Solanaceae
Legendary Nightshade
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I consider Cryptic balanced, at least among the other Atalean (honestly, I dunno how to spell this, it's inconsistent in the game) classes. Whereas its defenses are the reason it can compete against bosses, Ascendant and Riftwalker can simply outdamage bosses against high and low HP bosses respectively. Ascendant has pretty good defensive skills too, with a similar blind and a reflective shield (which I believe is B/D/P, thus making the enemy take more damage than you just from attacking). RW has Strength Strike, which is unlike shields and blinds in that it guarantees that you take less damage (though DoTs will still wreck your face), and its shield has the lowest downtime. Both RW and Ascendant also benefit more from on-hit effects than Cryptic simply because they hit more per skill. Cryptic is still the champion since it has a heal and a loopable defensive moveset, one which has several turns of overlap to boot, but the other two don't lag too far behind. The Doomwood classes are in a kinda weird place. All three have good healing, defenses, and damage, and all three have their own weaknesses, even after their shields have been homogenized against all three damage types. I could see an argument being made for any of them being hybrids, but it really boils down to how you use their skills. One of my main gripes with DK/Necromancer was that DoTs wouldn't get doubled if the DoT was applied BEFORE Stan the ScanOrb applied -All to the enemy, which really hurt their passives unless you used a trinket/potion on your first turn, but Verly seems to have fixed that. Thanks a bunch, boxcat! Personally, I'd take consistency any day. For an extreme example, if I had to choose between taking 50% damage every round and a 10% chance of taking 500% damage every round, I'd go with the 50% because it means I won't get killed just because RNG decided to roll against me 3 times in a row. This isn't a perfect analogy for a number of reasons, one of which being that a hybrid build doesn't guarantee taking less than 100% damage (well, +All does, but that inhibits healing too), but it's the best I can come up with.
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