Shield of Fury Changes

In the next patch, shield of fury is getting nerfed. Again. How it works in its present form is that you get a 30% damage increase for heaven’s fury every time it hits, stacking X number of times. In the beginning, this was not capped. Now its 20 times, soon it will be 10. At this point, 10 stacks really is very anti-climactic. How about if it’s changed from a stacking damage item, to a static multiplier like just about every other crusader shield? So instead of 30% x whatever, make it a 300% damage bonus?

3 Likes

Yeah, with only 10 stacks, the whole idea of stacking becomes kind of arbitrary. You don’t need to worry about attack speed because, you’ll get there in a few seconds either way. I guess you’ll still want to stack stricken quickly, but as for the shield itself, might as well be a flat 300%.

4 Likes

The truth is that devs have broken the original purpose of this item. Previously we needed to worry about attacking and stacking HF to increase damage, now this item is just a generic, soulless buff. Don’t get me wrong, the nerf for this build was deserved, but they should have done it in AoV, not SoF.

3 Likes

Yeah, I thought for sure they would have nerfed AoV. Capping the shield of fury with stacks pretty much killed the legacy of dreams shotgun build. I tried it in season 17. It was pretty close to blessed shield. Knowing what I do now, It probably had the potential of going higher.

3 Likes

While Ivory Tower is a very powerful item, the only time it takes advantage of the .2 second internal cooldown is in massively dense packs of trash. You could make it a full second and it wouldn’t change much.
Rift guardians in general attack very slowly. Reactive attacks only works with a few of them (Orlash, Hamlin, etc). It’s basically useless against 75% of them.
What makes it so powerful is the 2 set bonus on AoV.

2 Likes

Majority of these clears are 10k+ paragon. W/O perma AC (no AA), it requires enormous amount of EHP and effort to clear 150s. With projected SoF nerf (3-4 tier), a 146-147 is not enough reward hence greatly reducing incentives for pushing these tiers.

Personally, i think this is reasonable if IT is still OP, its better to wait/observe next era. Nothing atm comes close to either version of AoV HF from Sader solo anyway. Its possible more balancing will occur in future patches now that all new sets are rolled out.

One step at a time in my opinion.

1 Like

Cf https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/7bfpzx/psa_todays_1107_patch_26147919_is_a_hotfixnerf_to/ changing the icd wouldn’t do much because the damage of procs in between is still taken into account.

Current pig sticker shotgun (on ptr) build still looks strong but not too strong. Maybe a gr or 2 stronger than Ww/rend. I would like to see ivory tower nerfed as well, maybe simply lower the chance to proc a FoH on block.

I cleared 140 on the ptr yesterday, and 146 on the live NS server (both on stream), it was easier to clear 140 than 146 (as expected). Note that both clears were done with zodiac/flavor as opposed to endless walk.

2 Likes

It’s bad enough they already killed the LoD lazy shotgun build. Is that not enough? lol. If they nerf Ivory Tower, the valor version will be dead too.

1 Like

Ivory tower performance is dependent on shield of fury. If you look at the PTR leaderboards, it’s all pigsticker.

A player from china has made 150 many times, he managed in 10m in his best time. It is likely that after the nerf, it is still possible 147, maybe even 150 again with great difficulty.

2 Likes

It doesn’t matter who many times it procs. If fires of heaven is doing less damage, it might as well be tickling 150 mobs.

The main problem here is that you are considering some no-life and full botting players as “terms of balance”.
This people deserves to be banned, or, if Blizzard thinks they are useful for the brand, to be put in different LB. Just create a “No-life Leaderboard botting ranking” for players who have more than 8k paragon and remove them from the real game. Then we will reasonably speak about balance. End of the story.

Maybe the problem is fires of heaven itself. Perhaps it should be put on a hard timer instead of being able to free cast it.

I always get annoyed when people say that. If Shotgun clears 150 at 10k paragon, banning 10k paragon players won’t make Roland compete with it. If a 10k paragon player decided to play Roland, do you think he could clear 150 with it ?
And what’s your point ? “If there are no p8k players to push ivory tower, it’s balanced for lower paragons” ? And what about in 5 years ? 10 years ? Yes, the game will be dead, but there are still some players left on D2, why do you think D3 will be different ? In 5 years, maybe 8k paragon will be the norm, and then the normal shotgun build might as well not exist. The goal of balancing should be that given infinite time / resource / whatever, two builds perform equally in the hands of 2 players of equal skills. Not that “at high paragon, one build stomps another, because it’s needed for low paragon to be balanced”. Low paragon, bad gear, bad rifts should not be the way to balance builds, because when all is said and done, as time goes on, you will get high paragon, good gear, good rifts. That’s how the game works.
Ideally you achieve balance across all paragon levels, for example (in this case) by giving an item that increases toughness without sacrificing damage, that way a low paragon player can still compete against the pig sticker build (that is better at low para because more toughness) while not giving even more of an edge to the high paragon setup (because the higher the paragon and the more likely you are to be limited by damage rather than toughness). The alternative is to buff the non ivory tower version to do more damage at high paragon… except it’ll be too strong and should be nerfed then. So it needs to be brought to ivory tower levels, and then both builds should be nerfed by the same amount. Also called : nerfing ivory tower with extra steps.

I don’t see how changing the current ICD without changing the proc rate will do anything. It’ll hit half as often but twice as hard, which basically means same damage but less toughness… toughness that is already annoyingly bad for the build.

5 Likes

We need to “Logans Run” all of those 10K paragon players who are messing up the balance. :wink:

1 Like