Crusader set suggestion for patch 2.7

Crusader
21

Ahh, okay, I see.
A better word would have been “static” in this case,
When you said “flat damage” I thought you meant something like +2500 damage to Sweep Attack (not a percentual amount)

Why not both?
The damage of a blocked attack can be reduced by e.g. 50% and an additional xx.xxx damage.

I think that this is something that armor should reduce damage taken by xx% and reduce physical daamge taken by x.xxx, not block, but if they would change that, then the while itemization had to be redesigned and not just shields.

Yeah, that is good and I also would like to see more flat damage reduction in the game, assuming it can be balanced.

22

I’m disappointed you didn’t address Fist of the Heavens. AoV needs to include Fist in the 2 Piece plus it needs another moderate% modifier on something.

400% is probably a bit much but I agree, buff needed considering it is a shield and weapon slot, two of the most important for most crusader builds.

Akkhan’s needs the boost, 5000% is probably good but other items need to be balanced as you started to point out. Condemn has a lot more modifiers so others need to be brought in line.

In addition to Swift Mount getting a buff to damage, I think Steed needs an accessory piece that does this :
Steed Charge becomes a channeled ability, no longer has a cooldown and deals an additional 1250-1500% damage.

2 Likes
23

The main issue with steed charge is not its cooldown / duration / uptime, it’s that you can’t cast any other skill without canceling the charge. Make an item that removes this limitation and condemn / bombard / FotV instantly become contenders for fastest builds in the game…

1 Like
24

Considering a buff to Akkhans, Norvald’s and the Swift Mount buff he proposed, I don’t think that would be an issue considering how much damage Steed Charge could deal alone and channeling with no cooldown would always mean you have a fairly smooth transition back to mount. To make it more like DH Gears build, could probably add Steed Charge to Invoker 2 piece and 6 piece.

25

I think for Condem, it must be around 7000% so that I can be a little bit close to AoV, my two cents.

1 Like
26

I would like foth set about fist . What about if they reverse the 2 pieces . If you hit with heaven fury the damage of fist of the heavens will be 1000% more times x stacks. This way the set will be around FotH again

27

I think it should work both way. fist of heaven increase heaven fury damage and heaven fury increase fist of heaven damage.

28

This is a great change, and could open a path for simplicity’s strength - though using this gem over trapped would be predicated upon other factors, as currently thorns has few enough stats to desire for itemization, one of which is LPH.

What were your thoughts here?

Agree here. Partially it’s because I own a near perfect primal denial shield And I don’t want to get another XD. Also the shield stacks the dmg so it’s actually 625% already so I don’t see this multiplier going up greatly. [quote=“XelNagaIvan-1363, post:9, topic:20200”]
However, I would rather not adding a bracer to sweep attack, as the more core gear a build get, the less customization one get.
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Alternatively, the current build mandates strong arms for dmg or parthians for DR, or maybe just SA works. Not a lot of variety anyway in the bracer world. Shield bash gets Drakon’s lesson, and while shield bash rolands has issues to be dealt with, it would seem to give parity to the build design to give some sweep bracer. [quote=“XelNagaIvan-1363, post:12, topic:20200”]
I agree that AKKHAN’S ADDENDUM can also use some love. I am thinking about changing Firestarter rune to provide 35% fire damage and, make the item provide all runes.
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I’ve often tried to think about what sort of build this would work in. If only this item affix were an armor it would be a game changer, especially if some of the changes you suggested were implemented. [quote=“Kikaha-2290, post:13, topic:20200”]
Overall, not a fan of those reworks.
[/quote]

Kika I’m always a fan of your posts, especially your rolands guide. What different thoughts do you have?

29

I mean I wrote it in the same post.

30

Well, you know, I see things like

and

and instantly I think “ok that’s broken on AoV crusader”, which is already broken to begin with, and sure you can’t play both but either of those changes are incredibly OP, with 50% rcr basically being equal to 50% DR with Crimson 3p set, and it can be used very easily by condemn crusader among other things. But at the same time, I don’t want to be that guy, shooting down suggestions because then I am the bad guy always being negative. Or “well, you could adjust the numbers so that it’s not OP” - I’ll get back to that.

IMO, the first thing that should be done is making the roland 6p toughness buff additive with itself instead of multiplicative. Instead of keeping on increasing an already not obvious toughness value and people thinking “Oh, I get 5 times 20% so I am invincible ???”…

Going back to adjusting the numbers, increasing damage/toughness is not something difficult to do, as I said on another thread months ago, it’s easy to “fix” a set by just increasing the numbers. Blizzard doesn’t need a little hand to do that when they already have so much data to know exactly what to do. And if they don’t have enough data, it’s easy to do double what they think is enough, plop it on a PTR and see people like me go “oooh shinyyy” and break the LB with it. What bothers me is then people going “naaah it’s not OP, you don’t need to remove 200% damage from that rend belt”, and lo and behold, barb is the best botting build in the game, and aside from a few outsiders that are also nerf worthy (cough AoV, GoD, spirit barrage cough), the best solo push build in the game. It’s not like WW/Rend would have “sucked” if they kept the belt at 0% rend damage, it would still be the best barb build, but it wouldn’t be the best barb build by such a wide margin. And now, they don’t want to nerf it because barbs will whine, like barbs tend to do, while saying “muh balance is fine, we were the worst for so long, we deserve to be the best” and other “well you should ask for BUFFS instead of NERFS”.

Anyway, what would be interesting, and Blizzard has been doing and has been doing well recently is giving this items that change the gameplay slightly. Look at WW/Rend barb. Used to be a pure WW build. Then, with a few tweaks and most importantly Ambo’s pride, they were able to change completely how the build worked, without changing the core gameplay too much. I thought it was great.

At the moment, all the crusader builds play roughly the same. Choose a spender, it’s your damage dealer. Choose a generator, usually provoke (in the case of AoV, it’s FotH). Take crimson, laws of valor, trapped, stricken, and a CC skill (usually condemn, in the case of AoV it’s shield glare or immobilize). Make big packs, AoE them down. Iron skin = mandatory, Akkarat’s champion = mandatory. Laws of valor = mandatory. Most of the time, you rely on high attack speed + zodiac to reset your skills in time (unless you can stack enough cdr to… not need… zodiac, cf condemn).

I was hoping for some items that break that “meta”. That’s why, at least a year ago I proposed something along the lines of “if akkarat’s champion is not active, gain 300% damage and 60% damage reduction” - you can add some restriction on that, like “you can’t passively generate wrath” or whatever. That wouldn’t work on a build like condemn, that is so resource heavy, but would work great on Roland because it relies on Iron skin already. Then that frees up a skill slot, to easily have, idk, in case of roland (sweep) I was thinking incorporating either a laws or consecration for another damage buff. That way, we can try to move apart some builds that are otherwise fairly close together gameplay wise.

I didn’t mention it, but I think the best kind of feedback for the devs is

  • mechanical feedback, for example “ok, playing this build I had this issue, would be nice if it could be fixed somehow”, example : “playing shield bash, the skill feels clunky and slower than necessary, I also have huge resource issues despite playing every resource oriented buff I could, could you look at that”
  • viability feedback : “I feel like, playing this build, the damage / toughness is lacking, I am paragon X and with gear Y, can / cannot clear gr X/Y even though that’s what I would expect my other similarly geared character to do”.
    If something very egregious pops up (AoV crusader LOUL), they can always nerf it later.
3 Likes
31

I think the buff suggestions to Blessed Shieod are excellent. I would love for that build to be viable both in Akkhans and LoD. Great ideas all.

32

Maybe I misread, ddI you address speed or just power?

33

Ironically, the WW skill itself has never done a thing in the Wastes set for dmg except twisters and now rend. Why even bother having skull grasp in the game?

So this seems to reward you for not having Akarats up more than having it up… right? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the skill artificially for the build? I don’t get it really.

This I like, I made a post re: consecration implementation, didn’t think of this. Seems a good defense and heal skill to buff and use.

34

Well first of empowering akkhan by 4 times (1500% - 6000%), and increasing the damage of blessed shield by a bit (to match condemn)

Both these builds are quite fast on their own, especially condemn. Condemn works as an excellent pull in character with massive aoe damage, blessed shield hits the whole screen with the bouncing mechanic. They can fit steed charge to zip between enemy groups.

Secondly i wanted to maybe give a small damage multiplier on swiftmount to help with the spikes barding rune and invoker. With this I wanted to change invoker to have a static thorns component on the 6 piece bonus and a lower single target value (it won’t reduce the current single target power since the static power will make up for it.) You’ll essentially run through enemies, causing the thorns to explode in groups you hit, you’ll be able to use the norvalds favor to both extend the duration on the steed charge and the damage.

With improving invoker the aoe on the push build would improve on top of that.

2 Likes
35

I’d like to see them add something more of an AoE element to Invoker such that you could run hilarious steed charge/bombardment speeds with charge set with mortal drama cubed (perhaps a damage buff for this too?) through say GR 90-95; and then would also give you some potential to clear trash in higher pushes for the regular speedy-stabby build. It would help invoker a lot to push if we could clear trash, especially since new build uses CC and no nemesis bracers. I like the idea of Akkhan and Invoker gaining a good bit in push capability and becoming speed builds. Rolands is too slow for speed anything so I’d like to see this become a better push build nearer to AoV

36

Sweep attack is rather slow, but shield bash is quite fast because it has a screen clearing factor. There has been ideas floating around the forums for some time to have the Flail of the Ascended make it so that when you reach 5 stacks, you cast a shield glare automatically, such a change would make it quite fast.

At higher levels it wont clear the screen in one burst, but at lower levels it would kill most things.

But shield bash is still what it is.

2 Likes
37

I personally love sweeper but I’d play bash if it were better. The issue I have is that the best tune for SB and for SG are different dog types. So a SoJ could solve this or be good implementation with CoE, but you could take FnR and use the resource gen SG rune.

The item you proposed, I’d like to see it use all runes or several to get the most out of SG. The dog, blind duration, and resource gen at least, but I don’t see any problem really getting all rune effects.

Also, one thing which came to mind was that sweep does a roughly 180 degree arc, whereas shield cross can do 360 - though I’m aware some use pound rune instead. Ideally either give sweep a much better gathering and soft CC effect to group up or else somehow give an wider angle for dmg. I’d like to see Drakon’s give the shield cross rune, and I’d love to see a sweep bracer added - or modify Drakon’s to affect sweep dmg

38

Problem with shield bash is that you cant use shield cross or any other rune together with the flail of the ascended, beside pound.

The reason for it is because the stack are counted with the amount of hits the attack does, combined to a pool. This means that attacking with pound only hits one enemy with very high damage, stacking up with every single hit. While hitting with shield cross you’ll do much smaller hits and plenty of them, meaning that a pack of 3 mobs can fill up the stacks in one hit, some from the main hit, some from the smaller extra ones. (think of it like hitting 5x1320% pound, or 5x700%/155% shield cross)

Changing how the flail work is an option ofcourse, but currently without doing that, shield cross will never be useful if you want to combined it with the shield glare mechanic.

1 Like
39

Ah, I didn’t realize this. I’ve spent about 15 minutes playing shield bash rolands so I am fuzzy on about everything lol.

40

Resurrecting shield bash builds will be great.

2 Likes