It’s not lvl 1-15 that’s the problem with physical weapons it’s lvl 25-50’ish. This is where you have outgrown steel or any other weapon you can easily gem and you just don’t do the damage of any caster.
For this ladder season I tried to make a bowazon, I did fine through to act 5. Now mid nightmare I’m plinking constantly, averaging 5-12 shots to kill things, mostly hiding behind my merc. Once I find a 4 OS bow to make Insight in I’ll be fine but farming up that bow (or getting a better drop) as the first character was so painful, I made a caster…
Spirit is strong for its level but it’s not the core of the problem.
Just compare your double Steel Flail barb at any level between 13 and 23 to either a Holy Fire pally or a Fire Ball sorc with +3 vendor bought weapons.
A naked necro can easily SSF the game. Your point?
God forbid people compare progression differences between classes.
How about the monster HP boosts and physical resistances added in 1.10 that also didn’t address itemization? Guess there is Grief though right?
What exactly is there to learn after 20 years?
Diablo has never been a hard game. The only difficulty every attempted in the diablo series was at the launch of D3 where massive massive monster life, high gear depenance, and enrage timers were Blizzard’s failed attempt at increasing difficulty in an ARPG.
Diablo is one step above the difficulty of clicker games. I am sorry to hear that you are so easily challenged
A month commitment for an arbitrary achievement that offers no real power gains. Yeah definitely needs to be addressed immediately, can’t let the common folk get 99.
Do I need to repeat the response now?
Since you apparently didn’t read it?
I never said they were equal NOW, I said you could make them equal.
Well I made my point there already, read it.
I already said I don’t think melee has to hard of a time, I think casters have to easy of a time (and yes I consider necro a caster not melee, obviously, also consider Holy Fire caster, though maybe you could call it hybrid).
But you rather cherry pick parts of a sentences so to avoid the point I made.
Again you compare them in their CURRENT state, which is the state I said should change, however rather than make weaker builds stronger, make the stronger builds weaker.
When 1.10 hit my barbarian’s gear was instantly rubbish, however I could still easily do solo Baal runs, monster were made stronger, not however in comparison to the buff items and skills got.
It made the game easier.
If you play 20 years I presume you don’t fall in the second group.
I wasn’t talking about you however, I named three factors which imo can cause people to perceive the melee as a struggle.
Their are people new to the game, or that never learned to play it because they leech their way through hell and start with budget gear that can actually do Hell.
Well depends on your definition of hard, I can easily SSF with any character in D2, can do it asleep in D3, compared to many games Diablo 2 was hard when it launched and it to easy now.
The easier it gets however, the less interesting it gets.
Personally liked D3’s difficulty at launch, the game itself is a different thing, but finishing inferno SSF with my monk was a challenge, thus felt rewarding.
Then why do you want to make it more easy?
I am not the one challenged here.
It offers the reward of doing it, do you play Diablo to gain real power or enjoyment?
I don’t mind having the common folk get 99, I would encourage them to do it once (not much use doing it again imo and not really an achievement anymore anyway).
It perceive that more like a bucket list thing or grail thing as some would call it.
You are the only one equating balancing the classes to making things more easy.
Case in point. Your gear instantly become “rubbish” but hey Grief is the great equalizer?
There is nothing difficult about gear check timers. My first D3 build was a monk that died in A2 Inferno to a single unique wasp that hit the enrage timer. I had killed all the adds and it was below 20% HP. Technically died due to the “out of time” debuff dot…
Buy gear off AH to progress through Inferno. No thanks
In addition to increasing base weapon damage, I would like to up the ante for 2H-weapons and they will also receive 3% bonus damage per point of Strength (vs. 1% for 1H-weapons). This would add more value to the Strength attribute.
This really shouldn’t be looked at until there is some attempt at nerfing down synergy bonuses on a lot of damage based skills, and ones that pertain to S tier builds in particular.
THAT said however, I can see a plausible case for buffing crossbow damage - but even then only a modest one - as bows clearly outshine crossbows.
I had thoughts about buffing up weapons myself. Things have been going trough my head about this topic as casters still outperform melee. I may be going a little bit too far with this but here it goes:
If a weapon spawns with an edmg mod, increase it’s minimum and maximum damage on the weapon by 3. Kind of like how armor works where it spawns with max defense +1.
Eth weapons should spawn with double damage rather than 1.5 damage increase.
I know both ideas sound crazy but we need to make weapons even stronger if we want melee characters to be at least on par with casters. As you all would say the second idea would literally turn grief into a thing of the past. Many people may not like that but it’s about time for edeath to shine on this game. I’d like to see death and botd on more characters.
No I am not.
I asked for nerfing the more powerful builds and bring them down, not make the monster weaker in the proces, in fact I more than once stated I prefer the game becoming harder again.
Please don’t just make things up.
What do you even mean by saying Grief is the great equalizer?
I think Grief needs a nerf hammer like nothing before, always said that and always will, because I think Grief was a great example of how not to make runewords, like infinity and enigma, they may look cool at first glance but in the end hurt the game more than they add by far, because you “need” them (or atleast people feel they do).
Seriously can’t follow you here.
Used a super tanky high dodge variant that did AoE when dodging, so killing things often took long and more than once had enraged things before me because being so tanky with insane dodge did mean less damage.
I don’t buy gear in a SSF obviously, though I personally never hated the AH.
Didn’t even hate the RMA, though this was mostly because without it third party sites sold their stuff for real money (some people at D2jsp would buy fg and buy technically with real money) so rather had that happen in house if it had to happen anyway, basically hate paysites more and rather had Blizzard earn money on those sales so they had a monetary gain and incentive to keep the game working as good as they could.
Tbh though, I think the enrage timers were crap though, but I think having to focus on killspeed is in itself not a good thing.
Nevertheless it was the best time for D3 imo, while some changes afterwards were good, it was mostly bad imo.
And while it’s start wasn’t great, it only went down afterwards in my opinion.
Which is good imo, making builds as close to each other in power level is what actually creates diversity, as most people will flock to the better builds so as not to be left out, to closer their power is the more people will play the style they like more.
Think you can, isn’t an easy thing to do as you should not simply say here’s a nerf and that’s it, but if you don’t it’s a permanent powercreep or stagnance, because as you make new items your bound to make an oversight and create a situation that is to strong, but then you can’t reverse it or fix it because “people already own it”.
If you run a program that pull the runes from the item and places runes and item in a temp stash (like the ladder stash tabs) no one would lose their gear, ofcourse a good grief was worth more than a bad one, but it can by all butterflies and rainbows.
However this should be done with a melee overhaul, so the Grief lovers get a balance patch in return that gives more freedom to play what they want.
Ofcourse you could buff everything else, including melee, but you would be feeding the powercreep again and boredom is the biggest threat to D2 atm imo, being OP sounds fun, but it’ll last only a short while.
But in your case, your making a mod, so when you launch it it’s fresh, having Grief deal less damage is simply part of a rebalance.
Those calculation are all made based on the Phaseblade, which is only very fast but has horrible damage and could not become ethereal in runeword state, so not a great example to start with as things like BotD would only be at 66.7% effectiveness if having only this weapon to work with.
Try having a Thundermaul do 2.8x times, then give an Eth BotD one to a Fury druid and say it hardly matches Grief.
Because even without the weapon damage rework of 2.8x it beats a Grief+Phoenix on a Fury Druid with a good marging.
If you want to rebalance everything towards Grief you need to do it for each weapon seperately, not take the weakest (damage wise) and base everything on that.
Phase Blade with max werewolf = 9 frames base and 7 frames at 60 IAS.
Thunder Maul with max werewolf = 11 frames base and 8 frames at 65 IAS
Now comparing the weapons with max werewolf and using Fury as the attack:
Phase Blade:
at 0 IAS: 6+(4)+8
at 46 IAS: 5+(4)+6
Phase Blade:
at 0 IAS: 7+(5)+9
at 52 IAS: 5+(4)+7
This is comparing the fastest base weapon speed with the slowest and you are talking about a 1 frame difference between Fury attacks using 3 Shael/4 IAS jewels…
It’s not hard to beat a perfect PB Grief when the average base damage of an eth Thunder Maul is already 160, especially when the attack frames are virtually the same.
Perfect roll PB grief in 15% ED base = 437.5 average
Worst possible roll of eth TMaul BOTD is 220-1215 which equates to 717.5 average damage.
Even with the 2h advantage, werewolf is pretty awful. 10 frame Shockwave is easier to gear, does more damage vs everything but act bosses, and has greater survival.
Now should we compare dual grief WW/Frenzy to EBOTD TMaul?
This is a valid argument and one I addressed earlier. As for balancing towards Grief, that is a whole another itemization issue. It has nothing to do with the giant chasm of progression between mid Normal and End game for melee.
Progression should be in line with casters. Whether that means buffing melee or nerfing casters is a choice for the developers.
I like the damage buff ideas - but i would much prefer everything to be nerfed down to Barb levels. The problem is, the quick win majority wouldnt stand for it. How dare they have to hurdle a challenge to experience a reward?
Frenzy Barb is prefectly well balanced - its everything else that is wrong.
Keeping it simple.
Fury Thunder Maul could and should if you gear him (and merc) properly, hit 6.94 aps, while Fury Grief is hardcapped at 6.25.
Damage is about 33% higher with an Eth BotD Thundermaul.
An in the setup I was calculating it already hit 109k at res 0 with 50cb.
Not describing starter gear here, and already mention the Grief had a Phoenix on the side, so Faith Merc included.
So would increasing Thundermaul’s damage 2.8x by a good move, after it is already outperforming Grief?
That’s what I wanted to point out.
I named Fury Druid because I had actually just done some calculation and found that the T-Maul was stronger, then I read bump all weapon damage 2.8x so they equal to Grief.
It was basically an easy way to state why you can’t simply balance everything looking at a Grief Phase Blade and a normal Phase Blade.
I could create plenty examples of gear on all builds that really on weapon damage that would surpass Grief and come out the other end after a 2.8x buff.
That is just an enormous amount.
Now whether Fury Druid is less than Shockwave is a whole different discussion, Shockwave is not a weapon damage skill, I wouldn’t compare Fury with Blizzard either.
After the “buff” (still not sure whether it was intentional and not in the patchnotes or an oversight) Shockwave has become pretty good vs groups, but against ubers for example you would pick Fury.
Which both were closer to a middle road then they are, but alas it’s basically a single target and a group build.
I agree there is a gap and it needs rebalancing, I personally would prefer it in a way of nerfs (to some weapon and most casters, basically a big overhaul).
Bringing everything up just makes this game easier and easier, and the fear of nerfs devs apparantly have means a neverending powercreep.
Ofcourse you could bring everything up to the max and then buff monsters, but that will result in the D3 solution eventually ending in millions or billions hits, just ridiculous imo.
Haven’t played Frenzy for a while and haven’t done any calculations either, but in general I agree, bring everything down to a level that feels balanced and challenging.
Not really. Builds within the same tree should definitely be open for comparison. We are comparing melee vs caster progression after all…
Exactly, yet it scales better with lower quality gear.
Don’t think anyone would confuse Grief and BOTD as starter gear
Impale, Charge, and Vengeance builds only really. All 3 already favor 2h weapons…
Outside of swords(same ias table as 1h), WW breakpoints no longer support 2h builds.
It’s a hidden multiplier that’s comes out to (1+(.15*(n-1))) where n= skockwave skill level. Been around since 2.4. A hidden multipler doesn’t just arise out of a bug. Someone coded it in. Whether n should have been Werebear or Shockwave levels is about the only thing in question at this point.
Most of the game is damage vs groups. Shockwave is the clear winner.
No, I would pick a smiter
Hell, even Maul is a better choice thanks to bear attacks being uninterruptable…
I used phase blade as basis for this number because grief adds flat damage, not enhanced damage, and while phase blade is the lowest, but fastest, it will continue to outperform other more expensive sword-based runewords, such as last wish, ( I feel item balancing is of big importance) unless base damages are increased to a point that negates the flat damage vs enhanced damage ( which is around 2.8x increase).
I feel the impact of changes is most important to be observed on the main melee class, barbarians, and next paladins / druids, as only barbarians are pure melee ( no elemental / powerful multi-hit magic skills)
Skill unbalances that arise from balancing the weapons damages could then be addressed individually.
My main concern is balancing the items so there is not only a few choices due to their damage discrepancies.
I would be fine with grief becoming Enhanced damage, etc. and melee gaining a damage boost through skills / stats, rather than massive weapons base damage increases.
No we weren’t I was responding someone who made calculations and his finding were that every weapon needed a base damage 2.8x buff to make them equal in Grief to damage.
You replied to that post so I am comparing Grief with other weapons if all base damage goes times 2.8x
Not comparing those builds at all and not comparing Caster vs Melee.
Think you don’t realise what I was responding to, nor what I meant.
Was responding to this “However, unless at a base damage increase of 2.8x, grief phase blade will continue to outshine other options.” and the post linked to it.
Didn’t mean other builds with the Eth Thundermaul, meant I used T-Maul as an example where even that thing would destroy Grief if the 2.8x buff was applied, as it even beats it in the current patch with a Fury Wolf, but with 2.8x damage I could easily create plenty of other examples where items leave Grief in the dust if that multiplyer was applied to base damage of weapons.
I mean Frenzy, first thing that came to mind (and likely not even the best option if you really start theorycrafting) Eth BotD Zerker now 180 - 530 would become 504 - 1484 with great mods that are on the BotD, without a doubt crushing Grief.
I know the formula and it is a coded purposely coded one true, I however don’t know whether it went live on purpose and wasn’t some test or whether they accidently went live with it and they will ninja it out again.
I hope not because I like the fact that the bear has atleast one build (Fire Claw Bear simply is not good enough anymore and beaten out by the wolf easily).
Though I wouldn’t mind them moving it to Bear (which I thought it was at first, but quickly realized it could be by taking of the pelt ).
As long as that doesn’t mean it will be reduced to almost no damage again and only usefull for stun locking.
Lol yeah I would go smiter aswell, although I might not due to the fact that most of my uber killers were smiters.
I haven’t done the calculation, but I don’t think Maul could outperform Fury, the change to Shapeshift attack speed simply broke the Bears speed.
Don’t think it is realistically possible to go beyond 3.57 aps with decent damage per hit anymore (if at all).
While I would love to be mauling away (I prefer the bear in playstyle), the damage won’t go near Fury as it’s 6.94 vs 3.57 aps while Fury will do a little more damage per hit.
It only does so now and not even always, the Phase Blade is very fast, which is basically the only reason it is used at all.
The damage/speed comparison is not very good, it’s base damage is really bad compared to other weapons, I mean even a Bone Knife has a better base damage, as do throwing weapons.
And ofcourse Grief has range adder 0 which definitely matters when comparing weapons as well for many skills.
Besides even if you would only use Phase Blades 2.8x would still be a lot, wouldn’t mind those theoritical rare Phase Blades crushing a Grief Phase blade, would love it, but even others could top Grief, even a 250ed 2os Eth Crystal/Dimensional would become higher damage then Grief if upped with the 2.8x, so would any 300ed eth of those, once upped as you could alway make 1 socket and thats enough.
But I think the most important is that other weapons would gain so much more from the base damage increase, as the above example already says, a Eth BotD Zerker is now 180 - 530 and would become 504 - 1484 damage, I prefer the stats on BotD above those of Grief, but even if you like Grief more, the damage difference is so high that next to this Grief would feel like a Passion now feels next to a Grief.
I personally prefer nerfing to more powerful builds and having a more difficult game, however if you would want to buff melee, I would still nerf Grief (becoming ed would be a good choice imo) instead of buffing the other (which you would have to do with calculation for each weapon and buff each weapon individually).
Then buff melee skills to have more impact on the combat, especially the amount of skillpoints should have more impact and possible add more sources of lowering physical resistance.
Magic gains a lot more from skills and during the last number of patches (already started in LoD) the amount of bonus to skills was increased by a lot, this ensured that caster grew in damage much more then melee/ranged, so a good overhaul would also use the skills imo, and ofcourse elemental builds have many more sources of -res which impacts damage dealt immensely, so more would be needed for physical aswell.
So yeah I think that melee gaining a bigger damage boost from skills/stats instead of buffing base damage would be a lot better.
But that is literally the topic you are posting in…
Directly from OP…
Changing the damage formula to make damage from skills independently multiplicitave instead of additive with all other damage modifiers would be the better solution.
This would still need a rework of weapons across the board.
Ethereal should also be removed or 50% bonus should be additive with weapon ED, not multiplicitave.
BOTD is effectively 525-600% ED on a weapon(or higher thanks to superior bases). How exactly can other weapons compete when every normal base or unique rolls 300% ED or lower. Majority are in the 200% range.
But not what I was responding to in that specific reply…
That was to another person’s reply where the statement was made that weapons damage needed a 2.8x base multiplyer to make them comparible with Grief.
To the 50% of OP I had responded that I’d rather see casters brought down to melee level instead of melee brought up.
In another reply.
Might actually be even more work that way and while I think that is not a bad way of doing it, it’s also harder to keep in check and the rework would have to include the skills and weapons in one go.
The difference in skill damage already present is less impactful when additive, make it multiplicative and the impact will grow fast.
And would skill damage be additive to skill damage or each skill multiplicative, cause that would make balancing very tricky.
Either way, to make things more comparable I think weapons and skills (melee and casters) all need one big overhaul.
Might even get rid of the only a few weapons are used for runewords, which I also dislike.
Don’t think this dev team could manage that tbh.
Would make Ethereal nearly useless though, most items when ethereal would not gain indestructible or repairs for free, which means the 50% gained is lost aswell as you need to Zod it instead of Ohm (or better depending on needs) it.
It’s true however that the 50% multiplicative from ethereal is more than you would want for a healthy competition between items.
I like the ethereal concept and would love for it to stay, maybe not in it’s exact current form, tweaked is fine as long as the concept remains the same.
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