TLDR:

• Yet another broken Vengeant Cascade interaction: Shattering Steel (which is not Splitting Steel which some people might think of) with return is (presumably) bugged and allows every projectile split from Snipers Mark to overlap again
• Gear is quite lackluster and some fights are carried by raw dps
• Shattering Steel as a league starter performed quite well, even without Vengeant Cascade
• PoB: https://pobb.in/bUH1_0B_kefe (except flask and max res nodes, which vary by fight)
• DPS numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt, it's not a skill where you simply hold down the button.

Preface

Every league I try to play a skill that I haven't played before or haven't played in a long time and bring it from league start to whatever the hardest content currently is (perhaps with the exception of deep delving). After reading the patch notes it was quite clear that Vengeant Cascade will most likely lead to a couple of broken interactions and I started to look into what skills can potentially gain more than double damage from having their projectiles returned. This led me to having a deeper look at the steel skills, of which I ended up favoring Shattering Steel.

Shattering Steel - Basics

Shattering Steel has an AoE component, similar to Kinetic Blast, which allows the skill to overlap under some circumstances, particularly if the projectiles shatter early enough (i.e.: have slow projectile speed) and are close enough to the target. I did a lot of tests without any return setup and came to the conclusion that with lmp (alternatively +1 projectile from the tree and alt. quality Shattering Steel) it is possible to get two overlaps on average, which makes the skill competitive to other starters regarding damage output. It should be noted here that some videos and old posts mention different behaviour given increased / reduced AoE. In my tests I could not see significant differences on a medium sized target (which is the size of Pinnacle Bosses) with Slower Projectiles and Less Proj. Speed from the tree. To see the projectile overlap with and without lmp see this short clip here. The PoB for the character with which testing was performed is here.

Shattering Steel, Return, and Sniper's Mark

Now comes the fun part: the interaction with Shattering Steel, Return, and Sniper's Mark. Sniper's Mark splits a projectile into k projectiles, where k is usually between 2 and 6, depending on gem level and curse effect. To the best of my knowledge, these split projectiles are not allowed to hit the target again, even if the projectile speed is so low that they would all overlap. To verify this, I bought a Lake of Kalandra amulet with reduced proj. speed to reduce the projectile speed even further. None of the split projectiles could overlap in any circumstances, even with increased AoE.

This behaviour changes completely once projectiles can return. Every Sniper's Mark split projectile is allowed to hit the target again after returning. Here is a clip of the interaction without return and reduced proj. speed, and then with return. Once the projectiles can return they are able to hit a target again. This transforms the skill from a 2x hit skill with lmp to a potentially 7x hit skill without lmp; although due to the random nature of the projectile flight duration (until a projectile shatters) not all projectiles will always overlap. It should also be noted that this requires the player to stand on top of the boss.

Remark: In the clip the slower projectile support gem is only level 10 due to later tests regarding my Crucible Weapon. However, I performed the same tests with a level 20 gem with the same outcome.

League Starting Shattering Steel

I was not sure if the changes to Nimis' interactions in the patch notes would change the behaviour of Shattering Steel with return, so I PoB'd the skill without any return and did an Eater/Exarch test run in the week up to launch to see whether the skill is still viable even without return (and also since Vengeant Cascade requires two golden oils.) While it is not the best clearing skill (you basically use Call of Steel on every pack for clear) it has sufficient damage and defenses to have a smooth league start, which ended up being a great choice given how challenging Crucible content is. This was my first Maven on the start of my day 3. Comparing it to my other starters this was definitely one of the faster first kills, although it's also level 95 (whereas before most starters were around 93 on first Maven for me).

Ironically, when I logged in on my self-poison setup on league start to see whether the return interaction still exists I thought it was fixed (hence the character name GGGWasAwareSadge). Only when I was testing a different setup on day 3 I realized that the Mastery change had automatically allocated '`Damaging Ailments cannot be inflicted on you while you already have one' on my test character, which obviously bricked self-poisoning...

Gearing towards Ubers

MY rough gearing plan was this PoB, although in the end I changed the gem setup according to further tests and to my weapon having lvl 10 slower proj. support from Crucible. I did almost all of my progression non-crit with an Axe, and spent the past two days cooking swords in Crucible with Split Beasts until I only had the split base remaining that I used in the end. I think a non-crit setup that goes a Large Cluster instead of the Sword/Crit route might have made gearing a bit easier, particularly as a Cluster Setup allows an easier aura setup with a small reservation cluster. On the other hand, a Cold Conversion Hatred route with Leadership's Price might be a viable route for Uber Farming in SC. It's definitely something I would like to do a PoB for at some point.

In general, the gear is in my opinion somewhat lackluster. This is partially a result of the lack of Divines in SSF this league which made me more conservative with upgrading pieces, but also a result of the build being a rather slow mapper. While I was still roughly top 50 on the ladder in the first couple of days, I am now at only roughly 850k kills 10 days into the league.

Some of the things I really would have liked to fix, but was not able to do before the end of this weekend: I am not Shock/Chill immune or have sufficient reduced effect. I am not Spell Suppress capped, which led to a death on Uber Shaper as well as Uber Uber Elder. I don't have a +2 aura slot (glove or helm) together with a 21 Purity, which would result in 90 max res for the given Purity. I am not chaos res capped, which made Sirus almost impossible (read: 6 portals), given that the build has zero defense against degen and lacks Lethe Shade and basically has to stand inside a boss. Particularly Eater and Sirus felt more like zerging the boss down in true SC fashion with sufficient DPS, rather than a well-rounded build that has enough defense to fully play the fight; although for Eater this was probably more due to my greed to go for Pride instead of Grace. I also got told after I've done my Ubers that I was missing a Brittle boot implicit, but I am almost out of Ichors anyway. Nevertheless, I think it's not too hard to get sufficient defenses even in a hc setup.

Finally, I find it ironic that even on a pure impale build I prefer the other Champion Ascendancy nodes for Ubers.

All fights are in this playlist, with the exception of Sirus (imo not interesting as it was a 6 portal 'dies to dot' cringefest) and Cortex (which I simply did not drop yet).