Well, the boost to bombardment was along the lines of what invoker needed, it covered the aoe it so desperately needed, but because the interaction exist, invoker was dragged down.
Invoker could be fixed though, or akkhan, but some restrictions needs to be put in place. I’ve suggested that a static buff be put on the 6-piece of invoker rather than having such a large portion of the damage on the 2-piece. Switching the 2-piece with the 6-piece (since akkhan could still benefit greatly from the 4-piece of invoker).
Akkhan itself only needs a 2x-2,5 buff to be competitive with LoD. But before the interaction is fixed in some way, that will never happen.
You’re right. I completely forgot that Akkhan can combine with 4p of Invoker. I mean, for the average player, the loss of Akkhan uptime would be a problem, but for top-end players, they can narrow that down to about a second with perfectly rolled items. And since it’s a bomber build, a couple seconds isn’t such a huge deal regardless.
That being said, it’s far easier to achieve high-end results using C3 and Invoker 2p than it would be if invoker 2p and 4p swapped places. In fact, swapping those two bonuses results a ~30% loss of damage compared to the current A6I2 bomber meta build. Maybe even more.
Condemn and Phalanx need to be addressed with Legendary itemization changes, not sets. There should be more generalization for sets that offer interesting interactions or advantages with a few skills, not more pigeon holing with damage. Like what they did with GoD is great, they just need to balance out the primary skills so that they’re all viable and within a couple GRs of power, through Legendaries.
AoV completely missed the boat and they ignored suggestions from many of us, they could have included Fists and Smite to a higher degree for variety with the set. Instead, it’s balanced around Fire of Heaven alone, which is my least favorite rune for Heaven’s Fury so the other runes and Fists won’t live up to their potential because Devs didn’t address it.
Bottom line is, there are plenty of ways to fix Invoker without ruining Akkhan’s.
And how do you propose that without making the LoD vastly superior?
Ofcourse, but whether you fix it on akkhan or invoker, the problem remains that as long as they can effectivly buff eachother, they will hinder progress for both.
If they keep the 4th slot permanent then Norvald’s handles that easily.
I already suggested a couple easy ways to keep them separate. AOE for 6 piece on Invoker either through attacks or buff to Bombs. Akkhan’s can easily bypass Bomb build by making changes that exclude the benefit of A6/I2 in a plethora of ways.
I don’t think you should wage your bets on a seasonal theme going ns. Better to focus on changes that could be balanced for the future.
Sure but that still leaves the main damage multiplier for bombardment on the 2-piece, which is the only reason we’re having this discussion. The other suggestion was to keep the 2000% and add an additional buff to primary and secondary attacks, which still leaves out condemn and phalanx, them being better on LoD.
You could instead shift akkhan to buff condemn, phalanx, blessed shield and primary attacks by 4-5k%, keeping akkhan at a powerful level, leaving invoker to be fixed separately from akkhan, adding primary attacks to have a set for that.
I can’t help it if the Devs continue to make more missteps in an attempt to prolong what should have already been a more balanced game years ago. Your suggestions are just continuing the problem. More and more pigeon holing is bad for players, even if it solves a problem.
Problems can be solved in numerous ways and the better route should be providing the most flexibility, not the least.
While that sounds like a good idea, it’s also what lead to this issue in the first place, flexibility is great if it can be contained in a small manner. Look at wizard or necro, given too much flexabilty with the sets and skills hindered the class, too many sets and skills overlap, meaning that sets that were actually meant for a specific playstyle (vyr’s) became overshadowed by other sets because they were too generic (firebirds), at one point, one of those sets would suffer.
You argue for flexibility, but for what?, if you have a set that covers the skills you need it to cover (excluding bombardment in this case), and at the same time you can fix another set without worrying about what it would do to the balancing of another set, wouldn’t that be an ideal situation?
Honestly, I think the underlying philosophy of sets buffs is the real problem. Instead of buffs to specific skills, what they need to do is semi-standardize the sets and turn the final major buff to a generic one:
2p is the DR buff, maybe or maybe not connected to use of certain skills.
4p is your mechanics and and skill-specific functionality modifications (see: Valor 2p, Invoker 6p/2p)
6p is your major buff, and it’s a generic buff, like Akkhan, but again, tied to the use of certain skills.
Invoker could be all primary skills. Seekers is Blessed Hammer and Falling Sword. Valor is Fist and Heavens Fury. Roland is Sweep Attack or Shield Bash (and Punish or Slash). Those skills would be required to make the set work, but everything else is up to the player.
So instead of eliminating the value of any other skills from all of those builds, you tell players which skills the sets require to be used, but the remaining skills are up to the the player. Things like Condemn or Phalanx can be part of any build if you’ve got skill slots open for them. Legendary gems are wide open. Wreath or Pain Enhancer, Toxin or Mirinae – any class set can make equal use of them. Proc effects stop being completely pointless.
No, it wouldn’t, as previously stated. Imbalance is an issue because of itemization, set imbalances are a byproduct of itemization problems. When you have one skill that get’s 8100% damage + extra hits with 2 items vs a skill that has 4700% damage from 3 items, or 400% from 1 item, you have balancing issues.
If you want thorns to be good because of invoker, then make the set be good with it, you fix the 6 piece so that it does what it needs to. Nerfing a viable build that actually takes strategy to pull off is a poor excuse for balance if you’re annoyed that the build you want isn’t performing well. Akkhan’s has been underperforming for a while now.
But however you may look at it, if you want to bring up akkhan to the level it should be at, something else needs to be nerfed, I’m not saying this because I want to, but it’s the sad truth of it.
Now it is possible to add a seperate multiplier on akkhan to compensate for not buffing the main damage multiplier (see your suggestion about doing more damage with secondary and primary attacks), but then the set loses some of its generic value, which sort of defeats the point of having one.
If they want to increase the power of akkhan then, where do they take that power from?, cause they obviously dont want to see it get any stronger, seeing as they already nerfed invoker hard for it. Will they nerf norvalds or invoker?, one of those sets will feel the nerf hammer.
All of this is to balance around one particular setup, which is very reminiscent of how the star pact build was handled, ending in several wizard items/playstyles being gutted nerfed and ultimatly killed.
I might sound bitter, but it’s because I’ve seen this happen before, and I dont want to wait forever to play some of these builds again when they finally get around to it. Not to say that I cant play other builds meanwhile, but having these builds back definitly improves the experiance.
The philosophy about sets in general is flawed, but they choose this path, so we gotta work with what we have.
Actually, now that I think about it, there would be a relatively simple fix – Trove. Trove is the whole problem. It was created for Invoker, but it has obviously spilled far outside those bounds. Without Trove, bomber builds don’t really work.
If attacking with punish/slash – as part of invoker 6p bonus – reduced the cooldown on bombardment, Trove legendary power could be retooled into something more Invoker-centric. The bomber build would still exist. It just wouldn’t exist external to Invoker anymore. And the spillover effect to Akkhan would be gone, since it can’t use Bombardment enough to make the Bomber build work (and neither could LoN/LoD).
But would you then be able to buff akkhan still?, if akkhan should be buffed by a little more than twice, wouldn’t that make up for the extra bomb hits? In fact wouldn’t it just make the build easier since you wouldn’t have to worry about aligning the bombs?
I see what you’re getting at, but I’m also trying to buff another set. From the very beginning though, they should have done something like that, also having it seperated from other sets so we had a proper bomb set from the very start.
Whatever, we’ll agree to disagree. Wizard is the biggest disappointment of D3 in general, so I’m not even going to bother talking about it. Nerfing Akkhan’s is not the answer.
It should be possible to buff Akkhan then, yes. Trove is a 4s cooldown, which is why it’s so effective. Without Trove, Bombardment’s average cooldown is ~30s or so (with Champion at 100% uptime). Far too long to make it an effective attack. By my estimates, you could push Akkhan’s 6p bonus to 10,000% and it would still be weaker than the current A6I2 bomber build by about 25-30%. Which, increasing the 6p from 2,000% to 10,000% is a sizable buff to many other Akkhan options.
–addendum–
Now that I think about it, I’m wondering what the point of this would even be. Valor, Seekers, and Roland all provide better support for their respective skills. The only skills with legit legendary support is Blessed Shield and Condemn. Saders have basically zip for any other legendary item support beyond that. So what would be the point of buffing Akkhan when LoD is still better? 150-LoD is over 14,000% with all ancients. So what does Akkhan offer that’s better? 50% RCR, hogtied to a boatload of CDR? Akkhan, as it exists, is sort of a lost cause. It just doesn’t have any interesting mechanical effects to differentiate it from LoN/LoD.
First off, a lot more stable toughness, no other set can benefit as much as akkhan does when you combine it with cc3, due to the shear amount of rcr you receive. It also helps with high cost skills like condemn and phalanx.
Since you’ll be freeing up gem slots, you can fit something like pain enhancer for blessed shield. This works well with the stacking mechanic.
Also both blessed shield and condemn has to use the fire rune for maximum effect, which limits their choices, especially for condemn which has 3 other useful runes.
So yes they are quite similar, but akkhan just does it better besides the damage.
Also regarding phalanx, yes it doesn’t have damage to match others, but it does have 4 items buffing the skill in different ways, and it can be divided into two distinct builds, bowmen and stampede, both are fun, but lacking multipliers.
That’s why I didn’t include them. Without legitimate multipliers, Phalanx is just a silly token skill. Like all Sader primary skills. Smite has two. Slash has one. Punish has one. And they’re all worthless. The Eternal Union is truly pointless – especially competing for a jewelry slot. Warhelm is far better. And, of course, for Akkhan, the cooldown is immaterial: you need enough cooldown that bowmen are actively indefinitely already (or near enough).
Also of note: C3 requires RRoG, so it’s not a ‘something for nothing’ deal. Really, what you get out of the set is the ~60% DR. You were going to get that 50-60% damage boost from a ring no matter what. So, really, the C3 is effectively a belt that offers Akkhan a 60% DR. We go back to the original question: what does Akkhan offer that LoD does not? And you have a fair point: C3s sizable additional DR. But even if Akkhan 6p was 10,000% additional damage, is that really enough to beat out LoD? Comes down to legendary gems, I suppose. Stricken is a given. Then what? Powerful? Pain Enhancer? The options and effectiveness of damage-enhancing gems drops off rapidly.
So condemn is a actually fairly strong already, due to the synergy that it can gain from both aughilds and cc3, that rrog actually outweighs coe by a landslide. Adding focus and restraint into this, you more than double the power. That’s why 4-5k% is enough. Having the set also allows something like bane of the powerful, or even another defencive gem, so all in all, the small bonuses stack up.
Blessed shield has a different situtation, since you can fit a pain enhancer into the rotation, this scale up very fast in density, pushing the damage buff even higher. Or you might go for a zei’s or bane of the powerful to gain a more direct buff. On LoD, you can run blessed shield, but you’re having upkeep issues with AC, since it’s not counted as a spender (due to the passive on the flail), you cant use zodiac to make up the difference. Allthough I would say that blessed shield is still slightly behind condemn, but that could be matched on legendaries.