Now that all the new sets have rolled out, I wanted to give some feedback in preparation of the next larger patch after 2.6.9, which - according to the devs - is going to be focus more on major balance changes to skills, legendaries and sets to make more builds viable, rather than adding new stuff.
I divided this list into separate threads for each class, because one single thread with all that stuff in it would be too long and too unoverseeable.
I hope that some of it gets forwarded to the devs as a preparation for the next patch.
As a disclaimer: I am primarily someone who plays non-meta LoD builds, so a part of these suggestions are directed towards improving the usefullness of these skills for LoD & LoN builds, but others are also beneficial for set-meta builds.
Suggestion for the Monk Skills included in this post:
- Exploding Palm
- Seven Sided Strike
Exploding Palm
The main problem with Exploding Palm is that there is only one viable rune that vastly outshines all others: “Impending Doom”.
Impending Doom removes the damage over times effect of EP but more than doubles the damage of the explosion, which makes it by far the most effective rune in combination with the Uliana’s set, since it causes Seven Sided Strike to immediately explode EP on an enemy.
My suggestion to make the other runes more viable, would be to remove or redesign Impending Doom and in return, the damage bonus on the Uliana set for EP could be increased to make up for that (or another EP related legendary).
This would leave more room for the other runes to shine a bit more.
A possible replacement for Impending Doom could be a rune that either applies Exploding Palm on up to X enemies that were hit by the EP explosion, or simply increases the detonation radius of the explosion. Or maybe you can come up with something better.
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Exploding Palm outside of the Uliana set is pretty underwhelming imo, so to further improve Exploding Palm the base unruned version of the skill (and therefore all runes of Exploding Palm), could apply the DoT to the primary target, but also to +1 or +2 additional targets within 15 yards, which would make spreading the effect a lot easier. So basically include the Shocking Grasp rune into the base skill.
The Shocking Grasp rune itself then could increase the amount of targets that the EP DoT gets applied to by an additional +1 or +2 eventually.
An additional mechanical feature could be that whenever you use Exploding Palm on an enemy that already has EP applied on them, the DoT would be instead appled to another enemy within 15 yards that currently does not already have the DoT effect applied on them.
All of this would make more runes useful and the base version would get some nice QoL improvements.
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Some optional changes could also be made to the visuals, but it is not really important or necessary to be done. It is just something at least I personally would like to see and is jsut for the eye candy.
When the skill was shown first at a Blizzcon before D3 was released, Exploding Palms explosion used the animation of a bloody explosion that is now only used when a yellow rare elite dies:
You could even use the same animation for all runes, but that bloods detonation animation would just look much better imo and would be closer to the fantasy of a Monk causing your organs to detonate than the current one.
Seven-Sided Strike
The issue with this skill is that the Sustainded Attack rune (which lowers the cooldown from 30 to 14 seconds, which is more than a 50% reduction) is just way to powerful then all the other runes, especially with the Uliana’s Set that causes your Exploding Palm DoT’s to detonate when you hit an enemy with SSS.
The simpliest way would be to reduce the cooldown of the base skill to anywhere between 14-20 seconds and redesign the Sustained Attack rune to something else (and with that also reduicing the damage of SSS by an appropriate amount).
Maybe the potential replacement for Sustained attack could pull enemies into the center of the SSS zone before the attacks are happening, similar to a Cyclone Strike.
The Fulminating Onslaught rune could be made better by increasing the AoE from 7 to 12 yards.