The tooltips for the Caged Heart of Tal’Rasha and Caged Heart of the Great Feast now correctly state that their bonuses are additive instead of multiplicative.
Nice, at least now the tooltip clearly states how useless it is.
/Edit: 180° kick flip
The Caged Heart of Tal’Rasha and Caged Heart of the Great Feast now match their tooltip and are correctly calculated as multiplicative instead of additive.
I’m glad they changed their mind and I’d love to hear to story behind this stunt.
Hahahaha instead of fixing it they rephrase it
Those were literally the two hearts that I was most interested in, when I was deciding what class to play this season. They’re both like, you have to really go out of your way to make it work, but the payoff is significant. I don’t buy this “oh we always meant it to be a huge drawback for a minor payoff” explanation - they just couldn’t figure out how to make it work right.
Something like The Barber is way more complicated to implement than a simple times X multiplier, though. I honestly don’t know why they wouldn’t change it to be multiplicative. Even at 100% it’s probably still a tie up between it and the barber.
I personally think Barber may be bugged - against a single target like a boss, the damage increase should only be between like 15 and 60% depending on how long your Barber immune time is and when you dealt damage during it, because you’re not getting the compounding effect from multiple monsters all splash damaging each other. But when I tried a 4-second 11% one out at like level 60, when my gear wasn’t all that great, I went from taking like a minute on a boss to killing them on the very first Barber explosion. That doesn’t really feel like it makes any sense. If each individual instance of damage was being amplified based on how long it had been piling up in the immune timer, the oldest damage would be at 44%. If instead the whole accumulating damage amount is like compound-interest’ed every second, that still only comes out to like 50-something%. Neither of those would explain why the time to kill a boss was cut by like a factor of 10+. So I think it’s bugged. But who knows, nothing seems to actually work the way the game text ever says it does…
Barber can crit, too so it’s double dipping crit damage.
Wow that’s so dumb. Damage over time doesn’t crit, but Barber can crit twice.
it proccs AoE from AoE and turns crits into critical crits /shrug
Just some cool false advertising to get us to buy battle passes.
So much fun with “broken” builds
Yes, as I understand it a crit activates the Barber damage pooling, all damage is then pooled over the interval, multiplied by the Barber damage bonus (how valuable this is… depends…) then it explodes in an AoE. This AoE can presumably crit given potential damage values and the pretty number colors.
So, your damage is benefitting from all of it’s normal multipliers, the Barber multiplier and double-dipping crit if the explosion crits. It turns it all into an AoE to boot. Without any single-target drawbacks.
If a build can crit reliably and there aren’t any other miscellaneous considerations, like procs failing to work as frequently as you’d like, I see no reason it wouldn’t be superior to other options.
I’d also say Barber is objectively overpowered and shouldn’t work as it does in the first place. But, what do I know…
As for Great Feast. I’m not so sure blindly changing it to a multiplier instead of an additive bonus would be a good idea. That would create the same situation as Barber with another Heart. Although, I suppose if we’re adding stuff to allow absurdity for one Heart we may as well do it for others.
The Caged Heart of Tal’Rasha and Caged Heart of the Great Feast now match their tooltip and are correctly calculated as multiplicative instead of additive.
This is what it currently states in the patch notes. Do some testing.
Oh hey, look at that, they totally do! I just saw a line in the patch notes about those two hearts and assumed it was the same as the patch notes they released last week. That’s a last second switcheroo I can get behind 
It still doesn’t feel strong. I don’t get it. I have a 90% great feast my minions should be mowing down enemies but they still aren’t. I try to roll summoning skill damage, minion attack speed, crit and yet if I put my 76 necro against my 53 chain lightning sorc it would be over for my summon necro in seconds.
Well, 1.9 x 0 is still zero.
Great Feast is really poweful now. I use it over my Barber.
Great fix, Blizzard.
Minion base damage is so low, increasing it doesn’t really matter. Even Mendeln procs don’t use Minion Damage.
The only real play with Great Feast is full sacrifice so it affects Necro damage only. You can use +Resource Generation affixes to offset it, but with a base 3 regen, it’s too much of a drawback, imo. Even loads of Willpower and Resource Generation doesn’t feel good with it.
Great Feast is the perfect example of a good concept with poor execution.
Even my blood build (which stacks Willpower instead of Int) can’t keep up with the drain, passively. Barber is still superior because of the AoE damage component. They feel about equal on single target. My roll is 4x15% and barber can crit which doesn’t warrant the Great Feast’s drawback even at 100%.
Btw, if Great Feast fails to drain essence because you have too little you lose its bonus until the next tick.