I have a Thunder Hammer with the blessing: Shock & Awe. It indicates ‘ignores enemy hit mass for 0.5s on enemy death’.
I thought this would be great as it would allow the hammer to cleave when using the power attack. It should, as the enemy is certainly killed by the powered attack.
The blessing does nothing at all, the hammer immediately rebounds on powered attack even when striking grunts.
Should I report this as a bug maybe?
Don’t think that’s a bug and pretty useless for the powered up state. The hit bounce / recovery is a special design for the thunder hammer special. Has nothing to do with any stats.
Ignores enemy hit mass can be useful during regular heavy swings though. If you kill one first you get the benefit throughout the rest, but not 100% on that.
Ignoring Hit Mass for this weapon is pretty key for turning it into an reliable crowd control weapon, because by default the weapon can quickly hit a limit on how many enemies it can cleave. Unfortunately, Shock & Awe has way too short of an uptime at 0.5 seconds for the hammers slow heavy attacks to function in any meaningful way.
The up time of the buff from Shock & Awe needs to match the slow attack speed of the weapon and be more in line with other blessings up times.
Maybe it’s meant to activate within the span of one swing? Like if you kill the first enemy you hit, then every enemy hit after that in the same attack have their hitmass ignored. I’m not sure if that’s how it works though.
That is correct. It is only useful for normal swings. But it is very useful for normal swings. if you kill a few guys before hitting a Crusher with a normal heavy swing you can literally knock him over. This is handy in mixed groups where you might need to clear the chaff in melee before going for the big bois with your powered attacks. The 0.5s is long enough in horde conditions, assuming you kill someone every swing (and you should), that you can literally see the increase in effect with each stack.
Your hammer is probably the problem here. The Crowd Control stat is not a dump stat. It controls swing speed. I experience the effects of my hammer gaining stacks of Shock and Awe in almost every horde.
A blessing shouldn’t be worthless with average modifiers. That’s terrible design. I’m skeptical it works better with higher crowd control modifier, and I’m certainly not going to risk putting it on one of my good hammers when reblessing comes out.
My problem with shock and awe is slaughterer already gives power, which increases damage, cleave, and stagger, so at least on paper seems like just better shock and awe in most ways. Yes if you had both you’d probably have a bit of a horde monster but there are still things I’d much rather have paired with slaughterer than S&A.
I’d personally just give it a bit longer duration so stacking it is more practical (like 1.5 seconds?). I think it’d definitely have a place then.
After finally getting to test it out, I came to the same conclusion. Stacking +power with Slaughterer and even maybe Headtaker (I didn’t get to try the 2 together) is just more effective all-around because keeping up the stacks is easy with these 2 blessings.
On Heresy, with about +10% Power you always kill a Poxwalker and injure 2 others with a single Heavy swing. If you stack more +Power, the damage on the 2nd and 3rd targets becomes quite respectable.
With a high enough slaughterer tier you even start killing bruisers if they’re the first enemy cleaved and can cleave multiple Ragers (with the bonus impact feat you can pretty much hard CC them). Can also facilitate one shotting muties. I’ve been told Thrust is the secondary blessing for god roll (makes more one shots possible and a bunch way more consistent). Personally I’ve got slaughterer 2 and momentum on mine which feels pleasantly safe.
I got shock and awe T4 recently and it pretty much does nothing. The up time is just too short. This blessing us just badly designed for slow weapon like Thunder Hammer. It procs on kill and only last 0.5 sec so you will never get more then 1 stack on heavy swings since your damage after 1st target rarely kills anything. Light swings on the other hand are more single target focused. Basically to make any use of this blessing you need perfect conditions for it. And even then it doesn’t do that much. Compared to brutal momentum on axe (that does similar damage) this is worthless blessing that only takes up a slot and lowers your chances of getting a decent blessing. Blessings should need perfect conditions to be of any use. And if they need these rare conditions, they should make big impact. Like Devastating strike on chain sword (ignore mass in crit for 2+ sec depending on tier).
Yeah that’s pretty much the problem wiith it and why its completely pointless.
You cannot ever keep up any stacks of it on Thunder Hammer… 0.5 seconds is about how long it takes to wind up the weapon for a heavy swing in order to cleave in the first place, so the the single stack you get drops off before the weapon can even swing to get any benefit from it.
Yes, I agree, someone didn’t think this one through.
