Shoulder Slam - most useless skill ever

[Methane]

as had been said. Dev's wanted all classes to have a neat, very high damage ability to use while soloing packs of normal mobs. It was never intended to be used anywhere else.

 

That's not to say that I wouldn't like to use it other places though.

Edited January 1, 2012 by Methane

[cdstephen]

So useless. Bad damage that can't be used against bosses or players.

[wtb_skillz]

Its 1 less skill taking up my many bar slots... just disregard shoulder slam aquire currency.

[Tenacity]

During beta I really didnt like shoulder slam and the similar abilities, but now they've become a core part of my shieldtech's soloing rotation. On a 45 second cooldown, shoulder slam can be used once per group of mobs that you pull at level 40+. It's the hardest hitting burst damage attack available to my character - I've seen shoulder slam crits over 2500 damage so far, whereas my second best burst ability (rocket punch) tops out around 2000.

 

Shoulder slam becomes more usable when you get carbonize, since they're both on the same cooldown. Carbonize stuns targets (even strong targets) for 1.5 seconds, which is plenty of time to carbonize -> shoulder slam. Very useful against strongs at higher levels.

 

One thing a lot of people dont seem to realize is that at the 40-50 range strongs are often more difficult to deal with than elites - elites have more health, sure, but strongs come in packs of 2-3 or more and do twice as much damage as elites of similar level, making them extremely dangerous when soloing. The faster you can take them out, the better.

 

 

Against standard mobs, when you're trying to clear adds around an elite or particularly powerful strong mob quickly, you can use missile blast -> shoulder slam to pretty much one-shot most standard/weak enemies. Missile blast will knock down the target for a second, allowing shoulder slam to be used as an immediate followup.