[Lolzytripd]

Special Strikes are a cool concept but suffer on three fundamental pain points:

- They generally don't trigger very often, even with the added layer of bad luck protection. (Most Special Strikes start at 10% and are only increased by 5% per whiff.)
- They have a relatively long cooldown on top of that, which you also cannot build up your proc chance during that Cooldown.
- There's a lot of Special Strikes that don't hold up against even standard On Hit: Bonus Damage weapons.


I'll talk a little about why I think they've been held back so much. Back in the day, there was a pretty popular weapon known as the Tarnada. You could consider it the grandfather of this idea as how it worked was: On Critical Hit, there was a UL% (24 at max UL) of casting Vydel.

It was far stronger than any Special Strike, more reliable than most Special Strikes (despite no bad luck protection) and had no Cooldown between triggers. But it was also undoubtedly a problem, which is why it now works very differently. So of course I understand not wanting to reintroduce old issues.

However I think there's a large gap in the power difference between current Special Strikes and Vydel, so I think it would not be harmful to the game to make them more reliable (and perhaps more powerful for certain ones).



Increasing the trigger/bonus rates and lowering the cooldown seems like a pretty straightforward solution, if nothing else... But here's what I'd like to suggest, we forego the RNG aspect altogether.

I'd like Special Strikes to be turned into separate attacks, much like Weapon Maneuvers or like the skills Crazy Coyote gives. You'd simply have a Skill under your Basic Attack for the Special Strike and elect when to use it, then it goes on Cooldown as per normal.

While this goes against how they function in their inspiration game: Golden Sun, I think this also lends better to the tactical style gameplay SL2 has and works better for weapons that you don't typically want to basic attack with (such as the Tome weapons).

Some Special Strikes (and the Special Strike items) would need a bit of reworking to properly cater to this idea but I think it'd be worth the extra effort.

On a crit build I'd basically never want a special strike to go off, they rob me of a chance to crit, their damage is generally lower than a regular basic attack, the Aoe/projectiles are laughably unreliably for their intended purpose on a melee range on hit special chance.