Class changes that I belive would open up the game more

General Discussion
1

There are some meta build controlling the game, on those lists there is hardly any melee characters and for good reason - lack of movement and kill speed.

I would propose a couple of not to invasive changes that would be nice. Please do comment what you think.

Assassin:

Blade Sentinel
Summons a blade that circles the assassin. It will target enemies, flying to them, cutting anything in its path and then return to the assassin. Duration can still be the same, same with damage. It just follows the assassins movement and attacks the furthest away mob in a pack close by and shreds back and forth from the assassin.

Blade Fury
Gains the “projectile” word so it benefits from piercing items like razor tail belt.

Blade Shield
Blade Shield gains range it deals damage at like an aura, dealing damage up to 12,5 or up to 15 yards away (hammerdin range or more)
Also since it’s a shield, it should add some kind of protection to be lucrative for melee builds - so a flat 10-15% damage reduction on damage taken would be nice.

Amazon

Plague Javelin
Lower time it takes for max damage to apply to 3 seconds, down from 6,8

Barbarian
Under Combat masteries tree add a passive ill temporary call Bul Katho’s Rage

Bul Katho’s Rage
Your damage is increases by 25/5/5/5/5%
Your attacks splash 5/5/5/5/5% to enemies 5/0/1/0/1 yards away. (15 yards max)
Giving barbs faster clear speeds.

Battle cry and warcry - increased yards to 15 yards aswell - they aint that valid today because of range they reach

Druids
Hunger
Your damage is increases by 25/5/5/5/5%
Your attacks splash 5/5/5/5/5% to enemies 5/0/1/0/1 yards away. (15 yards max)
Giving feral druid faster clear speeds aswell.

Currant hunger is a worthless talent that dont work well.

Oaksage
Heart of the wolverine
Spirit of barbs

These 3 become an aura instead of a summon, keeping the sprite as a cinematic and companion, however it cant be killed or targetable. It dies too easy today and its ment as an aura anyways.

Summon Ravens
Ravens gain the effects from auras and buffs

Paladin
Holy shield
Add “Your damaging melee attacks splash as holy damage (lightning damage) to all targets within 15 yards” making zealers and smiters more valid for acctual game play and clearing.

Necromancer
Adding 2 new tabs under summoning.

Improved Rise skeleton
Increases the damage and attack rating of your rise skeletons by 10/8/8/8/8/8%
As this skill evolves, skeletons change apperance to other existing skeletons in game.

Improved Skeletal mages
Increases skeletal mages damage and spell pool.
Giving poison skeletons at lvl 20 poison bolt poison nova.
Frost mages frost bolt + frost nova.
Fire mages fireball + meteor.
Also changing apperance as they level.

2 Likes
2

The mages skills are big no. Screen clutter. Eye strain.
Just buff their damage and let us summon each element type as we wish.

1 Like
3

Yes the clutter would be there for sure - however, of you run 8 skeletal mages or 80 revives I still belive skeletal mages would be less clutter - this was thaught as a way to specialize in a sertain summon instead of being a “summon all meat wall”

But I do agree, will be alot of clutter either way

4

I just wish skeletons in general got some sort of passive buff from the mobs used to summon them. Would help them scale so much. Currently, both the melee AND the mages are a loss of damage by just existing. Way better off just using revives and merc.

5

Just don’t use big aoe skills for mages, they aren’t meant to be sorcerers.

6

True. It’s more a let me chill while i watch another screen but still play d2r

7

Play a sorc/zon/pally, hit 3 buttons, clear a screen then don’t look back for 2 minutes. Pretty much the same. But even less effort.

8

Yes this is true, I often find summon druid more play time because its less summons - Idea is to keep too a stronger smaller group of mobs that do something - while properties as you say from the mob you ress is cool - problem with normal rise skeleton and skeletal mages is acctually that it has a static base unlike revives.
So a summon skeleton to be good needs to level with you just like a merc does.
In my calculations summon skeletons base needs a flat 300% damage increase to be valid.

Mages need way more then 300%, I calculated that they either need a 800% increase of damage since its horrid and a spell speed of 0,2 spells per second witch would be horrible because that would buff enemy skeletons too to be valid, or it gains the 200 damage increase and spells that would damage over time stacking.

So a possible solution is that skeletons gains following.

Max level skeletons do 1000-1100 damage per skeleton (this is lower because of defences and hitrating today)
And an increased chance to hit. 6-7 skeletons would then equal the strength of 1 merc.
However with auras and buffs they would then be buffed induvidually - gradually becoming stronger then a merc.

Mages would need a massive overhaul - sure i Like that you could pick what kind of summon you get - depending maby on your gears elemental source, say you have 100-150 lightning damage on gear and 50 cold damage. Skeletal summonings would have offs of 3/4 lightning skeletal and 1/4 cold summoning.
Further they need massive damage upgrade since auras dont realy benefit them.
So perhaps the skill would rather increase their cast speed and damage by 300%, making their spell speed like 0,3 seconds per spell and increased damage is 300%, making total damage increase 600%

1 Like
9

For barbs just revamp increased speed to give movement speed and attack speed like assassin’s BoS, but a lower bonus as it would just be a passive.

Give iron skin flat thorns damage

Have increase stamina give flat replenish life and increased duration of positive effects (buffs, shrines, skill buffs like frenzy). For example BoS proc on hustle would last 50% longer with decent increased stamina investment.

Barbs need more reasons to invest into masteries or at least think about using mastery gcs.

Give crushing blow to Bash capped at 20% at lvl 20. Fix its flat damage to be calculated into the damage of the attack like normal skills and buff it (have it give like 100 grief damage at lvl 20.) right now bash’s flat damage is calculated after you hit. Which means it doesnt scale at all but has the weak effect of being able to leech from unleechable enemies (since the damage is so low it doesnt matter anyways after leech has been nerfed so many times since LoD).

Cap stun’s stun to 10 seconds at lvl 10 (the max) and have it give a synergy to bash ( 1.5% deadly strike per point). Every point after 10 should significantly increase the AR bonus. These changes have the benefit of buffing the 2h a5 merc as sell.

Conc should synergize with stun and bash. Have stun give conc increased attack speed and bash give % of its grief damage.

2 Likes
10

I don’t know.
Adding AoE and Lightening damage to melee Pally isn’t really helping the melee problem.
Then there is the Auradin, and Tesladin/DualDream already in the Pally’s tool box.
Smite is what it is, a very reliable single target destroyer…
Not sure why people differentiate Zealer - Smiter… No self-respecting Zealot cannot double duty as a Smiter… and, not a Smiter build around that isn’t heavily invested in Zeal/Sacrifice… “something-else” to make them playable…
I’m playing my Zealot now… he’s got 35 points in Smite, 36-Holy Shield…
I mean, even my DualDream guy which is essentially a Zealot (that deals lightening) has got 20-Smite, 23-Holy Shield.
Anyone that builds purely a Smiter, has a tonne of points left over/not being used. (1 synergy)
I’m not sure of a good/proper Pally build that does not use a shield, and therefor HolyShield… unless someone is just being obtuse in the build.
What I’m getting at is, (and this is my opinion) Smite is a focused tool within the Pally’s kit… there is no need to make it the focus of a build, in an attempt make it whole game applicable… when any “Smiter” has enough points left over (again, only 1 synergy for Smite) to be any build he wants to be…
With one exception…
Vengeance.
Vengeance requires so many synergies that you simply run out of skills… and are still left as the slowest thing at killing you could possibly imagine.
When my Zealot finally reaches lvl99 (Tesladin is already lvl99) I am going to build a Vengeance Pally, with an Act1 Merc wielding a Faith for the Fanata.

So, in short, adding AoE to melee, is not solving the handicap that is melee.
Again, my opinion.

11

Necromancer has two of its 3 builds working at 60 points + requirements + 1 point skills, being able to make variations in the build of poison and summon which is the great strength of the class that are to make the sub builds.

The necromancer’s biggest problems are:

The breakpoints of set Trangs with the 5 pieces is a completely embarrassing problem that should have been fixed by now. What kind of set is worse with 5 parts than 4 or less?

The runewords for the class are ridiculous except for the only one that works which is white.

Bone: Takes two UM runes and to be comparable and (probably worse) to a vipermagi.

Beast: it’s the summoner’s BIS, but it wasn’t designed for him. A solution to wand fanaticism whether adding or reworking a single item or runeword is desirable. Hustle helps, but again it’s not a runeword designed for the necromancer.

Shrunken Heads: Can only take 2 socks and therefore limited to rhyme and splendor, while all paladin shields can take 4 socks.

Pride: it’s the BIS of the summoner’s merc, but the rune cham itself causes a significant performance loss since the entire body killed by the mercenary will be destroyed by the freeze target 3. Since the necromancer needs bodies, for me the runeword would be more expensive trading a Ber for Cham and trading 20% crushing hit for freeze target 3, which is just not worse than Slain monster rest in peace.

Necromancer is obliged to use the generic runewords, mainly in the summoner build.

Daggers as necromancer weapons need to be given cast rate capabilities and other caster attributes for rares to be investigated. I’m sorry to say but the magic prefix and magicsulfix spreadsheets need to be redesigned

Completely useless skills poison dagger, poison explosion and attraction, weaken and terror enter the long list of skills that need to be reworked and in this the necromancer joins the queue along with the druid and the barbarian

There is a lot of work to be done in my humble view.

12

I see what your saying, however skills like ironskin adding thorns is horrible, the ammount of armor a barbarian has and such makes thorns worthless in hell.

Barbs do struggle with damage, and I agree with mastery tree - over the board ammount of dex and attack rating for all melee classes needs to be lowered by 50 - 75%, unlike spells melee and ranged still miss with a 5% chance (95% to hit cap)

Iron skin would benefit more from a damage reduction %.

So 1% damage taken per level, at level 20 that would be 20% ontop of armor.

Barb shouts need bigger hit area for sure.

Bash is true it needs to synergise with the other skills, crushing blow is an option same with deadly strike.

Furthermore I still belive the barbs damage is too low for clearing, still belive that the 120% damage increase for 20 points and splash damage would increase overall usefullness for throw barbs, WW barbs and bash, if you could hit multible targets

13

Barbs don’t need damage reduction and the thorns would be there for leveling purposes. As is, ironskin is fine, but there’s no reason to put more than 1 point. If it had a good sensical form of damage scaling then it could be used early game. It’s just an added source of damage that barbs already lack to offset the bad defense you’re gonna have early game anyways. Heck you could even make running naked a thing if the damage is good enough (which is thematic).

also berserk drops your defense.

14

you know you can make a hammerdin, add one point into smite and do ubers right? it’s that easy.

you talk like pally builds needs to have things, and they don’t. pallies are broken easy class. always have been.

15

Actually Smiter is frankly better off investing in FoH than other melee. FoH/Smiter is one of the better melee builds simply because it still has solid aoe in many places while being able to smite down anything chunky, or animal type boss packs.

Also with how FoH works you can pretty much cycle in Smite between FoH’s. You end up doing 75% of a FoH pallys FoH damage, while still being a full smiter.

Similar to how a Fire Claw druid is better off also investing in Armageddon and a lot of it’s damage will come from that.

The problem with Barb is mainly it being based around investing in BO/Hork/Mastery. Barbs as so strapped for skill points that they can’t afford to make much use of the little bit of AoE they actually do have access to in Leap Attack/Battlecry.

Best way to fix barb… would be to remove synergies from it’s combat skills entirely, and base the numbers around it’s current synergized values. Barbs were GOOD before synergies.

16

Hammerdin isn’t melee, or Zeal which seems to be what OP was hoping to address.

Then why do you never, ok, rarely see Zealots (OP’s point of this thread) in game?

Yep, which you clearly point out is not melee.
Seems everyone’s solution to Pally/melee - is - make a caster.

18

This makes sense partly because skill points in the combat tree do so little that synergies are more punitive than good since the bulk of barb’s usefulness are in his passives (masteries) and war cries.

I mean fortitude alone covers about the same skill damage as 2 of frenzy’s synergies. 40 skill points, only 320% skill ed. you get similar demon damage on lay of hands for heck man. Add that to the skill or buff the synergies, sure. Skill damage is awful for melee.

19

Ty exactly my point, melees need fixing - options to gain an edge as a melee character

1 Like
20

Actually purposely trying to suffer right now. Playing a HC SSF Throw barb. It’s amazing how bad the damage is. Don’t even have the lowbie runewords to fall back on, still using shopped javs in Hell lol.

It’s so terrible that I’ve been using an Act 3 Light merc to farm NM cows just so I can gather’em and static lol.

Without a ton of gear backing it up… it’s like spending 60 skill points to get less out of it than 1 point Blizzard. My damage right now is like 300-1k. And the only reason it’s even that high is I spent 5 hours shopping a 275% ED 40% ias jav.

1 Like
21

Bul Katho’s Rage
Your damage is increases by 25/5/5/5/5%
Your attacks splash 5/5/5/5/5% to enemies 5/0/1/0/1 yards away. (15 yards max)
Giving barbs faster clear speeds.

Would realy help here I think, throwing a spear and the damage splashes 15 yards around it - damage increase of 115% - however thats maby just a small bandage over a hugh wound