I was really excited to use Holy Bolt more often now that it can pierce friend and foe, but then they went and removed Blessed Hammer synergy for it and it does absolutely embarrassing damage now. Even putting 20 hard points into it and having over +20 skills from gear, it STILL does less damage than 1 hard point and +20 skills from gear on live. This is terrible and needs to be reverted.
With this change, there is no build or usecase for this skill anymore. The only use it had before was for Blessed Hammer builds because it boosted its damage to decent levels and could be used for undead monsters that were immune to magic damage. This change makes it so NO ONE will cast this spell, ever. It exists only to boost the bolt release from Fist of the Heavens.
I hope this change will be reverted before the patch goes live as it’s just a bad change all around. There’s no argument in favor of destroying the damage synergy it had. MAYBE if the damage lost from losing the synergy was baked into the spell, but as it currently stands this is a nerf all around that takes the one usecase for an ability and throws it away.
I did a comparison with holy bolt damage between 2.3 and 2.4 PTR… just maxing FoH and holy bolt in both cases. I noticed there was not much difference in damage (I think like 15 damage difference). This leads me to believe they did not boost holy bolt damage by 50%. I hope this is a bug they fix as it does not match their patch notes.
Even if the damage was boosted as it should be, it wouldn’t make the build more useable. What will make it useable is being able to hit both undead and demon enemies with holy bolt. That will lead to farming of better areas such as chaos sanctuary and act bossess.
It just needs the synergy back. I don’t even mind if they never give it the 50% damage boost as long as it gets the synergy with blessed hammer again. Removing that synergy only serves to butcher the one build that will actively use the spell.
The only other change they should make here is to give it the same exact damage scaling (50% per level) WITHOUT requiring the blessed hammer synergy. In fact, reading the patch notes made me believe that’s what their intention was seeing as how they did something similar with eg Amazon synergies. Remove one synergy and buff the others to overcompensate. Never taking damage away but rather making it easier to acquire with less skill points. The same thing needs to happen with Holy Bolt.
How do you figure it got buffed? Even if you put 20 hard points into it and 20 points into FOH, it still does less damage than it currently does on live with 1 point into holy bolt and 20 into blessed hammer/FOH.
It pierces so overall it does much more damage per holy bolt than it did in 2.3 and prior, and you don’t have to awkwardly try to maneuver around your merc to hit undead enemies.
Take Baal wave 2 for example, now instead of trying to hit the mummies instead of healing your merc you can do both AND you can hit multiple mummies with one holy bolt. I think it’s fine as it is.
Yep I also believe the synergy needs to be added back. or add another synergy from another skill. the damage issue will need to be resolved if this skill ever wants to see the light of day again.
The idea is to shift the skill into being used for a PvM FoH+Holy Bolt build. Not as a way to kill immunities for the hammerdin. They need to make holy bolts damage all enemy types for that to happen though. Right now they nerfed the damage of it for a hammerdin build, but made it pierce. The fact that it can’t damage all enemy types sucks for the FoH build though.
This is my point ARTPOP, if they don’t bring this damage back, who is going to use this skill? The only build where it will do any moderate amount of damage is FOH and guess what? No FOH paladin is going to choose to cast holy bolt over FOH since FOH will damage everything not just undead.
This change effectively removed this skill from the game. It just doesn’t exist anymore. No one will cast it now whereas before at least hammerdins would. Now no one will.
Reading the patch notes, I truly believe the devs intention was to remove the NEED for the blessed hammer synergy and roll that damage into the base skill damage, similar to how other abilities had their synergies removed and the rest got buffed to make up for it and then some. I truly believe this wasn’t intended to be a hammerdin nerf, and someone just flubbed the numbers in the patch. I hope the devs manage to look at this problem and solve it before pushing this huge nerf to hammerdins on live servers.
Making holy bolt pierce through is the best. For a cleric it means that the recipient of the healing will get his health - instead of the bolt bouncing pointlessly on a skeleton somewhere. Now my merc will get his health and whatever undead monsters were in the way will get damaged. Win/Win.
They updated the PTR today and didn’t fix Holy Bolt.
Look, if you guys intended to remove the synergy and bake that damage bonus right into the skill, fine. But you screwed that up because putting 20 hard points into it and +19 points from gear STILL does less damage than 1 hard point, 20 synergy and NO points from gear on live. Something has to be done. There’s absolutely no reason to nerf the damage on this move like this and I still believe this is an unintended bug and that it should be doing the same damage without needing the synergy, so I hope you devs see this and correct it soon.
DEVS you really need to listen to Kurai. This is clearly a mistake, if not then why touch the game, why nerf something that we had gotten used to for 20 years?
Welp still busted as of March 2nd 2022 PTR update. Holy Bolt is doing ~300 damage with 1 hard point, and +25 skills from gear versus ~3000 damage with same build and gear on 2.3.
This is really unacceptable and sad. They go and give it pierce and now it also hits demons too, but they completely ruin its damage. Why? Why ruin this skill so no one will ever cast it again?