Shatter soul has always been a bit of a niche ultimate but I have enjoyed using it due to the viscerally satisfying explosion animation when you successfully secure a kill with it. I've made posts advocating for the explosion to always happen regardless of if you kill the target with the abilitily, and after years of waiting this is now the case! In addition, you can now even intentionally cancel the ability early to leverage the AOE damage from the explosion. Awesomesauce. However it seems the ultimate can never catch a break, as it was nerfed into Oblivion in the same patch note. With a new duration of 5 seconds the damage per second has been diluted to "reduce the bursty nature" of a non-burst, channeled ultimate. This leaves the ultimate in a situation where it does less DPS than a LA/spammable rotation. In PVE losing LA damage already makes the ultimate unusable, and in PVP the application is limited to trying to execute medium armor builds with curse/fury/shatter soul combos (which often fail due to LoS anyway). I still might have used shatter soul with the 5 second channel change but the final nail in the coffin was the 75 ultimate cost increase. Assuming sorcerer 15% reduction, at 100/85 ultimate points, shatter soul could be used reactively to execute low health enemies, secure kills on escaping nightblades, assist allies by calling focus to a target, etc and although less effective than atro/DBoS/destro/meteor it could be used much more frequently. Now, at 175/149 ultimate, unless there is a mediocre cloak-spamming stamblade you have a personal vendetta against, there is no reason to run this ultimate over other options, and that just sucks.
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