If you look at seasonal play, towards the middle and bottom of the solo crusader ladder, you’ll see that most players are running with Pig Sticker. This season (S20) I put a lot of effort into an Ivory Tower build with the addition of the season 20 mechanic for multiple shields and it’s much more difficult than the Pig Sticker build. I think the ladder reflects that. I made ladder ~800 with Ivory Tower and everyone around me was using Pig Sticker.
The challenge with the Ivory Tower build is survivability. As someone said, it’s a lot of fishing and RNG. But at crazy high paragon, the Crusader passive survivability is so high that it becomes viable and then it’s “the more I get hit the more I hit back” effect scales quickly.
Ivory Tower is already a bad choice until almost 2k paragon. If Ivory Tower is nerfed per your suggestion, it’ll be useless until ~3k paragon or higher.
Build diversity is fun. I don’t see a reason to take the Ivory Tower build away because 10k paragon players are clearing 150s.
But I’m a seasonal player and want things balanced for seasonal play.
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Not really, Ivory Tower requires better gears to play. Its harder to get usable fate of fell than pig sticker. IT survives a lot better than pig sticker at higher tiers or lower paragon after stutter step nerf which was primarily biggest survival for Active HF build (pig).
s20 my season account did 120 at 1400 paragon with pigsticker. Its survival were too inconsistent at that paragon for 130+ pushing, so i swapped to IT BG. Its not until much later and higher paragon that i cleared more smoothly due to crappy Fate of Fell RnG. Everyone surrounding your rank probably locked behind gear walls too.
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That’s my point? Whether it’s difficulty of getting gear or requirement of higher paragon (which you admittedly had both of), you found pig sticker to be a better option until very late in the season.
If Ivory Tower is nerfed, you wouldn’t use it at all.
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The goal is to leave to the player the option to choose between the two builds for pushing without having a bad after taste because one is better than the other. I recently pushed with pig sticker in NS (I cleared 146), and I just know it’s weaker. I just don’t want to play a build where the goal is to get hit, IMO it’s a bad gimmick. If other players like it, I don’t mind that it’s an option that is on par. As it is, it’s just better, and I know that if I want to clear higher, a choice I have would be to go with the other build.
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The way attack speed snapshotting and stricken internal cooldown works would mean that your 20% attack speed wouldn’t be offering any additional stricken stacks.
Basically any dynamic change to attack speed is ignored by Stricken (unless you hit a potion, change floors, or die)
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I’m pretty sure this was changed long ago but I didn’t test it myself so I can’t tell you for sure.
As far as that idea is concerned, yes it does sound good. I mean, there are tons of ways of doing it. The goal is never to tell the dev what they should do, but instead telling them what they could do, and why things should be changed.
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Just change the 2pc to somewhere in the 125-150% range of additive dmg and finally we can see some other builds become viable because the might offer more during the trashkill face, it would still be about 30% stronger than every other single target build out there. With the %as bonus you’d make it an even better RGK than it is now and there are no other options near it.
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I thought they did say they wanted to balance it around 140’s solo, just to keep some headroom. And it’s not 2x longer it’s about 1.5 times longer, nerf to SoF is 4/7 and the build gets a 10% buff because of the SoJ buff.
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Yeah otherwise it would’ve been a 12,5% upgrade 57% dmg output is not twice as long that in itself is like 1.75 in itself, add stricken stacking and you get around 1.6 times, add about 8-10% dmg and you get to around 1.5 times. And your argument is that rend is too strong allready so everything else should be too strong as well? And do you mean it should have all options being able to do the same GR’s that will be really really hard to balance, also since one of the problems with the pigsticker build is that more of your balancing act is between DPS and Survivability compared to the shield build. This season was quite good for the shield build as well. I really do not care for the off season leader boards btw, this game is supposed to be balanced around 5k paragon not 11k. Add to that that the Rend barb got quite a bit from the current season theme (About 3 GR tiers) you’d end up with both being able to do 140-144s with the nerfs)
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It’s hard to balance against 10K + paragon players on “pay-to-win” servers.
For the 99.9999% of the rest of us, hitting a 150 with Ivory Tower ain’t gonna happen.
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Ok so I mainly agree with you actually, I just hated the fact that last season they brought out this set that should’ve been epic as an RGK, but it ended up being very mediocre and not a possible choice whatsoever, this season they brought out 2 sets/buffs around abilities that both should have possible positions as either RGK’s or trashkiller (Bonespear single target damage or Shatter in groups, and either bolas/grenades as trashkiller or HA as RGK) if given some scaling into either of these directions.
But since there are already two ridiculously strong characters out there with the Crusader and the Witch doctor (which is still head and shoulders above other options)There is little chance that these builds will actually be used. So I would rather see the Crusader to be nerfed a bit too much to give room to the 4 or 5 other builds that have relatively close boss kill times (DH Impale or HA, Frenzy barb, Pestilence or Bone spirits Necro) All of these other classes offer other added bonuses to the play style overall, while the current Crusader does not offer that much interaction during the trash killing phase right up to the moment where he needs to shine and kill the boss.
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I see what you mean, but if they are gonna balance a lot for next season as I thought they where planning to do around solo 140’s it would be more logical to nerf 1 or 2 builds now in stead of buffing 4/5, just from the data gathering perspective.
And indeed the current bonespear would need both the Maltorius’s spike thing to become multaplicative and another 400-600% increase in damage, and then it will still be a question if it can get enough essence back in time for the next CoE cycle, but a full CoE cycle should be possible with the 10% RcR and 400 essence, regaining this would take about 4 swipes with the scythe (since you get 36 essence every swipe with the 3 sims, which I believe is the reason they added the whole grim scythe Sim thing) you would actually end up really close to Impale, UE HA DH and the frenzy barb in DPS. So they can either buff every other build by like 50-100% or nerf the Cruz by another 30%
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So the main thing here is a difference in view of where the game should be going I think. Since the game won’t introduce higher tiers (159’s being the theoretical limit due to 32bit integers) I would like there to be more of a goal in a season, not the ability to run 4 man 150’s a week into the server, but hey if I’m the only one who misses a Coop goal in this game then I will gladly agree that the other option is definitely viable, all that being said I would expect the solo builds to be nerfed a bit just to leave some leeway for season themes to add to the gameplay, so if we suddenly get a 400% dmg boost in some strange themed way there is a possibility to still gain more by playing the season theme. I think it was understood with what I wrote that I expect the Rend barb to be tweaked down a bit as well, but for me the urgency of tuning would still be for the Group play viable builds first and I do not care that one class can solopush higher than another, since in the push for as high a rift as possible you are competing against other people playing that same class.
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Cap paragon at 3k … problem solved.
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That might work, or give more diminishing returns to survivability beyond 3k paragon, the main reason there is a gap between season and non-season for the barb atm is the need to run with band of might for survivability, same for crusader needing no esoteric alteration for the Shield build compared to the season one.
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As a general rule of thumb. the ivory tower issue is a general game mechanic bug to block/damage reflect.
(this is also a remark on overpower with reflect rune for barbs)
The maiin problem of reflect and block is Vanilla game allowed to block all types of damage including monster elemental effects such as poisin pools Ghom poison clouds (anybody remember Barbarian bug where overpower with reflect reflected poison clouds back at ghom and also procced lifesteal and Life on Hit?)
hence why some elementall effects were patched during game’s ongoing updates. unfortuneatly most of elemental effects still proc on bllock effects and most still does reflect damage back at the caster (anybody realize why thetrys insta melted on necro LoD thorns skeletons just after she spawned that ground pool of death on the mages? well it’s because the death pools reflected thorns back on thetrys on each ticks).
- It’s not ivory tower that needs fixing.
- It’s mobs elementall effects tick rate that needs attention. no unarmed melee attack could cause such a rate of on block effects/damage reflects, not even in groups. It’s the projectile rate and mob elemental effects with insane tick rate. Blighter was sort of patched, Voracity’s/Ghom’s poison pools too. Anarch lightning-rain was an issue detected while back too, and it also got patched, but not much everything else. archers, succubi bold star, any monster with fast ticking elemental spell eigther channeled or casted such as this diablo/tathameth’s breath, butcher’s/Man Carver’s fire pool, therhtys death pools, elite affixes and some monsters like giant spiders with poison pool, etc.
- In description it says block is capped at 75% (but only from items) that is not counting:
-passives
-skill buffs
-legendary item powers (blood brother)
with those mentioned above one can easily reach 100% block chance.
And it does work I’ve build a crus with Helm of Rule (11% block chance) dual Justice Lantern with legendary power and legacy without (but still 16% block on both) and shield with 20%+11% roll=31% block chance) plus passive 30%, block chace caps out at 100% and it literrally procs ivory tower every tick. (somtimes the block rate is so fast I’m not so sure it has an ICD actually 
) unfortuneatly i have a potato-PC so no chaces of me recording any of this.
Sorry for the wall of text. Let the devs at least get some bearing of this:
this is only proof to my words (just scroll down to diablo 3 section) it clearly states all damage get’s blocked and without any facing modifiers (at least in D1 one had to face the attack to block it with shield, and not get hit from any direction to proc a Saiga-12.
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Block
2 Likes
learn how to play the game… problem solved.
Would you care to elaborate on how I might “learn to play the game”?
Should I learn how to download T-HUD?
Should I learn how to set up a bot program?
Should I learn how to use a gaming mouse and keyboard to set up one key macros?
Other than DH… I’ve spent 0 time on that class 
Which aspect of the game should I learn to play that I don’t already know?
oh I’m sorry, looks like you are just d**b. never mind
how many thousand hours dit it take you to get to 2.4k paragon?