Rake leveling!

Great news!
A leveling skill that is quite effective has been found! If you use Rake- regardless of class and build, you can go through campaign pretty decently fast.
One single skill the entire campaign.

Yep, who cares about skill and build diversity, progression and evolution.
Lets make a campaign so boring and tedious that only two or three out of the hundreds of skills and builds feels good playing.

That is the true mark of a great game. Diversity!

Shouldn't have said anything, not it will get nerfed XD

Thanks OP, it's the only phys skill in the entire spear tree that's worth something and now it'll get the armour exlosion treatment.

Jokes aside i agree it's way too OP though. Not in the sense that it trivializes the game but that everything else a spear has is so bad that it's the only skill worth using. And we're stuck in this state for like another 4 months.

rake-stomp trivializes the game.

It needs a serious nerf, because right now it's the best leveling skill in the game for ANY class. (as OP said)

Rake-stomp-strength-stack has:

- better survivability (building strength gives you health)
- better damage (Easily 300% more dmg than any other melee skills)
- better mobility (you can travel 1/2 a screen every cast)
- better mana usage (you can use rank 3 rake forever)
- no need for weapon uprades (damage scales based on strength)
- best stun (because it gets the physical and melee bonuses)

Let's use Quarterstaff Ice Strike as a baseline, since it's a similarly spammable AOE melee skill.

I think Rake-Stomp-strength would be balanced somewhere near 75% of the damage of Ice Strike, because you already get better travel, and free health survivability. If Rake-Stomp was 100% of the damage of Ice Strike, what reason would you ever have to level Ice Strike (or any other melee skill on any weapon)? You wouldn't. you would just rake-stomp.

GGG could just move stomp from tier 1 to tier 3 (act 5), where gem doesnt seem to be overpowered.

Rake is complete and utter dogshit in the campaign. It is literally only stomping ground that makes it good at all. Try playing Rake without it and you'll end up just spamming Spear Stab with Bloodlust 95% of the time.

I used Rake without stomp for ages (because I usually don’t watch build guides) but it was pretty much trash.

Then I got hard stuck on a boss so I checked out a guide, which recommended Stomping Ground. That makes all the difference.

nearly any players that don’t follow a guide wouldn’t figure this out. Then again, most people use guides

"

TheBalrogslayer#7574 wrote:

I used Rake without stomp for ages (because I usually don’t watch build guides) but it was pretty much trash.

Then I got hard stuck on a boss so I checked out a guide, which recommended Stomping Ground. That makes all the difference.

nearly any players that don’t follow a guide wouldn’t figure this out. Then again, most people use guides

Anything else I should do other than Stomping Ground?

If you think rake-stomp falls off at Act 5, you should look at Splinter of Loratta. Because with this bad-boy, rakestomp should apply absolutely insane accumulating poison dmg. (assuming poison applies on stomp dmg instances.. have not tested) This will be insane on bosses.. and combined with plague burst and/or some other poison proccing, it probably would be decent at mapping. I'll report when I'm able to try it.

"

AnimGamer305#7666 wrote:

GGG could just move stomp from tier 1 to tier 3 (act 5), where gem doesnt seem to be overpowered.

The thing is, stomping ground is also used on shield charge, where it's not stupid overpowered, because shield charge has a cooldown. Taking it away from shield charge users seems not great. They could move *rake* from tier 3 to tier 5, but honestly rake-stomp feels much more "fluid" leveling than whirling-tornado-carpel-tunnel or wet-noodle-rake-bleed... rakestomp just has about 3-5x too much dmg.

In fact, here are a bunch of things they could do:

- do "something" to bring rakestomp dmg down about 3-5x at low levels
- make stomping ground dmg also scale with the skill cooldown (dmg=str * 15% * cooldown, so you would have to give rake a cooldown for stomping ground to do any dmg on it)
- move rake from tier 3 to tier 5
- lower stomping ground strength scaling, and add a weapon dmg scaling (dmg=str*20% + weapondmg) this would make it less effective on spear compared to 1h mace, because you need dex to equip high dmg spear...

"

Phukka#4656 wrote:

Anything else I should do other than Stomping Ground?

At low levels, you socket stomping ground and brutality, prioritize (melee strike range > str > attack speed > dmg up to ~150% > dexterity) in your passive tree... equip shield charge for mega zooming around, and Herald of Ash for AOE, and watch-for/buy that unique spear from above. I plan to also experiment with bleed/incision chance in passive tree, to get a bleed that scales on stomp instances. (the rake bleed does no dmg)

Huntress Rake/Stomp Strength Stack Silliness - PoE 2 Huntress Build Guide

I just did a focused rake-stomp+shieldcharge run and finished act 1 in 2h33m

When I have time I'll post the video to try to get rake-stomp nerfed, because this is so out of line than *any* other build i've ever tried. It feels like POE1 flicker strike, if you could use it at level 3 and attribute scale it to insanity. I know it's "fun" to find wacky builds, but this one is just absolutely broken, and I thought they said pure attribute scaling was going away.

"

TheBalrogslayer#7574 wrote:

I used Rake without stomp for ages (because I usually don’t watch build guides) but it was pretty much trash.

Then I got hard stuck on a boss so I checked out a guide, which recommended Stomping Ground. That makes all the difference.

nearly any players that don’t follow a guide wouldn’t figure this out. Then again, most people use guides

naa I figured and a lot of people surely figured. It is not hard once you use the skill and notice it is a movement skill.