I was hoping that the new patch would return to making melee builds useful for something, but instead incredibly they buffed the ranged builds that were already tier S, without making any substantial changes to Close Combat, leaving twisting blade too far behind.
I was hoping to read something about the many bugs that affect Poison Imbuement making important interactions with Comdenation or Weapon Mastery useless but I haven’t read anything about this either. What a disappointment, it seems like they force you to rotate builds by playing the ones that favor them and not the ones you prefer to do : (
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Flurry is getting a 10% damage buff along with some buffs in its advanced nodes. Not sure you can say that there’s no melee buffs.
For poison imbuement, weapon mastery and condemntation won’t be made to boost poison imbuement damage because they are not supposed to. I appreciate that this might not be very intuitive, but those things only boost the damage of your core or imbued skills, not the imbuement effects. It’s like this with shadow imbuement as well.
But I agree, close quarters combat should be brought back up a bit, and I find the balance updates rather tone deaf in nerfing precision (we go from 4 to 3 basic attack rotations, but will lose between 25-40% damage) but not nerfing barbs and sorcs.
But barrage’s aspect is quite OP now, there’s some encouragement.
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I’m disappointed that they havent addressed Preparation or Inner Sight in any way, Rogue needs new aspects to support those play styles. Flurry likely need a bigger buff but the buffs on the advanced nodes maybe are bigger than I think.
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100% looks like after this patch ranged will still be king, even with Flurry buffs Precision is king, and since they fixed the melee/xbox bug, Skyhunter is back in BIS for ranged.
First basic attack gives you 2 stacks because it crits automatically, and you want hits anyway for aspect bonuses. So yea I think it will actually be a huge buff to Ranged builds.
But melee even with buffs is left behind, honestly should just make precision work with any core skill not just marksmen skills at this point since all the other Passives dont come as close.
Skyhunter not quite BIS at least in terms of raw damage potential. Skyhunter does have some QOL and with the forceful arrow/heartseeker speed buffs it might work out to be more practical.
With only needing 4 stacks now, only one of the 3 basics needs to crit, which if you’re using a crossbow you’d want to be using puncture, which throws 3 projectiles which only one of those needs to crit. I doubt people would want to use forceful arrow or heartseeker with a crossbow anyway but can be wrong here until this gets play tested.
I think just unwind some of that CQC nerf should do the trick.
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Thank you for your reply, it would be very valuable for me (and I think for others) if you could explain better what you mean.
As I imagine you already know Wudijo in his guides says:
"There are various bugs that make this build weaker than intended under certain circumstances, which is why certain modifiers aren’t chosen for this setup:
- Expectant, Edgemaster’s, Condemnation, Tricks of the Trade and Weapon Mastery don’t work for Poison Imbuement.
- Poison Imbuement is not affected by Damage with Core (Basic, Ultimate) Skills and Damage with Cutthroat (Marksman) Skills stats, so avoid rolling these on your items."
From this quote I understand that investing in the perks on that list is equivalent to wasting resources because they do not impact the final damage done by the primary skill Poison-infused Twisting Blade. You seem to say something different, and I would like to understand how things are. Thank you : )
That’s correct, though more precisely, these aspects and multipliers don’t affect the final poison imbuement “the damage that is added on top of your imbued attacks” damage. They still increase the damage of your base/imbued attacks.
The only thing different here is when Wudijo says “weaker than intended”. The fact is we don’t know what the developers intended. It can be argued that the developers intended for this to happen, and this is just a misunderstanding on the part of the player community that these aspects are supposed to increase the damage of poison imbuement. The confusing nature of this stuff makes this misunderstanding warranted however.
Hope that makes sense.
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Ok, but the poison dot damage should be equal to base damage at the moment of the hit x “posion imbuement value”, so if condemnation and the other perk work on base damage at the hit, this should be esitate in more poison Dot, right?
Tomorrow i doing some test…
What kind of damage loss are we anticipating with the fix to Weapon Mastery? I think I’m doing anywhere from 1 to 4 million with PS at 6/3…will be very disappointed if I can’t one-shot stuff like Heralds of Malphas anymore.
I hear you. Part of the ambiguity it how do we define base damage exactly? In blizzard’s mind, “base damage” may just be the core skill damage without any modifiers like marksman skill damage, imbued skill damage, condemnation, edgemaster’s, etc.
What does work with poison imbuement is anything that improves the (poison) imbuement skill damage itself OR any active or passive debuffs that would make the target more susceptible to take more damage from it:
- Boosts poison imbuement damage itself: All damage, non-physical damage, poison damage, imbuement (not imbued) skill damage, damage over time, damage after dodging.
- Active or passive states on enemy: most damage vs X damage modifiers (though damage vs poisoned enemies appears to be bugged), vulnerable and vulnerable damage
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The bug was basically precision AND weapon mastery were applying twice when using a crossbow with ranks to weapon mastery. Given that precision more than tripled our damage and weapon mastery is like a 30% damage buff, you might lose as much as 4x damage.
1-4 million penshot damage WITH the bug seems low. I’ve been using Skyhunter all season and have reached 4 million penshot and 1 million rapid fire.
You see, Barbs are so strong now, they have held the developers hostage and ensured their mortal enemy is Rogue is weakened at the patch level. It is quite clever actually. Bad for rogue overall. Just give in and play Barb.
It’s quite sad though, alll avenues of damage even if they were bugs wasn’t even broken to the point it was surpassing Barb level damaeg. So if Barb baseline damage is currently acceptable, why not the tibaullt bug level damage or weapon mastery level damage? Very bad balancing decision IMHO.
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They over corrected for sure with Barb, at least seasons are every 90 days was not the case with D3 and it took a while even with sets to have it balanced out to the point where at least most classes had 1 build that could be within a few GR lvls of each other.
Since we dont have to worry about just paragon farming hear hopefully they will get his balanced out soon, rogue is imo though in the weakest spot overall out of all the classes.
Barb having legitmately 4 - 5 S tier builds is insane , compared to my necro and barb last season or even sorc season before the clear time for rogue is just not as close or fast and way behind OP barb now.
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It’s weird that barbs have such a stranglehold on the devs. It’s been that way since D3 because it was Jay Wilson’s favorite class – but you’d think that would’ve changed after a decade.
That said: I’ve played with some barbs doing Duriel farms. They suck. Maybe the guys I encountered just don’t optimize their builds or whatever but even the randos I encounter in the open world suck.
I think part of the reason the Devs went overboard correcting on Rogue was actually because of the success of guys like Wudi. Even during Beta, Wudi soloed a world boss and that probably gave some of the devs the mistaken impression that it was the power level of rogue and not Wudi’s skill.
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I will say having played all the classes to 100, all of them can solo the world boss NP, in fact I had to on Eternal realm cause no one was around with my Blizzard Sorc during season 2 timeframe.
My rogue currently season 3 (Xbow bug of course, but even with skyhunter) can still solo world boss. Devs should not use that as any source of reason to nerf a class, because they all can.
However that being said its just so so so much easier on Barb, its Fluid. HOTA is just OP.