Background: So here's Nightcrawler's sig ability:
If you're unfamiliar, whenever NC's attacks crit, he inflicts an instant bleed dealing a certain amount of dmg. Unawakened this dmg is very underwhelming as this instant bleed has a flat base dmg value that can only be increased by the sp2 bleed vuln passive. But once you awaken and sig up NC, as you can see above, his instant bleed potency and crit dmg rating scale with his prowess potency.
Why is that significant?
Well, on his base kit NC gains prowess whenever he successfully avoids an attack by dashing back, he has built-in dex in his kit with a bigger invuln window allowing him to fully dex the likes of Winter Soldier sp2, Photon's Light Form/ Serpent's specials, etc. He can get to a max of 10 of these prowesses, each with 10% potency.
Then, on his sp1 he gets a bigger prowess with 100% potency.
So an awakened NC's instant bleed dmg will scale up as he procs more prowesses.
Here's his base instant bleed:
Then with some of his dex prowesses:
Fully ramped up with his sp1 prowess and dex prowesses:
Finally, fully ramped up with sp2 bleed vuln:
Now, for the main reason for this post:
Nightcrawler-Bastion Synergy:
It increases his prowess limit by 5. Seems pretty straightforward right? Gives him 5 more prowesses, so total of 15 dex prowesses, which is 50% more prowess potency. Decent-ish. This is what I first thought too and it stands true. But there's more. strap in for this next part.
So, what I found is that this synergy is also increasing the
sp1 prowess stack limit by 5 (previously stack limit was 1). And if you recall, the sp1 prowess has a potency of 100%. So now he can stack up to 6 of these sp1 prowesses. Yup.
DMG with 2 sp1 prowesses:
DMG with 3 sp1 prowesses:
DMG with 4 sp1 prowesses:
DMG with 5 sp1 prowesses:
Fully ramped up DMG with 6 sp1 prowesses:
Finally, fully ramped up with sp2 bleed vuln:
So yeah, the dmg gets going. He hits really hard after ramping up 6 sp1s. All this is r3 unboosted w/ wmags prefight and class disadvantage btw. Without class disadvantage I think it was 18k yellow crit + 52k red dmg, so 70k total from a single medium crit. That's like OGIM levels of basic attack dmg.
I couldn't get any screenshots for his special dmg cuz of the Labyrinth 50k dmg cap, pretty much all of NC's special crits hit dmg cap w/ and w/o synergy so I can't say how much this affects that aspect of his dmg. I mean some youtuber with access to the test map could definitely try it out. Still it would probably be less than what cyclops now spits out so I think it should still be fine. Probably.
Now for the iffy part, knowing kabam this could definitely be unintended, but my boi NC needs this love imo. So kabam please, if this isn't intended, please still keep it. NC needs some love. Here's why I think it's still balanced:
1) He can't use it in BGs cuz it's a synergy.
2) You would never really use NC in war because of the node restrictions and his lack of utility so this won't make much of a difference there.
3) It takes like 1-2 mins to get fully ramped up and once he gets there that is his final dmg ceiling, he can't keep ramping up infinitely. So for long form stuff like necro, champs like northstar, stryfe, and ons would probably still be better.
4) It improves him by making him solid for almost all length of questing content.
5) There is some skill involved to keep prowesses paused and keep them from falling off.
6) It still does not work against any bleed immune or bleed resist champs (like ons, dust, korg, etc.). I know the sp3 lets him work around that somewhat, but that would require going all the way to sp3 instead and it would disrupt his loop.
7) NC would need to be awakened and high sig for this to even work.
TLDR: It's an awesome synergy and ppl need to stop sleeping on the Goatcrawler.
