I note that you skipped out on the Strength thematics point. <_< It'd look extremely strange to have a Strength skill scale off of Cunning, of all things.
Flexible combat should be a sidegrade for non-brawlers, not a no brainer. At least in my opinion.
It wasn't a total no-brainer before, when it was 100%.
Too good, probably. But there were plenty of Rogue types and lower physical power classes in general that skipped it, and with good reason. It was not a relatively huge bonus to damage compared to, say, Lucky Day.
It's mostly useless for those types, now, which I'm okay with, since the target audience now no longer has it as what was, indeed, too obvious of a skill.
But it's not overly centralizing. Arcane Blade gets a huge amount out of it...and a lot of other Prodigies, they tend to love an amazing amount of them. Berserker, maybe, but Berserker has a lot of great AM build prodigies now(Spell Feedback, Superpower) as well. And those are the two best users of it.
It's admittedly hard to say for sure until we get feedback on the 60% version.
It would be good for brawlers, rogues, arcane blades, berserkers who boost cunning, marauders, wyrmics that boost cunning, any mindstar build.
It's awful on rogue types, Berserkers only rarely build Cunning(It's not a bad build, per se, but no stats run off of it and their critical hit rate is excellent without it. AM will never build for it, and Con is a much more common build, since Berserker players tend to run along lines of trying to make the build as simple as possible.). Arcane Blades, yes, but see above. Wyrmics, yes, sorta. Mindstar builds, that's laughable, they have pitiful physical power.
Direct GWF comparisons only matter for brawlers, because they are the ones that are going to care mostly about the damage. The rest are getting it for the effects.
Unreliable and unusual randomized procs on an unreliable to be used physical attack, eh?
Many artifact gloves currently lack that, often very good ones... but even if they did gain, say, my proposed additions to them, the simple fact is that you can't rely on the best gloves for your build to have procs you care about.
Admittedly, for example, the first glove I thought of for important ego(War-Making) does have a pretty universally useful proc. (In fact, it has it at too high of a rate, since the Cripple buff. That needs to be lower than 20%, more like 5-10%. I'd say that's more of an artifact of the buff to Cripple, though...that was pretty reasonable before.)
But other gloves? Regeneration? Second Wind is great to useless depending, and it's on gloves that boost your stamina regen...effectively, this is so unreliable as to be more regen. Battle Shout? Reproach? Randomized Perfect Strike? To say nothing of the bunch of breaths and spell effects?
They're nice, but the effects scatter in a lot of directions, and you mostly have War-Making for ones that really dominate the spectrum. I would say that's a statement on them having too strong of a proc right now.
Otherwise, yes, it's a great effect to have, and you get a lot of support and utility impacts, but it's really hard to say which you'll get. Will you use the first randart you find/get from the merchant? Would it actually have cost you damage from a pair of War-making? Or Dahktun's? Almost certainly. Utility for damage trade makes this much more of a sidegrade than you let on.
Except War-Making. Those need a worse proc or a lower rate on it. That's clear enough, looking at it, and that'll be true if Flexible Combat was removed tomorrow, to be honest. A free physical hit with a fairly good status on it needs to be less common than 20%.
I disagree. The idea is to introduce scaling so that you don't get 60% on level 30.
For my money? Optimal stat build? Arcane Blade'll have 50%~ with your suggestion by 30 and so will Brawler. I consider Arcane Blade's primary stat to be Cunning, forever, since so much scales off of it, and Brawler I found optimal already to build Dex and Cunning and only so much Strength as I could get away with for equipment purposes-surprisingly little-until later in the game.
If you're trying to make it worse early, stats alone won't do it. To be honest, the fact that you get less free choice of good gloves early has more impact than you are crediting it-optimal gloves are even less likely to have strong procs on them, and vice-versa.
As a final note, I notice the only time you've ever ran this is in the same situation I have-when it's optimal damage, namely with Arcane Might on a Reaver(The only time it's actually much good on a Reaver, in my opinion. In the interest of full disclosure, and so no one has to go look, I've ran it on a ridiculous Adventurer build for more Arcane Combat procs, and on a Brawler.).
And that was before it was nerfed. For all the Wyrmics you've recently ran-a good class for it, and with heavy physical builds yet-you never ran it.
Why not? If it's still too good now, and clearly overcentralizing, surely it was the only possible choice for a class that was good with it, back when it was 100%. Right?
I hope neither of you have taken too much offense by the other, though, because even though this discussion is a bit heated, neither of you are completely off-base.
