Bone Spirit, Aura's and FoH do not need these buffs

This is my 3rd Post in my series of posts relating to D2r PTR.

This topic relates to the Buff now being implement for the Necro Skill, Bone Spirit, and to the paladin Offensive Aura’s and the Paladin Skill Fist Of Heaven.

OK, I fully understand the thinking here. Necro’s in PvM are not gods, and you want more players to play them. Bone Spirit, Offensive Aura’s and FoH are all seen as underused skills, i get it. These damage boosts will somewhat increase the popularity of these builds. However the way you want to implement these changes will create long term issues detrimental to the life of the game.

Therefore my suggestion is : proceed with your plan, but change the damage type. i.e. for Bone Spirit, create an additional attack type, such as adds x-xx damage to demons or adds x-xx damage to undead and have it scaled similar to your suggested (or even double) where/provided it does not affect players in pvp.

The same principal could be applied to the aura’s and to fist of heaven. also, fist of heaven needs the current delay that it has else you actually break that build. if you want to redue the time on something, reduce Frozen Orb casting delay by 1/2.

I want to play this game for years. In order to do that, there must be a driver to keep players interested. that means, Ladders, New Content and Player vs Player (PVP). All of these features drive the economy, and retain your player base.

In D2LOD it was the pvp communities that kept the D2 economy afloat for decades. Yes people would also come back for ladders, but part of that would be to trade “chase items” to PVP players. Would people still have played ladders? yes, but would the game have died sooner then it did ? yes.

The pvp community has a symbiotic relationship with the far wider pvm community. I appreciate that this might not be fully understood by alot of players but having a healthy PvP scene is a check against the ever reducing population playing the game. Having good PvP is a fundamental keystone to the overall health of the (or any) game.

In PvP the skill, Bone Spirit is fantastic. Necro’s are “S Tier” in PvP, and everyone knows how strong paladins are. What you are doing here is propeling Necro’s into orbit in the “good mannered pvp community” while propelling foh into orbit in the good and bad mannered community. For the Offensive aura’s you are doing something that is going to cause grief for alot of pvm players when someone hostiles them with such a build.

please consider changing these buffs to affect monsters only and not players.

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My first post was for the consideration of an entrance level runeword granting teleport, on the basis that it would be a “class balance fix” enabling more classes to be viable (played) from Day1 of ladder. i got a 404 when revisiting the topic so i made a new topic here: Please consider a new Mid-Level Runeword Granting +Teleport

My second Topic related to “shopping” items from vendors - refresh tool and possible ability to shop and/or gamble sorceress orbs - Shopping from Vendors - refresh screen

My third Topic related to the buffs to Necro’s and Paladins where i suggested that the buffs only be for PvM and not for PvP and that FoH should not have its casting delay reduced/removed: Bone Spirit, Aura’s and FoH do not need these buffs

My fourth topic related to the MDR Bug where having multiple elements of damage would actually REDUCED your damage where your opponent had items that grant the ability “magic damage reduced” (mdr) : The Magic Damage Reduced (MDR) bug in PvP

My Fifth topic related to a bug where if you used jewels with enhanced damage + min/max, in anything other then a weapon, it would bug the item and not grant the correct damage modifier as specific on the jewel: The Jewel Bug - how damage from jewels does not work properly

My sixth topic related to charge bug, how a fix has caused a problem, and the ww bug how something has changed with how it works resulting in less damage for the iconic build: Please fix “Charge Bug” and Barbarian WW Bugs

My seventh topic reviewed the new runewords and provided feedback relating to them. Basically, they are an addition to the game, slightly underpowered but they filled a gap. More needed, slightly better mods required. i.e. with some minor tweaks some of these runewords will be great while still not being overpowered. The New Runewords - Observations

My eight topic related to the Shaper Nerf in the PTR where Increased Attack Speed (IAS) in shaper forms was made to make more weapons viable but as a side effect appears to have unintentionally crippled Shapers. Shape attack speeds issue - Not working as intended

Bone spirit, I kinda disagree. While I think it pulls fine numbers, it bizzarely does no more damage than Bone Spear under the same conditions, even though Spear costs less mana and can hit more than one target.

IMO in the bone tree, Teeth needs a modest buff (see my thread) and really that’s about it.

What did you disagree with? Did you read all of what I wrote ? in laymans terms, what I said is: increase the damage, just dont have it affect players. There is no issue with boosting the damage by 30-50%, provided its vs monsters only. that is my suggestion. And yes, a modest buff to teeth is fine as well and the same principal can be applied.

Your thread title.

You said “doesn’t need these buffs.” I just argued that bone spirit kinda does, becuase it’s clearly inferior to Spear. But you make fair point that buffing it shouldn’t apply to PvP (though I personally don’t know anyone who cares about that…)

Teeth need to be like charged bolt where one mob can take more than 1 teeth’s damage

Also bone spirit need to fly faster. It’s too slow ATM.

spirit move fast enough vs a running players(lld)

vs teleport it wont reach them ever unless you pretty much teleport spirit to player which would be bs to screen snipe from miles away

in lld duels spirit is used to force a player to keep moving then angle them with spear by predicting where they be running to due to spirit chasing

pnb didn’t need more pvp power…but it need some boost for pve alone

Holy Fire may have been buff a tad too much…they increased dmg by 90%…i think 70% would of been enough to compete with holy shock…though for pve its gonna stay meh due to mass fire immunity…sad that Holy Freeze dmg wasn’t buff one bit though(could of use a 20% extra for highter lvl(30+) and like 60% more for 1-29

FoH…ya could of done without that buff…too strong for pvp

Who doesn’t teleport in pvp outside shapeshifter?

A bowazon historically did not teleport either.

Great post Ferdia.

Blizzard needs a better way of balancing PVM vs PVP skills, they cannot have both worlds and be balanced with just amping up their damage. They need to either reduce magic resistance on monsters or as you say add in some other metric that affects monsters only.

7k Spirit vs Demon Lord might help pvm, but 7k Spirit vs Player X will be way too overpowered and the community will have no way to balance this.

regarding boneskills, there has been the suggestion to give lower resist a slight -magic res. that would lead to a buff inn pvm, but not in pvp. it should be low enough to not break immunes at low level (sothat hammerdins can’t abuse that with lower res wands). even a 20-30% might be enough to boost pvm. then you wouldnt need the damage boost that throws pvp out of line