Reposting what I posted yesterday on the temp forum, since the whole forum apparently got closed lol. People asked for the TL;DR so if I were to sum it up I would just say that bow using amazons have been nerfed beyond the point of redundancy in the current patch and have plenty of room for being buffed without there being any repercussions for class balance in pvp or pvm, and are usually the centerpiece of team pvps, and deserve a buff accordingly. Anyway here’s the post again:
Hi all, I know a bit slow to the party, but been rather busy irl. I actually haven’t even played the Alpha/Beta because I would have to upgrade my comp (currently using work laptop for LOD). I just thought I would mention some of the things that I would personally love to see added to the game, since it’s possible some fixes and maybe another patch could be released, and this is sort of like a commentary on some aspects of class balance in the current patch. I am analysing the game based on the current state, not with WSG fixed (and yes, zons sucked that much even with WSG), because there is no telling what the game would look like then. I also have got to say that I am not looking forward to pvping with WSG fixed. Team pvp may be somewhat viable w/o WSG, but individual pvp will be even more unviable without WSG than it already was. Zons will suck even more with WSG fixed, so it’s safe to say that if they were in such need of a boost even with WSG working, they will need even more of a boost than that with WSG patched out.
But anyway I did discuss this with peeps on jsp some time ago, and while most of us want the game to be left the way it is as much as possible, a lot of us have realized there is an obvious balance issue that has been there that has not been given a real look for a long time (coming to 20 years!). We are talking about Zons on the Bow/Crossbow side (the Javelin/Spear side doesn’t need a boost, although you would have to say that Jab is very lackluster and Fend and Impale are almost completely unused. That means all of the physical oriented jav/spear skills are non-applicable in mostly every situation in pvp or pvm), which has been severely underpowered since the v1.1 patches. I would just have to point out that while I like the game the way it is and am not very keen on changing the game, there are certain instances like this (you will also have to take into account all aspects of the game, pvm and both gm AND bm pvp, to get a sense of whether a class is overly nerfed or not. People who have been entrenched in GM pvp for the past several decades are going to tell you it is “already” balanced, when it is ANYTHING BUT) where it makes every sense to give certain chars a boost in certain areas. Here’s a quick look that should make it clear as to why zons should be given a dmg increase on the bowside:
Analysing Bow/Crossbow skills for pvm:
-For practical purposes in pvm, only the jav/spear side is generally used. Boosting the bowside is not going to change pvm balance at all because jav/spear users don’t use bows/xbows either way, because trying to incorporate the latter would only hinder them. The bowside is not that practical in pvm, and even with a substantial boost to damage output it will not be as effective as jav/spear users, so buffing zons on the bowside will not change the pvm game at all. Meta would always remain jav/spear only
-The meta for bow/xbow users in post v1.1 is currently Faith+Fortitude+Pride. This is not very far off from the pre v1.1 Windforce+160ed/60ias meta, and it is only about a 15-20% increase in DPS from pre 1.1. This is contrasted to the increase in monster HP, which was increased by about 500-1000% in the patch, along with physical resistances. So even if zons were given a 50-100% increase in damage output for free, it’s not going to count for much when looking at the 1000-2000% increase in monster EHP vs physical attacks. It’s a no brainer: just boost zons
Bowazons are some of the more fun classes to use, but nobody uses them now to level chars or for gear finding. Some people just play untwinked pvm for fun using bowazons, but not many because most just use a more practical variant. The pvm game is mostly about caster cheese now, and most physical damage chars are very ineffective in normal gameplay, and mediocre at best with very expensive gear.
Analysing Bow/Crossbow skills for pvp:
I know assessing balance may be tricky because the game isn’t designed for pvp, but for the most part it is already well-known that zons are not the most exciting chars to be in control of in pvp. But anyway I will just do a quick assessment of all aspects of pvp, BM and GM, and team and individual pvp, and show why just as with pvm, there is no aspect of the pvp game where it doesn’t make sense to boost the bow/xbow aspect on the zons.
I will begin by pointing out some of the reasons why zons will be even sh-ttier in the remaster, and why NONE of the changes in the remaster will benefit zons:
-The increased screen resolution will act as a nerf to long-range missile attacks, because people can now see your Multishots and Guided Arrows from a mile away, and they would be able to avoid it or tele over it. The new screen res also acts as a boost to teleporting characters, and it just so happens that zons are the only char class that (mostly) doesn’t use Enigma where pvp is concerned
-The shared stash may mean that people may now actually bother to counter zons. The maxed block/% physical damage reduction setups wasted the most stash space before, so a lot of people didn’t bother with MB/DR (didn’t really need it anyway. A lot of chars have easy matchups against zons even without MB/DR). Zons were already crap, they’d just be rag dolls in the remaster, and they’ll just be completely countered by anyone who can be bothered to expend the stash space to counter them, which will basically be everyone in the remaster. With a system that allows for more complete characters, it’ll be shown even more clearly what poor chars zons actually were
-Zons are by far the most reliant on existing bugs/glitches in the game. They basically had to circumvent game parameters just to suck less, but then the more the coding improves, the less of those bugs and glitches they will be able to use, and it would only act as another nerf. Zons use tons of bugged FRW and continual weapon swapping to desynch and conceal their real location, invisible Plague clouds, invis arrows, etc, and zons actively build their strategies around these things. And this part is HUGE: if they actually fixed WSG, zons would be almost unusable, because they rely on WSG FAR MORE than any other class. You would basically have to fix a bunch of other aspects of the game just for zons to be of use against any of the other chars in the game, let alone asns. I’d just make a separate thread re: WSG Addressing the WSG - #2 by DHA-2187 - General Discussion - Diablo 3 Forums
So it’s only going to be all downhill for zons from here. I will just point out why, already in the current OG patch, it already makes every sense to boost bowazons (like if there were going to be a 1.15 or 1.16 in OG, I would recommend this as well). Just to be more clear on what “BM” is, when referring to “BM” over here it is just used to assess game balance with all tactics available to players, so “BM” over here just means no gear/skill restrictions but assuming all the other usuals in GM pvp: no extra team members (e.g. only 3v3, 4v4 etc, no uneven teams or buff chars), same pots across the board (under current GM rules ppl use all mana pots, but hypothetically speaking this could also be all rejuvs, or no potions at all, which is entirely possible because no pots gets ppl to become strategic), say “go” before duel start etc. Without much further ado, here’s all the reasons you buff bowazons in pvp:
-It shows in individual pvps how little effort is taken to counter them. It is GM to use maxed MB/DR in individual pvps, which is a whopping 87.5% total damage reduction vs a bowazon’s attacks, but a lot of people don’t even use it. A simple Stormshield already puts one at 35% DR, and since most people use Enigma that’s already another 8% DR, and then you only have to get another Ber Rune in the Stormshield itself or circlet for maxed DR, but people generally don’t bother with anywhere near that much, just to give you an idea of how much zons can be boosted without becoming OP. Hdins, who supposedly have a difficult time with zons (because hammers are the most difficult to aim, while zons are the most slippery of chars. But in terms of dueling tier hammers are very far above zons), are in fact able to counter zons very easily using only a Grief PB, but most of them don’t even bother using this, only using their general setup because that’s all that’s required to beat zons. In any case, as far as GM pvp is concerned there won’t be any worry about overboosting zons, because GM rules are completely fluid. So even if you were to boost zons so much that they became OP, the pvpers will just adjust the rules to balance it out
-Before assessing zons in GM team pvp, you will have to acknowledge that GM pvp is not an indicator of whether a class is actually of any good at pvp. You ascertain balance by looking at the BM game, not by looking at the GM game. But you can tell how much a class actually sucks by looking at amount of “GM” rules that was used to bail out that char to help it to be pvp viable. You almost don’t see any zons in any REAL bm games, so that should already tell you whether zons are good pvp chars or not. Under GM rules you are not allowed to: Holy Freeze a zon, Decrepify a zon, use more than 10% Slow Target on a zon, Bone Prison a zon. In addition to those, there are also some GM Team vs Team rulesets that prevent most chars from using Maxed Block (but under these rulesets zons are themselves allowed to use Maxed Block). All this is despite the fact that zons’ damage output is multiplied by about 4-5x in teams (Amplify Damage+Concentration), and in teams they are heavily shielded from close to mid-range attacks, which they are normally very vulnerable against. And they are actually only barely getting their spots in GM TvT despite all the rules that are being enforced to skew it in their favor
-They are a very poor addition to BM TvT, because a simple Decrepify or Bone Prison already makes them almost useless. Zons’ other weapon, Plague Jav, is somewhat useful here, but it can be countered with Andariel’s Mask, or Andariel’s Mask + Gul runes, although nobody really uses those. Plague timers also don’t stack, so you wouldn’t see multiple zons on a team because of Plague jav even if it were OP, because reapplying Plague from another zon doesn’t add any extra dmg. A Poison Nova necro also obsoletes a Plague Jav zon in every way in TvT, and Poison Nova also does not stack with Plague timers. So zons aren’t high on the list of chars you wanna add to a BM TvT team, Plague Jav or not. Zons also don’t bring utility skills like necro curses or druid oak (Slow Missile is currently banned, but it’s not that great a skill anyway, because you have to get in range of all sorts of attacks before you can use it), so even if zons became OP it won’t really mess up class balance because you won’t see multiple zons on each team even then
-Needless to say they are pretty much not seen at all in individual BM PvP. In individual BM PvP any class can use Stormshield+Doom and then zons are already completely countered
-As I wrote on the other post over there PvP: make it official. Long post part 2/3 , BM TvT is already mostly auto-balancing, and the only missing piece of the puzzle, is zons. Just buff zons, and then you will make this game more or less fully viable for BALANCED PvPs, without the use of any artificial rules and gear/skill restrictions. I discussed with some peeps the whole role of zons and why they currently fall short of it on a post on the other forum, and I don’t wanna rewrite it so I will just copy/paste what I wrote over there at the end of this post, but in short if you fix this, you would have fixed everything
-The current mainstays in team pvp mostly consist of chars with close-mid ranged attacks spamming at each other (hdin/wind druid/bone necro etc). It gets rather flat after a while. You have to make zons bm viable for it to fly
-Just to get some sense of what is going on, 1) they basically forgot to boost bows and crossbows where all other chars were given mass synergies and melee chars were given Grief/BOTD/Death/Beast, etc etc. Faith+Fort doesn’t add that much over Windforce, in comparison. All other classes/subclasses got massive damage output increases in the patch, but bowazons did not. 2) But the REAL underlying factor to why zons suck so much is that Enigma basically means that there is no distinction between melee and ranged anymore. People now close the distance almost instantly using teleport. But zons themselves can’t utilize teleport properly because of casting frames and because the dodges interrupt casting completely. There is very little advantage to being a ranged char at this point. 3) Zons are also completely reliant on IAS and FRW (all the other classes have minimal reliance or no reliance on those), and therefore are susceptible to holy freeze/slow target/decrepify/bone prison, and are made almost completely irrelevant because of those things. 4) If you want to analyse further (the rest of this section is just some number crunching, just skip to save time), the only pvp viable zon skills have next to no offhand physical damage multipliers, for example Guided Arrow only adds 5% per level, Multiple Shot 0%, and Jab 3% per level (and that is ridiculously low for a melee). Oddly, the only zon skills that were given substantial damage multipliers (Fend/Impale) are skills that would have absolutely no practical use in pvp (they are not really used in pvm, for that matter). Zons also have a skill tab full of passives but none of them give any % damage multipliers (contrast this to all other fighter classes in the game, which get multiple sources of it from various skill tabs. Basically all classes except Necro/Sorc). Faith+fort was only a band aid but then it just created another problem because the base dmg is now so low. I will just compare ranged attacks with melee attacks here because ranged attackers are mostly attacking at melee range anyway (the balance changes post v1.1 only accounted for gameplay without teleport): barbs attack at about 500 average base dmg at 12.5 attacks (uninterruptible) per second, and pallies attack at about 500-600 average base dmg (and with a crazy damage multiplier) at 4 attacks per second with an unblockable attack (again, uninterruptible), while zons attack at about 260 base dmg at 3 1/2 attacks per second. As zons are practically forced to use faith+fortitude it also makes them extremely inflexible on all equipment pieces (they are not only completely dependent on gear for offhand damage multipliers. They are also completely dependent on it for IAS, meaning they also can’t swap out gloves, amulet, belt and helm, and that is why you see they are very inflexible and limited), which just makes them lousy for pvp. For example if you wanted to use Enigma you will have to swap out Fort which accounts for almost a third of damage output on the bowside and much more than that on the javside. Zons are also so hard-pressed for options they use LF as a physical damage dealer, which also does not have a physical damage multiplier. To sum up, the only useful zon skills (in pvp or pvm), LF and CS, are mostly the pvm oriented skills, while the real pvp viable skills (the physical based bow/xbow skills mostly) are extremely underwhelming both on paper and in practice (in both pvp/pvm), so in that sense there is a lot of room for boosting zons to become pvp viable, without creating another OP pvm class. Contrast that to sorcs, who cannot be boosted to become bm pvp viable without becoming completely OP at pvm. But since you can boost zons for bm pvp without creating class imbalances elsewhere, imo zons should just be boosted in the next patch or w/e. Wrote a bit more than I had planned to, but in view of this list of major inherent disadvantages, it’s quite clear that you would have to boost zons a ton in order for them to remain competitive at pvp
As for how to boost bowazons, there are a lot of ways to boost it, but I will probably point out the most obvious part. There is a whole subclass of items in the game that nobody touches: crossbows. Nobody touches any of those: not the rares, uniques, or runewords (this is also your proof that bowazons are an overlooked subclass). That’s a whole half of the items that are supposed to be used with the bow/xbow tree that are virtually untouched by everyone in the game. Crossbows were a relic from the pre-2004 period, when regular monsters were IIRC only a few hundred hps in hell mode with no physical resistance. Xbows are completely irrelevant now, and nobody picks up xbows in any form, and it is entirely a waste of a whole subclass of items. Since you pretty much have to boost bowzons in the remaster anyway, you may as well boost xbows, because otherwise xbows would just be a complete waste of space in people’s games in the remaster.
To be sure there’s maybe like 1-2 gimmick builds that are not very efficient that utilise xbows, but there’s like literally about a handful of ppl in the history of D2 that ACTUALLY used those builds. More just to say that they got somewhere (but not very far) using some obscure and mediocre build. They are neither effective nor fun, so you’d be sure that changing or taking xbows away from the game won’t be taking anything away from the game.
The problem is that xbows are too slow, and are inefficient and boring for pvm, and unusable for pvp because in the time it takes you to fire off a shot you would already have been jumped and interrupted.
Imo just increase the speed on xbows so that they use the same IAS breakpoint tables as regular bows. Most people wouldn’t use anything slower than 7FPA Guided Arrow/Multishot for pvp, so just remove the current speed cap on xbows, or even set the cap at 6FPA, because bowazons are crappy enough to warrant that sort of boost. Maybe add 5-10 wsm to their base speeds, so for example colossus crossbow will be at 15-20 wsm and using the ias bps that regular bows are using etc, or something along those lines.
Or just let regular bows spawn ethereal. Doesn’t matter that they don’t use up durability, and at most you just can’t repair the charges on eth bows, but it makes perfect sense to make ethereal bows a thing. In fact it doesn’t make sense for bows/xbows to not be able to spawn eth, because they would be the only category of item (offensive or defensive) that doesn’t spawn eth. Also look at the number of people using Rogue mercenaries, which basically tells you that you have a lot of room to boost bows/xbows before rogue mercenaries even become relevant.
Other issue with bowazons in pvp is the arrow stack. It’s not an issue in pvm, but in pvp you actually run out of arrows. Should just increase arrow stack size by several times or do away with the idea of arrow quantity, like how Rogue mercs don’t need arrow stacks at all. Imo very nice QOL for pvp.
Other way to buff bowazons is to add more Enhanced Damage % to the bow/xbow skills or passive skills.
Probably a combination of all is needed really!
In summary, you can boost bows/xbows as much as you want for untwinked pvm and they won’t be OP, probably by about 50-100% on total damage output for twinked pvm, about 50% for team pvp (this is a conservative number. May have to get more input from pvpers on this. Must also be assessed in BM context not GM context. GM pvp has nothing to do with real game balance, and GM pvp is irrelevant for the majority of the player base), and probably about 200-400% for individual pvp without them becoming OP over there. I would say physical damage bowas should be boosted by AT LEAST 50%. If they are at any less than that, bowazons will barely be on the radar for usable builds in the remaster.
I don’t feel like rewriting it, so here’s the copy/paste of the discussion on jsp about the whole role of zons in BM TVT, and why it’s important:
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[QUOTE=Goomshill,Mar 25 2021 07:45pm]…
yes pure bowas are underpowered and unreasonably impotent against mb/dr. My damach zon can take 200+ arrows from a glass zon to kill. Ive let people shoot me just to watch them run out of arrows. In bear form ive stood still while 3 bowas pounded away uselessly just for sh-ts and giggles. And pure java is a one trick pony, totally inflexible and either unable to hit at all or just sorbed completely
honestly only reason bowas exist is to duel each other, vita casters, and TvT where they can stand in a hammerfield with amp+conc
and what does TvT really say about viabilty? Ive 4-0’d 4v4/gm multiple times in a row using my werebear geddon druid, Ive even brought him in while in bone midget form[/QUOTE]
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Imo the only thing going for pvp in this game is team vs team, because solo duels are unviable without all sorts of restrictions. Team duels have more viable builds and can be competitive without restrictions (bm maybe, but tvts are competitive whether gm or bm, unlike solo duels). But even then, you are still not allowed to hf/decrep/bp zons, even when they’ve got all the advantages of group buffs/debuffs in tvt, and there are still a whole bunch of restrictions put there just to keep zons in the game, so that all says something about whether zons are really a good dueling class or not, even for tvt. There’s a set of rules when up against any class in general, and then there’s another set of rules in addition to that when up against zons just to keep zons in the game (I know it’s general guidelines for frw/ias based chars, but it shows the limitations of zons as pvp chars. It’s the only char that can’t transcend the need for frw/ias. Having to build on those carries a bunch of inherent weaknesses, and it makes you susceptible to holy freeze/slow target/decrepify/bp and all sorts of other things, so you would have to factor that in when assessing the real strength of zons as a pvp char. The only REAL way to balance it would be to boost zons. GM rules are only an ad hoc fix). IMO only if zons are pulling their weight without holy freeze, decrepify and bp being banned, then you could call tvts “balanced”, otherwise zons would be a redundant class altogether. If you have to self-nerf just for them to remain relevant opponents, then they are not really relevant opponents. Zons are supposed to be artillery characters but they don’t even deal that much damage. A zon getting decrep’d, bp’d and holy frozen in a team duel should still be dealing enough damage with multi/strafe (strafe is useful sometimes. Counteracts ias debuffs) such that the bwalls/prisons go down immediately and the enemy team is still taking sufficient damage from your shots, and the enemy team is walking into your teammates’ attacks while going after you (they only will if you are a real artillery char, but zons in the current state are not), to justify a zon’s spot on the team. If a simple decrep or bp counters them then team pvp has no place for them. Imo a boost of the extent that I mentioned in the original post would rectify that (and way more fun as well).
IMO the only thing preventing tvt from becoming crazy popular, is that zons are underpowered (I haven’t really seen plague zons in tvt though, but there’s always a counter to it). Most of the classes cannot be fully countered and have some niche role in tvt, so there would always be sufficient variety in those games. Tvt is something that would always be balanced because teams choose from 4/7 of the pool of abilities available in the game. So it’s always auto-balancing (or worst come to worst it will end up always being a mirror matchup) because you always pick effective combinations with the least weak points, and most classes can join in and it would usually be fairly competitive whatever your picks are. But the thing that sticks out is the zons, because while they play a key role as ranged attackers, they can be taken out of the game with a simple decrep or bp, and they have to be alotted so many provisions from the enemy team it takes discipline to adjust your gear accordingly and to remember not to use certain skills against zons that you use against every other char. The premise here is that team pk is already auto-balancing in bm, but zons are the only class (don’t know whether to count sorcs or not) that won’t conform to this premise, because they are almost completely useless with nothing more than a decrep/bp. Bm is also the way to go because the only way pvp will fly among the majority of players is if you didn’t need to read a long set of rules and gear/skill restrictions, or at least if it was easy to monitor and enforce those things ingame. Most people in the remake aren’t going to bother looking at that list at all. So I doubt there would be much GM pvps in the remaster. The only pvps that will fly there is if they were allowed to use any char they leveled, with any gear they were able to acquire, and it would probably be TvT, because solo duels would be full of mismatches.
I think the game is good the way it is, and I’m not very keen on changes in the game, but over here it’s just a glaring balance error (I mean in general pvm and any form of pvp, not just gm pvp which tells you nothing about whether a class is inherently balanced). Makes every sense to rectify it.
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