damage on staggered enemies by 15-25% based on stagger and charge level”
Sustained fire - No opinion
Infernus - Adds 4 burn stacks on crit up to max of 12 stacks. Why is it that helbore inflicts the same amount of burn stacks as a normal small laspistol? The burn stacks inflicted should be at least 50% higher and increase with charge.
Problem - Inflicts far too few stacks for how high the base damage of helbore shots are. Also, once more, doesnt make use of the weapon charge.
Solution - Increase the amount of stacks the weapon can inflict on a fully charged shot - “adds 4-8 burn stacks on crit, up to a maximum of 24 stacks. Burn stacks increase with charge level.”
Surgical and Weight of Fire
These 2 blessings are absolutely flawless and should stay the way they are.
Honestly i have no idea how those numbers translate and how they work in the game.
A percent is easy to understand but no idea how “+50 cleave” translates to actual damage in-game.
No it isn’t. That’s a big reason why old power stacking autopistol was so insane. As soon as you had enough power to hit a cleave breakpoint whoops that’s another 2-3x damage multiplier slapped on top.
Its actually -50% (T4) hitmass on weakspot hits and it affects the bayonet. Being the only blessing potentially affecting the bayonet without being turbo dumb is a thing (I’ve thought of similar concepts but its hard not to work some better agile/weapon specialist in to have any effect at all…). It does at least that much, letting you easily control 3 Bruisers with stabs.
Very good post with a lot of reasonable ideas!
I agree with @alsozara ‘s assessment though, that if cleave was triggered on Body shots, it needed to be reduced a lot.
Ok thank you for clarifying. That actually is pretty good as is then. Maybe they could make it bayonet only, fix the wording to match this, then give it some additional bonus to compensate the lack of effect on ranged.
Could be something small like +finesse damage, bayonet attack speed would be pretty cool.
Having a dedicated bayonet blessing would be pretty nice, and it sounds like this one is already halfway there.
Though the question does follow what would you drop for it? Surgical and Weight of Fire are both BIG for the actual shooting part of the gun. Definitely not suggesting either is overpowered but it is rather tricky to think of reasonable things that are going to compete with higher crit consistency and a large effective fire rate increase.
As OP has pointed out hellbore spends most of its time one shotting things so it’s hard to imagine taking eg OP’s suggested combined falter + no respite over the current meta options. I guess being able to stop crushers in their tracks could be pretty strong utility if you tuned the bonus stagger that highbut you’d probably still rather just kill them faster.
Also want to add on the end here that the biggest changes I want for hellbore generally is
Reworking weapon specialist triggers so they’re less annoying and hellbore can use both bonuses with no swapping.
Change Mk III melee to a cleaving horizontal sweep (keep it much slower than the other 2 like it is now I think that’d be fair). Basically just rotate the attack 90 degrees and give it good stagger cleave lmao.
Good post, I agree with the vast majority of it, only thing I would leave max stacks of infernus as 12.
As you said the helbore is supposed to be a strong single target butst damage, I see no reason to give better DOT than the other weapons.
The point is that helbore already deals so much damage from single shot that the infernus blessing damage is so meaningless that it makes absolutely no sense. So the burn damage needs to be increased for it to be worth considering. Personally i’d just delete it entirely from the pool but someone out there might be using it.
I agree that the solution sound good… however, it sounds too good with surgical… I would use only that then…
Btw, when I played with helbore, I was chaining weakspot hits. So the condition does not seem a problem for me.
They can’t remove an existing blessing.
From my tests (true, it was a long time ago), falter + no respite is not good. I have not pushed them. Just has seen that this combination is far under what you can do with surgical. And worse, it is harder to proc this (weakspot hit) than surgical. But, must say that, as I said above, I tend to chain weakspot with helbore.
But still, even with that, this blessing combination does not seem good enough to justify to pick it.
This blessing is simply bad if you use the weapon as a precision gun. But if you use it like a sort of lasgun with the possibility to charge your shots… then it makes sense.
Must say that I’ve never used this blessing.
I disagree. However, I am not sure the limit of 12 stacks is something good. I know where it comes from and I know it could create problem on recon lasgun. But why not giving different values considering the weapon?
For me the limit, more than the number of stacks, is a problem.
edit: and I know that with an helbore, the increased limit won’t change really the utility of this blessing…this is a comment about the blessing itself.
They are good. From the time I played with helbore, surgical was for me mandatory. Weight of fire less.
Good to know. Sounds interesting. But not on MKIII (sadly).
Agree also
I really wish they could do that… The MK3 bayonet is useless.
So you think.
Why remove a blessing and mess with the new system and risking messing up everyone’s account, when you can just edit the 2 blessings? simply move everything from 1 blessing to the other and create a new blessing for the now empty one (as in the values). Simple.
In the old system blessings were shared, in this new system they’re all unique to the weapon family (i think).
As for the usefulness of the new version…If they’d rework the WS keystone it would be nice for the bayonet and allow for more varied playstyles.
If you have any better ideas im all open to them. Im just trying to make the useless blessings less useless without completely changing them.
Sorry, you misunderstood.
Both blessings in the system remain unchanged. They both exist like normal, the only thing you change is the inside of said blessings (and the name)
So the No-respite blessing simply gets more functionality, while falter is now empty.
You change the falter name to i donno “slaneshi thrust” and give it new functionality “+100% dmg on backstab +stun”
So after the rework, a weapon that had “no respite” and “falter” now has “no respite” and “slaneshi thrust”.
Its no different then simply changing a bunch of numbers for balance.
So 2 blessings? this is not what I read in your first post.
Anyways, we are agree on the most important thing. This blessing combination is bad and should be modified. And this applies not just for helbore but also for headhunter weapons (or lasguns).
While I wouldn’t exactly argue with combining the two generally, no respite is pretty solid on its own on other guns (eg shotguns).
Another alternative to merging those blessings globally would be to create a new hellbore exclusive blessing that has basically the combined effects (then take no respite and falter off its blessing list). This would ensure you don’t mess with other weapons at the same time.
Would falter + no respite be a bit much on shotguns? Probably not I guess when it’s competing with manstopper and scattershot. It’s something to consider though.
