Maybe you haven’t noticed, but in these last two major updates Blizz has significantly buffed Flurry and its builds. Let’s take a look shall we?
1.3.3 Build #50570
- Flurry → Damage increased by 10%.
- Improved Flurry → Flurry deals x20% increased damage to Vulnerable enemies. If Flurry hits any Vulnerable enemy it will make all enemies hit by that cast Vulnerable for 3 seconds.
- Advanced Flurry → Evading through an enemy will cause your next Flurry to deal x30% increased damage and Stun enemies for 2.5 seconds.
- Aspect of Encircling Blades → Damage bonus increased from 8-15% to 15-22%.
1.4.0 PTR Build #51678 (PC)
- Flurry → Damage increased from 66% to 75%.
- Aspect of Encircling Blades → Increased damage range buffed from 10-25% to 15-30%.
- Saboteur’s Signet - Unique Ring → Casting Flurry has a 15-30% chance to release Stun Grenades that deal Physical damage and Stun enemies for 1 second. Your Grenade Skills have a 5% Lucky Hit Chance.
They buffed Flurry’s multiplicative damage to the point where its damage now approaches Twisting Blades…on a single-target ; not to mention the same exact damage to [ x ] other enemies around you. I know the Grenade version of this build is new and exciting (believe me, I’ll be testing it out next week too) but can someone tell me why Flurry’s damage is still being treated like it’s insignificant?
I’m guessing it’s because Barrage and Penshot builds are still better, at least in terms of enabling both melee and ranged play.
I tend to agree they might have gone too far on this one. Flurry was meant to be an aoe attack that kind of sucked on single target.
Nah if anything TB could use a slight buff again considering poison hasn’t been out of control. Melee rogue was non existent this season.
Close quarters combat should be buffed first before buffing the specific melee core skills back up.
I disagree. Makes melee builds for inner sight or preparation worse. CQC had Combo Point bonuses and other aspects. So tired of combo point and cqc for every melee rogue build.
So you don’t want CQC buffed back up? It’s clearly an underperforming key passive compared to precision at the moment and affects far more than just flurry and TB.
I also don’t understand what specific CQC and combo point interactions you’re talking about. Can you name a few?
They definitely should buff CQC because they nerfed it way too hard. At the same time though it does suck that Momentum has been dead for a while now and Exposure and Victimize are based off Lucky Hit…which is just frustratingly annoying.
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Exactly this!
I do not want TB to be OP again, but as it is now, melee rogue is dead.
I don’t mind if CQC gets buffed back up but not at the cost of keeping melee skills where they are at. Melee needs multiple playstyles. Ideally they buff them all but CQC was the only playstyle for a bit.
Specific aspects where you basic attack and power up core skills, similar to what combo points does in general.
The only major nerf that wasn’t a bug fix was the CQC nerf, which badly affected flurry and TB builds and other builds as well.
The TB nerfs with bugged poison damage were long overdue to be fixed, and the 3x rotational bug with blade dancer’s was offset with a buff to blade dancer’s aspect itself.
So it’s not the case that melee builds are performing far worse than before, but that the precision buff just made it overshadow everything else.
As for multiple play styles, ranged builds don’t exactly have an advantage there either. Nobody uses victimise (at the moment) and exposure is more for a trapper play style which arguably synergise a bit better with melee skills.
Problem was it sucked so hard on single target it wasn’t worth building around. For a game that uses very few skills, versatility is critical.
Personally think Flurry damage (or rogue melee) is still quite bad on the PTR. Rogue feels like its the weakest class at the moment.
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Yeah, the way Blizz has tried to balance the key passives is off. It felt like it was very intentional, that in season 2, we all just play CQC, since there was the 40% dmg multiplier. After nerfing it to 10%, and upgrading the precision passive - we ALL felt forced to only play marksman builds. Its all feels - very contrived. It just eliminates the choice from the players entirely. Yeah, the buffs to Flurry are welcome. But I do think CQC also needs to be buffed - maybe to 20%.
Its weird - with all these advances in data science and machine learning - thought it would be so much easier to tabulate the optimal values to balance these.
If it’s anything like penetrating shot (another skill that has bad single target damage) then I think this is overblown.
This so called versatility that you seem to be asking for where any skill can be used in any use case will turn D4’s skills into a “they’re all chocolate icecream, just slightly different flavours” kind of boring fest.
The only thing I’d agree on is it should be buffed indirectly by buffing close quarters combat.
Funny, I was under the impression that is already our existing reality. Look at pretty much every A tier (or better) build and they generally all excel at both single target and AOE damage. Diablo 4 isn’t nuanced enough to have options for multiple builds that excel at certain content like D2 or POE.
I don’t design the game, I just play it and as it stands today a D4 build to be successful needs to be able to handle all content.
I think you’re confusing builds with single skills. Builds have a handful of skills/abilities along with being augmented with gear and paragon to compliment the build in whatever way.
And you mentioned D2 and PoE, of which D2 has the same problems but worse, and I guess based on what I’ve seen that PoE has this issue too. I regularly heard people in D2 for example ask “why does immolation arrow have a cast delay” even though exploding arrow exists already.
We are so limited in the number of abilities we can have equipped, in almost all cases your chosen attack/s need to do it all. The general point is that if an ability like Flurry cannot handle both single target and AOE situations then it’s at a major disadvantage. If there is a complementary attack that can paired with it for single target then maybe it works. However, to date its been a pretty lowly ranked skill.
Go look at most of the top builds and the majority have one main attack (Hota, Bone Spear, Blizzard etc). Those abilities generally have many skills buffing them or providing defensive utility and all deal great single and aoe damage. The only reason another attack skill is paired with them is generally to mitigate resource issues, trigger something passively or provide utility. I am not saying I like it but that is the games current reality.
If skills like HOTA and Blizzard can melt everything with one button and that stays constant then skills like Flurry need to be in the same ballpark.
That’s sort of my point in saying that reducing builds to being just right click builds makes the game boring, but then it’s also not what I’m saying in that it’s not harmful for game variety that some builds remain right click builds.
So really, rogue has versatile options with:
- Barrage, for ranged
- Twisting Blades, for melee
Both of these skills are more “balanced across the board” type of skills that are designed to handle everything, so I don’t really see why flurry or really any other rogue core skill needs to be changed in its design to be more “versatile”.
It needs to be viable and viability is always measured against other options that exist in the game. Twisting Blades, Hota, Blizzard and Bone Spear etc are all just better versions of something like Flurry (at the moment).
When you think about it, how many A-S tier end game builds actually use sperate single target and AOE damage attacks interchangeably? One day the meta might change but that day does not appear to be coming any time soon…right now big damage versatile (AOE + Single Target) attacks reign supreme.