Last Epoch Rogue Feedback

Blade Shield being unable to stack seems like a mistake. I understand that if it could stack as is it would be very powerful, but right now it has a tiny area of effect, an extremely short duration, and basically doesn't scale beyond just increased damage stuff. If it stacked it would allow for deeper investment via attack speed, duration, etc. I would gladly trade the ability to stack it for massively reduced damage (80-85% less damage even), less ailment effectiveness, etc. so that at least I can focus my passive and item choices towards making it better. At least then the small aoe and short duration would feel like downsides to a powerful single target tool instead of downsides to a skill that is already lacking scaling options when Blade Shield is taken.

On a more personal level, I think you should be less afraid of making skills or specific specialization/investment routes too powerful. You can always nerf the numbers, but when the entire mechanic is removed for the sake of balance it leads to a significantly less exciting and interesting skill. When I read the Blade Shield tooltip and it said it could stack I immediately started thinking of how I wanted to build to maximize that potential. Now knowing that it can't stack it makes most investment options irrelevant and makes scaling the skill far more obvious and boring on top of its already innate weakness of being a skill that not only requires being in melee range but being significantly closer than the majority of actual melee skills in the game. The node trades the ranged advantage of the base skill and the attack speed scaling of the base skill for...what? Without the ability to stack there seems to be no benefit to taking the node. You neuter yourself defensively by having to be right on top of things to damage them and offensively by removing a major scaling aspect in exchange for hitting an enemy multiple times per cast (assuming you take the pierce node, which is basically required for Blade Shield to be remotely useable as a damaging skill). So for baseline functionality, you've already had to invest 8 skill points and you still end up with a less safe and worse scaling version of the skill? Even worse is that there already exists a similar and better-executed version of the same idea on Sentinel via spiraling hammers, which do scale with attack speed and have a significantly bigger area of effect (basically the entire screen). The only trade-off for hammers in that setup is the mana cost, which Sentinel easily sustains with the ability to go back in time.

Currently, Blade Shield feels like it has a problem where it's incredibly powerful with very little investment and then it also doesn't have many investment options (perhaps in part due to its incredible baseline power). I'd much prefer to see its numbers nerfed significantly and its mechanical interactions opened up so that you can invest in making it better while maintaining some semblance of balance. Things like letting it stack or making it otherwise scale with throwing speed, more and/or better duration scaling options, area of effect/damage trade off options to increase area/reduce damage or decrease area/increase damage, more interactions with existing nodes on the tree.