I’m sure this has been asked for before;
I’m throwing a bunch of my own ideas.
I think blood rapier is an interesting idea, but it is just way too clunky, and I hope there are some QoL changes snuck into an update for this.
I summarize Blood Rapier as lacking severely from:
- swinging at the air a lot
- whiffing attacks
- taking too long to build up to its’ identity (high spike damage at max stacks)
- having almost no mobility (mostly in Flouring & Finish, but the range is small)
- 2/3 skills mandatory to play into its identity
- 1/3 skills being an awkward choice (Flurry). It’s weird because its’ only purpose in the blood rapier tree is to +++ the bleed duration, it’s starting damage is weak and you end up being staggered out of it or being forced to dodge during ramp-up. If I am playing for Bleeds this is the obvious ability to not pick, and use something else from Grace tree.
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Allow us to cancel flourish and cast finish instantly after activation. I think this is a fair trade-off, you lose flourish damage and stagger, but you get finish and bleed blowups before a target yeets into distance and you end up swinging at the air. Also flourish has a strange knockback direction sometimes, and makes finish whiff.
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Allow Finish to turn like Fleche., even if it’s a tighter radius. This is mostly to help with landing the attack to consume bleeds.
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Change the last perk on Tondo. The marginal distance between 4-5 meters is impractical to play around. I suggest - dodge forward for increase range (4 → 7). This reduces the accuracy tolerance for Tondo, at the expense of “safety”, since it requires dodging forward.
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Introduce a new passive that applies Tondo bleeds without Tondo, for a single target. This democritizes bleeds within blood rapier and doesn’t demand that Blood Rapier have 2 must pick abilities, but retains Tondo as the premium tool to apply many bleeds at once with some range.
For example, on crit or charged heavy attack, apply 1 tondo stack.
I think the above, relatively low-hanging-fruit changes, would improve the Blood Rapier QoL by a lot.