Banners and Champions

I'd like to point out a bad interaction between two Champion Ascendency Nodes, Inspirational (Banners and Aura Effects) and First to Strike, Last to Fall (Adrenaline at Low Life).

Now, at first glance, you'd think that a mean Low-Life build could be made out of this, and it can do a good deal, I don't have Adrenaline on mine yet and I'm somewhat happy with it. However, you can't get Adrenaline by staying in Low-life, only once you hit the threshold. This means that you can't simply reserve life down to Low Life, you have to take damage down to it and hope you didn't take a death blow. Not impossible for a Champion by any means, but it detracts from reliable builds heavily.

Now, there are Hiltless builds and things that can trigger a relaible drop in Life to trigger Adrenaline, and it may not be terribly unreliable at like 60% Life reserved, but you'll likely have to find a way to sustain back up to that 60% threshold. Or there's an even more reliable way: Banners. Banners are here to save the day, because all you have to do is reliably use the Banner to reserve life past the 65% mark, and swapping your banner from ground to character will reliably trigger your Adrenaline!

Except that Inspirational makes Banners reserve 0 Life.

So, in essence, the two passives seem possible synergy nodes, but are actually very bad together in their current iteration. Either Adrenaline needs to be active on Low Life, or you can actually make Banner placement mechanics a reliable strategy choice on proccing Adrenaline with it. This would need to be done by removing (yes, "nerfing") the Zero Banner Mana Reservation portion of First to Strike, Last to Fall.

How are you getting a 10% reservation skill to take 65% of your life? Removing the zero reservation is not going to solve your problem.

If you're looking for a way to reliably trigger adrenaline before boss fights, try using Righteous Fire. First to Strike removes burning when you gain Adrenaline, so it'll switch RF off for you. Whatever you're trying to do via reservation is not at all the way to do this.

"

mark1030 wrote:

How are you getting a 10% reservation skill to take 65% of your life? Removing the zero reservation is not going to solve your problem.

I am gessing an ES build with Shav that reserves life just above the threshold, and then uses a banner to reach it.

The usual way to trigger Adrenaline is through a Blood Magic Blasphemy Curse. Since the buff lasts 20 seconds, that's usually plenty of time to get your health back up to full on life builds.

As far as low life builds go, I'd recommend a Blood Magic Clarity or Precision if you're close enough to do it. I agree the banners would be nice to use in this case, but banners not reserving mana as default is better overall since casting them reserves mana but placing them returns that mana. It's quite nice to not have to worry about the mana reservation at all on them, even if they are only 10% baseline.

It's not so much that it's the only option for triggering, I know there are alternatives. However, I will say that with a Banner mechanic such as reserving mana until you place the banner is asking you to utilize the reservation change, only to then be breaking the synergy meaninglessly by removing the reservation. That's what bothers me.

I get why there's a 10% reservation, sure, but is there any real benefit whatsoever to gaining back the reservation after placing the banner? Feels like a wasted mechanic without uses such as this. That's why it's bothersome that there's one tiny use for it, and it's countered on the same Ascendency's node which could have synergy otherwise.

I did highly consider trying to use a low-level Clarity/Precision gem to swap it back and forth. However, it just feels less smooth in the end. I'd prefer a Banner did this. Heck, a larger reservation gem could be used as well, but considering that Inspiration is the aura-based node of the Champion, filling your reservation requirements with such a heavy aura also feels like the wrong move. I guess bottom line, it feels like this is a potential calling for Banner Reservation requirements on the Banner-based Ascendency, and they blew it.