Just did 115 in 12:48 Chakram N6/M4. Not sure how it is for you guys from US. But for me PTR is lagging. Chakram is shining in maps where you can pull loads of monsters. That is exactly when I was laging. Had to press Rain of Vengeance few times to cast it. Ugly play from my side. I did not play any variant of N6/M4 for 6 months or so, when I checked it for the first time on PTR. Missed few RCR rolls on items.
I have a good feeling of Chakram potential now.
I used Striken for Boss becase singe target damage was ugly. Juggernauts took forever. I think that this build can do ~118 @5K Paragons.
If you get elites and mosters who will follow you to the next spot fast maybe even higher GR.
I too have my own disabilities (physical, attention span, etc), but I think playing a game too much is not healthy for you. I deliberately choose to play less these days. A lot of my friends get 3k paragons plus per season directly from constant group play.
One of my old and very simple requests has been to actually buff the damage of DH weapons by 30% or so. The old argument against had always been that we had quivers offering their supplemental DEX, but with most other classes having their own off-hands or a means to overcome the drawback of two-handers, I can’t help but feel this is just one of those contributing factors. It certainly won’t be the solution to all the class’ ills, but it may prevent some set/item bonuses from getting stupid high(er).
Going back to the question of damage resistance for our class or more specifically how to buff it.
The thing about just buffing Elusive Ring does fix the problem for some of our sets and those builds like LoD Rapid Fire and such, it doesn’t help other builds because it can’t be worked into those builds.
What I mean is, if they buff Elusive Ring to say 70 or 80%, it think that would help our Shadow and LoD Rapid Fire immensely. But it would leave UE out in the cold.
UE has another defense item that could be buffed, the Wraps of Clarity, so you might say, “Well them buff them both”. The problem with that is then any build with N6 somewhere in it, could work both items in. And suddenly it’s toughness would probably outstrip even that of full defensively built Crusader, I think. Like I said, I’m not all that good with math.
But anyway, N6 builds might become meta because of that toughness but it would probably be as zdps role if we had more party buffs built into our class. And even if it wasn’t in that role, N6 builds would become end all be all of our class because despite it’s reliance on Rain of Vengeance, which in my opinion make the set really clunky, it would just be better than everything else hands down.
Now maybe this is just my bias speaking, but I wouldn’t like that all. I hate that set with a passion just because Rain of Vengeance is just a tack on the build to produce damage for the skills you really want to use. It does absolutely no damage itself, relatively speaking and seems to me be something that just to make the set clunky and for no other reason.
So I still think the best solution is to just give the DH the 30% natural damage resistance melee classes get because it would effect all our builds the same way. One or the other build wouldn’t be any tougher, comparatively to each other speaking, than they are now but all them would get a boost without messing with intra class balance.
That’s just my opinion. And I hope I was able to make some kind of sense.
Remember the free RoRG theme (Grandeur) and how it allowed DH’s to equip one more item in the cube such as Frostburn. (Cold skills deal 20% increased damage and have a 50% chance to Freeze enemies). Thats the biggest problem DH has. You have DH’s who have maxed the efficiency of the builds with no room to be flexible with a multiplier or added effect with defense or damage. How can you expect DH player to contribute fresh ideas if all you got are these best builds with no way to go up.
Exactly. Our builds are our builds because we’ve maxed them out with as good as balance between defense and damage as we can get and our builds are still too weak defensively. We’re weak damage wise too, but we’ve basically got no room to maneuver.
It’s made worse that Dawn is a necessity in nearly all or all our builds.
Our cube is completely taken up because of that. We can’t throw a defensive item like Fortress Balista because even in builds that allow you to wield Dawn they require another damage dealing item like Yang’s, DML, Augustine’s, or Manticore.
Our armor slot is taken up with Gunes or Aquila and now our ring slot is taken up with RoRG in most builds thanks to the re-work of Aughild’s and Captain Crimson’s.
From what I saw last night on PTR while I was playing Chakram, it would be nice if we could use Impale and buffed Chakram at a same time. It would be nice sinergy. If we could use buffed Sword in cube instead of Dawn maybe?
I went over dmkt’s buff proposal for Chakram. I like idea of Primary skills package buff. But I think we need whole set for it.
I did suggest using FOK weapon with Chakram before (because FOK is not used right now) but now I think it would not work because both “skills” are AOE oriented and not not great at single target damage.
First off, I’d just like to say that whatever level of Paragon or gear Blizz decides to “balance around”, getting more Paragon is always going to be a benefit, and higher Paragon players are always going to clear higher, on average.
With that out of the way, dmkt, I like your assessment of builds, damage, and toughness here, but I wanted to discuss a little further.
Assuming you’ve got a pretty regular setup of decent gear + augments, your armor at various levels of paragon is likely to be:
2500 P: around 34500 armor (92.01% DR)
5000 P: around 50000 armor (94.36% DR)
10000 P: around 81500 armor (96.45% DR)
Going from 2500 to 5000 gives you +15 GRs of toughness, and going from 5000 to 10000 gives you another +20 GRs of toughness. As you’ve noted, all this extra toughness lets you discard certain defensive options in favor of offensive options. So, not only does going from 2500 P to 10000 P give you about +6 GRs from Mainstat alone, it also lets you add in things like CoE or Cap’n C, each of which give another +2-3 GRs.
As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to alleviate this effect.
You set the balance so that even a very low paragon player (say P1000) doesn’t need to equip the defensive options.
You set the balance so even the very high paragon player (say P10000) must take the defensive option.
And between these two, only option 1 is any good, because with option 2, the P10000 player will find it challenging, but possible, to survive while wearing the defensive gear. But the P1000 player will have 35 GRs less toughness, even with the defensive gear, and will constantly die.
So, that leaves option 1, which basically amounts to just increasing the DR on some piece of gear that is 100% required for the build (like increasing the DR on the set bonus).
On a related note, I was thinking about the whole “fight at range vs facetank” conversation, and this discussion of toughness definitely ties into that.
If you want a DH to be fighting at range, and try to make this happen simply through a “damage taken incentive” (i.e. you make the character squishy, so they need to stay at distance from enemies), then that might be balanced correctly for a P1000 character. But a P10000 character, because of the enormous growth of toughness through added paragon, will simply facetank the same damage. Or, if you do it the other way around, the P10000 player will do ok fighting at range, but the P1000 player will get killed by every single mortar hit or goatman spear.
So, if you want the class fantasy of “fighting at range” to be fulfilled, that really needs to come in the form of more DH-specific items along the line of Zei’s or Steady Aim, that force you to remain at distance, whatever your level of Paragon, to actually get the damage bonus. Let’s call it a “damage dealt incentive”.
Because basing it around toughness is essentially impossible.
For instance, maybe a ring that sort of combines the mechanics of Steady Aim and Zei, that gives you +100% damage if no enemies are within 10 yards, +200% if no enemies are within 20 yards, and +300% if no enemies are within 30 yards. Just spitballing here.
If they had it to do over, I think the best solution would be to make paragon leveling exponential, making it much harder to amass a huge horde of paragon levels.
We have arrived at the same conclusion, for ranged builds we need a stronger version of Zeis as a legendary effect:
I specified this in post #15
I had cited about a half dozen other ways to center legendary item creation on distance in post #166:
In the DH survey I remember most players didn’t want to prioritize sweeping legendary items to fix underperforming builds —
It will be tough to please everyone with just one new item, a few might be needed to satisfy these build types:
2 ranged builds (N6M4 Rockers and UE6 Multi),
2 close ranged builds (Impale, Rapid Fire)
2 medium range builds/variants (M6 Cluster Bombs and N6M4 LfB)
There are so many good options for new items. We could also go the CC approach. The knockback effect is a great choice to work around as it supports ranged play, but is also part of Impale (vault/Impact), N6M4 (RoV), Multishot (Suppression). Stun is also a good choice too as it is on some unused runes. Immobilize is on Spike Trap and Caltrops. All of those effects are compatible with group play standards.
We just don’t want a situation where every build wears the same item.
That would probably have to be built kind of along the model of CL Necro, which applies a ton of CC, and a ton of damage, all at once, once in a while. Otherwise you end up with CC immunity and no damage. Knockback would probably be the hardest to utilize as-is, since each applies 40% CC resist instantly.
Hmm, let’s see: so the “+range damage item” needs to buff damage when you’re at range, but only for ranged skills… I guess it could work only on “requires bow” skills, but this leaves out Sentry, Chakram, etc. You could call out a whole list of skills by name (like with Mantle of Channeling) but that would be a hell of a long list. Awkward.
The “+close-up damage item” could, I suppose, work in the opposite way (i.e. “if there is at least 1 enemy within 20 yards you deal +xxx% damage”). And this, too would have to only work on specific skills. Otherwise the ranged build might incorporate it, having decided it’s easier to just facetank.
Good point. Only shadow can get close, but then it can’t handle common monsters like a spinning Dervish, or molten giant, you die easily. Range DH lacks defense. if your team moves on you just die.
Enemies 25 yards or further take 300% more damage when stunned, immobilized or knocked backed.
You’re playing this like Heaven’s Fury crusader, around the CoE cycle and/or some cool down.
The first condition 25 yards+ is only if you don’t want melee builds to solo with it, no matter what, some zDPS spec is going to be helping with a CC condition in 4-man push
Most people who push are CC immunity conscious: the barbs know better than to spam rage flip, or ground stomp, the zMonk who knows not to spam trident, most RGKs are familiar: corpse lance, heaven’s fury, etc.
DH does not have this worry at all, only ensuring slow is procced for Cull of the Weak / BotT.
For the Impalers/Rapid FireUE6 Grenaders, etc. I’d do something completely different, incompatible with the above. Life per Kill is a really good secondary for melee builds.
Take 10% less damage for every 10,000 points of Life Per Kill you wear. Enemies within 15 yards take 0.75% more damage for every 1,000 points of Life per Hit.
I believe your can only wear like 60k life per kill and I’ve seen 200k life per hit on my S6 Impale. The build becomes harder to gear, but more deadly when you have the right stuff. Think trifecta rings with LpK, or trifecta Traveler’s Pledge w/ LpK.
I assume you’d have to make it something like “while stunned or immobilized, or for X seconds after a knockback”. Right?
Question: do you think this effect, with this 300% figure, would actually work for something like UE multishot? If you’re going to “burst-ify” the damage, and need to kill the mobs within a short timespan, I’m not sure 300% is enough.
Question 2: what’s the best way for a DH to apply a mass stun/immobilize/knockback to a large group of enemies, at a specific moment?