I know it was never strong….but now it is so bad, it is completely useless. Who would use it and why???
Formerly, at least act bosses took damage. Now….they laugh at you.
Please buff or change it.
4 Likes
Yeah it is noticeably worse now. Thorns in ptr is not even dealing half the damage for regular monsters in hell and for bosses its not even 1 / 10th of the damage it was dealing before.
1 Like
Putting it in some ‘history’ in 1.09 Thorns would generally do 20-50% of the monsters life in damage. It would regularly kill monsters in a few hits. It was the go to for summoners as your skellies sucked and reflecting the damage was a better idea than thinking they could do damage. At this level it was worth investing in as it could equal out to direct damage kill speed. The ‘high’ damage vs melee was a trade off because it does nothing to ranged or spell casters. It also means your not using a skill that helps your actual damage kill things in 1-2 hits.
New thorns is a downgrade it does less damage overall than the old one. It’s now even more useless. To be a useful skill it needs to do at least 15% of the monsters health per attack, getting up to 20-50% at very high levels. This means a lvl 30ish thorns would need to do at least 2K damage.
The Percentage damage reflection is what makes this skill vialbe for multi player, a flat damage will never hold up to a Players 4 or Players 8 game. Take a standard NightClan Goat boy…
life 3170-5495 average being - 4332 in normal, players 4: 10831 players 8: 19496
Going from memory Emilio had damage of about 358 (IIRC, please correct) at lvl 85/lvl 15 thorns.
358 damage done is 8% of the monsters life in P1 3% in P4 and 1.8% in P8.
Apply Amp damage that’s 16.5% in P1 6.6% in P4 and 3.6% in P8.
TLDR: Flat damage isn’t going to cut in for Thorns or Multiplayer unless thorns scales with PlayersX
2 Likes
Exactly my thought.
Also…why use it now? It is now some random weird damage aura. You could just use any other elemental one instead.
They should either give it a synergie, or ramp up the dmg scaleing.
Yeah true it’s even more useless now
Thorns damage update suggestion:
If flat damage : damage increase through difficulty
Add a 20% percentage of chance to return damage to all ranged attacks
Add synergie damage bonus %
Add synergie chance to return damage to all ranged attacks
the PTR have the bosses bugged, nothing make damage to them (only hydra skill)
Don’t like the thorns nerf at all. It ruined my summoning necro. (I’m going to make a nod to the huge nerf in poison mages too. 4 second duration?! wtf?? Do y’all even know why summoning necros like poison mages? Hint: it’s not the poison “damage” lol.) This is what happens when people that don’t actually play d2r or know how it works decide to fix it. My summoning necro was fun to play and I also felt quite stylish and unusual with my act 1 rogue merc and faithful fire golem in tow. But how can my summoning necro be viable now that the power has been stripped from the thorns aura in my plucky mercs edge bow? Oh. I know. He can be viable by using an act 2 might merc. And a clay golem to slow the enemy instead of my beloved fire golem that enabled enemies to suicide themselves faster on the once-useful thorns aura of the edge bow. In short, Blizzard Approved Tried and True Only Correct Way For Viable Necromancer Build. Act 2 might merc, clay golem, and gag decrepify on act bosses. DO NOT PLAY OUTSIDE THE BOX. DO NOT MAKE FUN CHARACTERS WITH STYLE. Ok at this point, just condense the game to where there is only 1 character class with 1 skill to choose from and 1 merc choice and only 1 possible piece of gear for each slot. You’re 85% there anyway.
How did you get thorns in 1.09? Running around with a pally? You must mean Iron Maiden, now that I think of it.
I’ve made several posts about this, and people largely ignored them.
At least there are a few others out there that understand how bad this change is.
They keep up the dipsh1t mantra of how it will be better to have it, especially making things not even hit you, but the 1) obliterate the damage return, and 2) make it just another always on damage source.
People that use Thorns know how ignorant this idea is because we know the sacrifices we are making to get what we want from it. Instead, devs that obviously never used it to see where it is good, why it is good, and why not just use Might instead totally bork yet anothe skill they have never understood.
LoD made merc permeant, by 1,09 I could get a thorns merc in NM no issue. I did also run pallys that used thorns and necys using IM. Cure only necys could clear cows with just attract + IM and CE to clean things up.
Merc… of course. How did I forget that. Anyway, I think the rationale about the thorns change is good, but it seems from players who like the build like the numbers are just tuned too low. I would like to know what their intended playstyle is for thorns. The inflection point where it becomes as much outgoing damage as another offensive aura probably comes much sooner than the point at which it functions are the primary mechanism for a build.
2.4 will kill Thorns Aura and Spirit of Barbs.
With the “old Thorns” At least you could kill, especially high damage monsters like Frenzytaurs, Doom Knights or Thorned Hulks they would kill themselves on the 1000% or more damage returned.
With fixed damage and massive monster health pools its going to be even worse. This new Thorns reminds me of World of Warcraft’s retribution aura(thorns aura) which does a pathetic fixed amount of damage and is mostly for flavor.
Dont forget that it will kill off both of those skills in PvP as well, if they werent before, aside from a regular 1/6 pvp penalty, there is a hidden 1/10 penalty for both thorns & spirit of barbs ontop of that(because dmg reflect skills were much more OP before)
This is will completely nullify them
I’m getting cynical and thinking this is what they intended to do. The only utility Thorns had was to help get past Dury and Diablo in normal and help a little bit if you want to use Edge on a Rouge. This really kills that off.
If they take the 2.4 version of thorns live they are showing they really have never played a char to hell. ‘Popping bosses with thorns’? What game were they playing?
Reflect damage is still OP post 1.10, because the damage reduction doesn’t apply to things like necro spammed bone walls, bone prison and summons. Also things like valk/decoy, shadow master, grizzly etc. Thorns and iron maiden are strictly disallowed in basically all pvp tournaments, so that should tell us something. But in BM games it’s pretty crappy as well because you can’t ww/zeal/fury around it or w/e. The problem was that sometimes it dealt too little dmg and sometimes it dealt too much dmg. It’s probably also OP in pvm, because you can just bring a crap char with max thorns/iron maiden and you can get past baal or w/e that way. I don’t think there were that many uses to it in pvm though, certainly nothing optimal or anything.
Thorns doesnt even work with Bone Walls or Bone prison
But thats the whole point…get that barb or zealer to stop the me see red me attack, mindlessly whirling/zealing every enemy health bar in pvp, so he has to be careful at least. Dont barbs use telezerk on necros anyway? And berserk’s getting a buff.
Only reason Iron Maiden works so well with bone prison/wall/summons is because unlike 1/10 additional pvp penalty that Thorns and Barbs has, Iron Maiden only has 1/4 penalty.
Also
I mean just from a theoretical perspective. I haven’t gone into every detail of the niche strats, but there are a lot of scenarios where a simple item (I was actually just referring to reflect damage skills in general, not just thorns. So for example a simple Metalgrid or Bramble can already prevent you from using your main skill, which should not be how it works) or some non-invested skill immediately makes your main skill nearly unusable. There is no point looking at it piecemeal. If you are going to formulate balance changes, you would basically have to look at all scenarios that could occur. I also feel that I should be rewarded, not penalised for being able to deal better damage which is the whole point of the game.
Zerk isn’t gonna work that well w/ a lot of chars, when you are in bm tvt, or when some necro is using a lot of summons and is spamming pnb skills at you and you could have holy freeze and decrepify on you at the same time. I mean you could use lifetap but if you don’t actually have lifetap then you can’t even play ur char at all! I prefer a game with a myriad of viable strats and a myriad of solutions to each problem, not a game where your main strats don’t work and your main strats lead to more problems or get you to kill yourself lol xD In LOD just a town summon druid w/ Bramble and Edge could ruin a game. Course you could go several screens away, but it already tells you there’s a broken tactic along those lines. Patched or not, people will likely just find more of such ways again to ruin games, esp with people demanding for pvp modes and pvp maps. Course in general when they balance stuff you would have to account for all scenarios where your game could get completely ruined by something, and we don’t want any broken stuff falling through the cracks and then spoiling our fun. IMHO looking at just a few scenarios is not going to do anything for the game.