Ways to improve Overpower

Druid
1

I recently rebuilt my druid to try out a werebear overpower build. I have over 2000% overpower and about 39k health. My approach has been to use Earthen Devastation with Landslide and Trample with their respective bonus tectonic plate mods.

Anyhow, I’m completely underwhelmed by Overpower. I feel like it does nothing. Sure, every now and then I see some blue or dark orange numbers, but overall, I think a different mechanic would make my character more effective. To that end, there are some things I’ve noticed:

  1. The passive to get a free overpower every 16 seconds has a flaw, and that is that the proc can easily be eaten by basic attacks. I think this talent should be updated to only work on core and wrath skills. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a proc because I needed to build up spirit with a basic attack and my trample was on cooldown.

  2. I have a scant four methods right now of getting overpower procs:
    A. 3% proc rate. At 1 swing per second, this happens roughly once every 30 seconds or so
    B. Every 16 second guaranteed proc from passive. This regularly gets eaten by my basic attack since I’m not a machine, but at least it happens about 4 times a minute instead of twice.
    C. A core skill (aka Landslide) every 275 spirit spent from the Banished Lord’s Talisman amulet. This is easily the most reliable source of Overpower, especially when combined with Earthen Might. As soon as that spirit bar insta-fills, I just hold down right-click and let the magic happen. Best case scenario, which is free refills of spirit from Earthen Might, it takes about 10 seconds to get a proc.
    D. Every 20 kills from the spirit boon, which can be very frequent or very rare depending on the situation. It happens quite a bit when AOE’ing down trash, but it is useless vs. bosses which is really the problem.
    All told, I can count on about 8-10 overpowers per minute vs. a boss.

  3. When I do get an overpower proc, it does not feel worthwhile. When I’m in a NM100 dungeon or a mid level (60+) pit, overpower feels very “meh.” I don’t see bosses take a huge hit or anything. I certainly don’t feel like I just waylaid evil with my earthen might. I more feel like “at least NM100 isn’t timed like pit 61, time to outlast’em.”

As a result of this, I’d like to see the following improvements to help players use overpower more:

  1. Only allow damaging non-basic attacks to spend guaranteed overpower procs.
  2. Only take a single guaranteed overpower proc for a given spell. If the stars align and the 20 kill, 275 mana, and 16 second overpowers happen at the same time, my next landslide will take all three procs but only provide a single instance of overpower
  3. Provide a better explanation of the damage overpower does. For example, with 40k life and 2000% overpower damage, how much damage will landslide do? Trample? Basic skills? Is overpower adding a flat amount based on 40k health + fortify, is it providing some skill damage multiplier?
  4. Provide a new way to get overpower based on increasing the 3% chance. For example, have a passive that every time a non-basic skill does not overpower, then overpower chance is increased by (1/2/3)%, resetting when the user has a non-guaranteed overpower proc.

Anyhow, these are just my thoughts.

2

Or if you overpower and crit at the same time guarantee overpower for some amount of time after. But yeah I leveled an alt trying to use pulverize and compared to crits on lightning storm it felt terrible.

3

Hello Nebuul,

The mid-season patch coming next week has some nice improvements for your build.

I noticed you put a lot of effort in stacking +overpower. Did you try maxing your healthpool more?
The healthpool + fortify is the base of the calculation.

4

I thought 39k health was pretty good. What is considered good health?

5

OP was nerfed into the ground after a Barb exploit/issue, and never corrected for Druid alone. The fact that you need such dedicated numbers to make OP slightly useful speaks to how broken the mechanic is. You can not for example, mix OP with Melee or Storm. You need the Earth caster bonuses and focusing your gear on stacking OP to the exclusion of all else. 39k hitpoints & 2000% OP is ridiculously good, probably as close to maximum as one can get. It’s still a trash mechanic and will likely remain so into the foreseeable future.

6

For reference, my hardcore druid isnt build for overpower, but for survivability. It has 42.879 health. Im using Bestial Rampage as key passive. My gear is mostly 7/12 masterworked and I got 2 uniques equipped without max life.

7

Perhaps wall clock triggering isn’t the best way to manage OP in the first place?

It could be similar to cooldowns, but its own cooldown management.

It could be based on accumulating some sort of “power points” and triggering OP when you get to a threshold? Skills might contribute more or fewer power points, affixes or passives might lower the threshold, something might trigger “OP lasts for <longer than 1 hit>”.

Or would those ideas make it too much like other bonuses?

I do think different sources of guaranteed OP should stack. You could have “guaranteed OP after N seconds” from a couple of sources and go into a boss battle with a couple of big angry whomps stacked.