Piety - Shield Runeword for Iron Wolves

General Discussion
1

For Season 6, I urge the developers to consider adding a new runeword that helps Iron Wolves as these elemental sorcerers are still lackluster. I would like to propose a new runeword for 3os shields that is designed to improve viability of Act 3 mercs and the name “Piety” was chosen to be thematic for prayer and taken from the unfinished runewords list.

The design is centered around giving them their elemental masteries as o-skills (rolls from +1-3), improving their survivability with passive life regen from Prayer Aura, and giving them a bonus to FCR to meet their breakpoints. Lastly, as these mercs have the highest base resists, this runeword offers bonuses to max resist instead. The lack of resists would make it much less usable on players. To discourage players from using, a negative affix of -mana will be included.

To conclude, adding Prayer Aura to the Iron Wolf repertoire would go along way to provide utility and support for themselves and the player by helping party members recover between battles.

Piety

Shield
Vex Ohm Lo
Required Level: 59
Level 9-12 Prayer Aura When Equipped
+200% Enhanced Defense
+1-3 To Fire Mastery
+1-3 To Cold Mastery
+1-3 To Lightning Mastery
+35-45% Faster Cast Rate
+5 To Max Fire Resist (Vex)
+5 to Max Cold Resist (Ohm)
+5 to Max Lightning Resist (Lo)
-50 to Mana

3 Likes
2

Please, not another mandatory pre-buff item (for players)!
Change it to ordinary defense/block bonuses.
Or leave as Holy Shield, but with much shorter duration (it’s 30 s at level 1 already).
Or change to “Holy Shield when worn”. It may seem like too much work for devs, but Mosaic and Metamorphosis brought completely new bonuses, so we might get “buff when worn” as well.

4 Likes
3

That’s fair, but note that Iron Wolves cannot block, so block bonuses are meaningless for them. I agree about not adding a pre-buff item for players, so I’ll reduce HS level to 1-3, which has a duration of 30 to 80 sec, respectively. Updated OP.

4

Holy shield on a base 20k defense barb seems sus

1 Like
5

Maybe, but a Barbarian will more than likely use that Lo rune to make a Grief or Fortitude. I don’t think a Lo rune will be worth trying to only proc HS for 30 seconds or so, seems like a waste to me.

6

This would also be a pretty awesome shield for Vengeance or self-wield element aura Paladins.

3 Likes
7

To be honest, don’t have much experience playing a Vengeance Paladin or Auradin, but this would have the side benefit of buffing these two builds as well. I do like the fantasy of the Vengeance Paladin applying elements to the main weapon. I don’t want to speak for people, but think most would support a buff to Vengeance? Just want to make sure this runeword doesn’t break anything.

8

Another idea is to make these 3 separate runewords, one for each respective element (like they previously did with the helms). The names could be as follows:

  • Ember - Fire Mastery Shield
  • Winter - Cold Mastery Shield
  • Thunder - Lightning Mastery Shield
3 Likes
9

I don’t have much experience with Vengeance either, but I have a ton with Auradins, they’re some of my favorite builds. I’m under the impression Vengeance isn’t super impressive, so I imagine it would be ok.

Dream and Dragon builds wouldn’t have a free shield slot, but self-wield auras would definitely benefit. Looking at L10 Masteries after a healthy dose of +all skills, CM = -65% Cold Res, LM = +158% Lit Dmg, and FM = +93% Fire Dmg.

Holy Freeze is pretty weak and could use all the help it can get. This shield would ideally be used with Nightwing (DERP EDIT: +8 to +15 Cold Dmg) and Doom (-40 to -60 CR), so it wouldn’t be that huge a relative buff, especially on Sundered immunes.

Holy Fire would do nearly double damage, which would be a huge attack damage buff, but the AoE vs. Dragondin, Dragondins already triple-dip on the damage so the AoE boost wouldn’t really be relevant. Also, self-wield Holy Fire could never really be higher level than HoJ+2xDragon (L44) and would actually have a pretty hard time even reaching it.

Holy Shock would be the biggest winner with over 1.5x the damage. The attack damage buff would be huge, but again vs. dual Dream the AoE double dips. Self-wield Holy Shock’s level however could potentially be raised higher than dual Dream (L30).

Another factor to keep in mind with Dream/Dragon vs. self-wield is that Dreamadins and Dragondins are using a maxed out Conviction aura (minimum -125/-25 resists), whereas self-wield would max out with with Infinity (-85/-17 resists).

There are a lot of moving parts, but at a glance I’d say Holy Freeze would be fine and become a nice new option with a Cold Sunder, Holy Fire would become more competitive with Dragondins but with lower AoE, but Holy Shock might get REALLY good, possibly better then dual Dream with BIS gear. I haven’t crunched the numbers and others are better versed in it all than I am, but those are my napkin assumptions.

2 Likes
10

I was actually cooking up some individual element shields like that a while back, but also included matching Resist auras like Flickering Flame has. It was something like:

  • +1 Fire Mastery, L5 Resist Fire
  • +1 Cold Mastery, L5 Resist Cold
  • +1 Lightning Mastery, L5 Resist Lightning
1 Like
11

holy shield isnt busted only because of added block, its also reduced block frames to 2, or 1 and becuase fo the huge defense bonus

while level 3 is only 80 seconds
with extra 55% bonus defense

something like a necro or druid with 0 fbr going from 11 frame block to 2 frame still with 0, is absolutely absurd.

and dont underestimate defense, it doesn’t take much defense until enemy hits start to miss you, especially if you’re not in a terror zone
sure you probably wont reach 50% miss chance unless you go above 6k def

but free defense is free

2 Likes
12

Seems interesting! My mind immediately wonders what this would do for wind druid / lightning javazon.

1 Like
13

Yeah, both fire and wind druids would get a buff. Vengeance paladins and Tesladins would get a buff. Javazons would like LM, but they arguably don’t need it. Heck, might even find use on the Enchantress. Would be really fun to test this runeword in the PTR.

14

Please consider adding negative affixes which affect only player characters (such as -Vitality, -Mana), to discourage using such an item instead of equipping hirelings.

1 Like
15

If we did want to add a negative affix to discourage players from using runeword, adding minus mana would probably work best as Iron Wolves don’t use mana. We can add Prayer Aura to the runeword to add a source of healing to the merc for added survivability while also adding -50 to Mana as shown below. Updated OP.

Piety

Shield
Vex Ohm Lo
Required Level: 59
Level 9-12 Prayer Aura When Equipped
+200% Enhanced Defense
+1-3 To Fire Mastery
+1-3 To Cold Mastery
+1-3 To Lightning Mastery
+35-45% Faster Cast Rate
+5 To Max Fire Resist (Vex)
+5 to Max Cold Resist (Ohm)
+5 to Max Lightning Resist (Lo)
-50 to Mana

Changed name to “Piety,” thematic for prayer aura. Name is from unfinished runewords list.

2 Likes
16

Hey Charles, I like the idea of this purpose build Act 3 merc buff shield. We propably not seeing the proposed merc changes as well. But that would offer an easy alternative to the 2-3 adjusted uniques we made in the other thread and 2 OS “new” Splendor.

I think that shield would not cause to much of a problem given the fact that you sacrifice a lot in your shield slot by using this. But if we need that the -50 mana might not be enough? -250 would be a clear statement. What the game does if your base mana is below this 250 would be easy to figure out.

So I would support this overall!

Is this thread the discussion thread only for this shield and we collect maybe 2-3 other mid-game RW gabs in a “result” thread? Would like to discuss a mid lvl (25+/-) 3 OS 2H Staff RW for cold skills (in between OP Leaf and lvl 37 Memory). To make at least some use of a good staff mod rolled 3 OS staff (but not endgame viable)? 2OS Katars (+3/3/3) would get a good variant with a potentially buffed Wind RW.

1 Like
17

I think the easiest avenue for the devs to take to buff Act 3 mercs is to add a new RW tailor made for them. I hope they consider more merc changes, but I’m not holding my breath.

I think -250 mana may be way too much of a penalty. For the lolz, we could have -89-112 To Mana to be opposite of Spirit bonus. :stuck_out_tongue:

I wanted to keep this thread dedicated to a shield for Iron Wolves as they really need the help. Feel free to add your RW ideas to our main thread, “Season 6 - Calling to Improve Itemization.” I can make a new section in that thread for RW ideas from the community.

18

Another justification for this new 3os shield runeword is the Iron Wolf is unable to natively reach the required STR to equip a Monarch for Spirit and has to wait to mid 90’s to have enough STR to equip an eth Monarch or equip gear with +strength, like Lionheart.

In a nutshell, this merc is completely useless until mid 90s to being borderline useless after getting enough strength. This merc is in a really tough spot with limited options when it comes to shields, which is the reason why this new runeword fixes many of these issues surrounding our elemental sorcerers.

19

actually it will be garbage for veng paladin,
prayer kinda useless
masteries useless
fcr useless
max resist okayish

there are many many other shields better than this for this build.

1 Like
20

Maybe trash for veng pally, but do you think this shield would help make A3 merc viable?