Fantastic math c: I think this is a true eye-catch for the WD who’s gotten such a shaft. Hopefully we can continue to get updates to their builds and help curve this.
What a MONSTER statement this is. Disregarding inclusion in meta or not, the solo potential of our class was somewhat in a huge lull until Rend was reworked. A good rework like that had such a transformative experience with Wastes as a set, and honestly looking forward I believe that’s how to approach builds for all classes that are lacking. Adding multipliers is fine and all, but certain builds like MOTE and Raekor, as well as a few other class builds have fundamental limitations that won’t be solved with just a higher % of damage. Thanks for your time and math!
Well… you are asking the wrong person, I guess. I’m a solo-only player who really hates to play seasons (didn’t even test the upcoming theme, just what they did to Firebird). I just do it to unlock the rewards, mostly… because I know I can’t compete as a solo player. Not that I care, I give a damn about leaderboards, multiplayer or what is the current META. I play a little here and there and do it to relax, not to compete. And I mostly (99% of the time) stick to wizards since pretty much day one.
So, if I tell you all that and you go and look at my current paragon it is obvious that I’m one hell of a lazy punk, given that I haven’t even reach 4k yet.
So asking me for a good build or good mechanic is a little pointless. It also depends on personal taste, but you asked… so let me at least answer, although it will be me ranting quite a bit.
All I can say is that I don’t enjoy mechanics that are overly complicated or require a ton of micromanaging or those that feel “slapped together without real reason”…
Let me give you an example:
Hydra (Typhons Veil)
Okay this set should have potential. Place Hydra, avoid getting hit, pets do damage. Hm. So the character is passive in terms of damage and the pets do their work. Seems easy. Now here comes… Deathwish… a perfect item in this situation to support our snakes, because channeling buffs all damage and Hydra benefits. You won’t need to attack the target, just channel somewhere. Pretty simple, no? And the issue… people said “booring, Deathwish again, no more channeling, booooh… and btw, Bazooka is bad, fix it!”
So the devs destroyed Etched Sigil, nerfed Deathwish with a 1 second cast delay, changed Fragment of Destiny to all signature skills (good) and let Hydra gain a stacked buff. Egh, pkay, so you need to constanly land hits now, which means a bit more active playstyle, but those hits do zilch. Not to mention the buff to Hydra is weaker in terms compared to Deathwish - the mechanic is just more annoying. Then to top it off, they change Etched Sigil to Twisters and slap an orphaned skill (Blizzard) on Winter Flurry that makes things even more nasty, with another condition to buff Hydra. What the f*** did they smoke? This is not fun, it’s disjointed and feels both strange and unfitting and way to forced (to remove channeling). Keep in mind, the buff to Hydra on WF is way more complicated and still only on the level of Etched Sigil. Is this fun? NOPE, at least not in my book.
So, just an example - imagine this instead:
Change to Deathwish:
AT/RoF/Dis deal 325% more damage every second, stacking up to five times. Hydra heads now attack with your channeling skills when you do.
Not saying I would have done that but in a nutshell this would have killed off Bazooka and linked channeling and Hydra. Now it makes sense to channel, you need to attack actively and your Hydras would target what you do. Just an example… it would work in Typhons, it would work with LoD/LoN… Typhons is stronger, though.
Then let’s see… Winter Flurry… yeah right. Screams cold. This one should have simply been “Cold skills deal XXX% more damage. Enemies hit or killed by cold have a chance to release your Frost Nova.”
But if they REALLY want to make that one Hydra, then we just need to look at the Magistrate, an existing Hydra item, to find a skill that can be used instead of Blizzard:
“Enemies hit by Frost Nova take XXX% more damage from you for X seconds. This effect is doubled for your pets.”
See what happens then? Not saying it would be perfect then but at least it would make way more sense.
But now for those who say… boohoo Hydra + channeling, we don’t want to channel any longer… yeah, heard you. Now, what? Let’s see:
Fragment of Destiny… now this one has potential, but the devs did NOTHING to make this one fit the picture. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Pretty much looks like a band-aid that too small to cover the wound.
So, let me ask… why did they make a link between signature skills and Hydra and just stop there? Just to add a condition so that we cannot use Deathwish? Huh, then at least make FoD strong enough to outmatch the sword. What kind of crap is this… not to mention Signature skills feel disjointed since Typhon, the Hydra set, has nothing to do with them, or Blizzard. Those two are just useless annoyances we have to spam to make Hydra stronger. In return this robs us of our mobility because, you know… movement speed where? Can I use Aetherwalker? Ouch.
If they link our signature skills to Hydra, then for Pete’s sake make those skills at least part of the damage. Buff them on Typhons so that an item like Fragments makes actually sense. I would go even further.
If Typhons is a pet set (and you bet it is, the set only buffs Hydra atm) then it should be exactly that. I would look at our orphaned skill Mirror Images now. Remember? The one they axed on Firebirds. How about we migrate them to Typhons and have them stay close and attack with our signature skills when we do. Let that be a legendary or a set effect, whatever… just do something meaningful and we are talking. This is your active non-channeling build right there. Now FoD with Signature skills and Hydra makes sense and works in our favor. And you won’t channel… perfect. And you don’t feel bored, since you know… your own attacks actually make your Mirror Images attack and they also deal damage. A bit like Simulacrum/Masquerade. Stolen? Well, maybe, but if it works…
So, let’s say I don’t actually have an existing wizard build I really like. If anything I liked Mirror Images as a concept. Not necessarily every little thing, but that build could have worked as a concept. Had they improve on the AI a little, reduced the damage and made them part of a set. I think I would be happy.
Oops, a bit lenghtier than I thought… so there you have it, even if this has strayed offtopic quite a bit.
Yeah, that change definitely bumped us up a good bit in terms of GR level cleared. But, since that change happened, we’ve had only 6 clears in the top 100 (out of a possible 300). It would have been a different story if AoV had not been so powerful. Had that set not existed, Rend would have accounted for ~45 of the top 100 in Era 12. But… it did! So we didn’t!
That much at least sounds a good bit like me. I’m also a bit under 4k, even though I’ve been playing since shortly after launch in 2012. And I’m 100% SSF.
Everything you say about this makes sense. Definitely sounds like a very slapped-together set of conditions to make the build work.
Maybe you should try a different class! There are a lot of different builds out there… maybe one of them will make you happy. I was mostly a Monk player quite a while back, but then I discovered Leapquake… and it’s been a Barb, Barb, Barb, Barb World for me ever since.
Well, if the devs do what I expect them to for wizards in S25 - that is nothing more than what we’ve seen so far on PTR - I actually might do just that, at least for S25.
But I won’t be investing too much time anyways. I haven’t even played non season seriously, though I should have done just that as long as Mirrorbird still exists.
I think it depends on how you define " while that other class always gets all the love"
If you’re solely looking at which builds can I clear the highest GR with then highest DPS wins.
With the change to set leaderboards, it’s been more interesting not focusing on DPS of one class vs another class.
I love WD. I love the variety of playstyles because Darts is different than Garg that’s different than Jade that’s different than Mundu SB. I like the change to Arachyr because now it has a distinct playstyle that’s different than the others. I liked that they finally fixed Lakumba’s so getting killed on an RG with no adds isn’t a cascade of continuous deaths.
What I wish is that levels of various builds inside a single class were more balanced. Because even if you just stick to one class, I have a tendency to play the build with the highest GR potential. It’d be nice to just to randomly pick any WD build a within a class and know that’s it’s going to be as comparable to every other WD build.
I think that type of balancing will come over the next few years.
There are a lot of sets that need reworked and they are slowly getting to those with I’d say at least moderate success (the fact most eventually need more dev time later is not good).
But, there are also a lot of sets that just haven’t had their numbers updated to keep pace with the game, and it’s that low hanging fruit that could quickly alleviate a lot of player frustration.
The big winner in terms of these rankings post necromancer release in comparison to pre-DLC were crusaders. Obviously as the data shows, necromancers during their time have the second highest percentage.
If you are a Wizard or Crusader and complain that your class never gets any love… SHUT THE HELL UP!
to be fair to those builds the majority were not fun, buggy, or impossible to do without macroing or glitching. Hell, we only get a fix to Firebirds performance by just forcing pets off
It was one of those things that happened that while i looooove LQ as a build idea, it was so amazing to play something with such huge power at the ready as a Barbarian. (Still a bummer to know that we do need stricken for any barb build that DPS’s.) I had always felt like Wastes could use a rend buff, never did I imagine they’d work Ambo like they did. chef’s kiss.
Curses!! <3
Please forgive me for an overall lack of explaining well what’s in my head. My thought process was more along the lines of buffing the damage in a more interesting way than just that big ol’ 6 piece. For example, Ambo’s caused Rend to deal it’s damage over 1 second as opposed to the long duration. HUGE damage amp and vastly more interesting than just making that big digit on the tier set bigger. This was the kind of idea I had in mind earlier and didn’t convey well.
Also another important thing is to give all classes a comparable speed farming build. Like if every class’ best speed build was capable of for example 113-115 in 3 minutes with no class having better or worse than that as their best. I am sure everyone would prefer the most efficient (or at least very close to) XP/shard farming build to be available to the class they are also building up for a push instead of constantly going back and forth with shards and bounty mats to gear up the other one. So you can also gear up with drops and just the quality of life of not having to log on with the other character every few GR’s when you reach the shard cap.
Nice dig Inspired me to go for my little stash and do a similar analysis for seasons (US region, SC only):
Season
Barbarian
Crusader
DH
Monk
Necro
WD
Wizard
1
158
114
474
176
14
64
2
220
31
359
354
9
27
3
239
83
414
100
32
132
4
207
4
8
653
92
36
5
26
609
6
33
60
266
6
3
22
8
2
11
954
7
29
87
29
233
178
444
8
31
65
28
210
161
505
9
13
106
25
51
51
754
10
17
87
155
33
126
582
11
6
10
2
8
864
45
65
12
48
321
29
86
331
34
151
13
55
377
29
90
275
12
162
14
45
452
20
63
290
12
118
15
49
439
37
65
232
13
165
16
30
82
638
62
26
27
135
17
8
49
42
25
86
87
703
18
13
41
29
9
32
27
849
19
371
439
7
153
12
7
11
20
104
341
3
44
15
480
13
21
57
42
720
25
107
47
2
22
14
76
71
13
764
18
44
23
14
10
9
4
98
2
863
24
15
14
50
349
9
11
552
Avg Of 6
9%
12%
15%
18%
7%
38%
Avg Of 7
6%
19%
12%
7%
22%
6%
27%
Overall
7%
16%
13%
12%
13%
6%
32%
Here is a picture: https://i.imgur.com/9lv9DgM.png
I somewhat modified the criteria though. I took top 1000 clears per season, because top 100 can be completely stuffed by a single OP build (S22 is a good example of this, when Necroes ruled head and shoulders above everyone else).
Like yours, this data is from solo clears only.
I also decided to exclude HC boards, mostly because some especially unpopular sets had much less than 1000 records on their boards by the end of the season (yes, Raekor, I’m looking at you).
Sure, it is affected by seasonal themes, but generally it paints more or less the same picture.
EDIT: Updated the table, as I realised I’ve made a really silly mistake by including set-specific boards (which made top clears in the last 2 seasons to be counted twice, both from Overall and from set-specific boards).
Also expanded the totals:
Avg Of 6 - before Necro DLC
Avg Of 7 - Necro period
Overall - average over the entire history
The diagram, however, is so similar to the previous data that I decided not to update it.
WDs are indisputably the worst class in terms of total solo clears across all eras. They really need some major love–a whole patch’s worth, IMO.
Barbs, Monks, and Necros could use some help, too, though I suspect that better (higher) parity between all major builds for these classes will do exactly that.
Games are weird, bro.
(in b4 someone posts tables talking about group play smdh)
Inspired me to go for my little stash and do a similar analysis for seasons (US region, SC only):