Considering how weak the MA assassin feels right now, i don’t think it needs to be watered down at all.
We could even have an assassin casting fully charged finishers on every attack and it still wouldn’t outperform Hammerdins. So the only challenge is how to significantly buff her without ruining the playstyle.
That really is the issue, and it’s not supereasy to fix.
How about this:
*Finishers doesn’t use up charges (more dmg)
*Charges are lost after x.x seconds when not using either a charge up attack or a finisher (to keep charge attacks in rotation)
*No more than 6 charges at a time (to keep it form gping overboard)
*Adjust dmg numbers
*Do whatever with mosaic, give it stamina reger or -1 to teleport, just dont use it to fix martial arts assassins
Would that work, or would it just lead to annoyance once charges are lost?
The charge up part all in itself needs to go. While I am charging up with first few hits, a frenzy barb, Hdin, sorc, or druid comes along and kills my mob before I get to max charge. In Baal runs and TZ runs and lvl 35-40 skills I’m not killing anything but carvers. Things with more health all get killed by the other players and I just look like a noob that can’t kill stuff. Just a distraction for the mob while the other players get the kills, and exp from making the kills. It’s a leech char like WC barb. Charge ups are just dumb.
Imagine if the Hammerdin had to wait to charge up hammers? If cold sorc had to charge up blizz or orb? Fire claw druid charge up fireclaw?
It makes no sense at all to have the Assassin charging up to do damage. NONE
This is what I’ve suggested elsewhere, somewhat similar to what you mention:
- Make Phoenix Strike’s effects cumulative like other charge-up skills.
- This can be done by changing the prgstack column value for Phoenix Strike’s row in skills.txt from 0 to 1.
- Make finishing moves, except Dragon Talon, no longer consume charges per attack.
- This can be done by changing the prgchargesconsumed column value for their rows in skills.txt from 1 to 0.
- Make charge-up attacks automatically hit.
- This can be done by copying code already used by Impale.
- Make finishing moves require attack rating to hit again (for balance purposes).
- This can be done by changing the param8 column value for their rows in skills.txt from 1 to 0.
- Reduce the duration of charge-up skill charges from 15 seconds to whatever length is appropriate for balance.
- Change Mosaic’s affix/property to instead be “+25% to charge-up skill duration” or however it should be phrased to be clear what it means.
- Rework Next Hit Delay to apply to individual skill functions per cast, not an entire game-wide category of skills.
You’d have to hit once with a charge-up skill to get your first charge, but subsequent charge-up attacks would automatically hit. Then your normal attacks and finishing moves would apply your charge-up effects for the full duration of the charges, except Dragon Talon, which would still spend charges. This would help further differentiate Dragon Talon and Dragon Claw, with Dragon Talon being faster but consuming charges. Players would spend much less time charging up, both because of the automatic hits on charge-up skills and because the charges would apply to multiple attacks before expiring.
And all of that, except the NextHitDelay change, is either easily done through .txt editing or by copying existing code.
3 Likes
Track you from another topic (remove Phoenix Strike NHD topic).
I appreciate your solution.
Seems easy to approach except the individual NHD suggestion (actually, it should be a “must have” for a modern game).
However, I don’t think the D2R maintaining team would take the effort to change the NHD group mechanism. Thats why I suggest removing 4F NHD for specified missile in Phoenix Strike now.