Better Mirinae - Legendary items boost - Necro Inarius LoD

General Discussion
1

Mirinae, Teardrop of the Starweaver

It’s time for Mirinae to come back through itemization.

Summary

Frenzy Necro + Freezing Mirinae

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Mirinae

  • 15% chance on hit to smite a nearby enemy for 3000% damage as Holy, healing the character for 3% of maximum Life.
  • Upgrade: +60% damage as Holy per Rank.
  • Smites a nearby enemy every 3 seconds for [50-100%] of the average damage per second you inflicted in the last 3 seconds (Requires Rank 25)

Diamond Dust

Legendary Sword
Each enemy hit with your Cold Primary Skills increases your attack speed by [2 - 5] % for 5 seconds. Max 20 stacks.
Necromancer Only
Accessible at level 11 with 1000 Blood shards spent on average.

The following items require the Mirinae Legendary Gem to be equipped:

Falling Star

Legendary Scythe
Your Primary Skills have [25 - 50] % additional chance to trigger Mirinae smites on hit.
Necromancer Only

Carnivorous Star

Legendary Chest Armor
Each corpse you consume have [10 - 30] % chance to trigger a Mirinae smite.
Necromancer Only

Cursed Star

Legendary Amulet
Mirinae smites deal [100 - 200] % increased damage against cursed ennemies.
Necromancer Only

Marrow Star

Legendary Ring
For each Skeleton devoured, Mirinae smites deal [25 - 50] % increased damage for 10 seconds.
Necromancer Only

Dying Star

Legendary Gloves
For each enemy killed, Mirinae smites deal [100 - 200] % increased damage for 3 seconds.

Frozen Star

Legendary Bracers
Mirinae smites turn into cold damage and freeze enemies for 1 second.

Attractive Star

Legendary Phylactery
Mirinae smites deal [50 - 100] % increased damage and pull enemies within 20 yards.

Repulsive Star

Legendary Boots
Each enemy hit by a Mirinae smite increases your armor by [5 - 10] % for 15 seconds, up to 300%.

Radiant Star

Legendary Belt
Each enemy hit by a Mirinae smite increases your damage by [5 - 10] % for 15 seconds, up to 300%.

–

Synergies

  • Frost Scythe + Blood and Bone + Haunted Visions + Aura of Frailty
  • PowerShift + Mantle of Channeling + Early Grave
  • Pull: Volatile Death + Area Damage + Cursed Ground
  • Devour / Ruthless
  • Command Skeletons
  • Krysbin’s Sentence + Convention of Elements

Conclusion

  • Mirinae is back
  • 10 new items (5 Necro + 5 for all classes)
  • Inarius + LoD builds
  • Great Defense
  • Great Regen (Mirinae + Attack speed)
  • Zero Corpse Lance (Frozen ennemies = Zero corpse)
  • Zero Land of the Dead, Zero Cooldown
2

Why not just skip the Necro only and make it usable for everyone?

Seems odd to me to have a legendary gem that’s only really useful for one class.

1 Like
3

Necro oriented because I was inspired by looking at an old video of Mirinae + Inarius.

  • For Falling Star, it is transparent to replace the Scythe by any weapon.
  • Replacing both Cursed Star and Marrow star by different mechanics is possible. Feel free to propose.
  • Opening Diamond Dust to all classes is complex because Demon Hunter GoD -which is already top notch- uses primary skills so you cannot allow it to be buffed any more.
4

Equipment that enhances other equipment is out of spirit for Diablo.

The way this would work is that it would need to be a set. And, one that is similar to Blackthorne so it can be used by everyone.

Otherwise, you might as well just have a new legendary ring/amulet or something that ups legendary gems socketed into it.

5

Out of the box thinking is a required skill to fight boredom.
New mechanics cannot emerge only by cloning existing ones.

Correlated items buffing a skill do not need to be part of a Set.
Example : All the LoD items buffing Mages.
A Set is only needed when you want to add an extra rewarding power on a collection completion.
In the present case it can be, but doesn’t have to.

I had that idea previouly (beware, 4K image)

https://ibb.co/m0V9Hn6
Look on the right of the image, 4th item from the top, “Cardiac Effusion”

Also, the textual version:

6

Mirinae would be interesting if the “smite” enemies effect was actually the crusader smite ability. Imagine if the gem went off of what smite rune you had and any items that would improve the damage of smite.

7

I’m not sure about the Crusader smite which is very different and has nothing in common with the Mirinae Smite.

While having gems altering skills is a valid mechanic (see Path of Exile / Final Fantasy VII), you have to be careful that items intrinsic value is not shadowed as a result.

Since the role of items is to boost skills, and Mirinae smite is a sort of skill (not directly castable, you only have a chance to trigger it), it felt natural to design items that would boost that Gem-Skill.

8
Second thought

What I’m calling DPS might be more precisely called Real Damage Output (RDO). I’m not entirely sure the optimum way to calculate this other than to measure what the character is actually doing after all in-game modifiers are applied. That’s what I think the legendary gems that boost damage need to scale from. RDO, whatever formula is used, is the concept I’m referring to.

To OP:

I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, and I like the creativity, but IMHO this doesn’t really solve the problem. The problem is that the Star of Mirinae gem is effectively useless after ~T6 or so because of its poor scaling. It hits once every 6 hits approximately (15% per hit) and heals 3%. At 25, it hits every 3 seconds in addition.

Why does it suck? Because the 6-7K% modifier you get by the time you’re nearing rank 75 on the gem doesn’t do much to the T16+ creatures you have to kill. The damage has been outscaled by monster hitpoint scaling by orders of magnitude. At this point, it is effectively just a weak, unreliable heal with nice graphics that often applies when you’re at full health and don’t need it. Ultimately, you have to fix at least 1 of those 2 core problems: the damage scaling and/or the unreliable, weak healing.

Simply building an entire set around a legendary gem to try and get someone to use it is a poor solution. Shall we do the same for the poison gem no one uses? And the pain enhancer no one uses? More sets is the wrong solution.

What a game designer should do is redesign the gems to scale differently. Ultimately, as the game has developed, we’ve seen a push to more and bigger multipliers. We stack multipliers on sets and legendary items to get what are effectively pre-build “builds” that Blizzard was kind enough to design for us. Using anything without those multipliers results in orders of magnitude less power. Originally, the game was balanced around the idea of using the weapon damage as a normalizer. This is a good idea. And had they actually kept the stacking multipliers under control (ie don’t allow them to stack), it’d still be a good idea.

But now, what we actually need is some kind of snapshot of your damage output after all the scaling has been done by your specific set. Not the character sheet damage, but your actual applied damage using your main combat skill(s). Effectively, we need a DPS meter, and the legendary gems need to scale as a percentage of that. Maybe damage per second, maybe damage per hit. Probably DPS over DPH to better normalize for single-target attacks vs massive AE attacks. Regardless of how they do the calculation (yes, this could potentially be very complex, and we like simple), what we want to assess is the real damage output your character is actually doing, then balance the gems around that.

Example:

  • Star of Mirinae could drop an attack worth 200% of your DPS and heal for 10%.
  • Gem of Efficacious Toxin could poison targets for 200% of your DPS over 10 seconds + 10% increased damage to affected targets
  • Wreath of Lightning could attack all targets within range for 15% of your DPS + movement speed

Naturally the scaling for higher ranks on all these would be smaller because the majority of the scaling is baked into normalizing to your real damage output (DPS). Something like Wreath would probably only scale by 0.1-0.2% per rank. Mirinae which applies less frequently might scale by 5%. That might actually feel weak, so the ranges could be adjusted to start at less than 100% of your regular DPS.

Thoughts?

9

Yeah. I’ve been wondering what the Star of Mirinae is for. It looks as if the devs designed it and then forgets about it completely. Or, maybe devs knew that we would need an expendable gem for augmenting. Can’t decide which is which.

10

They should rework Mirinae to something that work with many builds. Current Mirinae gem is so outdated and it is not funny.

Also, Inarius set needs more buff.

11

They are due for a legendary gem overhaul. 90% of them are either useless past t6 or are too niche to work.

1 Like
12

Agreed! Every build seems to use the same gems. Some gems I only level up to augment my gear since they would never be used on a socket. It’s time for revamping the gems.

13

In 2017 devs nerfed the proc rate of Mirinae when Bone Armor was hitting Monsters. Previously to this nerf, Mirinae was triggering frequently, like 3 to 4 monsters smited simultaneously, and it was efficient. Inarius was shining back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5ENvnoOV3g

The July 2017 nerf completely destroyed the set and it never came back.

It means Mirinae is currently a good gem, when :

  • You have a general damage increase : LoD, Inarius
  • You have a decent proc rate, over 50% : Currently the base is only 15% chance on hit

This is why the proposal is directly buffing the proc rate, but also indirectly by augmenting your attack speed. I also added Crowd Control effects (pull, freeze, etc.) for the fun.

Then it is up to you to equip LoD (any class) or Inarius (Necromancer) to boost your global damage.

With this system you would systematically choose the skill rune with the bigger multiplier, occulting all others because they would be underperforming. So every class would have only 1 valid skill-rune. It would destroy build diversity.

You can’t base a multiplier on this, because it would means there is an order in the multiplications. The very principle of multiplication is its terms can be multiplied in whatever order. This is why all damage increase refer to the weapon damage, which is the base unit, just like euro or dollar.

BUT

You can create

  • additive damage, which is a parallel line of computation with its own multipliers (Mirinae, Gem of Efficacious Toxin)
  • Specific damage, increasing a dedicaded form of damage (skill, effect, additive…)

The proposal uses a mix of regular and specific damage.

  • Regular damage increase, for basic Mirinae (from weapon damage, attack speed, LoD, Inarius, …etc)
  • Specific damage increase, because I create items that are buffing only Mirinae smites.

Inarius surely needs 10 permanent stacks of Bone Armor, as long as the Set and Bone Armor are equipped.

14

No. You’d build exactly the way you normally do with any build you want. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in explaining what I meant. The calculation wouldn’t be some internal thing. It would be based on the actual damage numbers you’re doing to monsters. Drop a 25T hit spaced in with a ton of other little hits? The game would account for all of that damage in some way and snap shot it. DPS was just a simple way of expressing the idea. Let’s say you snapshot based off the last 60 seconds of in-combat damage you’ve done, just as an example. The game would add up all the damage you did, divide that by 60 seconds, and give you a number that reflects how much average damage you’re doing per second. That number would be used to do the legendary gem calculation.

The entire point of this is that it makes no difference what build you’re using, what skills you’re using, or whether you’ve got buffs up or not. All that would matter is your actual in-game damage.

Sure I can. There are plenty of modifiers already in game that stack multiplicatively. Regardless, in my answer above, I explained why that doesn’t matter anyway. The devs can literally do whatever they want. You can gear however you want. Stacks up, stacks down. However, you play your character, well or poorly. All that would matter in this particular calculation is your actual damage.

And the reason we do this is so that legendary gems that add damage can be adjusted to actually scale with the exponential growth in damage with sets and stacking multipliers on various legendary items. When that star of Mirinae hits once every 3 seconds, it’ll do damage enough to make the red bar move, so it’s not completely outclassed by the handful of legendary gems everyone actually uses. It needs to hit hard enough to be a viable choice.

15

Ok I get the idea.
Something like (see bold sentence in rank 25 power) :

Mirinae

  • 15% chance on hit to smite a nearby enemy for 3000% damage as Holy, healing the character for 3% of maximum Life.
  • Upgrade: +60% damage as Holy per Rank.
  • Smites a nearby enemy every 3 seconds for [50-100%] of the average damage per second you inflicted in the last 3 seconds (Requires Rank 25)

Few notes

  • The percentage of the damage you inflicted in the last 3 seconds cannot be more than 100%, because over 100% there would be a serious risk of a fast forever increasing damage (which would break the game)
  • I kept the first power base on weapon damage for the same reason, because otherwise it woukd depend on attack speed so you would apply a forever increasing damage, at each hit, which would be a little bit too fast in my opinion.
16

Indeed. I also think that Inarius needs some kind of dps skill buff to make it viable.

17

Look at this proposal:

18

I think the stacks mechanics in general are just frustrating. The game gets balanced around maintaining full stacks with 100% uptime in combat, but reality is that this is highly dependent on monster density. If you run into low density, you drop your stacks and become weak as heck. Depending on the mechanic, it can turn you from reasonably tanky to a one-shot kill, or just rip all your damage away until you get kills which can cripple you.

If you change dungeon levels, hit low monster density, get a poor map (snake or spaghetti-style), or just end up running behind a group that’s clearing stuff before you can hit it in a speed run, you’re in this situation for far longer than what is assumed by the developers.

They’ve built in these mechanics that are needlessly complicated and don’t actually reflect skill so much as they represent monster density and a very sensitive DPS check that penalizes you hard for not being in combat. I really wish they’d remove such mechanics. They’re just bloated calculations that could be simplified to more consistent numbers and doing so would actually make the in-game experience better.