First thing: The spear looks like it will be so much fun to use and the art is amazing.
I'm a Power Virtuoso lover. I don't think there's many of us, but I wanted to put my pre-beta and pre-balance patch thoughts down. I'll return to this after we actually get our hands on the weapon and I can play around with it, but here we go:
I don't want this to be entirely about spear, because it's also something that affects sword and axe. The upcoming balance patch is adding a damage modifier to "Blade" tooltips on infinite forge as a means to buff power virtuoso. Spear and Sword do not currently have "Blade" tooltips, while Greatsword and Dagger do. Prior to the upcoming balance patch, these tooltips did not serve a function outside of allowing condi virtuosos to apply bleeding through jagged mind. I do not take issue with the idea of making that tooltip functional for power virtuoso, in fact I like it.
However...I do fear that Power Virtuoso may end up pigeonholed into ranged weapons for all future releases and balance patches, as that will permanently separate ranged from melee weapons with the way "Blade" is currently used. It seems like it is only attached to ranged knife/blade/sword-like skills. I think it's not a huge logical leap to attach "Blade" to skills that involve hitting the enemy with a blade (spear, sword, axe, underwater spear currently).
It might seem like a weird statement to make because what we know of Virtuoso is that it is ranged, but I don't think it needs to be. I think of Virtuoso as replacing clones with blades, and I think swinging a melee weapon in the enemy's face while launching blades with your F skills is pretty cool too. Not to mention, Power Virtuoso is particularly rewarded for being in melee (maybe it's rather moreso penalized for being at range?) quite a bit as it is currently with the 600 range 10% damage modifier, F5, D2, SW5, and now (again for the second time) with GS5+F5 being short ranged Fireworks proc sources. Sword mainhand also has a leap on skill 3 to allow it to function as a more typical melee weapon, but only on virtuoso. Maybe this is just because of the clone mechanic, but it's there. It was designed to have a gap closer for power virtuoso.
Where I'm going with this: I don't think it is necessary to attach specific weapons to specific elite specs (I think that's what weapon mastery was all about anyway), or put in mechanics that make them just less good. I don't think adding "Blade" tooltips to sword and spear will make those weapons desirable for condi virtuoso for the same reason Greatsword is not currently (yes I tried it lol), and adding them to Axe could maybe add an interesting way to play condi virtuoso.
Power Virtuoso is a lot of fun and has one of the most satisfying rotations and spear's cooldowns are in that sweetspot where it looks like it will fit in perfectly if you want to use it. I don't want the current weapons to get killed at all, after all I love them. But I would be very interested to incorporate an actual melee weapon and having more weapon options with different benefits is great. I think a lot of players would also be happy to see sword get some love.
All this to say/TL;DR:
More weapons as options to play with = good. Ranged should have a tax, melee should be stronk (IMO even for Virtuoso, both power and condi if we're being honest).
That "Blade" tooltip balance lever will be a lingering threat to melee virtuoso weapon viability for the future even if spear is fine on release. Spears, swords, and axes all do have blades so I just think it doesn't need to be that way.
I am not making assumptions about how Spear will turn out or how favorable it will be on each build, I just wanted to organize my thoughts about ranged vs melee on this build and I'll return after we get hands on with the weapon and get to actually test it. My motivation is that the weapon looks incredibly fun and I'd just like to see it also function well enough to justify using on my favorite build.
Edited by Noro.2879
