Physical attackers in this game rely on AR to hit. Hitting is important, if you can’t hit the targets don’t die, you don’t leech life back etc. I made this to point out an issue about builds and their ‘viability’. If you look at the ‘best’ builds out there they all have either a high AR bonus or they ignore the AR check and they auto hit, like the kicker and Lit Fury Zon.
Builds like Blade Fury are not considered viable as it has no AR bonus and the ‘to hit’ is very low in Hell even with duel Angelics and a BA merc. WW Barbs have always complained since 1.10 and when you look at it, they have one of the lowest AR bonuses of any of these builds. No matter how much damage is added, if you can’t hit the build/skill is dead. The most ‘reliable’ skills ignore the AR check and auto hit: All Caster, Smiters, Kickers and Guided Arrow.
I’m completely fine with having a ‘to hit’ function in the game, I like that melee attackers are harder to run than mages. If you want to consider ‘fixing’ different builds you do need to consider the AR issue. Blade Fury, Strafe and WW could really use some help here. Some of the AR levels make sense with the skill like a Zerker having a high bonus helps compensate for the loss of Def. For other builds that have a very high ‘attack speed’ like WW, Blade Fury Strafe, it seems they lowered the AR bonus so they miss more, but these skills are hardly viable anymore.
Please add some AR bonuses to the lower end of this list so the builds can be more ‘viable’. Additionally looking at the AR bonus per pt in Dex would help a lot too.
Looking at an Attack Rating per ‘skill/build’: These are only skills to lvl 20, naturally actual builds will vary. Amazon skills are assuming you max pierce (raise your hand if you do!?!)
Lit Fury Zon – Seems to be auto hit no AR factor
Guided Arrow – Auto hit no AR factor
Kicker – auto hit bug (685% if no bug)
Smiter – Auto Hit
Zerker 565%
Fury WW 518%
Frenzy 413%
Poison Dagger 410%
Mageazon Builds 406%.
Phoenix /w Claw 368
Zealot 335%
WW 275%
Strafe/Multishot 225% (no AR bonus 225% is from Pierce)
Blade Fury no AR bonus
While I agree that AR bonus is good for blade fury, they are not as bad as you say in current setting if you make use of -X% target defense and CoS, that directly reduce mob def rating.
My friend was literally testing out blade sentinel/blade fury without gear in PTR and it’s working super well without angelic 2 pieces nor bless aimed merc.
All he use was claw mastery(BS does benefit from ar% from CM, blade fury doesn’t), CoS and Inner sight from rogue merc
I have also test out BF assn myself with shadow killer that offer -50% def with eth in socket.
It clear the throne room and Baal with ease under 4ppl setting.
Just be creative and make use of all stats/skills.
Cloak of Shadows lowers enemy Def by X% while Inner Sight lowers enemy Def by a set amount. A lvl 85 merc’s Inner Sight lowers Def by 1335, which is really nice. Both of those options are good ways to get around the AR issue. My current Blade Fury Sin uses a Blessed Aim merc to help out with the AR. ITD, Lowers enemy Def by X are all things we masochists’ use to make these builds work because they lack the fundamental things to make the build work in the first place.
With Fury Runeword, (+20% Attack Rating -12.5% boss defense), Blessed Aim merc, 8x36 AR small charms (unrealistic), Raven Frost (maxed), Blessed Aim merc, a normal attack from a Blade Sin on Baal at level 85 is 79%… with maxed out Claw Mastery.
Blade Fury is 71%. For 50% calculated damage, with a 55% block rate.
What this means is that it will hit 32% of the time. Even when we’re up at level 99, we’re talking 35%. If it got the bonus from Claw Mastery while using a Claw, it’d barely be under 40%, but at least it can deal with everything that isn’t a boss, basically. Should all builds be capable of boss killing? Probably not quite, but heavy investment into particular skills should be rewarded.
Even just 1500 additional attack rating delivered through skills should work just fine. Oh and…that’s with 316 Dexterity, 200 of which are hardpoints.
Just giving concepts on this. That would roughly double the chance to hit but your still at 60’ish%. That is also only when Inner Sight is cast.
BA Merc will give a 330% AR buff at that level which has generally kept my AR good (only in A5 NM at this point). I have been considering the ‘best merc’ is probably an A1 with a Faith Bow. Yes the AR is lower but it also comes with a damage boost.
Well again, it’s actually a total of 316 Dex, this is what it is at 200 dex points spent, which is a sizable amount of HP sacrificed to…hit about 40% of the time
Part of the problem with this is huge penalties on levelling after level 90. Back in the day, level 99 in a week was very attainable. Level differential is a part of chance to hit. When Blizzard took away the ability to reasonably attain mid to high nineties characters they also took away a lot of chance to hit. This was done to make 99 harder to get for ladder, but the end result was to make it, 99, only attainable for botters and at add a hidden nerf to melee.
Making 99 (or even 98) attainable again would go a long way towards addressing the AR problem.
Another thing they could do is increase the amount of AR gained from Dex. IIRC it is now at 4 AR per point added to Dex. If it were 8 or 10 then there would be a reason to put points in Dex instead of just maxing Vita.
There are some skills that really boost chance to hit, Conviction and Battle Cry come to mind, but they aren’t always easy to use with all builds (Battle Cry) or they nerf your own character to help other characters (Conviction).
Yeah, and that’s only going to get harder if they drop ladder seasons to 4 months…
No one has even discussed this change yet… I think many of us were hoping Blizzard would announce some higher difficulty content, maybe a difficulty above hell, or maybe Ubers would be buffed and made a viable place to get XP… Or maybe there would be some new “budget” enigma runewords to help accelerate the game for non-sorcs… Dunno… Something, anything, to make achieving level 99 in the compressed 4 month period a bit more feasible…
But I’m not seeing any new content in Patch 2.4 that’s gonna make it easier/more feasible to get a character to level 99…
Sure, it’s exciting and means there will be more spread of player levels at the end of ladder… but yeah these things all have ramifications in game to melee AR calcs and defence calcs…
I think Dex should give more AR. The two dex classes are some of the hardest up for AR, which seems nonsensical. Couple that with the fact that players feel like every point of dex is wasted, and it leads me to believe the core stat is undertuned.
99 isn’t attainable through legitimate game play. The experienced is reduced too much when the character level reaches the mid to high nineties. Eventually only Baal, Diablo and Nithalak give meaningful experience in a reasonable time frame. Is that really what the devs want? People endlessly running Diablo and Baal, not caring about drops because you don’t want to waste the time to see what is on the ground. It used to be possible to get experience from Uber trist but they stopped it after people used to make uber leveling games and just blessed hammer minions. Sometimes for hours. No one even cared about the torch, the value was in the experience.
It is hard to see how anyone with any semblance of a life will get to level 99 on ladder. It is hard to see how it will happen on non-ladder. Well until there is a bot available. Then the 99s will start showing up again.
