I’ve test new changes and from what I am seeing these are the major points from my point of view need change or rework.
Martial Arts
Dragon Tail - Need a bigger AOE explosion damage! I can suggest x3 from what’s now.
Dragon Flight - adding a stun damage for 1 second or something like this
Claws of Thunder - 30% more lightning damage will be great (a little boost)
Phoenix Strike - 30% boost of all type of damages
Shadow Disciplines
Burst of Speed and Fade can be used on same time! This will be a game change for the Assassin.
Venom - at least 75-100% buff damage. In the moment this damage is insane low. Doing nothing.
Shadow Warrior and Shadow Master (improving their base Life and damage) I can suggest x2. Especially damage is needed.
Traps
Blade sentinel and Blade fury - Their lack badly from attack rating. So here we need a big improvement. 10% buff makes no difference.
Runewords
Treachery (rework) - Yes runes must be different and higher.
Instead - Cold resist +30% → All resistance 45%
Instead - +50% Extra Gold from monsters → Life +1 per level
I’ll, sadly, disagree with the part about using BoS and Fade at once. It would make the Sin overpowered, like a Paladin being allowed to use two auras at once.
By design these skills were made to force you to decide: you improve your Attacks or Defenses?
Paladins can use two or more auras at once if using certain runewords (remember this is what got holy fire unbuffed in the last round of the PTR).
What if Treachery was the only version of fade that could stack with burst of speed? Sounds fun to me.
As for MA assassin: I was thinking it needed a buff of way more than 20% damage to the elemental skills. Or some runeword possibilities that adds +Oskill points to sorc mastery skills. Or some runeword possibilities that cast lower resist on attack/hit. Or maybe all of the above.
No strong opinion, the Radius is fine I think, the most annoying thing is the Knockback
Burst of Speed and Fade can be used on same time!
Completely nuts and undercuts the fantasy of both spells
Shadow Warrior and Shadow Master (improving their base Life) I can suggest x2.
The Shadow is one of the most tanky summons in this game already due to her Res scaling and her Items. No need for more life imo. More damage/Ar would be more appreciated
Treachery Rework
Treachery is already a S-Tier armor while there are a lot of underused chest pieces in this game. Why would you want to make it even better for the cheap runes it already needs.
The Cold Resist also comes from Thul, you can’t remove/change that part
The Gold Find comes from Lem, you can’t remove/change that part
Claws of Thunder and Phoenix Strike - 30% more lightning damage will be great (a little boost)
Would make no difference because Claws of Thunder/PS are bugged (Not really but they suffer from Next hit Delay which can be seen as a bug)
For MA to shine all we need is to remove Next Hit Delay from multiple charges released at once not dealing damage I.E. Claws of Thunder realising charge 3 and 2 with Dragon Claw or Dragon Talon makes the second Nova to do no damage because NHD, or Phoenix Strike 2 or 3 charges released at once makes the Chaos Lightining to deal no damage to enemis hit by the Chaos Ice Bolts because of the NHD being in a 4 frames.
Using Plague and Infinity makes the assassin do very good damage, but i agree that a boost in damage like 10 or 20% would be welcome.
For Shadow War and Master they re in a good spot. With CtA and a lv 31 she cant even die to ubers. (Warrior could die because he has low resistances i believe).
And last the Claws of Thunder, Fists of Fire and Blades of Ice having SLOWER attack speed than Tiger Strike, Cobra Strike and Phoenix Strike and also the basic attack makes no sense for me. This should be fixed to make all the MAs have the same AS because all the single elements being slower than PO makes their so inferior.
Wait a second. I was completely unaware of this Next Hit Delay thing.
Is this confirmed? Even in the 2.4 test build running on the PTR?
But it makes no sense; if the Chain Lightning from PS#2 would deal no dmg due to this Frame mechanism (bug?), why would the devs even make the change of each hit consuming one charge only?
The Next Hit Delay Issue was still in the first round of the PTR. We did not see any change in this regard in the patch notes.
But it makes no sense; if the Chain Lightning from PS#2 would deal no dmg due to this Frame mechanism (bug?), why would the devs even make the change of each hit consuming one charge only?
Maybe because they are unaware of the mechanic or because they do not care
NextDelay is a property that activates a hidden “hit timer” that limits how often any attack from that group can damage a single target. This works similarly to the infamous spell timer, which limits how often any spell in that group can be cast. The difference is that the hit timer doesn’t prevent you from attacking, it just sets everyone’s chance-to-hit that monster (with a hit timer attack) at zero until the timer runs out.
Here’s a list of skills that are affected by NextDelay, and the lengths of them:
25-Frame Delay (1 second)
Shock Web
Blade Sentinel
Twister
Tornado
10-Frame Delay (0.4 seconds)
Volcano (initial eruption)
6-Frame Delay (0.24 seconds)
War Cry
Grim Ward
5-Frame Delay (0.2 seconds)
Fissure
Volcano (small fireball)
4-Frame Delay (0.16 seconds)
Multi Shot
Strafe
Lightning Strike
Chain Lightning
Nova
Frost Nova
Poison Nova
Shock Wave
FoH Holy Bolts
Wake of Fire
Claws of Thunder
Phoenix Strike
Dragon Flight
Battle Cry
Battle Command
Battle Orders
So, the moment a certain skill from the list damages a monster, it prevents every other skill on the list from hitting the said monster for the original skill’s NextDelay duration (whether from you or any other character).
you mean like the paladin having 4x the defense, life, resistance, max resistance block rating than any assassin and 100% attack rating or unresistable damage?
ofc it would buff traps even more which we wouldnt want but i think it’ll be a godsend to the melee assassin builds to use both fade and bos
DTail already has the potential of dealing above 22k+ from each kick, the current radius is fair for the massive damage it can deal. DFlight suggestion does almost nothing in PvE and just adds more CC to our toolkit for PvP when we already have Cloak of Shadows and Mind Blast. CoT I agree with, but only on 2nd charge. For PS, I would rather have it scale “quicker” up so it’s not so gear dependant, especially early on.
Completely disagree with the BoS/Fade. It’s meant to be a choice. Since people bring up Paladin auras, neither of these are auras and the Paladin themselves gets to choose 1 aura out of god knows how many different ones they have. Venom feels very weak in PvE, can’t say much for PvP, but I know it’s used alot there. I barely use the clones myself so not gonna chime in there.
All blade spells needs base attack rating and +x% attack rating per level. That 10% they added was almost nothing.
I’d personally put Treachery in the top 10 for armors and the “insteads” you have suggested is from the runes like stated before me. That 45% all resistances would make you get 105% with the Fade on top of all of the other good stuff, that’s just too much. I’d rather say that we should look into the other “class armors” and armor runewords to balance them better.
Here’s a little kicker to that though, Phoenix Strike isn’t affected by increased damage from +%fireskilldmg, +%lightskilldmg or +%coldskilldmg. Only -enemyres works for it. It was a very nice suggestion though and I would love for these to work with it. We’re getting Plague atleast for Lower Resist which is nice.
Next Delay (ND)/Next Hit Delay (NHD) are both used. It is a big part to what is holding Martial Arts down and other builds as well. If you look closely at the list that Klenkogi posted, Volcano+Fissure is in there (Fire druid), Wake of Fire which most people enjoy using, but it’s not great damage. Because of ND, it’s not worth popping more than 2 WoF at a time.
Guys we need to also look at other things. At the moment the true Assassin fantasy as I see it, with high damage, dual claws, NO merc (Assassins do not use mercenaries, they kill themselves) just doesn’t cut it on Hell. I played for hours on the PTR and tested it.
The damage is enough for p1, but the hero is just SO squishy w/o Stormshield, CTA and Life Tap, that it’s just painful. If you are going to be in the center of the melee you need WAY more damage with the elemental charges. Also Mana Burn or any curse + aura combination just destroys you. You can’t see the charges at all in the melee…
Imho the Assassin MA are not finished yet and feel underwhelming.
That’s what I am saying.
My proposal above in the main post will make it stronger or way better. At least this is my opinion.
If you go P4/P8 you are totally screwed.
Damage it’s not ENOUGH!
I aggre that the class is squishy and we need more damage for sure, but assassins are not supposed to go into a large pack of enemies naked. We need to use our stuff life Fade, Dual Block, Mind Blast or our Warrior/Shadow to help us and most important Cloak of Shadows do a huge work agains big packs so we can deal all our AoE damage without risking our lives; thats how assassin does, go throught the shadows or with our shadow.
I actually agree with most of this, I think the MA charge up skills would benefit from a slight boost in AR and charge duration as well.
Fade and BoS together sounds like it would be powerful. Paladin auras can be stacked with items and there’s general powercreep going on in this patch anyways so that’s a maybe?