Their development team is massive. What is the excuse for not fixing Rupture since, oh, Beta?
I’m thinking berserk ripping, anemia, skullcrusher leading to infinite scaling. Then Rupture to add onto that formula. It still surprise me Rend got nerf back in Season 1.
Oh for sure. Anything Rob touches scares Blizzard and they end up nerfing it to holy hell.
I foresee the whole Twisters and Double-Swing being Meta in S4, Rob will make some video and some neckbeards will make reaction videos to it. Blizzard forums will scree that Barbarian is overpowered with Twisters deleting the entire screen and they cannot see anything because every Barbarian is running around with Double-Swing, Whirlwind, and 3 Shouts. Look at the whining about Charge and crank that up about 10 times.
The complaint will be “BaRbArIanS hAvE tOo MaNy WeApOn SloTs MaKinG thEm OverPowErEd”. Nevermind Overpower Rogues, Shout Druids, and Conjuration Sorcs likely facerolling LVL 200 Tormented Ubers.
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Necro is going to steamroll everything this season with Thorns and it’s going to be hilarious, I personally can’t wait (assuming no nerfs after PTR)
Yeah, it will be pretty funny to watch TBH. Thorns Necros are going to hate playing with other players since their DPS is going to plummet, especially when Barbs are Challenging Shouting, Charging, and Steel Grasping or Pulling enemies off. The Seneschal already does this and I flipped my S3 Barb from Thorns to Bleeding because how annoying it was to have my Seneschal steal aggro constantly.
Actually that’s another thing, we still have absolutely no clue what the seasonal theme and mechanics will be.
Probably not until early May.
If I had to guess, it will be The Void which was rumored for S3 and we are going to get some nifty Horadric Void Magic Powers including a large focus on Movement Powers (think Runes from Grim Dawn). It will be the 1st Season Blizzard adds a Skill Slot for an Active Void Power with most being Passive to test the waters.
Thematically, it will be about opening gates to new realms which ends up with pseudo time traveling as you take part in rituals to fight alongside a young Lorath, meet Deckard Cain in his prime, encounter the Barbarians of Arreat Summit, and fight the Prime Evils. Remember that dream sequence in the campaign allowing you to smoke the good stuff in Taissa’s hut and you break her free from Andariel? Like that.
Oh I don’t see Dust Devil overperforming everything else. Leapquake on the other hand… Being able to spam Leapquake on bosses with no cooldown is going to be insane.
Curious how effective the Quakes are going to be with the buff to X values. I have a build made that actually uses LeapQuake and Double Swing Twisters and the 3 Shouts. Also have an Upheaval LeapQuake build sitting around that could be insane.
Clearly the season theme will be a 100% playable Paladin class with all the skills and paragons etc etc. Do it Blizzard!
Dust Devils are kind of nuts, better than Druid tornadoes…
From the few streams I’ve seen, blizz fix a few of dust devils issues. Movement speed, minion AI. I don’t care about damage because that can easily be adjusted. Now if only those dust devil has some other interactions.
My guess, they have dumped it into the too hard basket and don’t know how to fix it without breaking something.
How could that actually be possible though, like it legit heals the bar, so keep adjusting it till it doesn’t. This is the oddest bug ever because its so apparent if you’ve ever put Rupture on the bar.
Yes! I don’t think anyone of importance at Blizzard has actually played a Rend/Rapture/Gushing Wounds build more than 5 minutes. If they played this thing for 100 hours in a season, then they might learn a few things about it and discover some issues and we could finally get some bug fixes or a thorough design review.
Playing Rupture within a few minutes you see the problem.
Playing Gushing Wounds from early to late game, you see the busted scaling pretty apparently just by swapping to Unconstrained.
Playing Rend early to late game, you see the problem pretty apparently.
No one at Blizzard has obviously played Rupture since launch - working as intended 
What’s the Rend issue? Seems like it’s in an ok spot.
Comparative to DS and Upheaval in S4 not so much. It will be great to be able to Temper the Rend effective size increase but that really should be baked into the Skill. There are not any Aspects or Uniques really that are “Rend” specific. Ravenous is mostly a Brawling Ring that enables Bleeding on enemies. It is fairly odd. Slaking is underwhelming. When you realize that the damage is dealt over 5 seconds also, that high damage value seems pretty low if you divided it by 5 and had a skill you spammed every second.
IMO - Rend should have an Offensive Aspect that makes the attack AoE and increases Damage. Rend suffers from the entire issue with Bleeds requiring more investment than other skills and more synergies tied up. Gushing Wounds is set up to be the Bleed activator but does not seem to scale or work properly. It has you invest in Critical Strike Chance, Critical Hit Damage, and Overpower despite the Bleed portion not being able to Critically Strike or Overpower. GW should allow Bleeds to Crit, the CHD should calculate properly, and GW should have chance to proc on the application AND DoT.
Most Bleed mechanics are also relegated to “On Application” which means “Initial Hit only” and not the DoT portion itself. This needs to be re-evaluated as the DoT becomes less interesting.
Oh was thinking there was a bug I didn’t know about. Rend could do Pit200 and honestly seemed like a fair build compared to some of the other stuff in PTR. Bleed needs a couple tweaks and as you said maybe give Rend more range so you don’t have to temper as much for it (but oh boy is max range glorious).