Exhaustive and Compiled Changes for Patch

PTR Feedback
1

Barbarian

Throwing mastery is fantastic! Bonus attack rating from weapon masteries is also great!

  1. Whirlwind: Lots of changes can be applied here - a very simple and easily agreeable change:

Suggestion: For starters, whirlwind damage should NOT start at -50% but +0% and decrease its scaling respectively (final % damage should be about the same).

  1. Grim Ward: I want to see this spell actually see more play and appreciate the adjustments to it.

Suggestion: Increase radius by ~30%

  1. Leap Attack: Awesome changes to making it have AOE - but the area damage should be a function of your weapon.

Suggestion: Make leap attacks area damage 15-20% of the single target damage.

Druid

I love the fact that the druids new IAS enables previously underused weapons to shine. Summoning druid now fulfills the fantasy (not OP), but now works as intended. Its possible that new hybrid werebear/fire and werewolf/summoning builds might emerge with a minor change.

  1. Rabies: Poison damage is great - but too slow.

Suggestion: Set the duration of the poison to be around 4 instead of 14 seconds. Its just not a viable skill with such a long duration.

  1. Spellcasting: There is a lot of potential hybrid summoning/elemental/shapeshifting hybrid builds - BUT this would require casting while shape changed.

Suggestion: Allow druid to cast DRUID spells while shape changed.

Assassin:

  1. Blade furry: This skill NEEDS a reduction in animation/wide time to make it feel reasonable. Its just SO clunky that it feels unplayable.

Suggestion: Decrease casting time animation/wide up. I’d rather you give it almost no animation time and correspondingly reduce its damage to compensate than have a slow wind up. Once the casting time is fixed, evaluate damage and attack rating to balance properly.

  1. Wake of Inferno: The late game damage of this skill is so low compared to lightning sentry and even wake of fire.
    Suggestion: Have its damage tick “per second” instead of per fire stream - effectively doubling its damage.

Paladin

I love that FOH now appears to work beautifully in some targeted areas - excellent change. This might be a new A-S tier build, but that is okay. A level 30+ fantasm aura with act 5 barbarian mercenary is kind of busted.

  1. Thorns: You’re change to dealing BOTH flat and percent of monster attack is in the right direction - but I think the below change is far superior.

Suggestion: Add “+X% chance to crushing blow” instead of % attack damage. Monsters health greatly out scales their damage - so this will keep it viable independent of the difficulty or number of player present.

Sorceress:

Nova builds are a great new addition - glad to see this skill becoming more viable.

  1. Hydra: I’d like to give blizzard a run for its money for early farming sorceress builds. Yes, hydra’s single target damage is really scary, but its power against multiple enemies is far weaker than other AOE spells (even fireball).

Suggestion: Set core scaling to 4% per level…

Necromancer:

I think this class actually needs a ton of adjustments (despite having a lot of strong builds) as MANY of its skills are too weak and underused.

  1. Skeleton Mages: Their damage is lackluster, despite its buffs.

Suggestion: Add a +15% damage synergy per level with fire golem. Ideally this new build would use - max fire golem, max skeleton mages + lower resist + corpse explosion.

  1. Poison Dagger: Poison skills that deal damage over a period of >10s are just not viable.

Suggestion: Set the poison duration to about 3-4s. This should be the “skill of choice” for poison necromancers use against single targets.

  1. Golem Skills (all): It makes no sense to dump 60 hard points into golems when you can only use 1 at a time. Adjusting their synergies to other skills will see a greater diversity of golems in play and might make it worth dumping points into golems if their synergies are already maxed

Suggestions: Remove golem synergies from each other and couple them to the other “core” necro builds. The clay golem should receive synergies from skeleton master (summoner druid), the iron golem should recieve synergies from bone spirit (bone necro) and the fire golem should receive synergies from skeleton mages nova (supporing a new “elemtanl summoning” style).

Amazon:

She seems great. Bowazons will probably be A tier WITH GODLY GEAR. The current changes will allow amazons with lower tier items to do okay damage. The access to spears with infinity will just make melee lightning amazons have A-S tier clear speed- which is fantastic.

Mercenaries:

Overall strength: Act 2 ~ Act 5 > Act 1 > Act 3.

  • Act 5 barbarian MIGHT be too strong (with frenzy) - but I’m okay with a meta shift (might require nerfs at some point).
  • Colossus Swords/Colossus Blades can be weilded both as a 1 and a 2 handed weapon. I believe they’re unusable at the moment in this mercenary - is this intended?
  • To make act 3’s mercenaries stronger - consider allowing them to equip paladin shields and/or 1-handed sorceress orbs!
  • Act 1 amazons feel okay - but not godly. If you gave her a level 1 vigor - I might pick her for the speed boost.

Bugs:

  • Werebear’s attack speed seems capped at a low value - is this correct? I don’t think it functions as the patch described
  • Mana burn bug. Depleting all your mana in a single hit is - a bit much.
2 Likes
2

Good list of suggestions. I also have a very similar list of compiled changes…

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3

Appreciate your comment! I definitely tried to make a clear list of all the change I’d do. There are going to be more "B, A and possibly S tier builds - which is great!

Cain does not identify items stored in Horadric Cube
Add item quality indicator for normal, exceptional, elite
Assassin Blade Fury - wind-up animation too slow to get shots off, should be reduced

4

Thats a very well tought and well writen feedback sir.
I agree with most stuff. So I will depict ones I see differently:

  1. Grimward - I would really like them to remove Fear effect. Instead add new debuff/curse for just slow+damage taken.
  2. Thorns - I would say apply crushing blow, deadly strike, open wounds from items.
  3. Hydra - idea about adding piercing firebolts may increase AoE effectiveness
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5

Thanks! All of these make sense and would work beautifully. I think adding AOE to hydra might… make it get a bitttt strong

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6

The problem with your WW suggestion is it causes WW after 20 to be weaker since you have lowered the per point scaling.

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7

Not really - WW can have two scaling systesm. The scaling per level doesn’t have to be linear (i.e. the amount it changes from level 1-20 can be different than the amount it changes after 20+). Not all spells scale the same with each level/point added.

I am glad tho, that this is the major issue that you’ve discussed! :grinning:

8

alot of good suggestions. usually these big lists have alot of OP stuff in it. yours is quite balanced. here is my opinion to some of your points:

Barb:
Throw: mainly agree. still think it needs a bit of fine tuning for the top values. You shouldnt be able to repair etheral weapons by throwing them. i saw a vid by mr. llama where it seemed to be that case at top gear. i didnt test it myself, but if thats the case a small adjustment to the cap (instead of a cap of “not using quantity” of 50%, maybe 45%/40%/35% or so) could already correct that. even an equilibrium in average would be okay. just not repair weapons.

WW: agree.
Leap Attack: agree generally. you can play around with radius and damage% a bit, but it should be somehow tied to weapon dmg.

Assassin:
Blade furry: agree. the wind up animation really makes positioning/reacting to mobs difficult. and mobility/speed is a thing that the assassin should be emphesizing. havent done the maths for the AR change, so don’t know if 10% overall is enough. got a feeling it isn’t.

Paladin:
FoH: agree. only thing i would add is mana cost at low levels being too low. at lvl 11 I had 31 Mana and 2.2 Holy bolt cost (lvl 5). The sorc has 7.5 for fireball (lvl5) and 8 for ice blast (lvl5) in comparison. setting the base cost for HB from 2 to 4 would be better balanced. Spamming at lvl 11 shouldnt be a thing to this extend.

Necro:
Mages: you either go for mages being an addition for dmg at low gear (which it is now, they do the same dmg as melee’s without aura, their good at ladder restart or without gear and a waste if you have that) or you go for melee exclusive or mages exclusive, but not both. not sure if your change would achieve that, considering you only have to invest another 20 points to get full melees, since you already have skeleton mastery maxed out for mages. you would lose the +100% dmg from lower res, but you would gain full blown melees.
Golem: most people only drop 40 pts into golem. clay gets clay 20, mastery 20, iron gets mastery+blood golem (for synergy). your changes seem alot and not sure why you would tie iron golem to bone spirit? iron golems are mainly used by rich summoners (beast/pride/insight)

mercs:
A5 Frenzy: first impression is i agree with you. he seems a bit too strong. maybe some finetuning with numbers will already fix it. but people are really thirsting for him.
A3: disagree. paladin shields dont add very much to them. they already got good resists. survivability is a bit of an issue, but simply implementing a blockchance and a blockanimation would already boost that. not a 100% sure, but i think he is handled as monster and monsters have a fixed blockchance, instead of using the shield’s blockchance. even a fixed 25% or so would already help.
with orbs it would lead to a whole bigger problem, since you would have to add new mercs to display them using orbs (instead of swords). there used to be graphics for them using orbs in d2 lod, but it was never implemented. i think a proper skill dmg balancing with masteries would solve the problem much better.
A1: not a fan of auras on mercs. its a sloppy solution. plus that lvl 1 vigor could already become a lvl 5 through + all skill gear

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9

It isn’t, we are hoping they meant to do 10% per level. I geared up the Assassin they finally gave us, not the best gear for a Furysin. I was missing like crazy still. The funny part was watching the leech going. When I hit my mana ball filled by like 50% but as I was missing regularly I was frequently at 10% mana.

Damage was crazy high, once I get the ‘proper’ gear this girl will be scary…

Blizz - I’ll trade you the 200% damage buff from Blade Shield for a 200% AR bonus right on Blade Fury.

10

i havent put much thought into the bladesin, but could it be that they were going for high damage but low chance of hitting thing? still recall you analysing that build, could you link me to that?

11

Not sure how many write ups I did on it. Here’s my maxroll on it and you can switch between live vs 2.4 to see the changes. The TLDR is they virtually triple the damage, the potential damage with ‘mythical’ gear prior to these changes was around 30K DPS when you hit.

https://d2.maxroll.gg/d2planner/8r0106xg#1

The real goal of the build just becomes how to ‘hit’ so you build for AR not for + to damage/damage %. Effectively once you can solve the ‘to hit’ issue then you melt everything easily on 2.4. This can be done with duel angelics, 2 piece clenglaws, ITD, - Target Def, Fanaticism, Conviction…So the moment I get that sorted out, the damage makes Blizzard look well balanced.

For those who know how to build the char, it is really powerful. For those who just don’t get the AR issue in D2, the build is still ‘bad’.

Edit: check out this viedo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deUlJiZ6mC0

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12

Thanks for your reply! Your comments are 100% on point! I agree with basically every single thing you said!

13

Strongly against it, radius of Grim ward is already too big. And its way too op.

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14

Thanks for commenting. I really want the bladesin to be a thing - but just hate how “clunky” the ability feels. I know that the damage can be insane. I feel like the clunkieness is somewhat independent of an issue for the damage (one addresses how it “feels” to play, and the other how strong it actually is).

I agree, in principle, however that once the skill feels great to play the damage and attack rating issues, need to be addressed such that its balanced.

15

Desagree, skellys and mages already have a mastery, if you gonna introduce synergies to BOTH (bc it makes no sense to introduce to only one skelly type) you must get rid of mastery

Golems already have a mastery
If clay gonna get bonus from skeleton mastery it should be changed to a bone golem

To add to the nec suggestions:

  1. Magic nec is very under whelming compared to the all mighty Hdin, i dont wanna it to be as good as pally but it needs further buffs

  2. Revive is lackluster, their dmg is meaningless and the uptime is too small. Points should increase its dmg further and add more duration

I would like to see the math behind the utility of act 2 auras Vs the single dps act 5 before calling for nerfs

16

I appreciate your suggestions about the mage mastery and synergies. I agree that my suggestions are far from ideal (other people commented as well).

Dbrunksi released a DPS video today and the Act 2 merc is basically on par with the Act 5 (for players 8 clear speed on shenk). I think the act 5 merc is REALLY POWERFUL for playthrough/with C-tier gear. Late game, it doesn’t seem to be too strong.

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17

I would rather see Grim Ward changed by removing fear effect and adding taunt. Otherwise, good suggestions.

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18

I agree that changing GW to taunt enemies would be… a great improvment and really powerful! This might actually make it useful.

Thanks for your comment.

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19

Agreed, hope Grim Ward is changed to taunt as that is far better than fear. Fear is obnoxious and forces you to chase them down.

20

Still hope Blizzard is listening to feedback, alot of good suggestions here.

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