Skill Feedback: Molten Blast

Despite the issues with Titan that countless players have pointed out, I have stuck with my Titan in order to try and make my molten blast build work in the endgame.

Having done so, I think that I have good feedback regarding this build archetype. Below are 5 clear and concise points of feedback that highlight the problems with the skill's design and a brief suggestion on how to resolve all of these issues with a small change.

First Point
First, across Titan's feedback there is a theme of Titan having far too many downsides and not enough upsides. Molten Blast is another clear example of this.

The clearest example of this is in the skill's tags. Molten blast only has three tags: AOE, Projectile, and Fire. This does not even match the precedent established in other long range melee skills.

Falling thunder on the monk, for example, is tagged with Melee, Slam, Projectile, AOE, and Thunder. Falling thunder has 10X the scaling potential of molten blast since the former can scale with slam mods, + melee skill mods, power charges, is faster, and it has no short-range penalty.

Having played Monk - the only other melee class right now - I can say it feels like Titan was developed by a completely different team than Monk. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in the case of such massive performance descrepencies, it makes Titan feel incredibly under-rewarding because it feels like the kiss-curse design approach is disproportionately lopsided in punishing Titan.

Second Point
Second, Molten Blast's scaling vectors come with inherent downsides that are crippling and un-fun.

Titans have almost no access to attack speed. So to make Molten Blast feel good, you need a ton of extra projectiles and AOE. This means taking scattershot, increased AOE support, and using two two-handed maces to double its projectiles.

But doing this means that Scattershot and duel-wielded 2-H Maces come with LESS attack speed as a downside. This means Molten Blast Titan faces a whopping 50% less attack speed modifier.

Third Point
Doubling the projectiles from dualwielded 2-handers should have a cost or challenge to overcome, but Titans already face such a challenge in meeting the strength required to dual wield 2-hand maces. You might compare this to how Monk must scale power charges to make falling thunder viable, however also note that falling thunder does not come with implicit downsides (it only gets better with power charges and scaling).

In the endgame, I need a whopping 636 strength just to duel wield high-end 2-H maces. This is a very challenging target for many players, and likely makes this build unplayable in SSF.

Fourth Point
Another glaring issue with Molten Blast is that a major short-range penalty is baked into the skill. The projectiles do not shotgun or even fully explode on short range targets.

In a game where hasted monsters exist, you are often forced to hit enemies up close before a single attack of molten blast goes off. This makes the skill feel extremely punishing before you have attack speed, which is already nerfed by a 30% LESS skill-modifier, and a further 20% LESS on the mandatory support, Scattershot.

Fifth Point
Let's assume that the design intention was to make molten blast so limited in its scaling options, that it could not be used as a primary skill. I would first ask, why is this limitation so unevenly applied to Titan and not other classes?

But then, I would say this: if Molten Blast is meant to be a "secondary skill" why does it not have the tags that it would need to scale properly with its brother-skill.

The obvious choice to pair it with is perfect strike, which also has fire scaling and fills the gap of needing a short range skill when you're being overun.

Tabling the implicit downsides of perfect strike itself, we do not have the scaling options needed to make both of these skills feel good when used together because perfect strike scales best with +melee skills and molten blast cannot scale with this modifier.

Suggestions for Resolution

Note that I think any one of these suggestions could partially if not entirely fix molten strike as a skill. Though pairing all of these improvements together would serve to make Titan Molten Blast a build that's at least competitive with Monk. Titan would always have the downside of being slower than Monk since Titan has no quick blink or movement ability with 2-H maces, so I think a massive power adjustment in Titan's favor is warranted.

1.) Remove the short-range penalty on Molten Blast so that its projectiles can explode on up-close targets.

2.) Remove the inherent LESS Attack Speed modifier on the gem, or it give it more baseline projectiles so that we're not forced to use scattershot to make it viable.

3.) Give Molten Blast the melee skill tag so that it can be properly scaled with its clear brother-skill, Perfect Strike.

Pairing #2 and #3 together would I think make this build feel fun and rewarding to play in terms of scaling options, while preserving the limitation that you also need a skill to resolve short-range damage issuses.

I agree with you, I play dual wield 2h with Molten Blast and the low attack speed really is something that takes the fun out of it a bit.

Also, I completely agree with your assessment that it should also have the melee tag. Being usable only with maces that are solely, but that skill, melee, does not make any sense at all. If maces had +projectile skill level at least, but that's unique to ranged weapons as well. So another downside here, you can't have maces that increase the spell's level.

It is a fun build and it would really gain a lot by those changes suggested.

Great post! I also play molten blast, and funnily enough i came across this post cus i wanted to make sure is molten blast not getting scaled by + ranks to melee skills, which doesnt make any sense!? Everything you said about the titan class with speed problem and other stuff i 100% agree and needs to be changed..

I tried molten blast and got annoyed by it.

Attack speed and the animation of it is awful having to constantly roll back or gauge the exact distance so all the projectiles hit at once on a single target was tiring.

Bad map terrain is either a determent or a benefit due to the physics of having it "shoot" up or down hills

You can't create cool combos with "wall" skill gems like frost wall or shield wall because the walls are not treated as such and are coded as a "mob" meaning you can't shotgun projectiles and have them bounce off. What ends up happening is one will "eat" the other while the rest of the projectiles pass through.

The problem is the warrior skills in general. Except the basic mace attack, every single other skill except shield charge has a noticable or glaringly large animation/activation timer before it occurs, during which if there are enemies nearby that can hit you, you are frequently stunned even when invested in stun threshold modifiers. Being stunned results in the skill being cancelled obviously.

Even with a One Handed Mace with attack speed, and with the speed increase for One handed weapons, the skills are still abysmally slow, meaning any monster with ranged attacks or not glacially slow can reach you from half a screen away before your skill activates.

Stun threshold needs to be buffed to prevent damn near any hit from stunning warriors if they are meant to be in melee range, and animation/cast timers for warrior skills need to be halved at a minimum, as even with getting the available skill/attack speed nodes with a fast weapon, its still absolutely terrible.

The most annoying thing about this is the hero's forward movement when attacking. It's just awful.
In some cases, this leads to death. When the hero is standing somewhere behind a puddle of poison, and after the attack he ends up in this very puddle

And also noticed that the hero misses when the enemy is very close. It looks like the projectiles just pass through the enemy. I think this is because the hero moves forward and intersects with the enemy model. It happens that the projectile simply does not "see" the enemy

It is honestly crazy that molten blast is attached to a melee weapon and gets no effect from + melee gem level. Kinda ruins the skill for me since its scaling will just be inferior to other gems which can reach level 28 and higher.

anyone tried to use 70% increased damage from "in your face" notable?

Deadly moving forward is the most stupid thing.

Great feedback. Before they change the skill, using a focus in offhand slot will stop the character from step forward for whatever reason. It’s a loss for some damage, but at least you can get some resistance, es and one elemental damage mod on focus.