Jumping straight into it.
Paingorger’s Gauntlets – Unique Gloves
Aspect of Adaptability – Utility
They’re making the Basic Skill builds a real thing now. My Hemorrhage Natural Overpower build will continue to persist even after S2 ends (as it was reliant on Moonrise & Ravenous). So that’s cool.
Joke.
How I interpret it is, Blood Lance can now hit yourself but instead of doing damage to you, it instead fortifies you. The 5% chance to form a blood orb seems low, but in an attack speed focused build, you should be firing off so many lances that you end up seeing 1. Keep in mind that you get 1 when you OP. The last part is important. BL deals 10-20%. Not just 1 lance, but overall. This is a much needed boost to BL in my opinion.
This, plus Swelling Curse, and Dreadful mod means that we can generate decent essence with it now. Swelling Curse enlarges your Essence pool and Dreadful restores 30%, so we’re getting 30% of the enlarged pool and not your default.
Iron Maiden
Horrid Iron Maiden
Joke.
The issue is that in endgame, I want to switch over to Abhorrent Iron Maiden bc that’s what’s fueling my Temerity barrier.
Corpse Explosion
Okay now we’re getting into serious territory.
- Lucky Hit Chance reduced from 40% to 25%.
This is a HUGE nerf. A great MANY MANY Necro builds RELY on LHC. Some of them, such as Mendeln and Bloodless Scream, were teetering on the brink, and the only thing that was making it work was BCE.
This is mind shattering levels of nonsensical. If you’ve seen my Razorplate Summoner video, I’m sitting there spamming CE to trigger Mendeln and even then, it wasn’t coming out all the time.
I know why they did it. It’s because of Abhorrent Decrepify. But then that begs the question why they didn’t just hit that instead of CE?
- Base damage increased from 50% to 70%.
I like this change. I’m happy that the devs were listening when I went off on that rant about Black River and PCE.
- Blighted Corpse Explosion damage decreased from 110% to 95%.
Yeah I said I’d uninstall the game if they nerfed the BCE build but it’s only 15% and only to the skill but not the rest of the stuff that makes that build ‘sing’, so to speak.
I still don’t like the nerf but it is what it is. We don’t have many high level viable builds to begin with. I don’t think a nerf was in order given the fact that Necros are behind every other class. The devs should’ve kept it as is and continued to monitor how it’s stacking up vs other builds.
In the olden days of fighting games, we never had balance patches and any changes required a full re-release meaning you needed to buy the game again. So in those days, players played the game, and discovered the strongest characters and the strongest combos. Yeah they’re OP, but in time, people find counter-characters and find that that character could be beat.
By nerfing the build so soon, you’re not allowing players to really discover new dimensions of the game. If there’s an analogy I could make, it’s like Magic the Gathering. They’ll release a new series. Certain cards (which lead to broken combos/decks and whatnot) would get banned. Eventually, that series altogether drops out of rotation and cannot be played anymore. That’s the direction it seems Blizzard is going towards.
Yeah, HotA Barb is strong, Ball Lightning Sorc is strong. But if you keep nerfing builds, you’re conditioning us to play only the meta. Similar to TCG’s in that certain decks are simply the top and if you’re going to a tournament, that’s what most people will be playing.
Instead of, I feel, these builds being “enshrined” in history. For example in D2 we had the Javazon build, the Trapsin build, Summoner build (lol), and so on. Like when you think Paladin, Hammerdin comes to mind. These builds should always be a thing, and your jobs as developers, for the seasonal format, should be putting a spin on a given build or builds. Making it exciting for players. Maybe something you couldn’t do before, like the Hemorrhage build.
Blight
Sever
Bone Spirit
I like!
Dreadful Bone Spirit
This is more of a boon for Bone builds as Bone builds want more Max Essence. So now, it’s more attractive to have Bone Spirit as kind of like a mana pot.
Acolyte’s Decompose
I dunno about this one. Reason being. Currently we use other ways of making enemies vulnerable, such as with Corpse Tendrils. Because we ALREADY have them vulnerable, the 10% multiplier was ON TOP OF THAT. We’re going to lose that in exchange for, what’s basically a perma Vulnerable (as long as you keep channeling).
Initiate’s Decompose
That’s cool, but I’m not sure if I was hungry for movement speed after channeling. I mean, we have Reaper’s Pursuit don’t we?
Whoa there, nelly! The fortify on BM was wack but now this becomes a serious mod. So think about it. You hit Blood Mist, Ring of Sacrilegious triggers Corpse Tendrils & your aspect gives you 10-20% crit, you come out of BM and get another 10%. Hit Bone Storm and you get 20% more. That’s huge!
You have to put careful thought into choosing either Ghastly or Dreadful bc both are good now. Ghastly gives you more ‘instantaneous’ action b/c that’s +3 corpses for Tendrils and BCE at the start of the fight. Whereas Dreadful gives you a CSC combo but you now have to generate a corpse at the start. You’ll likely need a new initiation approach involving Hewed Flesh and either Sever or Bone Spear.
Bone Prison
The QoL update is great but I’m not sure how I feel about this one yet. Reason is that Bone Prison is among one of my options in Eternal realm in that you can Tendrils to get the Blood Orbs, but the Prison will give you the Essence and Vulnerable. Then you blast them away with Blood Surge.
Thing is, the Fortify bonus is actually good for Surge. So being forced to choose between the Essence and the Fortify is huge. In seasonal play, I might not need that Vulnerablity, such as in S2, we had Metamorphosis or Accursed Touch, therefore, selecting Enhanced BP then Dreadful BP was the way to go.
Now we’re losing the Fortify bonus from Dreadful. This skill is now more so for Bone Spirit and Bone Storm. The loss to Blood Surge is quite significant, bc that Fortify plus collecting the Orbs along with Blood-Drinker would usually top your Fortify off.
Cult Leader Legendary Paragon Node
Initially this looked awful to me. Because prior, we get 45% increased damage by default, at all times, for having each type of minion. Now it’s reliant on having AS bonus. If you don’t have any AS built up, you have to wait for your aspects to ramp up PLUS you need to have that aspect.
For Pure Summoner specs, we NEED to build that 100% now. There’s no choice. The trade off is that EVEN IF Minion AS is capped at 100%, we still want build more bonus to AS bc Cult Leader will give us 10% damage per 20% of AS.
At least that’s how I hope it works. If it is how it works, this is a buff to minion damage, but with an asterisk. Sadly the damage isn’t “free” in the sense that you build it, you get it. You have to be playing at a top level in order to get the most out of it due to Kalan’s Edict. It’s not a choice anymore. You have to select that Key Passive.
Because it’s a Darkness skill, we can scale it! So that means on Razorplate builds, you’ll be looking for +Shadow Damage, +Damage to Shadow Damage over Time. It also brings Blighted Aspect into play, hopefully also boosting the damage of our Thorns.
Rotting Aspect
Really nice QoL update to Decompose! Now I’m not sitting there hoping I’ll get the 3 corpse spawn for the 100% essence refill!