I think even more nerf’s are needed, but I agree on all these.
Problem is more it’s a great high level runeword aswell which shows it’s to strong at low level.
However maybe it could become a compromise, make it +1 to skills however remove the Amn as needed component (Amn is mostly useless as effect), not with the intend to save yourself an Amn rune, but this would make the runeword 3s instead of 4s, meaning it would be a lot easier to actually get into a weapon before running somewhere in Nightmare and everyone (not only Paladin) could actually use it in a shield before running in Hell.
Would still easily be the best shield before endgame for most builds and weapon would be good for a pretty long part of the game aswell (the rest of the stats on Spirit are also pretty good).
Agree 100%. Hope the developers implement this change. This would be the single best move, along with revamping uniques.
I still think Cold Mastery should follow the same formula as any other skill that adds a penalty vs. Sundered Monsters for consistent game mechanics. Cold Mastery gives too much bang for the buck with no additional gear requirements.
However, I agree the Cold Sorceress is in a good spot and shouldn’t change. I wonder if there is a good compromise that would be acceptable. For instance, nerfing CM to add 1/5 penalty, but then add a Flickering Flame-equivalent RW that offers -% to Enemy Cold Resist to make up the difference. Lastly, this gives cold facets a bit of their power back.
I don’t agree with everything, OP. Blessed hammers could be tuned down, but if you remove the entire bonus from concentration, it will simply fall bellow all elemental builds because you can’t scale it in any way meaningfully (no magic resistance reduction, no magic % damage). Maybe add more magic immune monsters? Or reduce the scaling slightly.
If cold mastery was nerfed to 1/5 penalty, it would effectively give you much much less power than what any other mastery grants if you were to compare them on an endgame basis. For example, with tal rasha, 3 facets and infinity, you can have -47% resistance to an element. That’s more than what cold mastery would provide. You’d get something like double damage from it at best, while other two elements would still get their mastery bonus which scales to 300%+.
If you nerf grief, you throw physical melee characters in the stone age. They simply don’t have other options. My suggestion is to nerf grief (I don’t care how you do it), but at the same time base damage of ALL melee weapons should be increased by something like 50% or more.
Just make sure the “follow up” is in the same patch so we don’t have an entire season of melee even worse (nerfed Grief) but none of the compensatory buffs.
Energy provides 1 to 2 mana per point based on class. Pallies sit in the middle at 1.5. A low end 180 mana is equivalent to 120 Stat points into energy!
You are talking about anywhere from 150 raw stats points to well over 200 (for barb) with enough FHR to get at least 7 frames on all classes. The 70 FCR gets most classes (except zon) to 11 frames or better.
The most amazing thing is that pallies get to access this at level 25 in addition to being able to stack an additional 45 resistance with their shield bases…
If Spirit was nerfed, how about completely removing +55% FHR? This would keep +skills, FCR, and mana untouched and keeping the flavor of the runeword intact. The large bonus to FHR seems like gravy to me.
I mean, melee could use more damage than any build since their aoe is so garbage. I would like to see ww barb actually killing monsters on p8 at a reasonable pace. It will still be significantly slower than most sorc builds, but at least he has item find to make up for that. Right now, barb is a travincal/pit bot and nothing more.
That doesn’t matter because you can get an infinity and put monsters below 0% ele res easily. You don’t have that luxury with paladin. I feel like people misguidedly ask for blessed hammer nerfs when in fact sorceress is the most op class in the game, maybe second to javazon.
I see numerous callings for no nerfs. I think that kind of thinking is one-dimensional and is not healthy from a game design standpoint. There is both nerfing and buffing, both of which are equally important and are essential elements that establish an equilibrium within the game.
In certain instances, nerfing is the best course of action. For example, bringing overpowered runewords, namely Spirit, Grief and Enigma down a notch to achieve relative balance.
Most detrimental course of action is taking the approach of only buffing across the board to contend with unbalanced elements, which introduces power creep and has a devastating ramification to the overall experience. Last point is nerfing with a measured hand is healthy, keyword measured.
