Barbarian
Throwing mastery is fantastic! Bonus attack rating from weapon masteries is also great!
- 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).
- Grim Ward: I want to see this spell actually see more play and appreciate the adjustments to it.
Suggestion: Increase radius by ~30%
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.