“Sever no longer returns and instead splits into 3 specters that expand out and back from its apex. Sever deals 140-200% of normal damage.”
This is now a ~6.3 times damage multiplier on a 2-Hander (if I understand it’s triple Specter mechanic and wording correctly), and while I’m not one to complain about buffs to an underperforming Skill, a 630% damage increase from one source seems quite ridiculous - and the need for it is indicative that there is a design issue somewhere else.
This seems to be the case especially for Shadow Builds, where Blight is in a similar situation of also being entirely carried by one singular item in Ebonpiercer.
A lot of this power should probably be sensibly spread out some among the Capstone Passives and more broadly accessible Legendary Paragon Nodes.
A Capstone passive like Affliction or Legendary Node like Scent of Death providing a (conditional) 15% damage multiplier, compared to a single Legendary Aspect’s >600%, seems silly.
Similarly, not every build wants to or can tap into Blood Orbs or Corpse Consumption, and not every build should have to lean into Overpower to capitalize on the other Paragon Boards.
Having to force these mechanics into every build makes imo for highly frustrating buildcraft, poor gameplay, and makes them all play and feel incredibly samey - if you want adequate performance.
These are core issues which need to be addressed sooner rather than later - before band-aid Diablo 3 Setpiece type damage multipliers, like we are seeing emerge already now with things like Reaping Lotus, take over.
Blizzard would rather redo their work over and over instead of doing it correctly. They didn’t want Crit/Vuln being in every build but now Overpower has the same issue. They wanted to reduce the number of vendor trash items, like rares and sacreds, but regular legendary items now fill that same spot. On and on and on.
If this was done properly, the game would have a long term vision where everything could slot in and work together. Bugs and other surprises would be promptly addressed, rather than let sit all season. Because they wouldn’t be redoing everything all of the time, they may actually do what the players really want in a live service game….create content. New skills, new paragon boards, new enemies and maps, more unique events. This is what people want to see in a new season, and what we get very little of these days.
I hated Ebonpiercer because the splitting of smaller SB does what exactly? If you’re a SB build you probably have the CC aspects for it so the weaker versions weren’t needed, just make shadow blight stronger and maybe add a root effect.
They need to stop adding these gimmicky useless additives that “solve” non existent problems.
The main problem is, that your main skill damage no longer matters, because the Unique item is doing all the damage.
Instead with Ebonpiercer for example the damage should come from 3 main sources.
Blight Skill Rank
Shadowblight as the appropriate Key Passive to use.
Wither on Paragon, the node that make your dots crit.
But Skill ranks do nothing, the Key Passive Shadowblight is unplayable in Torment 4 and the Wither node is capped much lower then every crit build.
The design to not needing skill ranks for your main skill because the Unique is doing all the damage is just sad.
Shadowblight itself needs to crit, which itself contradicts the use of dots.
Wither: The highest bonus you can get is 210 % with a 45 % chance, that is 94.5 % on average. Every crit is x50 % bonus without any multipliers.
But it’s quite easy to solve.
Unique and legendary Aspects need to scale with their related skill rank.
Shadowblight need a complete rework to properly work with either all Shadow damage or all Shadow dot damage and it should work without crit. A lucky hit component would be much more interesting. The main problem with crit is that every build wants to play Heir of Perdition, which itself is a problem.
Wither needs infinite scaling. With 3000 Intelligence you should get a 100 % (105 %, but should be capped at 100 %) chance to do x450% more damage and with 4000 Int you should get a 100 % chance to do x583 % more damage. That is damage scaling with dot builds.