Been tinkering with some of the new Forgotten Gods items, namely a 2H sword called Rancor. It looks really neat at first glance - clearly oriented around Trickster (Nightblade/Shaman), a mastery combination that really has been neglected nearly as badly as Saboteur has, despite being in the game from launch. More specifically, Rancor seems to support/boost a Phantasmal Blades Trickster build. Trickster has anti-synergy issues just like Saboteur, though for different reasons - Shaman focuses pretty heavily on 2h weaponry and Nightblade is much more focused on dual-wield melee. Still, maybe this sword will help bring them together better.
Nope.
The thing about Phantasmal Blades is that it's a notorious energy hog. Doesn't matter if you transmute it to be spammable or use it as a cooldown skill. It gobbles up energy like mad. Rancor itself has zero native energy management abilities. So you look at good gearing options to cover that, while still supporting the damage types encouraged by Rancor (pierce and bleed - it even converts Vitality to Piercing, seemingly offering a bridge between Shaman's Vitality skills and Nightblade's Piercing skills). Most gearing options focused on Piercing don't really accommodate a 2h sword. Bleed... you have the Bloodrager sets, but they have no energy management. Nightblade has some limited e-management but certainly not great, and it's never been enough to support PBlades on its own - most PBlades builds are Spellbreakers (Nightblade/Arcanist) to take advantage of Arcanist's e-management, which PBlades desperately needs. Trickster? Shaman has no e-management at all natively, and none of the sets that support Trickster offer it that I've seen.
So now you have this 2h sword for a Trickster (already a problem, since Nightblade keys so heavily off dual-wield and the 2h skills for Shaman CAN be worked around... except the Bleed stuff works a LOT better with a 2h, and Rancor's Pierce/Bleed focused). It can't really be adequately supported with a Nightblade set that focuses on Piercing. It can't really be adequately supported with a Shaman set, period. It can't be supported at all with any set that supports both Nightblade and Shaman - honestly aside from Bloodrager and the epic Bloodreaper set there really aren't any, and Bloodreaper ties up both hands with a pair of swords... a Trickster set that supports dual wield, you don't say? Oh, and the Korba Trickster is also dual-wield? It's almost like dual-wield is way better for a Trickster than 2h. So why do we have this 2h Trickster sword?
But let's say you just IGNORE the really neat PBlades mods on Rancor. OK. It has Devouring Swarm mods, too. So focus on that... oh, Devouring Swarm is really awful as a primary damage skill, even with the modifications to it? Well, ok, so it's a support skill. What does it support? With the mods, it reduces Pierce resist, converts the Vitality damage on DevSwarm to Pierce... ok, so now you have a Pierce/Bleed Trickster with a 2h weapon. It can't benefit from the Pierce focused stuff in Nightblade that keys off dual-wield, and it does nothing to unify the damage types outside of PBlades and DevSwarm, so your Savagery and Primal Strike on Shaman side, skills that key really well off a 2h weapon, still have a bunch of Lightning damage that is basically unsupported in any sense by the Nightblade side. But maybe you could do Ring of Steel on Nightblade side instead? A cooldown PBAoE pierce/bleed nuke, sounds promising right? Rancor does NOTHING for Ring of Steel beyond the base damage modifiers. Not a damned thing. Other gearing options exist to boost Ring of Steel, but then you start asking why you're dragging around this 2h sword for Ring of Steel when there are so many other better options to support Ring of Steel.
So Rancor has a niche, that it's hilariously bad at. Anything it could be good at, something else will do much better. And what blows my mind is that Trickster, like Saboteur, has been in the game from launch. There are builds focused around the new FG mastery, Oathkeeper, that are hands-down some of the strongest builds in the game right now. Out of the gate, Oathkeeper just kicks ass and takes names. Warlord (Oathkeeper/Soldier) is one of the strongest things in the game right now, and it's basically the new kid on the block. Oathkeeper has crazy synergy with SO MANY THINGS. But Crate apparently has either forgotten about Trickster and Saboteur or doesn't fucking care. At least Trickster has Korba. Saboteur is just suffering, and even the new sets that enable Saboteur to do things that don't suck (Rimetongue, Ember's Calling) are probably better for something that isn't Saboteur.
I'm just baffled, really, because Crate has shown that it CAN address anti-synergy issues (Battlemage now feels pretty good with Krieg set and Spellscourge set, despite being one of the worst mastery combinations at launch), and it can get really inventive with addressing mastery combo shortcomings via things like damage conversion and skill modifiers... and yet here we are with Rancor, a weapon for one of the laggards (Trickster) that supports a criminally undersupported skill (PBlades)... except it supports it so poorly that you shouldn't use it.
