Mosaicsin Balance Suggestions [A Dissertation]

General Discussion
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This will be a long post with some ideas that might seem bonkers at first, but bare with it and don’t get too offput by one particular idea without taking everything else into context, as there will be a lot of propsed changes. Also, it’s worth nothing that while a chunk of this post is explaining the Mosaic issue and the other chunk is providing one over-detailed solution, there are alternative suggestions that are not so radical towards the end.

Additionally, not every change has to go through. They can be mix and matched. Any numbers I give as examples can be adjusted as needed for any set of circumstances needed.

How Strong is Mosaicsin?

As most of you probably know, Mosaicsin power creeps the game to an extreme amount. With only 2 Gul runes, all of the content in the game is trivialized. I decided to put her power to the test. When modding Terror Zones, there is an option to simulate player count in the Terror Zone. By default, it’s set to 1. This can be set to seemingly any number. There is a limit, but I don’t know what it is. I did test up to players 512 and that was functioning as expected. So, here’s some results:

For those that don’t know, each additional player count grants monsters 50% more life and 6.25% more damage and attack rating. Additionally, the increase damage only applies to their melee attacks (or their physical damage, not sure). It does not apply to missiles/spells. Venom Lord’s Inferno, Oblivion Knight’s Bone Spirit and other missiles still tickle the same amount of health regardless of how high the player count was.

Each character was fitted with endgame gear and 99% minmaxed. Every area was Terrorized.

Build Area P Count Run Time
Mosaic Chaos 32 2:46
Hammerdin Chaos 64 9:22
Mosaic Chaos 64 3:20
Hammerdin Chaos 128 Not possible
Mosaic Chaos 128 7:07
Mosaic Chaos 256 Do-able*
Mosaic Chaos 512 Do-able*

* They took so long that I stopped trying.

Here’s a video of me clearing p128 Chaos on Mosaicsin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC0xefIltTA
and the same on Hammerdin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLc0x7nZ24M

Well, these are quite some numbers. Mosaic is capable of clearing Chaos nearly 3x faster than Hammerdin on p64, and is still faster while on p128. Both p256 and p512 are possible, but they take a while. It took me 7 minutes to clear the entrance and Vizier’s wing on p256. It took me 11 minutes to clear the entrance on p512. On p128, I kicked Diablo to death with only the Meteor charge. There was enough meteor fire on the ground to slow my game to 1 FPS. I sat there looking at the screen waiting for either me or Diablo to suddenly fall over.

So what did I observe? On p128, the monsters’ melee attacks do enough damage to one shot your mercenary, which Conviction is a huge % of your damage. On p256, the monsters’ melee attacks do enough damage to take 90%+ of your life. This is where the challenge lies. On p64, Hammerdin can occasionally put a monster into FHR. On p128, he can’t, and dies in two swings. Being max block does not seem to make much a difference. I cleared p64 without much issue by kiting the entire time, but on p128 monsters have so much life that it gets really challenging to stay alive.

For a more grounded comparison, I did P8 Hell Chaos (it was Terrorized, but due to my level, the monster stats were unchanged) in 7:42 on a level 81 Assassin while wearing almost no gear. My gear consisted of 2x Perfect Mosaic Greater Talons (no staffmods), a perfect Raven Frost, a light sunder, and superior Spiderweb Sash and superior Wyrmhide Boots. Nothing else.

What lets Mosaicsin do such high player counts though?

  1. Insane damage output.
  2. Permanently freeze 50% of your screen.
  3. Permanent Life Tap*.
    * Only thing Life Tap has over Cobra Strike is leeching off undead.

First, let’s begin with the Mosaic problem.

Let’s review how the Martial Arts tree worked before the Mosaic mechanic:

  1. You use charge-up skills to build charges, where each successful attack grants 1 charge, up to 3.
  2. The entire charge stack expires after 15 seconds, but every time a charge is built, the expiration timer is refreshed.
  3. You use finishing moves to spend charges, where each successful attack spends 1 charge.
  4. Fists of Fire, Blades of Ice, and Claws of Thunder release the effects of all charges below the charge being spent (meaning spending the second charge will release the effects of the second and first charges). They are also dual-wielded skills where one execution swings twice, generating up to two charges per attack.
  5. When spending a charge, the finishing skill will always hit.
  6. Each charge you have gives 25% or 50% attack rating to the finishing skill (which is entirely redundant now, as finishing moves always hit when spending a charge).

While using the Mosaic mechanic:

  1. Unchanged.
  2. Same effect, but now spending a charge also refreshes the expiration timer.
  3. Using a finishing move has a chance to not spend the charge, only execute it. With 2 Mosaics, you have a 100% chance to not spend the charge, meaning permanent charge uptime.
  4. Unchanged.
  5. Unchanged.
  6. Unchanged.

Here’s the issue with Mosaic. The Martial Arts skills are all overtuned on a basic premise. Without Mosaic, they suck because the time spent generating vastly outweighs the power these skills contribute. However, with Mosaic’s near-permanent uptime and spell-casting speeds faster than any caster, these overtuned skills are now massively overpowered.

But we can’t just nerf the skills. If we do this, the Martial Arts build before using Mosaic (which is effectively required now, by the way) will be even worse, which just reinforces the need for Mosaic, limiting itemization even more and crippling the build without Mosaic.

Many people have turned to the opposite idea, nerf the mechanic of Mosaic or nerf Martial Arts in some way while using Mosaic. There have been several ideas, including:

  1. Limiting the amount of charge-up skills you can have running at the same time. This is probably the worst idea. Mosaicsin is already overpowered with the two core charge-up skills, Claws of Thunder and Phoenix Strike. If you limit the charge stacks to 2, nothing changes and you only reduce the build’s flexibility. If you limit the charge stacks to 1, what’s the point of playing a Martial Arts Assassin? You’re locked to one skill with several limiting factors that other caster builds don’t have. This is generally just an anti-fun and lazy change.

  2. Do away with the non-consuming mechanic. Instead, let charge-up skills execute the charge that it just built (without spending it). Not the worst idea, but I feel this brings it back too far in the other direction. People didn’t like the original Martial Arts Assassin because you spent 90% of your time charging and 10% of your time spending. While this idea does execute charges more than the original concept did, you are still building charges an overwhelming majority of the time.

  3. Nerf the % for not consuming charges on Mosaic. This is almost as bad as option 1. Having your charges be randomly spent makes the build way too frustrating to play. You won’t know what charges you do or don’t have as the charge overlay is not distinct enough with multiple charge-ups active to easily discern how many charges you have of each skill.

These are the most popular ones. I’m sure there’s others.

Instead, let’s fix what makes Mosaicsin overpowered.

First, her damage output. Strong scaling damage in massive AoE with absurd cast intervals.
Second, her permanent safety. Two skills give AoE freeze for long durations.
Third, her survivability. ~10 point Cobra Strike, ~10 point Tiger Strike and any elite boots is comparable to Life Tap.

The Changes I Would Make for Mosaicsin

The justifications will be provided afterwards, so don’t rage at me for these changes until you’ve read the justification/explanation as to why I think it’s a good idea.

  1. Make the Mosaic mechanic the default for all charge-ups. All finishing skills now do not consume the charge, only execute it.
  2. Remove the other Mosaic mechanic that refreshes the expiration timer on executing charges entirely.
  3. When a charge stack expires, only remove 1 charge from the stack rather than removing the entire stack. After 15 seconds of having 3 charges, you will go down to 2 charges. 15 seconds later, you’ll have 1 charge. Building a charge (even if you’re at the max number) will still refresh the expiration timer.
  4. For both charge-up skills and finishing skills, make the charge mechanic always happen, but the weapon component work as usual. Take Amazon’s Charged Strike as an example. The bolts will always happen, even if the weapon attack misses. Do the same for charge-ups. If the Assassin swings, she builds the charge. If she misses, she simply won’t deal damage with her weapon. If the Assassin uses a finishing move, execute charges even if the finishing skill misses. However, let Dragon Tail and maybe Dragon Flight keep the current mechanic where executing a charge makes the finishing skill always hit. This change will only apply to Dragon Talon, Dragon Claw, and maybe Dragon Flight.
  5. This is where you might question my sanity. Allow the Assassin to put up to 40 hard points into her charge-up skills. JUST WAIT, READ THE JUSTIFICATION FOR THESE CHANGES BELOW!
  6. Cut the base damage and synergy scaling in half for all elemental charge-up skills (except maybe Fists of Fire).
  7. Cut the range in half for Chaos Lightning. Reduce the amount of lightning bolts generated by 25-50%.
  8. Make Fists of Fire, Blades of Ice, and Claws of Thunder only execute the charge of the charge being spent, removing mechanic 4 listed near the top of this post. Maybe leave Fists of Fire alone.
  9. Remove Chaos Ice Bolts’s ability to freeze. It should not convert Cold Length to Freeze Length. Chaos Ice Bolts should only chill, not freeze. Significantly reduce the length it chills for.
  10. Significantly reduce the length Blades of Ice 3 freezes for.
  11. Make Dragon Talon only spend a charge from 1 charge stack per kick instead of spend a charge from every charge stack per kick.
  12. Nerf Cobra Strike by at least 75%. This thing is stacked.
  13. Remove the attack rating bonus that charges give. Only take into consideration the charge-up skill’s attack rating bonus when using the charge-up skill and only take into consideration the finishing skill’s attack rating bonus when using the finishing skill.

Justification

Now, I understand I just listed a lot of changes. Some of them might even be crazy. But hear me out.

I think the core element of Martial Arts Assassin should revolve around her unique ability to multi-cast skills in a single animation. She can build up charges from different charge-up skills and execute them all in one finishing skill. However, being able to multi-cast skills can be an overpowered ability (as we can currently see). Thus, we need to mechanically incentivize the playstyle rather than making it super simple. But we can’t make the build too mechanically intensive or it falls back into the place it use to be at.

It’s impossible to balance the Martial Arts Assassin with the Mosaic mechanic on the item. It shouldn’t even be on the item. Just make it the default. Now that all Martial Arts Assassins have access to the mechanic, the skills can be rebalanced around this new concept. New Mosaics can simply have that mechanic removed from the item and Mosaic will now be a cheap elemental claw. Perhaps change Mosaic to roll the elemental damage % increase numbers from 10-15 instead of always being 15. Old Mosaics can simply keep the mechanic modifier and simply be redundant (assuming the refreshing expiration timer on charge execution is removed from the mechanic).

First, how do we open up more options so that every Mosaicsin doesn’t just build all 6 charge-up skills and use Dragon Talon and explode the screen?

We begin by make the skills able to be leveled up to 40. Then cut the effectiveness of all skills in half. This keeps the same balance it currently has, but requires double the investment. What does this accomplish? This lets you max up to 2 charge-up skills, or go half into 4 charge-up skills. You can either have 2 charge-up skills at roughly their current power, or 4 charge-up skills at half their current power. Fists of Fire, Tiger Strike, and Cobra Strike may need to be balanced differently than just a straight up 50%. Further damage nerfs may be needed on top of the 50%.

Now, let’s focus on specific skills:

Cobra Strike is overpowered no matter how you spin it. Even at half effectiveness it is still overpowered. It is comparable to Life Tap on minimal skill points and 0 investment. Right now it gains 5% leech per level. This is whack. Even if you set it to 1% per level, it is still overtuned. It needs a serious nerf. Maybe a baseline of 5% with a 0.5% increase per level if you are factoring in 40 skill points allowed.

Dragon Talon is also too good for mass charge releasing builds. As such, I think it should only release a charge from 1 stack per kick. However, I don’t think it should be done randomly. The next charge to be released by each Dragon Talon kick is the least recently executed or charged charge. This now makes Dragon Claw and Dragon Talon both good for charge releasing builds depending on the amount of charge stacks being used. If only 1 or 2 charge stacks are being used, Dragon Talon will end up being better. With 1 charge stack, every kick will release that charge stack’s effect. With 2 charge stacks, it’ll alternate, so you end up having 2.5+ activations of all your charge stacks per Dragon Talon. However, if you are running something like 4 charge stacks, you’ll only be releasing each charge stack ~1 time per Dragon Talon. With Dragon Claw, you’ll release 2 of each per Dragon Claw. Dragon Claw overall has a slower rate of fire, so we’re still at a lower power threshold then we are currently at with the current Dragon Talon for charge spam builds.

Claws of Thunder does a lot of damage in it’s limited AoE. In my experience, even if I’m using Chaos Ice Bolts over Chaos Lightning, I still end up doing mostly lightning damage. Of course, significantly reducing the rate of fire of these charges by itself is a huge chunk of damage loss based on how the skills work. I would even consider making the elemental charge-up skills not release all their effects. Claws of Thunder 3 would only release Charged Bolts, Claws of Thunder 2 would only release Nova, and Charged Bolts would do more damage than the Nova. You can choose between higher damage but not as sustained, or sustained AoE damage but lower than the Charged Bolts.

Chaos Lightning from Phoenix Strike has too much AoE. Even if it was nerfed into the ground, it is visually destructive and hurts all of our boomer eyes. I think the range (aka lifetime) of the lightning bolts should be 25-50% of what it is now. Also make less bolts spawn. Also needs a damage nerf.

Chaos Ice Bolts provides way too much safety. It is a massively AoE freeze. This is the primary reason Mosaicsin is able to do p512 Chaos. Nothing can attack her. Chaos Ice Bolts should only be allowed to chill, not freeze, and reduce the length as it scales way too much with hard points.

Blades of Ice 3 also provides too much safety. It’s much less AoE than Chaos Ice Bolts, but it provides a longer freeze. However, it does less damage. So I think the freeze should remain, but reduce the freeze length to reasonable numbers. You could offset this by slightly increasing the range (as the freeze is only 2 yards, not much). Blades of Ice 3 should only be able to permanently freeze monsters near max level (taking into consideration 40 hard points), which means they lose a lot of DPS for this safety.

I think Fists of Fire and Tiger Strike are both okay. Tiger Strike does contribute to Cobra Strike’s effectiveness, but it is also essential to the Dragon Tail build, so I don’t think nerfing it helps. Instead, this is where a different suggestion comes in:

The weapon element of finishing moves should no longer be guaranteed to hit when executing a charge with exception to Dragon Tail and maybe Dragon Flight. If an elemental Martial Arts build is building caster gear, they won’t have a ton of attack rating. However, right now each charge gives a ton of attack rating. If you are using a lot of charges, you’ll have a good chance to hit even if you don’t build for attack rating. There is even a bug currently where you can infinitely stack this attack rating bonus from charges. So simply remove charges granting attack rating bonuses. Only use the attack rating bonuses that every other skill has (which is only applied to the skill in question being used). Now, Martial Arts Assassins have to build attack rating if they want to effectively use Tiger Strike and Cobra Strike with anything that isn’t Dragon Tail. Their elemental charges will always release, but if their attack misses, they might execute a Tiger Strike or Cobra Strike charge and get nothing out of it because the weapon component missed.

So what we’ve accomplished so far is creating lots of variety in the way you can build the Martial Arts Assassin, nerfing her current output by forcing her to invest more, and adding in mechanics to try to separate the elemental charge-ups from the physical ones unless you specifically build for them. However, permanent charge uptime is still going to be too overpowered. But we don’t want to make them charge-up constantly by spending the charges. So instead, let’s incentivize occasional recharging by expiring the stack every 15 seconds but only removing 1 charge from the stack instead of losing the whole stack. This means every 15 seconds or so, you will have to build 1 charge from each charge-up skill, instead of all 3 charges from each charge-up skill. The charges lost won’t be random, as it will be in the direct order you built them in, so you’ll have a tempo in your head of what needs to be rebuilt as time passes. You’ll still be executing charges more often than building them, but the mechanical play is still there if you want to remain at your ideal charges.

Now, I know some of you won’t like the 40 skill points idea. But I ask you, why not? Summon Druid gains synergy bonuses from soft points. This is different from every other build in the game. Why can’t Martial Arts charge-up skills require 40 to force players to invest more heavily into a couple of skills or have 3-4 half-power charge-up skills? If you leave it at 20 skill points, every Martial Arts Assassin will always have at least 4 charge-up skills at full capacity. Removing her ability to have multiple charge-ups goes against her build identity and is anti-fun. I would rather her go back to her original build than to limit her ability to stack several charge-up skills.

I know these are a lot of changes. Not all of them have to be put into the game. The numbers proposed can be fine tuned and tweaked to be more balanced. But I feel like this is the best way to go about fixing the Martial Arts Assassin without making her a generic and boring build. I know Blizzard is putting bare minimum effort into maintaining the game anymore. But word around the street is they’re interested in adjusting Martial Arts Assassin regarding Mosaic.

An Alternative

I realize these are a lot of changes that widely depend on each other to implement and the chances Blizzard does anything this big is slim. So I offer a very brief and abbreviated way of trying to balance the build better:

  1. Nerf Mosaic back to 25%.
  2. Make each charge-up get up to 50% chance to non-consume unique to its specific skill through hard points. 20 hard points would be 50% chance to not consume.
  3. Make the elemental charge-ups only release the charge that’s being consumed, not all of the charges under it. Or just nerf the skills. Or maybe even both.
  4. Nerf Cobra Strike heavily.
  5. Reduce the AoE of Chaos Lightning significantly. Also reduce its damage.
  6. Remove Chaos Ice Bolts’ ability to freeze.

This makes it to where you are forced to invest into the skill to have 100% non-consume for that charge-up. Of course, they’ll be able to have 4 maxed out still, but the damage will be nerfed, Chaos Lightning won’t be as obnoxious, and Chaos Ice Bolts won’t be super defensive. Cobra Strike won’t be a 1 point wonder anymore. So the core build becomes Phoenix Strike, Blades of Ice, Claws of Thunder, and Cobra Strike, but with less safety, less damage, less AoE, and less sustain. Pre-Mosaic gets buffed by having a good chances to not consume the charge as an offset for the skills being nerfed (though it’s probably still a nerf overall).

I think there are still significant problems with this design, but it should be relatively simple enough to implement. Taking some of my previously mentioned features like removing the expiration refresh timer on non-consume and only expiring 1 charge at a time and the attack rating adjustments could also be thrown in without much changes and help out more.

Another Alternative

Since big changes likely won’t happen, here’s another decent way to go:

  1. Get rid of the non-consume mechanic entirely.
  2. Give Mosaic X% chance to additionally generate a charge of another charge-up skill when generating a charge OR give charge-up skills X% chance to additionally generate a charge of another charge-up skill when generating a charge OR X% chance to have this charge be additionally generated when a charge from another skill is generated. Increase the % with hard or potentially soft points. Mosaic now has no mechanic and is simply an elemental claw.
  3. Give charge-up skills X% chance to execute the charge generated (but not consuming it). Make it scale with hard or soft points.
  4. Figure out a better way to visualize what charges a player has. Consider some particle effect to indicate what charge was just generated that is clear to see to the player and draws near the player model? Also have some status effect indicator near the hotbar that gives an absolute count of each charge (this option alone kind of sucks, you’ll spend so much time looking at where the status effects are and hardly looking at the gameplay itself)?
  5. Potentially take other QoL features mentioned above.
  6. Potentially implement the Dragon Talon nerf.
  7. Rebalance skills as needed (namely Chaos Lightning and Cobra Strike).
  8. Consider removing expiration entirely and letting these charges be “permanent” in a game.

This brings Martial Arts closer in line with its original design but greatly reduces how much time you’ll spend needing to generate charges. The build is buffed outside of Mosaic (assuming you put the mechanic on Mosaic) in compensation for the skills being nerfed (though it may still be a net nerf). If putting the mechanic on skills instead, Mosaic is no longer a required item.

I cannot recommend letting any of the above % reach 100. I think the execute on generation should probably cap at around 50%. The generating another charge when generating a charge can go higher but I still wouldn’t let it reach 100%. This build does have RNG, but its not as bad as the current Mosaic when less than 100%. With better visuals of charges, I think it could be fairly straightforward to have an understanding of how many charges you’re presently at, since you still have control over what charges to build.

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Wasting your time. The reason they increased the combined rate to 100% retainable charges was literally because Mr. Lama thought that would be cool. Thta’s it. When they introduced it, it was not at 100%.
So, unless you think you can convince him to tell them in no more than 10 words…not gonna happen.

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u can go be cringe elsewhere. the entire blizzard forums asked for 100% well before he could even talk about it. not a single person said no to it until after it was added. quit placing streamers on a pedestal, they don’t come up with every idea

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What I’ve thought would help tone down Mosiac pretty significantly is simply allowing Dragon Talon to only trigger charges once per use instead of once per attack. That would at least help reduce the eyeball and video card melting.

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it’s not a bad idea, but i think it would be weird for players where the effects of the charges only applies to 1 kick and the rest are just normal kicks. i think my proposal is a little better, where each kick only executes 1 charge 1 from skill rather than 1 charge from every skill, in order of least recently built/executed charge

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my suggestion would be to go back in time, pretty far. delete everything they’ve done. give us “the game you know and loved” … you know, a quote from blizzard, not one of us.

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if you don’t have anything productive to add, please don’t comment. i don’t want you to read your stroke-inducing negativity

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I read the whole thing! Sorry… just couldn’t help showing off.

On the whole, I like the changes. I have been playing around with the build offline and using it to farm any terror zone I please at P8 while watching a show. That’s probably enough evidence to warrant some sort of change.

The only change that I think we will have to work out a better approach for is the 40 point limit. Not because I don’t like your reasoning but because I fear that it will drive the complexity of the change up enough that we won’t get the change at all.

I think the best thing about the change is to take this “don’t expend a charge” off of the runeword and into the finishing skills themselves. That was always the most ridiculous part about Mosiac. That a runeword (x2) is now essentially required for the build to even exist and then propels it to top tier.

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yeah, its the only downside of proper martial arts balancing. it requires a lot of work and blizzard dont wanna do a lot of work. that and 40 skill points is pretty different from the norm but blizzard has been weirdly back and forth about what kind of gamebreaking/non-vanilla-esque stuff they will or wont add so i figured maybe its still within the realm of possibility lmao

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The solution is way easier :
Give Mosaic “A random charge is not consumed when using a finishing move” and “Only the first hit of a finishing move applies charges” instead of the “+50% (…)” line.
This makes it so that dual-Mosaic only abuses two charging skills at the same time, and you don’t get 6 times the effects of all your charges every time you discharge, which is the source of game stability issues.
This also means that Dragon Claw and Dragon Talon still spend more than one charge if you aren’t using any Mosaic.
Those changes still make Mosaic a strong improvement for Martial Arts builds, but doesn’t make it mandatory, and offers a more varied choice of uses with it (Do I want to use a single Mosaic instead of the usual 2? And if so, is it with a shield, or with another claw, and which one? If I use 2 Mosaics, what charge duo am I going to use? Do I use a weapon swap to be able to fully discharge if I want to switch the charge(s) I keep?)

And they should also solve the main issue of charging skills : the fact that they don’t hit reliably due to monster block chance. They should get the charge if the hit is blocked (I don’t know if they should get the charge or not on simply missing the target).

I really don’t think a massive rework of the mechanic would be a good thing, even if it is subpar. Let those of us that like the rhythm game that martial arts offer play with it.

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Whatever they change I hope they address the issue where people who have machines that cover their game system requirements cannot be near a mosaic sin or their FPS drops to <20. Let the build be as op as you like. I couldn’t care less. If I don’t like the build I wouldn’t play it, even if it melts p1024 chaos, but for God’s sake let me play in a game where a mosaic sin also exists given that this is now plaguing the ladder.

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by a random charge, do you mean mosaic rolls on generation the skill that is not consumed? so i roll my mosaic and it rolls “phoenix charges are not consumed”? interesting idea… but i think thats the equivalent of limiting the amount of charge stacks, which im against. you may still be allowed to charge other stacks, but you have to spend a lot of time charging them up. not the worst idea tbh, and its a creative way to go about it. as for the second idea, i think that just makes finishing skills useless. everyone will be using normal attack

what rhythm game? there is no rhythm game curently, thats what my proposed changes try to bring back. ofc your idea brings it back in more significance than my proposed changes do, but i like the fantasy of having the option for multiple charge up skills without inducing arthritis or making mosaic effectively required, which i think your changes dont mitigate well enough. i think having to constantly charge up 1 or 2 charge up skills, even if you have 2 that dont get spent at all, is 1. build is still too strong and 2. still leans too much in the direction of being mechanically unfun to play because you spend more time charging than finishing

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I appreciate your work. After reading this topic I assume that it will be too hard to properly balance charge use with mosaic.

My opinion: this item was a huge mistake and Blizzard tried to balance MA from the wrong side.
Just delete this item, go back to previous state, think about how to fix melee characters → then their skills → then items.

I have to remind you… we still have a problem with chance to hit formula and weapons base damage which is a root of every melee class.

Maybe if loading a charge could execute some effect?

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I mean it rolls when you use your finishing move, choosing a random type of charge from the ones you apply, and having 2 mosaics automatically rolls different types. For example, if you have 3 charges of Fist of Fire, Claws of Thunder and Blades of Ice, and 2 Mosaics, you would have after your finishing move 3 charges of 2 of those skills, and 2 charges of the one that wasn’t selected at random. Use another finishing move, and you will either have 3 charges on 1 skill, 2 on the 2 others, or 3 charges on 2 skills and 1 charge on the other.

Solutions that let you constantly spam charge effects are not good.
If you want to offer this accumulation of charges as optional gameplay, I’d suggest letting charge duration be across all charge types, and letting charges boost each other, either through something akin to “+X% effect for each charge of another type” or “boosts all charges of another type with X effect”.
For example, Phoenix Strike could either get “+30% damage for each charge of another skill” or “Every charge gives other charged skill +30% elemental damage”.
The point is that you don’t need to constantly have a payoff, what you need is to have the setup increase the payoff exponentially (or, said another way : if you double the setup, you need to get more than double the rewards).
In normal gameplay, accumulating one type of charge or two is going to be the most effective strategy, and then against bosses, players are going to fully charge to have a brutal effect.

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but thats RNG, which many people are against… hence the whole purpose of the 100% buff

what is charge spam to you? anything more than the original design? your idea hardly changes the current gameplay style. if you only use 2 charge ups, theyre never spent. RNG element avoided. still a spamming gameplay style, all you did was force people to only have 2 charge up skills. if you build more than 2, you are going to randomly lose 1 and its going to be obnoxious to keep up with and nobody will want to do that, again, because nobody likes the RNG, hence the 100% buff.

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Great work as always. I added 75% charge no consume sc to beginning of game and yeah I can attest MAsin still broken so definitely the chance charge no consume percentage doesn’t really matter. Although with less than 100% you can use the different charge effects. Only real upside.

How would you fix dragon tail? It’s such a weirdly worded skill idk how it even works? It converts 50% of your base damage to fire damage then multiplies it? But every end game build ive tried with it does piddly dmg cant even get past p5 cows let alone p256…

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  1. What people are against is unreliability, not RNG. If you use as many different charge types as you use Mosaics, then it’s perfectly reliable, which is the intent.
  2. The charge being chosen at random is just an arbitrary way of having only 1 charge stack per Mosaic be sustained. Other methods of determining which charge is selected if more stacks are present would be perfectly fine. The point is you can easily change your sustained stacks by depleting them then charging new ones.

Charge spam is when you can apply charge effects on almost all your attacks. The whole point of the MA system was setup => payoff. Your suggestion transforms it to an almost constant payoff with barely any setup (once every 15 seconds is negligible).

The whole point is to keep the current gameplay style and fixing its issues, rather than completely alter how MA works.

The whole point is indeed to not have all charges up all (or most of) the time for Mosaic. That’s specifically why Mosaic is currently broken and why it makes the game unstable.

I am not against Mosaic offering an alternative (and stronger) gameplay based on having the payoff without the setup most of the time, what is an issue is if this becomes the basis for the system. I am not against there existing a very strong Mosaic build, on par or even slightly stronger than Hammerdin. What I do not want is the build applying many different effects on every single attack (this is specifically what makes the build’s power so far outside the bounds of anything reasonable, and why it is such a burden on the hardware).

It seems to me is that you want Mosaic build as the MA default, but with a lot less power, and that would completely remove the current setup => payoff build that a lot of players enjoy casually.

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Agreed, I like the original playstyle of MAsins with the constant chargeup + release. I don’t think it’d be great to force everyone into Mosaic mechanic based MAsins.

I like some of the ideas Kabryxis has presented here, I think making charges only expire one at a time rather than the whole stack makes sense and gives you a decent buffer when you’re moving between groups of monsters.

I also like the idea of charges building up on attack regardless of successfully hitting because MAsins are such a rhythmic build, it sucks running into a monster with high block that throws off your groove.

In addition to those perhaps chargeup skills could have a natural attack speed boost so that they’re faster than a normal attack, making it so you spend less time building up and more time releasing. The starting Assasin has a 12 frame normal attack with a Katar, maybe chargeup skills could start at 9 frames. Her max speed normal attack is 7 frames, maybe chargeup skills could reach a max of 4 or 5 frames. Something like that.

I’m not really sure what to do about Mosaic itself, I hate the design of it, haven’t and probably will never use it. Maybe Mosaic could be the basis of a “lazy” MAsin, you don’t have to worry about charge upkeep but it reduces the effect of MA skills by 75% or w/e suitable amount, or you can play the “active” MAsin and have to keep your charges up but the payoff is greater.

I don’t know how much hardcoding something like that would take though so might be more work than Blizz cares to do, I don’t know if it’d even be a good idea in the first place. :stuck_out_tongue:

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No harm in making the suggestion!

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these two things directly contradict each other. you want buildup and pay off but you don’t want the build to change. im confused. there is currently no buildup and payoff right now. its just build up and infinite execution… and your suggestions dont change that either, so im confused

im not getting it. what is buildup to you? is it charging everything up and then releasing it all at once and starting from 0? you and 3 other people in the game might of liked htat system, but MA sin got buffed repeatedly for a reason… nobody even asked for any of the changes they made. it was just that unplayed.

my suggestions aim to try to meet in the middle. have a blend of charging vs releasing. but your suggestions are not in the middle, its just taking the polar extremes. playing the same overpowered mosaic build OR playing the same overpowered mosaic while roleplaying as the old MA build and still be forced to use 2 mosaics.

if anything is taken from this post, its getting rid of martial arts dependency on mosaic. MA sin should not be forced to wear 2 mosaics, or 1 mosaic, or even a claw. this reduces all builds to the exact same copy cat build. phoenix strike, claws of thunder, and potential flavor. dragon tail has better weapons outside of claws. not every martial arts assassin should have to be an elemental build.