Witch Doctor
- Spirit Barrage
- The Spectres from the Phantasm rune no longer benefit from pet bonuses.
Man, I hope they change their minds on that one.
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Yeah, the build is going to take a humongous hit. Here’s hoping the build doesn’t die entirely.
Mask of Jeram in the cube and the Enforcer gem need substitutes to compensate the power loss.
Not terribly surprising, unfortunately. I’ll hold off on rending my clothes and tearing out my hair until I get a chance to test it out and see how badly it hurts, but I must admit I’m more than a little disappointed.
RIP to a fun build… The first time I’ve enjoyed WD in years. Seems like a bad move to me. Oh well, I guess WD can’t have nice things… 
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Basically, builds for the Regalia set will all have to be re-engineered.
I think many of us knew a nerf was coming, but this is not “just” a nerf. This does not merely lessen the Regalia set’s damage, it means two key items (Enforcer gem, Mask of Jeram) that players commonly use will have to be replaced. Maybe another gem can fill the void, but I don’t see any obvious replacements for the mask.
It was fun while it lasted.
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Well, there goes all my augments and mats I recently used to build this set.
I knew a nerf was coming, but not this bad…I hope they can figure out a way to get it back close to where it was, but those pet multipliers will be hard to replace.
I learned my lesson with this with my static charge Monk, and stupidly copped it again with an Inarius/Mirinae Necro when it was first released. Still a little sore about that one. I spent over 100k mats making a godly build. 
If I even get a sniff of a build being even a little too good. I won’t bother augmenting it.
My WD got shelved for this reason. Thankfully there were enough new things to try to keep me going this season, can’t say I haven’t had fun. But this… is a dissapointing end to the season.
I can understand a nerf, but this change is a nueter.
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Stevie Wonder could have seen the nerf coming. However, not counting as a pet is probably the worst case scenario. Possibly it only gets 50% of the pet bonus? That would be more in line I think. SVR was saying it could be a 15 GR level hit, which would be a bummer.
Mask of Jeram and Enforcer are Additive.
200% + 60% (Enforcer at 150)
HP per added GR
GR +1 = 1.17x
GR +2 = 1.369x
GR +3 = 1.602x
GR +4 = 1.874x
GR +5 = 2.192x
GR +6 = 2.565x
GR +7 = 3.001x
GR +8 = 3.511x
GR +9 = 4.10x
This means you will lose at least 6GRs. More than likely, you will replace Enforcer with Pain Enhancer. And you would replace MoJ in the cube with Frostburns.
For rifting and bounties, you have plenty of damage without pet bonuses. I run for speed so for rifts, I’m running hoarder, trapped, gizzard (with squirts necklace) and krelms belt in the cube for speed. I don’t rely on pet bonuses at all for rifting or bounty builds.
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Aren’t they mult?
They were calculating on another topic, and it looks like we will have a ~ 10lvl nerff. But on second thought, this is not so great if you think that many are doing 150s
I really don’t like “reaching” the maximum limit for this game. If we now go from 150s to 140s, I don’t see any problem.
Except that will be 100% useless too now (just like every other buff to attack speed) because it actually doesnt increase the tickrate or anything. AS only buffed phantasm because it was a pet. Pets dmg = equal to your paper dmg.
It’s 100% rip if these changes go live (which I highly doubt cause I never saw a nerf like this on live before except for broken mechanics).
Ya. If they want to Nerf it. At least turn it from pet to channeling skill.
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Tickrate only applies to Manitou and Phantasm which don’t benefit from AS. 80%-90% of your damage was coming from Phantasms with the pet bonuses.
Now the Phantasm will do about 15% of the damage. Most of your damage will come from accumulated explosions during the Cold COE cycle. The rune of choice will no longer be Manitou. AS only benefited Phantasm up 2.381 ias so you could get for 4 ticks if you continuously channeled. Faster than that and you would only get 3 ticks and lose damage. But then no one serious spammed SB during gameplay - you wanted all 10 seconds of tick damage.
I’ve been using Spirit Is Willing for solo pushes. After the nerf, I’ll switch to Well of Souls which will benefit from Pain Enhancer.
After the nerf, most of the damage will come from Well of Souls Barber explosions so I’ll want to accumulate as much damage between Cold COE which means more attack speed.
A -6 GR loss for me will put it in the same range as WW barb and post nerf Aegis crusader.
Mundu will still be the fastest WD farming build.
From what I saw, there are many differing opinions about the size of this nerf. I think Blizz should have released the notes a little later, this week is going to be very long.
I don’t know about MoJ, but Enforcer was once additive, but got changed to multiplicative back in 2.4.1 .
I think we could replace the enforcer gem with Gogok, it will provide CDR that could cap with the crimson set and AS. Or even Taeguk that could give 60% damages level 100 ? Instead of enforcer’s 45% at the same level.
As for the MoJ, maybe we could use an echoing fury, nemesis bracers, grim reaper or even furnace !
Edit: No, taeguk couldn’t work because it’s not channeling
As I said AS doesnt increase the tickrate, it directly increases the dmg (just like for every other pet). Or why you think everyone is using pain enhancer (and AS on gear) in the 4 man meta currently?
So either attack speed is useless or it isn’t useless. Which is it?
Pre-nerf, pet damage is 80-90% of the damage. Post-nerf, pet damage will be 15% of total damage.
Post nerf, Spirit Is Willing (which doesn’t have a a tickrate) will be the rune that does the most damage (not Phantasm). And that rune does improve with IAS and Pain Enhancer to build up Barber explosion damage in large group.
correct, i dont know because some ppl speak without know ingame mechanics lol
Current clear before Nerf:
GR132 - 14:29
Damage: 4.9M
Int: 26K
Toughness: 78M
Recovery: 4.9M
Testing without Mask of Jeram and Enforcer (so no pet bonuses)
Replaced with Belt of Transcendence (to make the RG easier)
And Pain Enhancer
GR126 - 12:55
So far it looks to be roughly a -6 GR loss.
Edit:
GR127 - 14:05
Running Frostburns in the Cube
I’ve been testing with running with Slam Dance for the extra damage. Since it’s 5-6 GRs lower, it feels fine without Ghost Trance.
I forgot that Phantasm currently snapshots the APS at time of casting. I’ll run Iceblink or a defensive gems so it’s not snapshotting higher than my current APS.
GR126 - 13:11
Cubed - Belt of Transcendence
Gem - Ice Blink
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