Mosaic needs to be removed or nerfed significantly. IMO the item design of Mosaic reeks of Diablo 3 item design. Obtain a set of 2 easy-to-get Weapon-Runewords to annihilate the whole game. This is BS.
Until Mosaic came along, no matter what powerful runeword you would grind days or weeks to get (like Enigma or Infinity), you still had to worry about defenses and hitting break points, improve HP and Resistances by means of other GG items. With Mosaic, you just equip the two claws and perma-freeze and then annihilate the whole screen going forward.
I’ve played Mosaic one season starting on day 1 and it broke the game entirely, I mean I was invincible despite total Trash gear other than the two plain white base Mosaics simply because monsters could not move at all (frozen). Terror Zones were a total joke.
I am a big fan of items like Enigma, Grief and Infinity, they are key items in popular builds, but they don’t make the whole character immortal and powerful enough to one shot the whole game on their own. Those items are big key puzzle pieces obviously, but they still require other GG gear to really shine. Also the Rune and Base cost is significantly higher despite being nowhere as game breaking as Mosaic.
Mosaic is totally different… (Sorry but its D3-Style Item Design Cancer)
Options:
Removed entirely and DPS-power moved to skills themselves to compensate
or alternatively:
Damage significantly reduced
Ability to Perma-Freeze removed so you cannot freeze the whole screen for longer than 2-3 seconds (now comes with a 2-3 second break in between freezes, so only 50% of the time you attack a pack of monsters they are actually frozen in place)
Rune Cost increased significantly
The problem is, Mosaics turned powerful yet underused Assassin skills into a total joke by allowing spamming the screen so badly that the whole game crashes when used in certain ways.
Stop worrying so much. Hard focused on mosaic when…
Hammerdin still exists
Cold sorc into light sorc still exists
Javazons still exists
Nova still exists
Hork Barb still exists
Plenty of OP classes, sure I’d love it if they tuned down the visual aspects of mosaic, but I simply don’t care that it is good or even great. Don’t like it don’t use it.
There are two steps to bringing Mosaic back to a more reasonable level :
Each Mosaic keeps one charge at 100%. Not one charge for each charge type, one single charge, making it a total of 2 charges kept if you are using dual-Mosaic.
While Mosaic is equipped, only the first hit of finishing moves applies charges. This is specifically a drawback on Mosaic, not in effect while Mosaic isn’t equipped.
The first change limits the amount of effects you get to 2, making the build a lot less survivable against freeze-immune monsters.
The second change avoids abusing multi-hit finishing moves, which is a good chunk of why the build is so broken.
All that being said, charging needs to be a lot more reliable, for non-mosaic martial arts builds. I’d give the charge when the charging attack is blocked, in order to make the charge/discharge tempo reliable. This change has the advantage of making Martial Arts a lot more fun while avoiding buffing Mosaic builds (at least in a significant manner).
Ain’t happening. D2 has never been fully balanced at any point of its history. At this point if we are getting any updates in the future, best to ask for more obscure builds to see some hype. Regardless of what you think of Mosaic, to me it made end game MA sin sort of fun, was fun just rocking one for a while until I found a second Gul.
a Javazon can instantly kill anything in the game that they can hit. Their damage is overtuned across the board on all of their skills. It’s like 600% higher than every other class.
Paladins mostly do magic damage. Immunities basically don’t exist to them. Same for necromancers, but necromancers don’t have access to skills that are situationally op in all scenarios. Plus Necros have the worst synergy balance of any class in the game making paladins even more op. Paladins have access to smite as well. They should have removed it’s always hit feature a while ago.
Mosaic doesn’t really do anything a lot of these broken op classes, mainly the paladin and amazon already do. Both noob classes that break the game. If anything would need to be changed it would probably need to be assassin scaling damage since the class wasn’t designed to basically have infinite charges. They should move the 50% chance to not use charges to 100% so it always works that way and just nerf the entire martial arts tree to a more balanced state.
Basically martial arts was the worst tree in the game pre mosaic. It was just added to add more viable skills to the game. There are still some nerfs they should undo from 1.10 they should look into reverting as well. Frozen Orb was nerfed just because everyone was using it, but even before it’s nerf it wasn’t hitting as hard as fireball. Frozen Orb should probably get a 10% scaling with ice bolt and add a synergy for frost nova. Since it’s an ultimate skill for the cold tree it really should be one of the strongest skills on the sorc in the game.
The weakness to frozen orb is simply it has shorter range than any other skill in the game. It’s a mid to close range skill unlike bliizzard, all lightning skills except charged bolt, and all fire skills people actually use. So you do have to move into the range where bow packs can instantly kill you to use it. Which is risk enough that it should get a synergy buff.
Firewall got nerfed just because people were crashing games with it which shouldn’t be a problem anymore. The range used to be like 10 000% longer and didn’t have a cooldown. so a width buff at the very least would be nice. These skills are also supposed to do damage on every frame as well. Like their damage is generally fine, but LOD always had a bug where damage per frame effects never did damage per frame like they still do on classic.
This problem significantly removes skill viability that would be like 10 000 times stronger if that bug was fixed. Some shotgun skills have a cooldown on when they are allowed to do damage as well which drastically reduces their usefulness. They do lower damage because they are meant to shotgun so those need a damage buff if they aren’t going to shotgun. Mostly teeth and multi arrow. For some reason charged bolt still can.
I’m all for fixing the unviable skills. The game would be much better if a lot of these skills never got nerfed and everything was balanced around a purpose in a tree instead. The base damage on most skills suck because 1.10 multiplied the hp of all monsters on every difficulty. So some skills need a scaling increase to compensate for that. It’s the main reason skeleton mages suck so hard because they are balanced around enemies that have 1/10th the hp they do now.
I’d rather we not pretend mosiac is ruining the game any more than javazons and hammer/smite paladins already do.
So you’re saying if 3 players, mosaic sin/javazon/hammerdin, raced each other from level 1 SSF, Mosaic sin is less gear dependant than javazon and hammerdin? Lol
The only reason why mosaic sins have been at the top of ladder discussions is purely due to funneling. From a SSF standpoint or any general solo playing, mosaic changed nothing.
that VERY much depends on what you’re trying to achive. If you want to get the best out of a javazon, then yes. But that is true for pretty much any build.
A javazon can already be a beast with white javs. Max LF and pierce and you’re ready. You won’t be able to kill LI like that but you can farm your normal farming spots (cows!) and be a valuable contributer in Baal runzzz.
Add a (cheap) razortail and you have 100% pierce (and you save some skill points). Few (if any) chars can reach this power so early and so easily.
Ssf lvl 1 to 99? Mosaic would beat them all if p8 is available. It’s much easier to get the 2 amn/gul/mal runes to get mosaics to p8 clearing than finding the high runes griffons etc the others need.
They all need enigma for efficiency if we’re really racing. And then it really just boils down to which TZ drops and when. Shorter TZ’s with less mobs would have a hammerdin or nova sorc leading if that was your goal all together simply being level 99 first. Meanwhile mosaic would do fine with longer TZs or TZ’s that require you to kill a high HP boss. 2 gul is vex so a hammerdin could have a hoto, but at the point where they all need teleport the nova would have an infinity and the hammerdin and mosaic sin would have enigmas. But then you’re left with basically RNG leading the way between drops and TZ selection. As for why most of those who want to be #1 and top go for mosaic it is mainly that they’re versatile they can transition from high HP mobs to trash better and they’re good vs ubers and clones, but that wouldn’t save them in the race.
The argument of cheap for mosaic is simply boring. Without an enigma they’re mid and would struggle and enigma is a high enough price to pay.
Nobody talked about ladder race in current multiplayer.
It was explicitly stated that it was about SSF.
You can clear p8 chaos in pub baalruns with lumps and dual mosaic. That’s not struggling by any means. If you struggle with low geared mosaic then it is a skill issue on your side.
A hoto does basically nothing for a hdin. And you can level to 99 and have no jah or ber drop. So stop with rng excuses when we are comparing power levels in specific scenarios. Your strawman tactics are close to trolling.
While Gul and Mal can reliably be farmed as early trap sin at countess, you have to rely on rng to get the 2 ber or jah+ber to get the other two going in p8 farming.
But then you mention p8 chaos in pub baal runs? But very shortly you’d be limited by chaos or baal as a mosaic, and w/o enigma a nova sorc would dominate TZ’s. But I’m sure you’re better than the skill issue of a mosaic sin with no teleport in flayer jungle or tomb running tz’s, or catacombs. So speedy.
Dont even need a hoto to pump out solid damage on a hammerdin, dual spirits are easy to come by. Was just comparing similar value. There is no strawman just your delusions. Absolutely zero RNG? Well cool sorc wins because nobody is getting an engima, and the rest aren’t good without teleport. Sure you might eventually get to dual mosaic from countess and you’ll have 2 mosaics just in time for the sorc to hit 99.
Gul isn’t part of countess special drop, it’s a normal drop from act 1 hell diff (and 4 SU in NM diff) and thus really rare.
Ist and Mal are, though.