First of all, I’d like to thank Jacob Crouch for making the weapon. Hopefully he’ll get more opportunity to design fun and interesting weapons in the future. (daggers pls)
What i like:
- This weapon clearly made with skill expression in mind and it rewards the player for being better.
- Most skills don’t have long animation locks, it feels fluid.
- You can cancel dodge animation with Evade/Fleche which is good for both combat and traversing the world faster.
What i dislike:
There is very little reason and opportunity to mix your build with both trees. I feel like I’m being forced to commit in either one of directions. And there is very little opportunity for build variety. I played with Ice Gauntlet, Great Axe and Fire staff and i felt like i could pick any 3/6 skills they provide without feeling bad about it. Not the same with Rapier.
Why do i think that happens:
- Rapier has less passives that are not tied to specific active skill than any other weapon (10).2nd lowest is Ice Gauntlet at 12.
- Rapier is one of 3 weapons that uses Active skill’s passive as “ultimate” passive (others are hammer and ice gauntlet). I dislike that design in general.
*You can’t effectively use Tondo and F&F without each other. I don’t think any other weapon has this sort heavy of co-dependence in their trees. - Even some “free” passives that are not tied to a skill basically require you to have Tondo (Unerring, Heavy Puncture, To the Bone).
Suggestions:
- “Ultimate” passive free of any skills that applies/interacts with bleeding.
- Flurry shouldn’t have bleed passive that you have to take if you want to reach “Finalize”. Maybe move it to the end? Or change “To the bone” to something else. I want be able to use Grace tree + Flurry without wasting points.
- Make an early passive in blood tree that has a wording like “after using a lunge ability your next attack consumes bleed”. This will free F&F from Tondo/bleed build to make it usable for Grace users and will allow Blood tree users to pick Fleche as alternative since it also has lunge.
TL;DR: great weapon but needs more build variety.