Warning: Estimated read time 10 minutes. According to some website.
I’m a WD main by heart. It’s what I love despite it’s lack of success overall. Each update with WD changes always excite me but I rarely use the PTR. I preferred experimentation in the “real” game. But this time, I hope to provide feedback to inspire some change. Speaking as a 99% solo player, forgive my ignorance to any unseen multiplayer problems.
I don’t want to get too wordy, but I have a lot to share. Do I need to flex credentials to be taken seriously? I’ve noticed some gatekeeping to the feedback and I hope everyone takes what I have to say with a critical mind and how they agree or disagree with how this affects the game. I have a background in programming and I’m very detail oriented. In D3, I have over 800 hours on the WD but usually played casually. I find my fun in theory crafting and solving the “puzzle” of making a build. However. I’m no stranger to high GR pushing. This last season (24) I’m rank 24 for hardcore monk (Not WD, but giving the monk a pet build really got my attention). With that out of the way, I’ll start with how I’ve noticed the new Arachyr set works with other things and finish with suggestions and ideas. I’ve been reading these forums and have agreed with other suggestions around here but my post will be a lot to absorb as-is.
Brood of Araneae
- The stacks work in the same way Gruesome Feast works in that each applied stack lasts for 5 seconds, independently. As such, additional applied stacks do not refresh the duration of any previously applied stacks.
- The Grin Reaper’s corpse spiders benefit from and apply stacks
2pc - Spiders now have health and attack twice as fast.
Confirmed in my testing:
- This does not change how spiders benefit from pet damage and the spider queen remains the only rune that does.
- The toughness of all the spider runes are affected by the enforcer legendary gem’s rank 25 bonus and take 90% reduced damage.
- The Grin Reapers can cast all corpse spider runes, however, the Grin Reaper’s spiders neither have health, nor attack twice as fast.
- The spider queen rune’s duration is reduced to (edit:) about 5 seconds. Gear stats and paragon don’t appear to affect the duration any further. I did not check if total damage per queen was changed because it was difficult to test due to my target dummy (a slow moving zombie) wandering around just enough to make damage ticks inconsistent.
- What I don’t know: If “attack twice as fast” means “same damage in half the time” or “twice the damage per thrown jar”. I do visually see the spider “bite” twice as fast, but due to their random-ish nature of “how” they bite it’s hard to eyeball it. I might record some clips to slow down the frames and count out the damage, but maybe someone else here knows.
6pc
- Appears to work as intended.
- The Grin Reaper’s corpse spiders benefit from the damage bonus.
Feedback
I actually really enjoy this new set and I intend to main Arachyr for season 25 currently. At first glance the new bonuses seemed strong (The belt in particular) but in practice, even with the season 25 theme, it falls off very quickly. These spiders absolutely shred low GR’s (up to 90 ish). This includes the season theme, but not using the currently suspected bugged traits (No 25 yard on kill damage or ring of devastation). Things start to fall apart as soon as enemies have enough health to withstand more than a couple jars of spiders. Many have mentioned that the area damage of the build is lacking. Even rolling area damage on gear and maxing it’s effectiveness with pihranado doesn’t help much. I believe this is mostly due to the AI of the spiders which has a waterfall effect with other “issues”.
The AI of the spiders.
I’ve noticed that the spiders tend to “spread out”. I consistently watch spiders land on a target that I threw the jar at and then walk over to a different target; sometimes more than 10-20 yards from the impact point. I first noticed this fighting an elite on a staircase and some of the spiders ran down the stairs to other enemies when I threw the jar at the elite at the top of the stairs. To erase further suspicion, the “other enemy” was further away from me, the player, so it couldn’t be based on my positioning.
Now, because of this, other “issues” with the spiders become more painfully apparent. I put “issues” in quotes, because I don’t believe they would be as bad of issues if the AI was better. These other issues are:
- The health of the spiders. Actually seems quite low and they are quite fragile without enforcer. Enemies WILL take the time to turn and attack a spider. Especially if you pop into spirit walk and they become the only other option. The amount of enemies we face can rival the amount of spiders you can put out even with high attack speeds. An enemy seems to be able to 1 shot a spider quite easily, quickly culling your horde. Not to mention elite affixes with aoe ground effects. Your spiders don’t stand much of a chance. I blame the AI for exacerbating this problem. Since your spiders will prefer targets that are not being bitten by another spider already, they will take the time to move around, further increasing the time they are in harms way without doing their damage AND they have a max duration already. Walking time also means less uptime as well. I’ll say that Plagued affix was the hardest to deal with if it can’t be dealt with quickly.
- The brood belt is not stricken. Again, this is fine, but the AI makes it bad. Since your spiders are spreading out, the 5 seconds per bite is rarely stacking up more than a few times on an enemy in larger pulls.
I’ve combated this with a few approaches.
- Enforcer damage reduction allows the spiders to live longer to more consistently put out the damage they were intended to do
- Attack speed stacking. More spiders, more cannon fodder. And even when they spread out, this increases the spider to enemy ratio.
- The Grin Reaper. As stated above, their spiders benefit from the arachyr damage bonus, but their spiders don’t have health (and don’t attack twice as fast). So with two extra spider throwers you have more spiders (like attack speed), and the spiders no longer die before they can do their work.
Side note: Grin Reaper’s spider queens seem “OK”. I noticed they can have up to 2 queens each, for a total of 4 active spider queens. Further jar throwing from them just replaces the oldest after this. What really nails the coffin here is that when you throw YOUR queen out, their queens die. All of them. Micromanaging this is not worth it. A single use case might be procing the Grin Reapers and then sitting in Spirit walk with Shukarani’s Triumph, until you need to proc them again. However, by using spider queen you no longer benefit from Depth diggers, a big damage loss.
I must say, this “feels bad”. Ignoring Grin Reaper, if you use this set at a high level, your spiders are bound to die before doing most of their damage unless you use a legendary gem slot where they only benefit from rank 25 and further ranks do not help the build at all. WITH Grin Reapers, it’s “better”, but introduces a new issue. You cannot use The Grin Reaper, Mask of Jeram, Tasker and Theo, and Depth Diggers without losing the 6pc bonus. This is a problem solely because Legacy of Dreams exists. Where you CAN use all of these items together. First, your own spiders are almost useless at this point. Second, this also “feels bad” to put the set back in the stash because the “no set” set is better than the actual set that was meant for it (Seeing bombardment crusader similarities here). All in all, the set is lacking, but I think it can be helped.
I can’t leave without some suggestions.
- I don’t think changing the AI is a reasonable ask. I would love it if the spiders would prioritize enemies closest to the jar’s impact point. This is likely too heavy of a lift. Further, this is the classic “pet build” issue. It’s what contributed to Zuni being so bad before Dagger of Darts was a thing. A thing that let you focus target your pets in a sense.
- Maybe, spiders prioritize enemies on the web from spider queens grasp?
- Don’t make the spiders have health. This feels like it was meant to do exactly what it’s doing: cause a player to play in such a way to keep them alive or to use them as body blockers. (They seem to take projectile hits for you, like a fetish would) It just feels bad if they also don’t benefit from pet damage. If anything, let them stand more of a chance. Their AI won’t let a player more skillfully place them for survival with any significance where it’s a problem (AOE affix’s).
- Alternative to the previous point: Corpse Spiders now spawns with health, attacks twice as fast, and are now treated as pets. This would be amazing. Enforcer would make sense again (a “pet” gem should apply both effects to “pets” and not just one). Plus, it opens up the possibility of dropping depth diggers for mask of jeram, allowing players to make use of all of the spider runes and several other synergies with damage types and effects.
- Change the 2pc attack speed. Preferably, include more creatures than just spiders. As it stands, that might not change much without changes to other items as well (like Renho). If it must stay corpse spiders for now, why not increase the “cast speed” of corpse spiders by 100% instead of them attacking twice as fast? Other classes have items to increase the attack speed of primary skills, this would be the same. This would produce more spiders to offset the bad AI and function the “same”. (Unless attack twice as fast means “same damage, half the time”. In that case this would be a buff, but still needed in it’s current state) If spider health remains this still helps for situations outside of Elite AOE affix’s. It also prevents confusion with how the bonus works.
- Allow the “web on impact” from spider queen’s grasp to provide the damage reduction of the 4pc bonus. Let’s face it, unless you are smack dab in the middle of the action (which is the best place to be for now) getting the damage reduction from the queens webs is frustrating.
- Alternative to the previous point, make the spider queen from the 4pc move much much faster. If I need to be at range to avoid dying to an elite affix I’ll throw a jar at my new location, the queen has to run, no, jog, from the middle of the action to me and if I don’t wait for it to get to me before resuming “dps”, she will turn around and go back to the action.
- Another alt for 4pc, put it back to what it was. I liked Mr.Toad and the “Creature” set would arguably be more interesting by making use of more creatures than just one at a time.
In summary, unless we can get a way to make spiders prioritize a target, we need a way to help with their spread. Not too much, because it makes sense to be it’s weakness, just as other AOE builds struggle with Rift Guardian kills. Just enough to make it more viable as 90% of encounters are AOE fests.
Thanks for reading.