Why is HOTA the only barbarian build that reaches those kid of damage numbers? Why doesn’t double swing? Can you guys please buff other builds???!!!
You have to first understand why Hammer of the Ancient is reaching those insane numbers. Then add those factors into other damaging skills. Afterwards just delete everything a barbarian has except three skills. Fury generator, a shout, and Hammer of the Ancient. Eliminating all playstyles, options, choices, reasons to play barbarians at all.
I can tell you they REALLY want you to play double swing. Just about every piece of gear I get has double swing on it. But I just switched my charge/rend/hota build to just hota with a touch of charge to break things up, and yeah, everything dies much faster.
HoTA scales off Fury. This is what makes it so absurd. Unbridled Rage is a force multiplier. You can gain every benefit other builds have and then some. You can guarantee your hits with Overpower and Crit on Vulnerable targets while Berserking almost every single time you use HoTA. If Earthstriker required gaining Key Passive of WA, it would help.
DPS in D4 means jack squat when Burst Damage is so insanely high. HoTA was built as a Burst Damage Skill. So either redesign every single Skill or HoTA gets nerfed into oblivion. Not really a good option here. They just had no clue how to design a game and it shows.
D4 being in development for a long time didn’t help either. It looks like there’s multiple design team over the years. Each with their own design philosophy. Though we’re going into Ultimate damage territory here.
They’ll never mega nerf anything ever again after the uproar that happened when they mega nerfed almost everything pre-season 1.
They can still mega nerf the game. Only problem is nerf doesn’t change the game state. We’re still going to be the exact same power creep just takes a longer time to get there.
I mean… Kick can utterly demolish the numbers Hota can get, there is just one glaring issue with it. It’s primarily single target or at least the effectiveness of this particular “Kick Nuke” is single target so no AOE for those how get this mixed up. It can’t be spammed more than twice and even that second kick requires you to build HEAVILY into resource generation and anything that gives you Fury as fast as possible, since it uses the entire Fury pool to do the damage. Last but not least, gaining Overpower and/or Criticals for kick is rather painful. Getting Overpower for Kick is a matter of three things. The Dominate rune, granting OP every 30 seconds. Bonebreaker Node, granting OP every 12 seconds. And the Earthstriker Aspect, which grants OP after swapping weapons 8 times. Out of these three, Earthstriker is the most reliable since you can prime the enemies before hand with steel grasp for example, since it is the easiest to pop on both vulnerable and berserk with a single button press. Then do whatever two skills you have that get you to that 8 weapon swap stacks. Kick and poof, one Overpowered Kick.
Criticals on the otherhand… They are limited to literally what you can roll on your gear. There is nothing that can help Kick crit otehr than the base rolls and Dexterity. So the best you can do is roughly around 55-60% Crit chance. Which is fine I would say, normally. But Kick is a one hit and done skill. It has Charges and cooldown, AND consumes all your fury. So taking 60% as our best case scenario. 40% of the time on a single hit ability is a HORRIBLE loss.
So even though Kick has VASTLY more damage potential than Hota, Hota is able to be constant. It is able to be AOE. It can be used more than twice. It can easily crit and op.
I personally HATE Hota with a passion. But that’s what I end up playing. I working on getting the pieces I want of an upheaval build atm since you can get a stupidly high 29/5 ranks in upheaval this season but they had to make Malphas stupidly annoying to get tuning stones from. It’s not difficult in the slightests, but its just time consuming. Which is the whole point I guess from a devs perspective… sigh sorry devs… from the High up corporate company’s perspective. Since the longer you play the higher the chance of you buying something in their in-game shop. Eventually, if they put something in there that appeals.
But yeah, Im seriously looking forward to S4 and the itemization changes.
kick has a pretty reliable cone effect once you get used to it
Sadly it doesn’t matter. Also I think the cone effect you speak of is removed if you use Power Kick. Which is what makes Kick far stronger than Hota. Or at least I think its removed. Reguardless everythign else still stands as the issues Kick has vs Hota.
im a brawlin fool so hota isn’t even on the menu for me
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Thats good, means you have more fun. A lot of us are fixed in place though. I’m glad you’re having fun though.
Kick and Power Kick isn’t single target. Use Ancient Oath to pull enemies then Kick them with Brawler aspect. The major issue is the cooldown. 10 seconds. Really bad for boss hunting.
Not anymore, or at least not anymore once the patch drops.
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I smell a Magnus Opus nerf pretty soon. Not because the unique is good. But because it’s popular.
eh… why though. With what we have in the PTR, why would someone use RMO over 2 tempering options. This is something the devs didn’t fully think about. Tempering is a bit too strong for some affixes making certain uniques less valuable to worthless.
Dust Devils being the example. RMO vs Tempering. Tempering wins hands down. The Dust Devil affix for damage on size increase is multiplicative and then you can get Damage while zerking which is also multiplicative. RMO doesn’t give you enough to make up for it and since you wouldn’t be using RMO you can avoid a LOT of paragon nodes required to make RMO shine, spending them elsewhere.
Nope RMO should be getting a buff if they want to make it relevant at all again. Unless if they tweak the numbers you get from tempering but even then… thats a LOT they need to remove to make RMO relevant.
I suppose you could use RMO with Rend…
Because Double-Swing is Meta yeah probably.
But it doesn’t scale Dust Devil damage right? Idk did anyone actually do a pure DS build with new unique gloves that don’t have crit chance…the one stat a DS build needs.
I actually don’t get how this was approved. Like the Core skill increased size doesn’t also increase damage dealt. Did they really think Dust Devils needed more damage in their testing?
Well considering it didnt do jack prior to getting tempering… yes. It kinda did need a boost. Just I doubt it needed this much of a boost.