meet the worst skill in the game: Perforate of Duality!

so, a skill review:

This skill is garbage.
( https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Perforate_of_Duality )

Perforate proper is a very bad skill with no redeeming qualities but the Duality variant is properly terrible. And the pre-made 'build' around the 'press a button every 4 seconds during a boss fight' just sucks and the clicking isnt the worst part.

- It forces stance skill use. Sadly stance skills are in a terrible spot: barely any tree support (Dance of Blades is undoubtedly the worst cluster in the game - nobody took it till week 3!), huge reservation, 2 skills (socket pressure is huge - Flesh and Stone likes to go with Maim) and completely unaffected by %aura effect. Stance skills need a rework or removal (and bake their power into banners or whatever!)

- The 'blood' AOE is HORRIBLE. it is like literally smallest AOE skill in the game. sure, it overlaps like crazy BUT any movement means the overlap hits empty space.

- The cadence is just bad. clear (go into blood) kill rare (go into sand) - this is tolerable, this is actually how regular Perforate plays. but anything that doesnt die in 3.5 seconds forces player to go into sand, do no damage until cooldown, then go into blood and repeat several times. It sucks, it is like resummoning animate weapon doing lab. But with 10% of the damage. How could anyone thought it is 'fun'? And please, do not ask people to forego this - the entire identity of this skill is the cadence. Without it the regular version is outright better in every way making Duality variant's existence a waste of 0s and 1s.

How to improve this clusterduck?

4s -> 10s. note - it is still terrible while fighting something that doesnt fall over immediately, but doing something pointless every 10s sucks less than every 4s..

Make the reach further. Currently blood stance's reach is literally 0.

Make the spikes 'track' the target. currently they hit the location but for any ~fast moving target, it will move away yet the 15 hit salvo takes noticeable time to finish.


Note: these, even if done simultaneously, will barely put it en par with Perforate. Perforate, skill with AOE component barely bigger than Melee Splash and damage effectiveness of rotten cabbage.


GGG. melee in 90% is numbers problem. but with this skill the numbers could be literally ten times better and it would still suck to play. this skill actually needs mechanical changes. or removal.

Worst skill? I'll take your word for it, I've noped out of perforate every time I've ever tried it, its just narrow finicky groundslam that literally leaves enemies untouched in the midle and outskirts of the AOE sometimes. Molten strike has similar area early on with vastly superior scaling. Every time I decide to try it go right back to town and graba different gem and tell myself never again.

Having stance passives on the tree at all is silly with how empty the design space is. Stances were seemingly someones cool idea that they moved on from and never fully fleshed out.

Where's the "fluidity and Resolve" stance

Fluidity makes you not stop in place when you use a melee skill (arguably a thing melee needs to ever compete with spells and ranged and notably used in other games to level the playingfield (Ultima Online for example)

Resolve allows you to hold your melee skill button down while you move around to charge it up and when you release you hit with X% damage multiplier for hits and ailments based on how long you charged up.


This is easy low hanging fruit IMO... How is there one stance in the game and its themed around sand and blood? Pocket sand and blood aren't even thematically a "stance" and their thematics are all mixed up... you throw pocket sand at single adversaries not packs of them and you would want to superficially cut multiple enemies in groups to discourage and disorganize them (an actual knife fighting tactic when facing more than 1 enemy AKA a "stance"). As it stands its logically and thematically backward.