Now that all the new sets have rolled out and more feedback has been requested by the new CM’s, I wanted to provide such feedback in preparation for D3’s next larger patch after 2.6.9, which - according to the devs - is going focus more on major balance changes to skills, legendaries and sets to make more builds viable, instead of adding much new stuff.
I hope this thread (at least in parts) gets forwarded to the devs, like the feedback threads for the Demon Hunter and the Barbarian in the past year, which lead to balance changes and several new items.
As a disclaimer: I primarily play non-meta LoD builds, so a part of these suggestions are directed towards improving the usefulness of these skills for LoD & LoN builds, but others are focused to be beneficial for set-meta builds as well.
Suggestion for the following skills are included in this post:
- Leap
- Rend
- Whirlwind
- Elemental Arrow
- Caltrops
- Vault
- Marked for Death
- Exploding Palm
- Seven Sided Strike
- Corpse Explosion
- Land of the Dead
- Locust Swarm
- Blizzard
- Arcane Orb
- Hydra
- Disintegrate
- the Wizards Conjuration Skills
- visual indicator for Energy Shield
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Barbarian
Leap
This one here might be a bit controversial, but I would like the Barbarians skill Leap to have 2 charges by default instead of a cooldown. The idea behind this is that you can leap into a group of enemies, but that you also could eventually use the second charge of Leap as a means to escape.
Currently you can only use Leap either as a tool for engagement or as a defensive tool for escaping (I am talking about the base skill here, not the version with Lut Socks and the MotE Barbarian), but a second charge would give the base skill a bit more flexibility, which would make the skill more appealing because it would give additional utility and maneuverability, while still not making it OP.
The Launch rune or the Toppling Impact rune could get redesigned to give a 3rd charge since they are not useful in the endgame and the Lut Socks legendary boots can be redesigned to grant this new rune for free and maybe also to increase the damage of Leap by xxx% or reduce the cooldown of Leap by xx%.
This tweak to Leap wouldn’t change much for MotE Barbarians since the gameplay would stay the same, because you still could Leap 3 times in a row and get the charges back quickly by spending Fury via Seismic Slam, but Leap would become more attractive during leveling and for some endgame builds as well if it would have 2 or 3 charges by default or via runes.
Giving Leap a second/third charge is better than Lut Socks’ current 2 second window in which you can leap 3 times in a row, because with charges you could choose when to use the charges, instead of being limited into a 2 second window, which gives Leap more flexibility.
Rend
Rend would be more interesting for non-Wrath of the Waste builds, if it would incorporate the effect of the Mutilate rune into the base effect of this skill, which is that enemies take xx% more damage from either all sources or your own attacks (but multiplicative, not additive) while they are under the effect of Rend. A 10% or a 15% damage increase from all sources or from your attacks should be enough.
It would give other builds an incentive to also use Rend as a secondary damage dealing skill in addition to their main damage dealing skill, because skills like Hammer of the Ancients, Whirlwind, Seismic Slam etc would also (indirectly) get buffed by it.
The Mutilate rune then can keep its current effect, but simply increases the amount of additional damage enemies take while under the effect of Rend further, so this wouldn’t require much tweaking.
If more stuff is required to make Rend more appealing to players, its base duration can be increased from 5 seconds to somewhere around 7-8 seconds while still keeping the same damage per second.
Whirlwind
I always thought that Whirlwind needs a rune that increases its AoE (from ~10 yards or whatever it currently is, to ~15-20 yards). The Hurricane rune is a perfect fit for such a rune, especially since its current effect is mostly underwhelming.
The damage increase of Volcanic Eruption is okay, but it could kinda use a bit of flavor, like leaving behind a trail of fire for x seconds as well.
The Dust Devil rune was buffed many patches ago from 120% damage to 180% damage to better work in alignment with the Wrath of the Wastes set, however, this also leads to the Dust Devils rune outshining all other runes. Maybe some readjustments can take place here by nerfing Dust Devils but buffing the Dust Devils damage bonus on the Wrath of the Wastes set, to bring the rune back into line and to provide more choice for LoD builds and during leveling.
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Demon Hunter
Caltrops
Caltrops is the Demon Hunters worst skill, even when legendaries and sets are not factored in.
What hinders Caltrops the most from being even remotely useful is that you can only lay the trap beneath your feat and not place or throw it over a distance. If Caltrops could be placed at the location of your mouse cursor, the main problem in its mechanic would be solved.
However, it would need more adjustments after that. The base skill either needs to have its radius increased from 12 yards to somewhere between 15-20 yards OR the slowing effect needs to cling on enemies for about 2 seconds after they stepped out of the Caltrops area. The latter effect is also in line with the fantasy of stepping into spikes that impale ones feet and stick in there.
Being able to place Caltrops at the targeted spot and have its effects cling on enemies for a few seconds (or having the Area of Effect increased) would make this skill actually worth using for some builds.
I also would say that the slow on the base skill should be increased from 60% to 80%, because otherwise the skill just can’t compete with Thrill of the Hunt.
The ‘Bait the Trap’ rune which empowers you by giving you 10% Critical Hit Chance when you stand in the Area of Effect of Caltrops should probably keep the effect of the Caltops being placed beneath your feet, but that rune probably should also have the radius of the caltrops drastically increased, to maybe between 20-25 yards, so that enemies cast reach you too easily and as a compensation for the loss of not being able to place the Caltrops over a distance.
The ‘Torturous Ground’ and ‘Carved Stakes’ are fine for what they are, as the main problem is the base mechanic of the skill itself.
The ‘Jagged Spikes’ rune on the other hand (the one that adds damage to the skill) is completely useless, because no one will ever use Caltrops for this minor amount of damage.A possible improvement could be that instead of adding damage to Caltrops, it could either increase the AoE radius of the skill further or increase the time the slow effect clings on enemies.
If the slow effect on the base skill gets increased from 60% to 80%, the ‘Hooked Spines’ rune becomes obsolete, and in this case it could either increase the area of effect of Caltrops, or cause the slow effect to cling on enemies for about 2 seconds, depending on which effect is not on the base skill.
Elemental Arrow
The Demon Hunter skill Elemental Arrow definitely needs higher and/or more damage multipliers on legendaries (Kridershot and Augustine’s Panacea).
Eventually Elemental Arrow can also be added to the UE set to be more competitive with other skills.
What follows now is more a personal request rather than something that needs to be fixed, but I always desired to have Molten Arrow in the game as a rune for Elemental Arrow, and I was really disappointed when that skill was removed.
Molten Arrow was one of these skills that I was most exited to use, ever since the first DH footage was shown of it at Blizzcon 2011, but sadly it was scratched from the game and its effect was later put on the Scorch rune for Arcane Orb for some reason.
There still is footage from Molten Arrow:
Technically this skill is still in the game as the Scorch rune on the Wizard’s Arcane Orb skill, which shoots a massive molten boulder that (for some reason) pierces through enemies and leaves a trail of fire on the ground.
Maybe it is possible to swap the effects of the DH’s Immolation Arrow (a rune on Elemental Arrow that causes the arrow to detonate on impact in a fiery explosion) with the Wizard’s Scorch rune from Arcane Orb. The Wizard is in need of a real Fireball-like ability since the beginning of D3 anyway, so swapping these two effects in one way or another could provide that.
Beyond that, there also was a skill in Diablo 2 for the Amazon called ‘Lightning Fury’, which one of the most iconic, popular and fun builds in D2, and I always wondered why it was not brought back in D3 as a rune for Elemental Arrow.
The visuals/animations of the Lightning Blast rune of the Wizards Electrocute could be utilized for the secondary missiles of a D3 Lightning Fury as well.
Maybe it would be too much work to replace one of the lightning runes on Elemental Arrow with Lightning Fury, dunno, but it certainly would bring back some great D2 nostalgia to D3.
Lightning Fury in action:
If that all is too much to ask for, I can totally understand that. It is not really necessary. Its just that Molten Arrow was one of my favorite skills and Lighting Fury was just so iconic. Maybe you agree.
Vault
In PoE there is a skill called Dash, which has a feature that also can get applied to the Demon Hunters Vault ability to allow better maneuverability:
When you use that skill while you are holding the “Stand Still / Don’t Move”-Button, you dash into the opposite direction of your mouse cursor instead of at its location.
I do not know how difficult it would be to implement something like this, but it would be an interesting feature for Vault to have, like a build-in Backflip.
Marked for Death
Currently the damage increase from MfD is just additive with other damage multipliers, not multiplicative. That makes the skill much worse than it could be and MfD is probably one of the worst DH skills next to Caltrops. So the first and most important change that should be made to this skill in order to make it more useful, is to turn the multiplier from an additive in to a multiplicative one.
Secondly, a single cast of MfD just affects a single enemy, which in practice is not really useful, but it could get increased to effect x enemies within e.g. 12 yards around the primary target with a single cast. Alternatively, all enemies within ~8-10 yards can get affected by a single cast of MfD to make the skill more viable.
Some adjustments have to made to the ‘Mortal Enemy’ and the ‘Death Toll’ runes as well, like that you can only regenerate x% of your maximum life / x Hatred once per attack, regardless of how many enemies you hit that are effected by MfD, since with the AoE increase of MfD more enemies would get effected by it, which would make these runes too powerful. In return, these amount of Life and Hatred you get has to be increased.
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Monk
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.
One possible solution to make the other runes more viable is to remove or redesign Impending Doom, but in return, increase the damage bonus on the Uliana set or another EP related legendary for EP to make up for the loss of damage on Impending Doom.
That leaves more room for the other runes to shine.
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 a rune that simply increases the detonation radius of the explosion.
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Without the Uliana set in LoD builds, Exploding Palm is a bit underwhelming in my opinion, so further improvements could be made to the base skill.
Instead of just getting applied to a single target, the DoT effect of Exploding Palm could also get applied to +1 or +2 additional targets within 15 yards, which would make spreading the effect easier. So the idea is to basically include the Shocking Grasp rune into the base skill.
The Shocking Grasp rune itself can increase the amount of targets that the EP DoT gets applied to by an additional +1 or +2 enemies.
An additional mechanical QoL feature that would be useful for Exploding Palm is that whenever you use Exploding Palm on an enemy that already has EP applied on them, the DoT would instead be applied to another enemy within 15 yards that currently does not already have the DoT effect applied on them.
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Some optional changes could also be made to the visuals, but that is not really necessary or important, but rather just neat to have.
When the skill was first shown at Blizzcon when the Monk class was revealed, Exploding Palms on-kill effect used the animation of enemies detonating in a bloody explosion - and animation that is now only used sometimes for when a yellow rare elite dies:
This blood detonation animation just look better and more gorey and resembles the fantasy of a Monk causing your organs to detonate more than the current one.
Seven-Sided Strike
The Sustained Attack rune (which lowers the cooldown from 30 to 14 seconds, which is more than a 50% reduction) is just way to powerful compared to all the other runes, especially with the Uliana’s Set that causes your Exploding Palm DoT’s to detonate everytime you hit an enemy with SSS.
The simplest way would be to reduce the cooldown of the base skill to anywhere between 14-20 seconds (and with that also reducing the damage and resource costs of SSS by an appropriate amount to balance out the damage output) and redesign the Sustained Attack rune to something else that does not involve a cooldown reduction.
My suggestion for a potential replacement for Sustained Attack would be a rune that pulls 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.
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Necromancer
Corpse Explosion
Corpse Explosion currently detonates 5 corpses in a 11 yards radius around the targeted area and the corpses crease a 20 yards explosion.
What feels a bit clunky and counter-intuitive about that, is when you have your mouse cursor targeting an enemy and activate Corpse Explosion, but no corpses explode because they are more than 11 yards away (even if they are just 12 yards away), although the detonation radius of the corpses is 20 yards. In that case you first had to target nearby corpses and hope that they hit your desired target when they go off,because they might be too far away.
CE would feel better to use if 5 corpses within a 20 yards radius would detonate, because then when you have your cursor on the enemy and no corpses go off, you can be sure that no corpses are nearby.
15-17 yards would be okay as well if 20 is too much.
Land of the Dead
Land of the Dead is probably the most problematic skill in the entire game.
The playstyles that result from it, aka running around for a minute, doing nothing and then having a 10 second window in which you nuke everything by having access to an unlimited amount of corpses, is, although very efficient, not at all a fun way to play the Necro.
This skill also leads to balancing issues for the whole Necro, since a lot of Necro builds revolve around it, so it might be a good idea to redesign it, if there is already an intent to work on re-balancing the game in the next patch.
I don’t really know what could be done in order to fix this skill (except completely removing it), but one option is to replace it with a similar skill that has a lower cooldown, but that only spawns a limited amount of corpses, for example a Rain of Corpses-like skill, which causes xx corpses to rain down from the sky that then can be utilized with corpse skills, which has something like 20 or 30 second cooldown.
Basically anything is better than Land of the Dead in its current form.
Alternatively LotD can be turned into a Passive Aura that periodically spawns corpses (e.g. 1 or 2 or 3 corpses per second) and also has an active component that immediately spawns 20 corpses on the ground, with a ~30 second cooldown.
Another issue the Necro has is generating corpses outside of Land of the Dead. A potential way to fix this is to let Primary and Secondary Skills have a chance to cause enemies to drop a “Corpse Fragment” when you hit them, which would work exactly like corpses, except that they drop when you hit enemies, rather than by killing them.
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Witch Doctor
Locust Swarm
Similar to Rend, this skill could use a secondary effect that causes enemies to take ~10-15% more damage from your attacks while under the influence of Locust Swarm on the base skill, which would make this skill more useful for builds outside of Jade Harvester since it would also buff their other skills.
There already is a similar effect on the Ring of Emptiness, so why not double down on that?
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Wizard
Blizzard
Blizzard is probably the Wizards weakest skill.
When I do a playthroughs of the game by leveling chars from 1 to 70 just for the fun of it, without getting powerleveled, Blizzard is the Wizards weakest skill even when you don’t use any of the legendaries that give huge multipliers to other skills like Meteor, Disintegrate, etc,
Even just 2 or 3 seconds of casting Disintegrate is significantly more powerful than a single Blizzard over its whole 6 second duration, that is how bad the skill is, even on a base level. I understand that the damage-over-time to resource cost ratio needs to be somewhat in line, but the skill just does not feel impactful at all.
One possible way improve Blizzard is to add a cooldown to the skill (probably something between 10 and 15 seconds) which in return would allow the damage to be drastically increased. In addition to that, the duration could get reduced from 6 seconds to 3 or 4 seconds, while the skill deal the same amount of damage over its duration (e.g. 2000% damage over 4 seconds, rather than 2000% damage over 6 seconds).
All of that would make Blizzard feel a lot more powerful.
A 10-15 second cooldown Blizzard could deal anywhere between 1500-2200% damage over 3 seconds in an area and that would be a lot more impactful.
If that still doesn’t make it more useful/impactful, its cooldown could be increased further to 20 - 30 seconds and its damage increased further as well, which would turn this skill into a small nuke that you would use against heavy enemies and elites, but I think that this role would fit better on the Meteors Molten Impact rune (another rune that isn’t seen often in the lategame, the one that gives the skill a 15 second cooldown, but also increases its damage), so that rune might be in need of some tweaking as well.
Arcane Orb
The damage of all runes except Frozen Orb need to be increased substantially. Frozen Orb outshines them all by a mile and a half. This, or nerf Frozen Orb and buff the complementary legendaries Triumvirate and Unstable Scepter.
Now, this following suggestion ties in with another suggestion I had for the Demon Hunter’s Elemental Arrow:
Swap the effects of Scorch (Arcane Orb rune) and Immolation Arrow (Elemental Arrow rune)
Scorch currently is a giant molten rock that for some reason pierces through enemies and leaves a trail of fire on the ground for a few seconds.
Immolation Arrow is a skull that detonates on impact with an enemy and leaves a pool of fire on the ground for a few seconds.
Imo these two effects should be swapped, so that Scorch is basically a Frieball that detonates on impact and leaves a pool of fire on the ground and Immolation Arrow is a piercing arrow that leaves behind a trail of fire in its path.
That would just make more sense is also visually and thematically more pleasing.
On a sidenote I was wondering if it would be possible to change the Obliteration rune so that it has an increased Area of Effect, instead of increasing its damage, but to significantly lower the detonation radius. although Obliteration currently deals more damage than the unruned version, it still feels like a nerf because of the decreased AoE.
In D3 classic there was a rune for Arcane Orb called Arcane Nova, which simply increased the AoE, so maybe that rune can come back and replace Obliteration.
Hydra
Would be possible to have up to 2 or 3 Hydras at once, as a baseline feature of the skill, not just with the Serpent Sparker legendary wand?
I think that being able to have 3 Hydras active at once would be fine as a baseline for the skill.
Maybe you can get +1 additional maximum Hydra from the Serpent Sparker Wand up to a maximum of 4, but not more.
Yes, the Typoon set had to be slightly rebalnced, but when the maximum amount of Hydras you can have is 4 (with Serpent Sparker), then the numbers on the set just had to be halved and it would be on the same level as it currently is.
This change would make Hydra more useful for all Wizard builds.
Disintegrate
Factoring out legendaries and sets for now, Disintegrate is by far the strongest of all the secondary skills. It is significantly stronger than Ray of Frost or Arcane Orb. This has to do with Disintegrate ticking more often per second than it should, which causes it to deal more damage per second than e.g. Ray of Frost, although the numbers say otherwise.
Now the question is how to balance it? Either by fixing Disintegrate (aka making it tick less often) or simply making it deal less damage (and changing the multipliers on sets and legendaries as well, to bring it into more balacne) or by buffing the other secondary skills? I leave that up to the devs. It is just very noticeable that this skill on its base level is too overpowered.
Furthermore, Disintegrate could use a rune that deals lightning damage to allow for more elemental diversity with this skill. There is currently only one fire rune and 4 arcane runes on this skill, but no lightning or cold rune. Since Ray of Frost is its own skill, only a lightning ray is missing.
The perfect rune for that would be Chaos Nexus, which is rune that causes you to discharge energy at nearby enemies while channelling. These energy discharges already look like small lasers and changing them to lightnings would perfectly fit imo.
Wizard Conjuration Skills
The Wizard’s Conjuration Skills (Ice Armor, Storm Armor, Energy Armor, Familiar and Magic Weapon) are just cast-and-forget skills. Many people have already suggested that they should have an active component, because otherwise these skills just rest on your skill bar and only have to be used once all 10 minutes.
The most simple fix would be to make their current effects passive while they are on your skillbar, give them an active component that simply doubles or triples their passive effect for x seconds and give the active effects a cooldown. That is something that the Crusaders Laws already do, so maybe it is not too hard to apply this effect on the Wizard’s Conjuration spells as well…
It would make these skills more engaging to use.
Energy Shield
I was wondering if a visual indicator for Energy Shield could be added as a visual overlay on the Health Orb, similar to Path of Exile, which would show how much Energy Shield (from f.e. the Wizard passives, St. Archus Gage gloves, Molten Gizzards Wildebeest etc) is remaining.
https://imgur.com/mLGC851
This feature was already being tested in the RoS beta, as you can see here, so I don’t know how easy or difficult it would be bring it back, but it would be a very nice QoL feature:
https://imgur.com/2fHihdf
Galvanizing Ward
Aside from that the Wizard’s Energy Shields (and all kinds of other energy shields from items that are usable by other classes as well), could need a visual overlay on top of the health globe to show how much energy shield a char has, there is one particular Wizard passive skill that could kinda use a redesign to be more in line with the fantasy of an Energy Shield: Galvanizing Ward.
Currently, Galvanizing Ward immediately gives you an energy shield that absorbs damage based on 60% of your max life, but first after you have not taken damage for 5 seconds. But the fantasy of an energy shield is more like that it recharges over a few seconds after you have not taken damage, but not that it instantly comes back to 100% of its power.
So instead of being at 100% power after not having taken damage for 5 seconds, the shield could start to recharge after ~2 seconds of not having taken damage and replenish over the next 3 seconds. That means that if you have not taken damage for 2 seconds, every 0.5 seconds after that, the shield would recharge to give you 10% of your maximum life as Energy Shield, which means that after 3 seconds of recharge, it would have reached its maximum capacity of 60% of your like as Energy Shield again.
No much would change, except that your shield would start to recharge faster and it would be more fluid to use and play around with during combat.
You also get the Energy Shield from the Molten Wildebeest’s Gizzard legendary gem after 4 seconds, while you gain the Energy Shield from Galvanizing Ward after 5 seconds.
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Thanks for reading!
Maybe the community can add more suggestions for skills that can get improved or changed, either in this thread or by making completely new ones (or both) in the preparation for the next upcoming large balance patch.