Suggestions for how to improve the new Nat's set

PTR Feedback
1

After blasting all the way to GR 150 (with potions) and GR 140s (without potions) and GR 130s (with no S2), I have some thoughts on how Nat’s could be improved without throwing away the current theme the devs came up with.

Here’s what’s on the PTR, followed by my suggested change:

Chanon Bolter:

Your Spike Traps lure enemies to them and deal 150-200% increased damage. Enemies may be taunted once every 10 seconds.

New: Increases the blast radius of your Spike Traps by 50% and your Spike Traps deal 150-200% increased damage.

Reasoning: The taunt effect is dumb. The auto summoned traps can’t proc AOE.

The Demon’s Demise:

Each blast from Spike Trap will damage all enemies again after 1 second and deals 150-200% increased damage.

New: Each blast from Spike Trap hits enemies twice and deals 150-200% increased damage.

Reasoning: The 1 second delay is too clunky. We want to be able to time things precisely. (However, if the 1 second delay effectively extends the N6 bonus, then leave it.)

Trag’oul Coils:

Spike Traps gain the Scatter Rune, are deployed twice as fast, and deal 150-200% increased damage.

New: This is actually fine, just need to fix the bug where the Scatter Rune semi-overrides the selected rune on the skill bar.

Natalya’s Vengeance (2-piece bonus):

Hitting an enemy summons a Spike Trap if it is on your action bar. Each Spike Trap detonation restores 1 Discipline.

New: Laying Caltrops summons a Spike Trap if it is on your action bar. Each Spike Trap detonation restores 1 Discipline.

Reasoning: “Hitting” an enemy is too generic and too unspecific. Also, it’s a traps build, let’s have traps synergy. Also, now your discipline management matters.

Natalya’s Vengeance (4-piece bonus):

Laying a Spike Trap grants 60% damage reduction. The duration of this bonus is always equal to the number of already laid traps in seconds.

New: Each Spike Trap grants 8% damage reduction, and your Spike Traps deal 100% more damage for each second they spend arming, up to a maximum of 8 seconds.

Reasoning: The whole duration counting already laid Spike Traps thing is goofy and doesn’t really do anything. This reverses the logic. While your traps are out, you gain damage reduction. You lose it as soon as you use the traps to blow up the enemies. More player awareness required.

Natalya’s Vengeance (6-piece bonus):

Spike Traps deal 10,000% increased damage, and each consecutive blast from the detonation chain reaction will deal 10% more damage than the previous blast.

New: Spike Traps deal 10,000% increased damage, and each consecutive blast from the detonation chain reaction will deal 20% more damage than the previous blast.

Reasoning: In its current form, it’s almost impossible to get the full effect because new Spike Traps override the olds ones too quickly. But with the delay proposed for the 4 piece bonus, you would be getting far fewer Spike Traps detonations than you do currently. The effect is cool and the proposed increase in damage should compensate for the time delay to get the full effect.

Additional note: The Spike Traps Lightning Rod rune needs to be updated. It currently benefits more than it should from the Trag’oul Coils and it detonates when an enemy approaches rather than when the player chooses to trigger it. The arcing lightning is really cool, though, so be gentle.

2

Nope. This single change would kill the build.

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3

You mean it would kill the spin to win version of the build. A build that we don’t need.

Using Caltrops this way would allow you to make choices. You can still manually cast Spike Traps as needed, but you can also use discipline to lay them, bypassing the cooldown on the charge, and you get the bonus effect of the Caltrops to help position the mobs or protect you. You can’t spam Smoke Screen thoughtlessly, because you would need to maintain enough discipline for rapid deploy of Spike Traps. If you read the rest of my proposal, you’d note that you would want them to sit for a few seconds.

It wouldn’t kill “the build” it would make “the build” make more sense. At least in my opinion.

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4

That YOU don’t need. Fixed for ya. I rather enjoy it. You do know that there are other things you can use besides strafe right? I rather enjoy spin to win style gameplay.

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5

Nope. I meant what I said. WE already have GoD, which looks and feels exactly the same as the current Nat’s build. If they’re going to do a rework around Spike Traps, then WE need an actual Spike Traps build, not a Strafe build.

You rather enjoy it? Cool. Throw on your GoD gear. It will taste exactly the same.

Not for the current version of Nat’s. Strafe at the right attack speed creates and detonates traps so fast that nothing else can even come close. Have you actually tried “other things”? I have. And they suck.

6

I cleared a 140 without strafe while using nats…other things work. Sounds like a skill issue.

7

Just like Slamboney implied, Spike Traps being played automatically when hitting enemies is rather fun and enjoyable.

If your primary intent with your proposal is to not have another Strafe build emerging, then I would say that removing the auto-placing mechanic of the set is nit the best way of doing it.

You could specific a number of skills that can proc Spike Traps being placed and Strafe not being one of them if your primary intent is prevent another Strafe build, but removing the Spike Trap proc completely is removing the primary thing makes the current version of the set actually interesting.

There are other ways that can this issue can be solved with without removing the Spike Trap procs.

8

It’s not about Strafe. I find the idea of Spike Traps coming from on hit to be the main problem with the current version. The player completely forgets about Spike Traps and instead focuses on just hitting the enemies as fast as possible. This makes it a build about some other ability which just happens to include traps. Currently, that’s Strafe, but it doesn’t matter what it is. In a traps build you should be thinking about your traps, where to place them, when to activate them, and then you should get a massive payoff. As is, there is little thought involved and you don’t even need to use the Spike Traps skill.

9

Id prefer something game changing. Instead of spamming a single ability, something like a careful setup and burst would be a welcome change.

Nat 2: RoV has a 15 second cooldown. Enemies hit by RoV are Marked For Death. You can now cross-wield a hand xbow and dagger.

Nat 4: Smoke Screen gains the Displacement rune. Remain 50% invisible while Smoke Screen is on cooldown while cross-wielding.

Nat 6: FoK and Impale deal 25000% damage to enemies effected by Marked for Death and you regenerate 8 Discipline per second while cross-wielding.

Shoulders: Blademaster Spikes. Lord Greenstone’s Fan and Karlei’s Point now have an additional (15-25) maximum and minimum stacks and gains stacks twice as fast. Impale now has a 15 second cooldown.

Ring: Natalya’s Reflection. Basic attacks on enemies deal no damage but generate 3 Hatred and Charms enemies, luring them to your location. This effect lasts 8 seconds.

Offhand: Lord Greenstones Fan. Every second, gain (300-400%) increased damage for your next Fan of Knives. This effect stacks (25-30) times. Fan of Knives gains the Pinpoint Accuracy rune.

Chain smoke, lure into a pile, RoV->FoK, Impale follow-p for single target of Boss 1-2 punch. Can use Hunters Wrath and Wraps of Clarity with the ring. Discourages Vengeance and F+R and Stricken. Prioritizes Nats Reflection, Elusive and Squirts. And the Cube is open for outside the weapon slot. Impale rune would prioritize the rune that does not work with Shadow set. Sounds fun to me. Sneak and Spike! :smirk:

10

If that is the main issue, then I would suggest to combine both features.

  • Resource Spending Arrow Skills deploy Spike Traps
  • each manually placed Spike Trap increase the Damage of Spike Traps and Arrow Skills by xxxx% for xx Seconds - stacking up to x Times.
  • each manually placed Spike Trap reduces your Damage Taken by xx% for x Seconds, stacking up to x Times.

You also can make additional conditions, like that Spike Traps auto-deployed by Resource Spending Arrow Skills are separate from manually placed Spike Traps, so each of them have their own counter (but they both benefit from increased Spike Trap damage), and Arrow Skills only detonate Spike Traps that were auto-deployed by Arrow Skills…

… you get the idea.

That way you still had to manually place your Spike Traps.

You can go even further and let Enemies that were hit by your manually deployed Spike Traps take increased Damage from both your auto-deployed Spike Traps and your manually deployed Spike Traps, etc.

My reasoning behind keeping the auto-deploy feature is that they are simply fun to use / fun to proc and I assume most people would agree with that, but I also see your point, so if you wanna be successful with your proposal, I would suggest to you to advocate for combining the two features, because removing the auto-deploy / auto-proc of the Spike Traps will not be received well by most of the community.

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11

I’m not a frequent DH player. I do like the Marauder’s set, the sentry towers were always my favorite part of the DH skill set. But something about the new Nat’s set has me scratching my head. It’s designed to use a hand crossbow – it’s one of the items in the set – yet almost every top build on the PTR is running with a weapon for impale. And not only that but many of them aren’t even slotting Impale as a skill. To me this indicates something has gone wonky in the meta for the set.

12

You are correct. The change to Shadow 2 noted in the patch notes meant to address folks mixing S2 with N6 is bugged and Shadow 2 still has the global bonus to all skills if a melee weapon is equipped.

It gives the set a 60X bonus to damage and was why they had to also a fix a bug a while back that allowed you to wield a crossbow and melee weapon in each hand which resulted in a Fan of Knives build that dominated the DH boards for a while.

13

Natalya’s should have embraced the cross-wield mechanic!

14

I get the fun aspect of it, but I feel like it’s cheating and less rewarding. I think it will get old fast, at least for anyone who isn’t just playing it to do a million speed GRs.

Of all the ways to proc the traps, the most fun way I’ve found is to use Shuriken Cloud. You drop the traps by running through the enemies and then detonate them by refreshing the cloud. It’s not the most damage, not even close, but it feels more rewarding because you aren’t caught in this perpetual drop/detonate 5 times per second cycle.

15

That’s a pretty neat idea, Cavendar. Too bad the PTR is closing soon or I’d test that out for myself.

Might detonate with a fire Fan of Knives though just because I like the idea of mixing Shuriken Cloud, Fan of Knives and Spike Traps.

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16

Did anyone ever test out Hellcat with Nat’s? There was talk before the PTR but I haven’t seen any findings on it.

17

Here is the problem. If you have enemies that behave, you know where they are, and you can take a moment to plan a strategy and place your traps tactically, then great, but we don’t have that kind of game.

We have a game that as soon as you enter the area you are immediately swarmed by every enemy there, you don’t know how many there are going to be or where they’re coming from, and you certainly don’t have a moment to plan any kind of strategy other than to get as many traps on the ground as possible before you’re overwhelmed.

Strafe works pretty good for that.

Additionally, your scheme of using one specific skill to trigger another means that we always have to have those two skills on our action bar, and while the same holds true for Strafe and Spike Trap, with Caltrops and Spike Trap, the combination of those two become your only damaging combination with that set. That means that all other weapons and skills are completely useless given the level of damage but needed to kill an enemy at GR140, and now you have a single build, like the Strafe build, except which is slow and clunky to play, where the player is constantly frustrated by not having the environment to play a tactical game, and has exactly 0 other options for laying traps.

Your Shuriken Cloud build would be dead as well.

Players will always gravitate toward the most efficient build and play style; witness the 1000 GR150 players using a bugged set. That set is not going to make it live, and they will have to learn to play it all over again.

I played the full six piece set, no melee weapon, and gave up the ring cube slot for the RoRG so I could equip Blackthorne’s pants, maximize elemental damage, 10 pretty comfortably completed GR 130 in about eight minutes. And if the PTR is still going on when I finish writing this, I’ll probably reach GR135 with the basic Nat’s Strafe build.

It’s fun to play, it’s reasonably fast, it’s very powerful, (even more so with the Altar), and I don’t mind losing the old “Sticky Bomb” effect of the damage per additional explosion.

18

Please, no more Rain of Vengeance builds…i’ts been done to death, doesn’t work, and isn’t fun.

19

I would speculate that the reason for why RoV builds “did not work” (as you call it) in the past was because several factors came together, like

  • the Natalya set being a general buff to all Skills, which makes balancing harder
  • the fact that Strafe was the best option for combining it with RoV in the Natalya set combined with the fact that having to cast RoV interrupts Strafe and Movement feeling annoying for Strafe builds
  • and eventually also because the buff window of 10 Seconds for getting the Damage and the Defense Buff from RoV being too short, so you had to cast RoV too frequently.

Theoretically you could make a RoV set that does not come with any of these annoying conditions, like for example (coming up with something on fly) increasing the duration of the Buff Window to 20-30 Seconds (or more) and only letting it apply to very specific skills, rather than all.

Since most builds would have a good amount of CDR anyways, a 20 seconds duration should be more than enough.

20

Thematically, I was after a Sneaky build that then has a reveal with RoV (AoE bow skill) as the opening attack to mass-Mark, then FoK (AoE dagger skill) Impale (Single Target dagger skill) for the finisher… Technically, with my Nat6 wording, you could skip RoV and work with Calamity.

I was more geeked out about harnessing the basic attack as a charm/lure with the ring…:rofl: