Mosaic Runeword Feedback

PTR Feedback
1

Dear Developer Team, many thanks for acknowledging the need to address the lack of runewords for a martial assassin tree. We’re happy you try to introduce more diversity and innovative gameplay with your latest exploits. We (me and some friends) would like to give some honest feedback about the runeword Mosaic coming with the patch 2.6. We’re avid martial art’s assassin players.

About Mosaic:
+25% chance for finishing moves to not consume charges
+2 to martial arts (assassin only)
+20% increased attack speed
+200-250% enhanced damage
+20% Bonus to attack rating
adds 3-14 cold damage
prevent monster heal

All of that for the price of Gul and Mal which aren’t cheap. While 25% to not consume a charge is ingenious and reason enough to build this runeword, this very common unique exists:

Bartuc’s Cut-Throat

+1 to martial arts
+2 to Assassin Skills
+30% Faster Hit Recovery
+150-200% enhanced damage
adds 25-50 damage
+20% Bonus to Attack Rating
+7% Life stolen per Hit
+20 strength
+20 dexterity

As you can see, this cheap, common unique which can be had for perfect gems during the start of ladder not only outperforms Mosaic in the fastest claw base possible for a fraction of the cost but also offers ethereal version and an open socket for optimization.
Bartuc’s covers pretty much all of the Martial Art’s Assassin skills except for Dragon Talon, Dragon Claw and raw physical damage. We really need a not so astronomically rare claw which doesn’t break all the time, doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to repair at Charsi and let’s a Martial Art’s Assassin survive long enough to unleash those charges. As such, we’d like you to tweak the runeword to address needs specific to those builds:

  • Dragon Talon and Dragon Claw eat through durability like nothing. Claws need constant repair.

Repairs durability over time or Indestructibility

are a must have to be viable for them.

WW sins using Chaos face the same problem in player versus monster. The good base, superior claws cost too much to repair. Even if at least one of
the claws is indestructible life gets much easier. Currently, the only readily available indestructible claw is Shadow-Killer, a slow not so impressive unique.

-The raw damage is needed to leech enough life back for survival until enough charges are there.

Plague runeword does have deadly strike and high enhanced damage to grant enough life leech. Mosaic lacks damage wise, higher enhanced damage and/or indestructibility would grant that.

Second point which we’d like to be addressed is the lack of crushing blow against act bosses. Martial Arts Assassins struggle against act bosses. There is no claw runeword providing crushing blow most important for Dragon Claw and Dragon Talon Assassins.

Even 25% crushing blow would help.

Gul rune isn’t exactly cheap. Third, to compete with Bartuc’s Cut-Throat

Mosaic needs either +3 to Martial Arts or +2 Assassin Skills.

Last but not least, an Assassin is granted lots of bonus to attack rating by skills and claw mastery. 20% bonus to attack rating might sound much but it’s nothing actually. A better much needed stat would be either:

-25% Target’s Defense or +100-200 attack rating or +x attack rating per level gained

Those would make a ton of an actual difference.

18 Likes
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Amen! Martial arts assassins need more love. Blizz please help us move them from meme to main

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+35% chance for finishing moves to not consume charges
+1 to all skills
+1 to martial arts (assassin only)
+20% increased attack speed
+200-250% enhanced damage
+120-220% Bonus to attack rating
adds 3-14 cold damage
prevent monster heal

5 Likes
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To re-state what was said; Mosaic needs more to be worth the cost over the existing options. It is not significantly better than Bartucs which is infinitely easier to obtain (I just dropped one in a game for the assassin in it because I had ‘extra’ - read a few extra)

Sure we could theoretically find a claw with +3 DT +3 DC and make mosaic in it but it still isn’t worth the cost.

I agree with the +2 assassin skills vs +2 MA skills.

While we are posting things please set the cooldown off Cloak of Shadows to a standard 5(ish) seconds. As you get a few points into it from + to skills the cooldown outlasts the duration.

2 Likes
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Alternative version of Mosaic for elemental Martial Art’s Assassins:
+1-3 sin skills
30% ias
25-35% chance to not consume charge
-15 to -20% fire resist
-15 to -20% light resist
-15 to -20% cold resist
-50% target defense
300-500 fire dog
1-1000 light dmg
100-300 cold dog

There is no item for an Assassin to bring resistance down with sundered charms.

3 Likes
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personaly 35% chance for finishing moves free is so bad in pvp , a other bad design item that have nothing to do with diablo 2 , so unbalance

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Martial art’s Assassin has never been a PVP char. I don’t know what were you smoking or why are you spamming a constructive thread. And no, a WW-Sin isn’t an Assassin using the Martial Art’s tree.

1 Like
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free finishing in pvp is fine…if they even get the chance to build up those charges to begin with b4 they die

crazymage: the claw is design for elemental Martial Art from what i can tell…its too weak in term of ED//IAS to make a Tiger Strike//Dragon Claw build

things to add/replace(assuming its limit to a number of 7 mods(not counting runes ones)
+2 Martial–>+3-5 Martial skills
+20% ias—>+30-45% ias
-30-50% Target Defense
(2 of these 3 negative resists mod chosen randomly) since impossible to fit 8 mod
-15-20% Fire Resist
-15-20% Lightning Resist
-15-20% Cold Resists
Thul—>Um…for Open Wound Effect

5 Likes
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you dont recall it because you are not 1.09 player that simple and maybe possible not born back them ,

Martial art’s Assassin make duels back them

no need excuse and bla bla now plz

1 Like
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that would be early D2 era and ppl back then had like no knowledge of how mechanics work…so only likely were up there due to that reason

guides weren’t as readily available as they are today…no youtube…no twitch…no numbers crunch down done…dont live in the past dude

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how you know lol

he use to have pvp game playing all day long making duels and pvp :slight_smile: back them pvp and duels are a huge part of the game today with bad balance everything is screw

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The chance to not consume charges makes an already convoluted playstyle even more convoluted, though. Before:

  1. Charge up skills
  2. Release skills

Eventually, with enough attack rating, you’d get in a flow state, where you hit the enemy a couple of times, release, hit, release, and so forth.

With the chance to not consume charges, it gets a bit weirder

  1. Charge up skills
  2. Release
  3. Check if we need to charge or if we can release another one

This is specially important for Phoenix Strike, since the charges are so different. If I’ve built an Assassin with 20 Phoenix Strike and 20 Claws of Thunder, I’ll want to charge PS at most to 2. The chance to not consume charges would get in the way and I’d launch the wrong charge instead.

My suggestion for this runeword is to just make it guaranteed to not consume charges:

Finishing moves do not consume charges

This will make the martial arts assassin way more interesting to play - you’ll charge up to the charge you want, and just go ahead nuking the whole screen.

Of course, some attention must be paid to the elemental charges: Claws of Thunder, Fists of Fire, Blades of Ice, Phoenix Strike needs to make sure they do not release the same charge twice - i.e. chaos lightning, chaos bolts, meteor, etc - otherwise Dragon Tail and Dragon Claw would release multiple copies of the same charge.

9 Likes
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You still will have to build charges, because they run out eventually.

2 Likes
14

If Mosaic also refreshed the charges with finishing moves then I think it gets waaaay too OP

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MA sin is/has to be the most niche/clunky/terrible build in the game, even with how it is supposed to be used.

The new helm for druid tries to capitalize on this too. By having charge skills in order to get benefits.

I gotta be honest, If I was going to play a wolf or bear, I wouldn’t put a point in both. I would pick one or the other. This doesn’t seem to go along with the theme of how synergies work. The helm is a bust in my opinion.

The claw is nice to have in theory, but we still have to remember how terrible it is to actually play a MA sin, and it is VERY BAD.

Maybe the new stuff that they have held back in secret will shed some light onto the issue.

I’m pessimistically optimistic about it. Who knows though, only the Dev’s know, for now.

1 Like
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I’m ignorant on assassins, but isn’t the premise of this new mechanic to have high uptime on skills like Phoenix Strike or more broadly AoE damage using martial arts skills, which don’t really rely on physical damage so much?

1 Like
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They do rely on physical damage. You collect charges by hitting with normal attack speed, mostly 2-3 times. How are you supposed to survive without enough physical damage and life leech? Then, finishers like Dragon Claw and Dragon Talon allow you to tank a lot and to kill act bosses quickly but they eat up durability of the weapon. If I choose a good superior base, repair costs can be up to 1 million every single time.
Bladesins face similar problem, best weapons are ethereal claws but you can’t use blade shield then because the skill uses up durability.
Charges don’t stay forever either. With 2x mosaic you’ve got 50% chance not to use up a charge but the charge itself decays over time.

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Yeah I saw something like this, that’s absurd!

I’m still curious how a build using dual wields of these with +3 Phoenix Strike would fair in areas that she may have normally not farmed before because of not enough AoE. Assuming that these repair costs are brought to some sane level.

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I don’t know about a Phoenix sin but that’s my current Tigertail sin:

With an indestructible claw ( and you have to use a claw with Claws of Thunder etc.), you could use Dragon Claw’s double discharge for GG gameplay.

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I normally do the PS build and the chance to not consume a charge really messes it up I did some testing on the PTR :
what I was testing using Talon and 2 of the claws (50% chance not to consume) . What ended up happening is that the 50% is based on each kick on Dragon Talon rather then on the cast ie 1 cast can have X kicks. I get it makes sense this way based on how the changes are consumed on each kick, however it means you don’t use every element on PS. What ends up happening is when you have all 3 charges of PS and kick you might (my test the skill was only at 3 kicks) i use lighting and 2 ice or 2 light and 1 ice.

Also:
did a test run with the Dragon Tail build, it is better and does (excluding stats of the claw) improve the game play a little. When i went through chaos was able to keep 3 TS charges active often, on diablo himself was able to do 3 kicks before consuming a charge. feels like the weapon was only thought for the Dragon tail build tbh

Overall I like that they are looking into a MA sin item but the item has potential if we just change it completely :smiley:

My thoughts are on the line of this type of interaction:
What if instead of how it is now, you have a 50% (2 claws) of triggering remaining charges without being consumed. IE have 3 PS charges, all charges get cast when you use dragon claw but still have 3 charges.

2 Likes