Patch 2.6.9 PTR Notes

Barbarian
1

Patch notes are live.

Some interesting stuff there. I’m glad to see Impale get a buff, but I don’t know the DH or Necro class well enough to gague whether the proposed buffs are good, bad, or mediocre. At the very least, I’m interested to try the new Necro set.

This, however, caught my attention:

Stone of Jordan

  • Added power: All elemental damage bonuses to skills are now equal to your highest elemental bonus to skills.

Aside from interact with the Season theme, I’m not quite sure what this is meant to do. Any takers?

Biggest surprise: Changes to Necro skills. I’m quite surprised at the scope of this patch, especially given the impact of Covid-19.

What do y’all think?

2

Well, the only thing about Necro skills I read is the change to Last Service, and that’s pretty good since no longer consumes pets. About the gear, I see Haunted Visions and Jesseth set have been improved, and since I only use Rathma Skeletal Build for my Necro main I’m pretty happy.

3

Shadow Impale got double damage.

New set looks better as a 4 piece supplement for the Natalya’s Set. Although skill interactions remain to be seen.

4

I think the SoJ will basically buff all your elements damage base on your highest element? Wondering how good it will be. I really want another dps ring to be on pairs with CoE.

5

It’s near the bottom under Skills. A number of Necro skills were altered/updated.

Yeah, and that has me jazzy. I love Impale!

Right, but I don’t quite understand what it does or how it fits into any build.

  • Stone of Jordan
    • Added power: Each of your elemental’s damage bonus is equal to your highest static elemental bonus to skill.

I’m not sure to what “elemental’s damage bonus” refers. The “static” likely refers to the elemental damage we stack on bracers and amulets, but that is already applied as a separate multiplier to skills whose rune elements match. Maybe this slaps the new element onto any rune, regardless of the rune’s element? Maybe I’m trying to read too deeply? I really don’t understand what this item is supposed to do.

6

From the looks of it maybe WWrend is top solo pusher now. I have no idea how strong the two new sets are. I’m not too worried about impale buffs either in solo.
Knowing how many crazy versions on necro there are someone is likely to find an OP version.

7

I’m not a fan of the nerfs to Sader and WD, but I’m really curious to see how strong the new sets end up.

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8

Yah they went too heavy on the nerfs

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10

I think there is a issue with how they are describing the power. How it sits now we would not need to roll 20% on one item. Then every other item with elemental on it automatically becomes 20% or whatever the max is. Even rolling 16% on an amulet would make it 20% if one item on your gear has a 20%.

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11

The SOJ wording is not clear at all. My interpretation is that all elemental damage gets buffed to your collective max (ie: if we’ve got 80% phys damage from gear, then now we’ve got 80% elemental damage across the board).

Does the announcement of the patch notes means the current season end is imminent? I’ve never participated in a season before so would be good to know when it is expected to end based on their historical practices.

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12

That’s exactly how I interpreted, which makes it meh.

I luv interpretation. This would be game changing.

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13

My interpretation of the SoJ addition is all non-static elemental damage will be changed to your highest static armor roll. I say this because they changed the wording on CoE to include non-static in the buff. So SoJ would make CoE have 100% uptime for the element of choice, this would also work with a skill like Spectral Blades- Flame Blades by turning the Fire damage buff into the static element on your gear.

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14

My reaction to the DH stuff was that I’m really hoping the new set doesn’t include pants so that Depth Diggers fits in without needing a RoRG, for some really nice Grendades action, especially as I’ve already got some pretty tasty Grendades gear.

As for the HPS gaining 100% more damage. Oh, man. I spent literally months worth of materials trying to get one better than the ancient I’m currently using. With this one patch it’s rendered useless compared to a non-ancient with the new affix. I guess it’s time to farm thousands of bounty materials ready for reforging when 2.6.9 hits live.

Finally, there seems to be some stuff that’s conducive to group play with the Bolas stuff guaranteed to pull mobs in and make them take increased damage. Will we seen a limited return of a support DH? We’ll have to see.

I’ll certainly be playing around with this on the PTR on Thursday. Interested to see whether the S21 every 2 minute elemental theme is as powerful as the Pandemonium theme from S19 was.

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15

Rykker was commenting that SoJ might be best suited for LoD, guess we’ll see.

16

At this time they are doing two week PTR starting on may 21. There will likely be two tuning passes before they go live. Generally season will end a week after ptr ends and season 21 will start a week after that. So season end is 4 weeks away if this is true. Season 21 start would 6 weeks as well but there is no set is stone pace blizzard likes. They tend to change thing very often.

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17

This was the main benefit I could see.

It’s really the only time you can stack a ton of elemental (usually fire) damage.

Unless they Blizz’d up the description, and it just adds all elemental bonuses together, regardless of type? :man_shrugging:

18

the only option for the new SoJ is in a LoD setup stacking Fire-ele-dmg and now be able to choose another element rune(like physical) while still benefiting from all the elemental dmg on your gear…that is if you have a free slot to fit SoJ in

so all in all a very niche item that most ppl don’t benefit from in their builds (if my understanding of the new affix is correct)

19

I can’t really see the SoJ being very good, at least for Barbs. Because nearly all of our builds rely on doing damage with a single skill.

(My own reading of the affix is that if you have, say, 19% fire, 17% cold, and 15% phys, and 0% lightning on your gear, then all of these would have a bonus equal to the highest, i.e. you would have a bonus to all 4 elements of 19%).

H90 does all its damage with Frenzy, and this is baked into the set.

Zodiac Rend does all its damage with Rend. Technically, it is possible to do a bit of damage with WW, but not much compared to Rend.

Pro-Slam does all its damage with Seismic Slam. MOTE gives a big bonus to a bunch of skills, but only SS and EQ have the supporting items to be relevant, and you can’t equip all of those items at once.

Vile Charge does all its damage with Charge.

IK HOTA, R6 HOTA, and LON HOTA do all their damage with, well, HOTA.

The closest would be Leapquake… it might be a small advantage to be able to run Fire EQ, phys SS, using BoD and FotVP, and getting 40% elemental on each. But, where are you going to put the SoJ? Losing F+R costs you a bunch of damage. Losing BoM probably means you die. And if you were going to swap out BoM, CoE would be a vastly better choice, as it adds considerably more damage.

So: it’s definitely not meant for us. Maybe it’s intended to work with the new DH set, which fires primary skills while you channel strafe. I’ll have to look at the numbers a bit and give it some more thought.

Edit: no, it doesn’t seem like that’s it, either. The new DH set doesn’t actually buff Strafe damage at all.

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20

I think SoJ is meant for people to be able to use some of the elemental affixes that are on weapons that are locked but not be handcuffed to a certain skill rune.

Like WkL for monks. Or if we wanted to use a fire rune but still use doombringer or azure wrath.

Really seems to me like a QoL for early to mid level gearing. Or a VERY high paragon when you can drop a survivability item to eek out a tad more damage.

21

I think the new SoJ would have been better if it simply added up all your different elemental bonuses from gear and made that the bonus for all elements. Still not great for barb, but for casual players trying to find that perfect amulet it might make the experience a little more forgiving.