The current state of them is the result of ZoS basically not knowing what to do with them. They were used to sell Greymoor, and were very powerful. Then, they were gutted like a month later, and spent many weeks constantly being changed. They're now just a shell of what they once were. They went from being used in most serious endgame content, to just...a meme.

MotokoHutt wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

Stranglers are an item without a home. The rate at which they charge is high enough to exclude them from pretty much any form of competitive content. The problem is, when you reduce the charge time to the point it becomes useful, it's almost too useful. Basically, Stranglers have a power level based on the length of the content, your ability to score killing blows and your ability to not die. In any situation where all those things come together, you will see them get used.

However, not all content is the same length so at some point, if you reduce the charge time, Stranglers become useful somewhere. That's for the number crunchers to figure out. Probably a dungeon/trial with an excessive number of mobs to kill. The Stranglers are then still useless in other forms of content that aren't that mob dense to provide an actual benefit. Maybe if there is a new trial that has hundreds of trash mobs floating around all over the place that all have 1hp, then this item instantly becomes useful again... in exactly one trial.

Surely though even if they kept the 50 stacks, but made all group kills count toward your stacks, there usefulness in more scenario's may increase allot, For instance not being useful for the first boss in a vet trial or dungeon, but being an interesting item to take for the rest of the run.

Like you could have 1-2 people in the trial take them making them sub par on the first boss which "usualy" bosses ramp up in dificulty throughout the content, but above par on the rest of the bosses.

I think that's ideally what the goal of the item should be. First of all, I'd have it track all kills like you suggest. The metagame of having to fight for kills when using them is something I definitely don't miss at all. At that point, as long as you stay alive, it should be an item that gives up early damage to gain late damage at the cost of your survivability as you charge them. They are just poorly balanced at that. The trigger of kills is probably just a bad one to use to begin with. ZOS constantly needs to keep them in mind when designing new content to keep them from becoming automatically best in slot. Compare their effectiveness in something like Asylum versus Sanctum. At 20 stacks they were great in SO with loads of things to charge them up, but useless in Asylum. ZOS knew this and set the charge stacks so high on purpose to nerf it out of use in any content it would matter in. We can ask them to basically reduce the stack size again, but we run into the problem of them being too good and suffering another nerf as a result anyway.

There is a good item mechanic there. Something that grows more powerful as you kill things, while you become easier to kill. Build your own glass cannon. They just couldn't get the balance right and went with the "nerf it to oblivion" route instead. They could change stack size to maybe 5 max to hit the cap and instead have it trigger off of boss kills (shared by the group). In this way, you don't have to balance around dungeons or trials with lots of trash as most content has between 3 and 5 boss fights. As long as you don't die, you would be hitting max stacks by the end fight in most content. If you die, take it off and go with your backup gear for the rest of that instance as you can't just simply ramp it up again.