I understand Patch 2.4 was the big hurrah for balance changes for expanding build diversity while retaining class fantasy, but urge the devs to consider another round for improving lackluster melee skills for Season 4 as follows…
Amazon
Impale - now benefits from critical strike and deadly strike (arbitrary single-target skill is unable to crit, apart of Amazon’s repertoire) and add new Fend synergy of +2% IAS per level
Assassin
Blade Fury - increase AR to 15% per level (up from 10% per level), remove the 1 second windup delay, and now benefits from pierce on items
Blade Shield - no longer uses weapon durability. Skill designed to be used in tandem with Blade Fury, doesn’t mesh well due to risk of breaking Eth weapon
Blade Sentinel - now grants AR of 10% per level and removed the 1 second windup delay. Also, fix the issue of detrimental pathing
Weapon Block - now grants +1% FBR per level and works when running (chance to block reduced to 1/3, capped at 25%)
Venom - now receives +10% AR per level and add new Cobra Strike synergy of +10% poison damage per level. Lastly, can be cast on party members and hirelings (e.g. Enchant)
Cloak of Shadows - cooldown removed to incentivize leveling skill to extend its duration
Druid
Shapeshifting - allow direct transformation from wolf to bear and bear to wolf. This change supports the Metamorphosis runeword
Lycanthropy - first skill in tree and prerequisite for both Werewolf and Werebear (similar to Armaggedon’s prerrequisite change in 2.4). Also, the duration bonus removed and now allows permanent transformation until de-activated (arbitary timer)
Rabies - increase Poison Creeper synergy from +20% to +25% per level and increase spread range and speed by 25% (spreading disease)
Maul - now hits up to 2 adjacent enemies next to your primary target
Hunger - skill will always hit target for guaranteed life and mana leech
Shockwave - increase Maul synergy from +10% to +15% per level and physical damage now benefits from Might, Fanaticism, etc.
Spirit of Barbs - now grants -1% enemy physical resistance per level
Barbarian
Increased Stamina - rename to “Increased Resilience,” and now adds +1% FHR per level
Taunt - now taunts monsters in the immediate area (no longer single target)
Bash - now grants +5% crushing blow at level 1 and increases +3% per level, increase flat damage to +3 (up from +1) and increase +3 per level (up from +1)
Stun - rename to “Cleave,” and now requires a 2H-weapon equipped and hits up to 2 adjacent enemies next to your primary target
Whirlwind - don’t apply diminishing returns to weapon IAS (only to other equipment). This places more importance to weapon IAS, which harkens back to old mechanics
Concentrate - increase max attack FPS from 9 to 7, replace Bash synergy with Iron Skin, and add new Increased Speed synergy as follows:
Iron Skin: +1% PDR per level
Battle Orders: +15% Damage per level
Berserk: +5% Magic Damage per level
Increased Speed: +1% IAS per level for 1H-weapons and +2% IAS per level for 2H-weapons
Frenzy - remove Taunt synergy and adjust synergies as follows:
Double Swing: +10% damage per level
Berserk: +3% magic damage per level
Increased Stamina: +8% damage and +0.4 seconds per level
Grim Ward - remove corpse requirement (max. limit is 5, similar to traps)
Necromancer
Poison Dagger - now is uninterruptable, poison duration reduced by 50% (capped at 5 seconds), and add new Amplify Damage synergy of +10% physical damage per level
Poison Explosion - now increases radius per level, similar to Corpse Explosion. In addition to synergy adding +20% poison damage per level for Poison Dagger, it now adds automatic activation of Poison Explosion upon kill with Poison Dagger
Paladin
Defiance - adds passive +0.5% PDR per level
Sacrifice - now adds +3% open wounds per level for added utility
Conversion - always hit. Skill should not rely on AR to ensure you’re always rolling on chance to convert targets
Charge - now grants +5% pierce per level (also benefits from pierce on items) and damages all enemies you charge through. If pierce doesn’t activate, you stop at the enemy like normal
Vengeance - now is uninterruptable, increase max attack FPS to 6, and remove Salvation synergy and roll bonus into main skill (reduce amount of synergies required to max skill. Currently requires a massive 100 skill point investment)
While I agree we need some Melee love I think the issue should be addressed from the ground up rather than looking at specific skills. I do like some of the changes but I think addressing three things would help all Melee builds rather than just hitting some skills.
Double the AR gain per point in Dex. Currently it’s 5 make it 10. This increases base AR helping all melee builds hit things.
Add 5/10/15 to the base damage of all weapons. This increases the potential damage weapons can do.
Add DR to armor 0% to Light Armor 5% to Medium Armor 10% Heavy Armor.
These simple things improve most of the issues with melee, the ability to hit things, damage we do and damage done to us. Once these issues are addressed we can look at specific skills.
Assassin - I like the Fury and Claw Block. Benefiting from Pierce doesn’t auto pierce but will allow pierce when obtained from an item.
I’m not sure about blade shield: There are two main ways to play a blade-sin. Back line attacker and front line ‘tank’. The back line build can use the eth weapons/higher damage because it sits back and is more of a glass cannon. The front line Blade sin does more up close and personal damage to everyone with Blade Shield. I’m ok with it taking weapon durability because it potentially can do more AoE damage than the single target back line attacking Blade Fury Sin.
Poison Dagger - It should auto hit/not rely on AR. The duration should cap at 10 seconds. This ups the DPS of the build while keeping a longer duration. If you know how to properly stack your poison damage you can get over 20 seconds and keep your dps high. The key with poison damage is the damage per frame, that needs to be higher with dagger than with nova, but the duration being long is a good thing for a melee necy so he can stab, move on and let it drop as you walk away.
Poison Bolt sounds interesting. You can also just increase the size of the poison cloud, make it bigger with every point in the skill.
That is the nuclear option, but is unlikely as that is revamping entire skill tree.
The developers could increase the radius of PE, but would still be a sub-optimal version of CE. Changing skill to “Poison Bolt” would offer more build diversity with utilizing xbows.
Not sure it’s enough with current weapon base damage levels and the skills damage/AR levels, but this would definitely be a step in the right direction. I’d honestly like to see it getting a special exception from chill and decrep speed debuff since it never had to live with those negative effects in the past.
Berserk is adding +3% magic damage, not converting, in this scenario? Taunt was 8%, so you’re losing 8% but getting 6 from Increased Stamina, and 3 from Berserk, for a net gain of 1% total but some of it is unleacable magic? Now you also have to put more hard points in Berserk AND Increased Stamina. I like that you’ve given us something more compelling than just the duration for Increased Stamina, but it seems like you’ve shifted things around in an already point starved build to possibly now have an additional skill to spend points on. Previously you could chose to ignore Stamina and go Taunt and DS for damage, now for full damage you’d need Stamina + Berserk + DS, with mastery and Frenzy itself that’s 100 points with no BO, FI/FP, or other pre-reqs 1 hit wonders…Seems like we should be going in the other direction to condense synergies required, IMO.
This would be nice, but what would be even nicer is to roll all of its single element synergies into Salvation, that way it becomes a 40 pt skill instead of an all eggs in one basket skill. It would make it fantastic as a hybrid/backup attack.
We both agree that Frenzy is over-synergized with 4 skills requiring 80 points. As we are proposing to remove Taunt synergy, we are freeing up 20 points.
The way I see it for a Frenzy build here’s the skills of interest you’d have to figure out:
Frenzy - 20
Double Swing - 20*
Taunt - 20*
Mastery - 20**
Find Item - 5-10***
Find Potion - 5-10***
Increased Speed - ??
Battle Orders - 20
Often Taunt and DS are each given 10 rather than maxed due to skill point constraints
**With End Game RW you don’t necessarily need the dmg/ar from maxing mastery, but it’d be nice if you could for higher player games…
***I don’t recall the exact numbers, but I know for a few points it makes sense to get FI directly, after which it is better to pump FP.
So we’re at ideally 120 w/o pre-reqs and nothing even counted for Increased Stamina…
In your proposal we’re losing the 10-20 points needed for Taunt, but we’re now going to want to dump 10-20 into Berserk for the new damage synergy and 20 into Increased Speed to get the 6% damage synergy plus the other benefits. So I am worried of a 1 step forward 2 steps backward situation. Save 10-20 points but have to spend up to 40 for the new situation.
I’d propose that we leave Berserk how it is for those who find the magic damage useful, and simply move the Taunt damage to DS or Increased Speed directly, with the additional changes you’ve proposed for Increased speed, to more clearly reduce point spend.
I like the idea of making the Berserk synergy more valuable, but giving the buffed Increased Speed only 6% when Taunt had 8 seems like now you’re needing 2 synergies (Berserk and Increase Speed) to match/surpass what you got from Taunt.
Perhaps increase the Berserk synergy from 1 to 3% and give Increased Speed the full 8 from Taunt, coupled with the buff you propose to transform it into Increased Resilience?
I also saw someone suggest recently that Increased Stamina could give a flat AR bonus. Thematically it makes sense since you’d be able to hit better if you were less tired, and the flat bonus would help give Barb’s a much needed boost for the skills and mastery %AR bonus to multiply.
I’ve been suggesting buffing weapons too. Any weapon with edmg% should increase minimum and maximum damage on the base by 3 (like armors give max damage +1). Also ethereal weapons should buff the base x2 rather than x1.5. We need BOTD and Death to be able to surpass Grief in average damage. It’s been a long fix that yet to come all these years. Patch 1.11 made this game for casters to dominate online.
Haha, completely agree Stun is utterly useless. I was thinking Stun could be replaced by Cleave, which requires 2H-weapon and would hit up to 2 adjacent enemies next to your primary target. I just didn’t want to propose too many changes to devs.
I was going to mention this for the assassin blade skills, the AR is woeful and needs addressing.
I think you’re right though, this is a problem for all melee and should be fixed from the ground up rather than specific skills at least initially.
A minor nitpick: logically it makes sense for Lycanthropy to be a pre-req for both morphs (although the name doesn’t fit - change it to Therianthropy or Shape Shifting Mastery), but that’d mean that first we need to invest a skill point in a passive which gives you initially nothing and only later in another skill which that passive boosts (making Werewolf available at character level 3). Other passives are either after the active skill in the skill tree (Skeleton Mastery, Golem Mastery, sorc’s elemental masteries) or you benefit from them all the time, not when using a specific skill (barb and amazon masteries). What do you think about making Lycanthropy and morphs separate skills, without pre-reqs (like sorc masteries)?
Alternatively it can be just a Poison Bolt spell, like Andariel’s. Requiring to use a crossbow (two-handed - you lose one stat stick) would require quite substantial crossbow buffs to make it worth using. With currently available items, no one would exchange Death’s Web or even White for any xbow.
Poison Dagger - rename to “Poison Blade,” and now affects swords in addition to daggers (similar to Sword Mastery change in 2.4), uninterruptable, and poison duration reduced by 50% (cap at 5 seconds)
And this…
Poison Explosion - now increases radius per level, similar to Corpse Explosion. In addition to synergy adding +20% poison damage per level for Poison Dagger, it now adds automatic activation of Poison Explosion upon kill with Poison Dagger
Agreed, and increased AR gain per level…
Blade Fury - now benefits from pierce (when obtained from items) and attack rating increased to 15% per level (up from 10% per level)
