Impackt: Spooktober

Vampire puns suck

Blueprints

A bow appropriately decorated for the season, the Hallowed Willow offers a nice low-tier wood option for your crafting queue, though the Webbed Wing requirement can only be lowered by 1. A pretty good option for your bow-wielding heroes whilst they level.

From a crafting perspective

Generally for crafting purposes daggers are seen as a good choice – they are a low cost option for your metal slot that doesn’t require the use of rare resources. The Nightwing Bolt can become one of those daggers if you don’t mind ascending it – it’s possible to completely remove the Jewel requirement and bring the metal costs to an incredibly cheap level if so.

From a meta perspective

So from an initial glance we can see that the Nightwing Bolt is the new best-in-slot dagger option, meaning we bid a fond¹ farewell to Lucky Strike². It has an attack stat on par with the base tier 11 daggers and is unusual for a pack dagger in that it doesn’t have 5% critical hit chance for its secondary, instead it boasts a respectable 135 defence.

And with that out of the way:

Scenarios where you should consider using Nightwing Bolt

• You’ve rolled Warlord on a Thief/Trickster.
• You rolled Dagger Mastery and decided you really want to keep it.

Scenarios where you should not consider using Nightwing Bolt

• Anything that wasn’t covered by the above 2 bullet points. It’s not going to be winning any blanket “oh wow this is amazing you should totally use it” awards because the dagger-wielding classes already possess much better options. With the extension of Tier 11 into next year new items need to be doing a bit better than just baseline damage (cause we have 6 months of pack items to compare against.)

Superior

Blueprint

From a crafting perspective

Slightly unusual for a high tier leather craft we have a requirement of Jewels instead of Ether – this makes it a lot easier to fit into your rotation if you’re crafting some of the other pack items we’ve had this tier (such as the Canid items from the Dog pack³.)

The use of a Haunted Castle component also makes this on the more expensive side to craft (this of course could change in future but I’m writing for the moment we’re in.) That said, still a fair option.

From a meta perspective

It’s an interesting item – this is new ground for a glove slot (having defence and health.) Which is pretty cool as it’s always nice to see alternative options, however in this particular case the alternative happens to be the evasion glove line (Patchleather Bracers, Mountain Man Mitts, Raptor Wings.)

Most of the glove-wearing classes are Rogue-types who really benefit from being evasive/crit hitting powerhouses – Raptor Wings shines there as the 5% evasion allows you to pick skills that are higher in damage but lacking on the evasion as the gloves help compensate (for example, you could use Curse (120% ATK 5% Eva)) instead of Anti-Magic Net (100% ATK 10% Eva.) Whilst Nightwing Gauntlets do offer some survival with its health increase it’s not really enough of a changer to justify using it over one of the aforementioned items.

The Spellcaster-types however that can use gloves (Sorcerers, Geomancers⁴) are going to be greatly in love with these – with them not being reliant on evasion that extra staying power will really shine when the enemy decides it wants to ignore your tank and go for them instead.

Scenarios where you should consider using Nightwing Vambraces

• You’re using a Spellcaster hero
• Your Rogue hero is already at the evasion cap without using evasion gloves.
• You’ve decided to just facetank with your Rogue

Scenarios where you should not consider using Nightwing Vambraces

• You’re a member of the Church of Evasion
• Trying to make your dancer become a tank⁵
• You care about the economical aspect of gear

Summary

• Hallowed Willow adds to the growing collection of ways to dress up your heroes for Halloween
• Nightwing Bolt has great crafting potential but falls short on making an impact on heroes
• Whilst not a strictly best-in-slot option the Nightwing Vambraces are a pretty cool pair of gloves.

Final Score

Mega Pack: 4/10
Superior Pack: 8/10

About the recent trend of low mega pack scores

I realise the last few mega packs have had a low score – we’re just getting a consistent run of items that really aren’t that great compared to what we already have.

Take the dagger from this pack for example – two of the dagger classes can use swords and could pick up the Elegant Rapier from the Antique Store and it has much better damage/synergy for them. Dancers wouldn’t touch it with a 10ft pole when they have access to bows, wands and crossbows, all of which work so much better for their innate due to the sheer damage they bring over the dagger.

I get that they might be trying to reign in power creep (100% guess, not based on any confirmation) and they’ve got another 2 months at least of fleshing this tier out but that ship kinda sailed when the initial packs of the tier smoked everything we already had.

1. I say fond, if you were someone who bought Swan’s Edge only to see it be dethroned by Lucky Strike later that month you might have some other feelings towards it
2. 13.63 Swan’s Edges/23.36 Barkback’s
3. creative naming not being the pack creator’s strong suit
4. also Spellblades but they already had a health handslot option available to them
5. Mammoth Dancer being that fun offshoot if you ever get bored