Vengeance has way too many synergies to be effective. It’s also a single target attack that needs Fant aura to Hit higher frames and you can’t max Vengeance as well as a holy aura as that would require 120 points and you would still leave yourself completely vulnerable in melee due to low defense.
Every melee attack needs a synergy with holy shield as holy shield is required to be viable in melee for paladins. Holy auras should probably just have a single synergy.
Yes, the current build relies on gear for the auras. This isn’t how the builds are actually used before end game and multiple high runes. If you think the skills should only be viable end game than that’s a whole different issue. Right now Holy Aura builds are strong enough to get you to about midway to NM, far enough to find double spirit bases to switch to Hammerdins. A +3 aura scepter can carry the build in p8 pretty easily through normal.
If you really want to get into it, vengeance elemental conversion is actually based on physical damage so Fant is exponentially better for Vengeance than Holy auras.
But what do I know, it’s not like those of us that played prior to respecing actually had to. Preplan our builds…
The results of people making suggestions when they have no understanding of game mechanisms: Vengeance is a bad skill, auras are once again bad skills. Lets combine the two to make even a worse build!
One thing is for sure. Nobody plays a vengeance paladin because of single target damage, attacking slow, no leech and additional survivability and way too many synergies. So every change is appreciated. while you at it improve sacrifice too because it has almost the same issues besides too many synergies.
I don’t like the idea of making melee characters into wannabe casters. What is great about the feeling of melee in d2 is that it’s mostly single target attacks.
PoE tried to “balance” melee by giving everything aoe/chain/missile/etc effects. Resulting in no real melee attacks being viable. So instead of going for the root problem and nerfing aoe skills/spells, they completely ruined the fantasy playstyle of melee.
We should do everything we can to not repeat PoE mistakes.
Yeah, vengeance triggering additional holy aura pulses would obviously make it more interesting by compensating the fact it’s a single target skill and all single target suck
As for sacrifice, I always though they should instead embrace the Life taken and add it to the attack
Ie: sacrifice 300life, gain 300 damage on the hit
Also, having it paired with sanctuary would clearly make it interesting mainly because of the mechanic it would create
You would just use conviction, get your aura from HoJ, Dragon, or Dream. The holy auras share the same synergies as Vengeance, and you don’t have to max all of synergies on Vengeance for it to be effective. You can focus on the element matching the Holy Aura you are building foe. The other two elements will still be chunky and effective with a good weapon.
The aura proccing on melee vengeance hits is how you solve the AoE problem of Vengeqnce. That seemed pretty obvious to me?
Except Vengeance damage scales by Physical Damage. Vengeance converts your physical damage into elemental damage so having vengeance proc the auras would be at a cost of vengeance melee damage. The auras themselves have been nerfed back to their existing form so the AOE damage is insignificant even with ultra high end gear.
You are also talking about 3 Sur, 3 Lo, and a Cham for HOJ and double Dragon runewords for a mediocre end game build. Double dream is only a lvl 30 Holy Shock, it can’t even come close to damage of a level 44 Holy Fire stack. Nevertheless, should a skill/build be based entirely around ultra high end gear and be completely useless otherwise?
I think vengeance should work as an auxiliary skill for pure physical zealers to deal with PI’s. Change all the synergies it gets from auras to sacrifice. Maybe sacrifice could be change to a percentage damage model, it does like 12 percent damage to your and deals 6 percent damage to the total life of the monster you’re hitting. The life damage percent should scale better the more points you put in it. Maybe put a cap on it at 50% like static or something. That way vengeance and sacrifice will both have niche uses that’s better than just zealing in the right circumstances. Vengeance for PI and sacrifice for bosses.
Elemental zealers should just function separately using the elemental auras as a source of damage.
I know how vengeance works. There would be no trade off here? How is at the cost of anything? It would work the same as it does now, just also trigger an aura aoe proc to add some more AoE to the vengeance build.
They still buffed Holy Fire synergy a bit and increased its damage by 70% on top of that, so Fire Aura build is much better than it used to be.
The end game gear let’s you rock conviction instead of the aura itself, which is nice, but if you choose not to use dual dream you can get a much higher Holy Shock aura than Dream gives you.
In short, you can definitely make a viable farming build off of a self cast aura build that farm places with few immunities. The physical component of vengeance, your merc, as well as the two other elements on vengeance help with that too.
The above change to make vengeance proc the aura just makes the aoe damage better, which is the main drawback of vengeance.
Also, Re: the aoe damage. It’s somewhat low because it ticks every 2 seconds. Ticking every 2 seconds + on every melee attack would make it actually pretty good.
If they did this AND brought back the distance aoe scaling, they would be doing well. In fact, they could make things at the outskirts of the radius take 50% less, while things right next to you take 150% or 200%. The fact is, it’s literally just a column in the skills.txt file that you can drop whatever % into. It’s very easy. Very tunable. Them reverting the 200% buff outright was just lazy af.
Exactly that, vengeance do not need to be an all types of dmg, it could be focused + aoe + physical (doubt ppl will not use grief anyway), and thats what OP and I (in my video) have said about the change, because the main reason of vengeance not being used is terrible single target slow attack, make it procs auras and it helps a lot.
Or you could go with a funny Doom runeword Dual dream pally. Tons of lightning and freeze with res lightning and res cold, pretty different from zealers as Vengeance is more like a bulky attack against fast phys+lightning attack and you could choose between using holy fire by yourself or conviction.
Even if you don’t focus all the synergies, a ~250-300% damage as Fire and cold alongside a 500% lightning damage buff and Holy Shock aura is still nice those extra elements and the physical bits do help kill things, particularly when facing immunes for your auras.
