Mandatory "Please look at ascendant again" post of the patch.

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Belegur85#5784 wrote:

Out of interest, what builds have you all played as scion in the past that you don't think are viable any longer?

Gonna respond to this as I have nothing to disagree on with the rest.

I mean, Scion is my favourite class and has been since her release. A lot of the skills I played on her simply aren't played at all anymore because we have better options. I'll go over some memorable ones though that aren't playable on Scion these days:

many variants of Spectral throw - elemental buzzsaw most memorable (kinda dead skill atm)

My all time favourite: Ancestral Warchief - Bringer of Rain - Facebreaker crit.
Died because it relied on the old hierophant node which had +1 totem for skills slotted in helm and power charges when you create a totem. Of course melee totems are removed now.

Elemental hit (also dead-ish)
KB Wander (Int stacking wander exists these days I guess)
Varunastra Ground Slam (this died when offhand statsticks died)
Poet's pen - Spellslinger. (Kinda also dead-ish)
Cospri's Malice CoC - other coc builds are playable as Scion, but Cospri's specifically isn't.
Any minion build, specifically holy relic.
Armageddon Brand nuke - Idk if arma brand is playable in endgame these days, but this relied on the old chieftain node anyway.

Those are old and kinda dead because the game has simply changed. Here are some more recent ones which died because ascendant is simply weak:

Fire Omniscience Reap. Died when Chieftain node died, and then it lost Raider too. Currently probably would have to be Elementalist.
Righteous Fire - Fire trap. Again, died when Chieftain died. Only Lance's lowlife stacker variant remains playable today, completely different from before.
Cold Dot Ascendant. Died when Raider was removed. Probably Occultist or Elementalist now.

If you notice a pattern, it's that Chieftain node death killed fire builds on Scion, which used to be strong.

Other than that, I do think one of Scion's problems is that we are in an ES meta, and yet, she gets NONE of the ES scaling from ANY of the classes that have it naturally - Hiero, Guardian, Occultist, Elementalist (golems) or Trickster. Five of the Ascendancies in the game get ES simply for clicking the node on their tree, and not ONE of the relevant Ascendant passives have any ES scaling. Honestly, if she had some of that ES scaling, she would be a very competitive option for FRoSS, or EE/Eblade setups such as Eviscerate ignite, Smite, Molten Strike, AWoSR etc.

I played her not long after she was release as well, my first character that I played extensively. I played COC Icenova. At the time I think Assassin was the stronger choice, but it was good to play Scion.

Since then I have not played her extensively to the end game, so my knowledge of her is probably not to you guys level. I played P.Conc, also not the strongest class for the skill, up to maps, and have been doing a lot of campaign with her which has been really good, but nothing up to end game bosses. I think its okay if builds drop off so long as they are being somewhat replaced, which sound like you are all saying is a bit of a problem currently.

I looked over your rundown. I agree they are pretty much all underwhelming compared with the classes themselves. As you point out, the power of scion needs to come from the synergy of being able to pair these things, to enable builds in a way that would not be possible on other classes. If the synergy is not powerful, it is going to have trouble keeping up with classes that naturally have this synergy in their ascendancy. Combined with the extra skill points, tree access and attribute versatility for not having 4 points.

Another good point you make, the Raider path was one of the very strong ascendant choices. I don't actually understand why they changed the raider. I thought it was a good class. I have played warden since the release and found it interesting too, but if someone knows why raider got removed and is able to inform me I would be interested to know. It does seem like this is not a strong node in general compared to what the raider was giving, which was pretty generically good for many builds. Particularly if you don't want to use tinctures.

I think your point about ES is most valid though. ES is too strong in my opinion as well, because it is too easy to get high levels with the new bases. Since Scion is not heavily connected to any of the defense types, like a lot of the other classes, it may of relatively fallen behind in this aspect of survivability. If they are going to leave the bases and ES levels as they are, I think some other aspects of the game need to be buffed to keep parity with them. Life pool for example. Scion life wheel got nerf not that long ago, so any builds going through that pathing took a bit of a hit, where maybe it should of been left as it was, and instead buffed the other life nodes on the tree to make them competitive with pathing over to that wheel or taking it as well.