What I think about Holy Fire

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1

So my first opinion on internet and here it goes…(LONG TEXT INC)

I’ll begin this rant with this, I’m a huge fan of auradin and my opinion is biased. With that cleared, I do understand the points people make about the P1 clearspeed. I have no math or data to support anything below and I’m talking about a PVM environment and not PVP. There are other builds which is in spots that make them more viable at low/mid tier gear levels, there are builds that absolutely demolishes density with mid gear such as Lightning fury, CE necro, Hammerdin etc. There are builds that do not plow through hordes with mid gear but become powerhouses at higher/perfect gear levels.

In Diablo we get to choose how we tackle monster type and immunity to some extent, some will be bad, some will be great.

Holy fire in this case is clearly a density destroyer, WITH the right gear.

Let us take a moment and think about it, the right gear, what kind of options do I have to be able to outperform P1?

Gear options - The word “options” in this case is a bit misleading because there are few to none if you really want to push this build. Sure it may slap Hell cow, but the journey there is a pain since we won’t have anything reducing fire resistance and we know that there are A LOT of fire immunities on our way to Baal.

You’ll need double dragons, HoJ(Hand of Justice) and in my opinion Flickering flame. That leaves us with 4 out of 10 slots filled. These items make this build work, I repeat, THEY DO THE DIFFERENCE.

Why? They grant a passive damaging aura on equip that also stacks, which in turn gives our player, a paladin the option to go with the most awesome anti-resistance skill, Conviction. We need Conviction to make this play work because with Conviction, our granted “passive” aura Holy Fire will be able to burn down any non-fireproof village to the ground. On top of this, a player will be able to not only spend skill points in synergies for Holy fire, but it also gives a bit of dimension and flexibility to the build because it leaves us with an abundance of skill points to invest in other things.

This is great, this is “OP"/"BROKEN”…Which I for a second don’t think. In the testing I’ve seen, the big streamers testing and with some anecdotal notes I’ve brought together, I get to the conclusion that it’s not that broken at all and here is why…

TIME.

Let us have a look at those 4 awesome items. To make all those items we need 3x Sur, 3x Lo, 1x Cham and 1x Vex if I’m not mistaken, these are high runes and we also need some low/mid tier runes to complete those runewords. We need suitable bases for those items and for a min/maxer a great base won’t come cheaply.

In total we have to hunt for 8 High runes and as we all know, High runes do not grow on trees. I’m not going to explain any math(because I suck at math) to back up my claim on this because I think everyone knows that hunting for HR is time consuming.

Now I’m going to state that we need two/three things to get those items, one which is TIME and the other two DENSITY/VOLUME.

Time and density/volume will be our two/three main factors here, we need to spend a lot of time in a lot of density/volume to be able to find those High runes. I think this applies to most of us players, but we also have cases of people finding High runes and super rare uniques very frequently all the time. However, this group is a very small minority and I think our main goal here is fitting a character with a quantity of 8 very hard-to-find runes to make very powerful runewords with an average player behind the wheels.

Let us imagine our average player whose name is C. C is a player with base knowledge about the game, C plays around 2/3-4 hours when it’s possible to play. C likes to play with other people and enjoys a private game now and then. Let’s stop here.

The time that C has to play is a limiting factor because is he able to plow through enough density or volume during a season?

Will C be motivated enough to play through bad luck streaks? Do C understand item value and how to efficiently trade for upgrades and runes, maybe on other platforms other than ingame? If C plays Hardcore, will C be resilient enough to make it through a ladder season filled with death and despair?

There’s too much other factors, people here will laugh at me on this because I’m not presenting any data to support anything here. But as I stated, this is purely a rant on what I think about Holy Fire and why I do not think it’s broken or OP.

So at long last, I want you, the reader to reflect and think about this:

“Holy fire with these items are steamrolling Player 1, was the grind for those runes worth it and should I not be rewarded for the time invested?”

Conclusion:

Holy fire is in a good PVM spot.

2 Likes
2

Leveling and farming is now much easyer. Even whitout crazy items. And you don’t have to respec on higher difficulty, unless you want to play some other biuld.

3

I disagree with a few points.
#1 you dont need flickering flame… the +3fire skills dont apply to auras given by an item. Otherwhise there is the -10 to -15 enemy fire resist. A Much cheaper option is to use any helm with 3 fire facets. You dont even need perfect fire facet for it to be better than flickering flame for this build.
#2 yes the build requires 7 hrs, but which runes? All HRs are not equal. Sur is worth 1/2 Ber. Lo about as much as Sur and Cham is really cheap. These 7 hrs are really worth about 3Ber runes. Or 1.5 Enigma. I think people overestimate the value of there runes.
I understand that alot of people never get a single hr, but what I mean is these 3 items are cheaper than a good eth infinity. They are still far from a Last whish…

4

Sur is worth 1/2 Ber. Lo about as much as Sur and Cham is really cheap.

Yes, in the current state of the game.

We can’t really make assumptions yet, how the changes will affect the prices of those runes. I can see Sur become almost equally valuable as Ber, and Lo will obviously increase in value, Cham aswell. Only time will tell.

5

I do not see much difference to tesladin, he is able to kill with aura as well maybe slower and has more randomness as lighting starts at 1. But it works even in 2.3. Why only lighting aura should do damage and fire not? It is a nice option to tesladins. I do not think it will be new meta, just because one streamer said it is broken… In 2.3. fire aura works for leveling, but late game it falls far behind lighting. It is alike 5x the difference or so?

6

The build is nothing but a glorified cow killer the standard tesladin is way better in chaos sanctuary than the holy fire pala.

2 Likes
7

I see and I’m happy that you do, to be able to agree and disagree should always be encouraged because I think that it drives improvement and brings balance.

I also understand your point about Flickering flame. I didn’t know that those +fire skills would not add to the aura.

Now when I reflect about what you say about HR value I think you’re completely right, they are classified as HRs but all HRs are not equal in terms of trading value. That is something I’ve completely left out of my “rant”. JAH and BER is also statistically harder to find which means that they will naturally be more expensive, to add to that, they are required to make one of the best RWs offered in the game which even amps up the price more.

So from a trading perspective I totally agree with your counterpoints. But I will still stand by my last bastion which is the Time/density/volume argument, because I think that’s a strong driving force and will influence an average players’ ladder season outcome. But only if they ditch the trading portion of this game.

But yeah, it’s awesome that the community voices their opinion because otherwise we would have an unbalanced mess…in the end we all just want to improve the game we love.

1 Like
8

I have no issue with 8-10 HR builds “wrecking” certain areas of the game. That being said, thematically speaking, I think it best when characters “do” something that kills the enemies.

The only “nerf” I’d do do the damage auras would be to adjust the damage radius scaling. Currently they do 100% damage at the edge of their aura, scaling to 200% when right next to your character. When you get level 40+ aruas this “increase” damage is many screens off! I think the auras should do 100% damage at the edge and ONLY increase to monsters with (say 8 yards) of your character eventually scaling to 200%.

I just want to see the “real damage/power” of the auras to monsters that are within 1/2 to 1/3 of a screen of your main character - not miles away.

2 Likes
9

Holy fire paladin can just walk through all of normal and just two shot bosses.

It’s not ok.

10

Holy pally normal is almost as good as druid and assassin, but not there, so, not op, and druid and assassin traps got even better now, i am comparing new HF against old traps + druid, act 4 wise is even worse in fact. Nightmare is really meh, much better go Hammerdin here, and hell is absolutely trash. Normal mode is not a base for any argument as even full thorns pala passive paladin can finish it… heck, basically a spread all around build can, normal is just easy. Hell is the only place builds matter, and it doesnt matter how strong the skill is (blizzard, hihi) single element that is not called magic will have many troubles in many places.

11

I think in it’s current form Holy Fire is too passive and too strong…

I’d imagine it wouldn’t be hard for a hacker/Duper/Botter to build a script for the Auradin/Holy Fire paladin that can run P1 cows (or other areas) automatically…

If hackers/botters can abuse it, they will… It’s just too passive / abusable…

12

The only real problem, its on normal/nightmare. If they don’t scalate or nerf on those difficulties would make those modes more joke than was before.

Folks focus too much on hell and pvp, but the fact that normal and nightmare became just a ladder that nobody cares even if represents 2/3 of the game, it’s terrifying.

They need ramp up the difficulty and make transition between those 3 difficulties more smoother.

I would even say, reduce the crazy ammount hp of foes on nightmare, even more on hell and increase their damage and resistances. Making being careless riskier and more organic.

At least old iron maiden and thorns would work. Necro’s golem already gets modifiers based on difficulties, they should think about expanding it across all skills. That way all difficulties most skills would be fine and would be easier to tweak and balance each one of them based on the difficulty itself.

Right now holy fire makes a 8-10 paladin kill duriel passively without, almost, no risk. Same could be said about thorns on hell underperforming.

Instead of using bizarre gauges, just make those kinds of skills have percentile improvements on itself based on difficulties and for the love of the sanity, create a pattern on foes on how hp increase and properly consider their damage and resistances related to it. Even if it means less resist on enchanted affix but absorb when they receive some kind element they are “enchanted” or get more resist. Virtually making the game behave somewhat like right now but less overall damage done on player’s side and proportinally reduce their need or crazy amount hp.

Like a foe instead of 25 fire resist, have 50 and 25% fire absorb, if gets fire enchanted gets more 50 instead of 75(total of 100) and 25( total of 50%) fire absorb. That way effectively wouldn’t change their immunity ceilling but would reduce the damage from player by half on enchanted ones and by about 1/3 on normal ones. That could lead to less 50% hp already if done on all elements. That also would benefit physical/melee builds if they do it well on that scale if needed, even poison would receive some love in that regard also.

Less overall hp, would make cb and static field less mandatory also.