Shadow DOT Necro was unfairly nerfed into the dirt

Necromancer
1

I guess it’s not really fair to call it “Infinimist” anymore, due to the changes to how cooldowns work, but Shadow DOT necro (i.e. Blighted Corpse Explosion) is essentially unplayable in the end game thanks to a series of heavy handed nerfs to the game that were completely unnecessary. I’m sure there will be many that I miss but let’s go through some of the big ones.

First, there’s the aforementioned Blood Mist cooldown nerf, which tanks the survivability. Related to this is the fact that Aspect of Explosive Mist is essentially useless now, since the CDR aspect does literally nothing.

Blighted aspect was blindfolded and executed by firing squad. This is presumably in response to the Blight necro build from season 4 which was, by all accounts, the THIRD best build for the class. And on top of that, something like 95% of it’s DPS came from the flat damage provided by the unique affix on Ebonpiercer. If they really wanted to nerf this build, they could have just targeted that one single affix (but - again - it wasn’t even in the top two builds for the class, let alone the season, so I don’t know why they sent the nerf squad after it). In reality, this had a massive impact - probably the single biggest impact - on ALL shadow DOT builds. This is the definition of heavy handed collateral damage… assuming it wasn’t intentional to remove any DOT necro from the season.

Then there’s the Wither nerf, which is probably on par with the Blighted aspect nerf. I won’t go into the techincal details, just let it be known this was another crowbar hit to the kneecap.

I want to stress that Shadow DOT necros were already middle of the pack AT BEST, and these nerfs did nothing to address “OP META BUILDS” or anything of the sort. All they did was take middling builds and kick them into the dirt.

If you care about the actual math and details, I highly suggest looking up MacroBioBoi’s video titled " They Nerfed Everything… And I Don’t Know Why". I want to point out that I didn’t watch a video and start crying. I played the season, and I build a Shadow DOT necro. I leveled to 100, I tempered and masterworked my gear. I (tried to) finish the season journey (I have zero confidence I could kill any uber-uber bosses even if I had PERFECT masterworked rolls and perfect gear). I came to my own conclusions per my own experience, and it feels even worse than I expected.

Why? Why was Shadow DOT hit so hard? What was the point of this? I know a lot of you junior high dropouts will say “jUsT pLaY bOnE sPirIt dUmMy” but having one OP build is not the mark of inter or intra class balance health. I don’t need to be META OP, and I don’t need to be able to kill level 200 Duriel without heavily investing in a middling build, but I do want to know what the devs were thinking when they murdered an entire archetype for seemingly no explainable reason.

Why?

For now, I’m logging out and uninstalling until this is addressed.

2 Likes
2

Blizzard doesn’t want you playing one. Simple as.

3

Funny part is infinimist isn’t dead, it’s just a little different than before since now you have to run Cursed Aura for Decrepify CDR to keep it up 95-100% of the time. All they did it take it’s fairly bad damage output and made it so bad that sure, you can clear just about any content that’s not one shot uber lilith ground removal stuff but it’s going to take you an hour+ to do it.

So their nerf was more or less a sidegrade for a build that was frankly, not great outside of basically being impossible to kill while at the same time killing hybrid builds. It reeks of “I saw this on Twitch while drunk and didn’t like it” bias.

1 Like
4

I really like the look and feel and aesthetic of Blight, but the thought of trying to get an Ebonpiercer again and make this build works is not something I am interested in, going off of everything I read about the nerfs.

5

Just use BCE as your shadow DOT. Shadow isn’t dead but you do need better gear than before and to rely a lot more on stacking up corpses for BCE to wreck.

6

I read somewhere earlier some guy saying he was at around lvl.28-30 BCE and it felt so weak? That many ranks is insane I cant even imagine…maybe he was talking about one single corpse and no overlap, not sure.

There’s the one weapon that is supposed to explode multiple corpses, but when I tried it last season I noticed the size of BCE did not get bigger?
I think, iirc, reg CE did get bigger so I wasn’t sure if it was even increasing my BCE dmg or not.
Ended up taking it off for the OP aspect last season.

7

Ahh, Black River. Yeah it’s OK. You’re definitely better off with another weapon. Personally I use Howl from Below gauntlets because it lets BCE chase down enemies for better stacks.

I don’t have 28-30 in my BCE and each one deals 300-570k dmg over 6 seconds with a maximum of 20 overlaps I think? And each one is proc’ing shadowblight which procs wither. It’s just a DoT spamfest. That’s with pretty mid gear too, I’m not rocking any of the non legacy mythics and my master working is at 4.

1 Like
8

I like the ring that auto casts CE too.
With last season’s Blight build I’d spam Blight and let the ring auto explode. Was nice QoL, but I think you can only explode 1/sec with the ring, iirc?

9

Ring of Sac is amazing imo. I use it on my build with Corroded Signet.

10

I am a fan of CE, too. I really feel frustrated that CE looks nerfed so much and is much weaker than others, such as Bone Spirit. In fact, i still can finish Horde Tie 7, but I really need to spend a bit of time killing the bosses. CE and DOT are very weak to the boss.