Aspect of Plunging Darkness bonus damage increased from 50-100% to 75-125%.
Aspect of Ultimate Shadow damage increased from .16-.22 to .43-.48.
Aspect of the Damned damage bonus increased from 30-40% to 40-50%.
Shadow Damage: Increased by ~25%.
Shadow Damage Over Time: Increased by ~40%.
Darkness Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%.
Amplify Damage increased from 3/6/9% to 4/8/12%.
Abhorrent Iron Maiden healing increased from 5% to 7% of Maximum Life.
Lidless Wall (Unique Shield): Lucky Hit - While you have an active Bone Storm, hitting an enemy outside of a Bone Storm has up to a 5-25% chance to spawn an additional Bone Storm at their location. Each of your active Sacrifice bonuses increases the chance by 25% and the total number of additional Bone Storms you can have by +1.
Osseous Gale Aspect bonus Bone Storm duration increased from 4-8 to 5-10 seconds.
Combine this with the big crit nerf and vuln getting smashed into the ground, a traditional shadow/dot build just got a heck of a lot stronger
They did zero to try and fix minions tho.
5 Likes
Wouldāve been nice if they touched on literally anything else. Tired of the same two builds.
1 Like
Thereās a few small buffs to minions but yeah, not much
True, but just doing a few small calculations, ādarknessā bone storm after the buffs will hit like a literal truck and the unique shield combined with a sacrifice build looks like amazing potential
shrug I donāt use bone storm. shrug again
itās one of our strongest abilities tbh, even pre-patch - the DR from it alone was invaluable, and the barrier gen, now with the big damage buffs and (75% i think) lucky hit chance to spawn-on-location with the uniqueā¦ itāll be crazy good
Minion + Shadow for awhile seems like it could be interesting/fun until late game whereā¦ yeahā¦ normal issues unless the malignant hearts have something crazy for minions
Iv been playing a shadow/bone spear necro where most the damage is darkness with the bone spear used as secondary damage to snipe distant enemies and help generate corpses. Will be interesting to see how it plays when i get home!
The biggest problem for DoT builds of ANY kind (Shadow for Necro) is you lose an entire damage multiplier.
Even with the nerfs to Critical Strike damage values, it wonāt change the fact it is still going to be a 200%+ damage buff to any and all direct damage that DoTs cannot benefit from. The sheer volume of buffs needed to catch up would look like Diablo III balancing.
To fix DoTs, there is one simple, seemingly elegant, solution (barring numerical balancing):
Take all the ā+% Damage over Timeā affixes and Paragon nodes out of the general āDamageā additive bucket, and make it their own multiplicative damage bucket (like Critical Damage or Vulnerable Damage). This way, those who want to focus on DoTs have a damage avenue, and the builds that just use DoTs to enable other mechanics donāt really benefit from getting it, because they have no skill point investment to make the DoTs matter.
1 Like
Shadow dots have their own aspect multipliers though, which cant be stacked quite as high, but after nerfs, they get a got closer -
Aspect of decay - on a 2h, gives a potential 400% multiplier to shadowblight damage (now even higher due to darkness/shadow buffs)
Aspect of the damned - now on neck will also give an 80% multiplier to all shadow damage with both curses (including dots) - pre-patch you could only get 80% on this via a 2h i believe
Combine those with the other base buffs, and the ability to spam with no essence requirements, itās not bad - plus you now get 7% max health on kill for iron maiden (thatās freaking amazing) 15k * .07 = 1050 life-on-kill
Hereās the problem with both of those: They apply to Direct Shadow Damage too, specifically Reap, Sever, Shadow Skeleton Mages, and Ultimate Shadow Aspect Bone Storm/Blood Wave.
So, yes, it does apply to DoTs, but itās not exclusive. All those above things ALSO benefit from Critical Strikes.
I said to my myself that I will be focusing on a shadow necro and this made me quite happy
2 Likes