I don’t know if any blizz devs ever read these posts, but I would really like to understand how/why you could fix Earth Ally in the dampening fields so easily, but for GoDH you just screwed over the build?
If you have learned something new since then, can we please get an update to 9th Cirri Satchel? Just have it make the HA projectiles immune to slowing. No need to put the fun and flavor killing pierce cap on there if it’s that easy.
Sorry if this feels like a rant, but clearly there’s a better solution available.
They adjust it because it would have had a similar impact GoD6 use to have with missile dampening, making earth allies significantly stronger the moment you see one. Instead of revamping the earth ally mechanics to accommodate this issue, which would have nerfed them overall, they instead fixed the issue at hand.
It had nothing to do with how fast they are or how often they do stuff.
I feel like thematically it didn’t make sense to slow any mystic ally form in missile dampening in the first place. They may have felt like it made sense to make mystic allies immune to it where making hungering arrow immune to it would feel like it goes against the theme of that affix. HA also had the problem of having too many active projectiles at once, which wasn’t an issue for MA as allies already have a cap on how many they have out at once.
If possible, making enemies within missile dampening immune to pierce might actually make sense and be a solution to having too many hungering arrows (or other projectiles) out at once without having to have that limit. It also would fit the theme of that affix. It would also make missile dampening stronger as an affix though, which people might not like.
I think it makes sense to have a pierce cap on HA. It makes it more consistent. Before, it still had a cap, it was just a distance cap instead of a pierce cap (I guess it probably has both caps now?). Maybe the current pierce cap could be raised if they dealt with dampening differently. I guess you could also argue that a distance cap instead of a pierce cap added an additional “skill” element since positioning mattered more.
I don’t think I agree with this. Plenty of things can stop the next pierce. It was only in the dampening field where the projectiles acquired seemingly infinite pierces that the damage went crazy.
It really doesn’t. A natural HA has no pierce cap other than RNG. Eventually it won’t roll a next pierce. With 9CS, the theme changes explicitly to guaranteed pierces. Adding a pierce cap at the same time completely undercuts that theme. I’d rather have a +25% chance (or whatever) to pierce and no pierce cap.
I’d agree with you here if there weren’t so many elements in the game that don’t match the thematic perspective, especially the classes and builds. At this point, balance is more important.
If it meant that HA can go back to being uncapped or have a higher pierce cap, most people would be fine with it seeing how missile dampening is already a rare affix.
The consistency works for solo speeds. The issue is that pushing the builds potential punishes you for doing what you’re suppose to be doing in high GR’s and that’s gathering lots of things. It’s good when there’s not much stuff around, but because you can’t control where the pierces go, you can’t play a high GR only targeting high HP mobs and elites due to the mechanics of the set, so you’re screwed regardless.
When it was uncapped, it rewarded you for gathering density, and gathering is ironically something the set is really good at doing with it’s high mobility. This is what made it fun, for both solo (and groups).
I don’t mind that there’s a cap to be honest, but the fact that it’s capped at the exact number you’d get whether you gather density or not makes it not fun nor rewarding, and essentially punishes you for playing high GR’s the correct way.
The travel distance cap always effectively created an indirect cap. Having a strict pierce cap on top of 100% pierce chance just makes it more consistent.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Maybe because I haven’t used HA without 9CS for years, but I can watch the projectiles go some distance and then turn around and come back (easy to see on single targets especially if you’re not moving). It sounds like you’re saying they’re supposed to just give up if they don’t hit any targets?
But this is beside the point. The issue that was “fixed” by the pierce cap was the interaction with the dampening field. If that can be properly fixed by simply having 9CS give HA projectiles immunity in the same way as the Earth Ally, then it should be done.
I already offered an alternative solution specific to dampening in my first post.
What you quoted was a response to a specific comment that wasn’t about dampening.
I’m not sure if the cap was always the same or not, but when 9CS added a 100% pierce chance, the HA projectile already had some kind of max travel distance cap. I tried to look up what it was, but I couldn’t find an exact number. Just old references to it.
This distance cap meant that if you shot one projectile it would never just pierce infinitely. It always stopped after a certain distance. The indirect cap I’m talking about is that after the projectile travels its distance cap, it disappears even if there were still targets it could have continued to hit. Infinite piercing was never possible.
Go kill Diablo and stand and shoot at its corpse. Watch how the projectiles all stay in a straight line, going in and out until they reach the pierce cap. If there were a distance cap, then that shouldn’t happen, imo. They would just go out of the corpse and vanish.
Unless you mean there’s a max distance they can travel while looking for a target and will vanish if they don’t hit anything? I don’t see how that’s relevant since we only care about the projectiles that do hit a target and start piercing.
What there always was (and still is w/o 9CS) were these two limits:
rng - I think there’s a rune that makes the pierce chance 50% instead of 35% but even with that the probability of getting more than 4 pierces is very low and more than 10 is infinitesimally small.
obstacles - this is why the elite affix type we hate the most is waller. I’m guessing your distance cap is just the arrows hitting obstacles (or never hitting anything).
As for the mechanics of Hungering Arrow, each individual arrow has a cap on how much distance it can travel. It will disappear once it reaches that cap, so yes, it pierces forever as long as there is a target, but it will eventually reach a maximum travel distance.
This is incorrect. I made a video showing and explaining that the arrow behaves differently depending on the distance you are when the arrow first pierces. Best results were between 20 to 40 yards, not on top of the mobs, and buriza had no effect on this. Not the best person to be pulling DH info from.
Regardless, point is that an easy fix could have applied to GoD6 HA instead of hard capping it at 4 no matter what you do, making high GR’s a very frustrating experience.
I’m sure you’d have the entire monk community up in arms if they increased earth allies damage a little, but it can only hit 5 mobs, all to just fix the missile dampening issue.
I think we’re talking about two different things. I also don’t think a distance cap is relevant. If you fire an arrow east and there’s nothing there, then it goes 120 yards and vanishes, okay, not meaningful because it never started piercing. If you fire an arrow west and it finds targets to hit, how does a distance cap change anything at that point? It will keep piercing until it reaches the limit.
This discussion is interesting but tangential. I just want them to do the better fix now that it’s clearly an option.
Edit: I think it just clicked for me. You’re saying that the total distance the arrow can travel is limited to 120 yards including all pierces. If that’s the case, then any pierce cap really is pointless, aside from the dampening effect.
Yes, that’s what I was getting at. Even without a pierce cap the distance cap created a sort of indirect cap.
edit: and with 100% pierce the main difference between a distance cap and a pierce cap is that positioning matters more for the distance cap. I guess we probably still have both caps, but the pierce cap is too small currently for the distance to matter as often.
just REMOVE MISSILE DAMPENING!!! man this affix is so useless!!!
or wait! better rework it like an slow in movement speed and attack speed by 25% instead of slow projectiles
