If I have tough as nails (enemies that hit me bleed) and their FIRST hit on me knocks down like half their HP, will they still be slowed?
Is it guaranteed to work on their first hit, or will the “Healthy” condition not even apply if that first hit leaves them with less than 80% HP?
No, because it slows Healthy opponents, so when their health drops below 80% it stops working. Though I didn’t test it with an actual thorns build, I just use thorns for the occasional funny Punishing Speed self-knockdown and the Slow that’s prep for my No Mercy critical strikes.
The Condition applies after the damage gets calculated. You can notice this graphically with the time it takes for the Slow from Hamstring to appear on your target. Also, if the Slow applied before the damage was calculated but at the time a hit was reigstered, you would then be benefitting from any Damage to Slowed or Crowd Controlled Enemies on that opening hit which clearly is not the case.
You can test this with a High-Damage Direct Damage Skill like HoTA. Assuming it does not kill the target outright, a Slow will not be applied to the target if their Health falls outside of “Healthy” range.
This is specifically why a lot of players say No Mercy and Hamstring interaction sucks so bad now. Honestly, it would not be as bad if the condition was change to “Uninjured Enemies” at the very least. This allows the Hamstring to apply to all enemies except Injured ones. The Slow Effect should reduce Movement AND Attack Speed also which makes it way more valuable of an investment from say, the Steelgrasp Unique, the Slow on Leap, and actually putting 3 points into Hamstring instead of the 1 just to get the Condition.
It still has it’s used. Just we got nothing to benefit from it right now. Trash mobs will die before the passive kicks in. Elite will only be the real issue. Most Elites lose half HP after one Core skill hit.
Hamstring still have uses. It’s not something we want to invest into though. There’s better options. There will always be better options.
If you’re using Barber then it’s still good, because most of your targets will be either healthy or dead.
For myself and most of us it’s really just the point we need to invest in order to get the cut to the bone passive. There are lot of wasted skill points on all classes meant to do the same thing. This is part of the effort to curb power creep. As they being more skills and passives to the tree in the future expect more of the same.
I highly doubt we’ll ever get additional branches to the skill tree. Not until the expansion. Maybe. There’s enough bugs with the current one. As well as legendary aspects interactions with specific skills. I can’t imagine blizzard cooking up new skill branches with paragon glyphs, legendary aspects, plus Seasonal mechanics that can be balance in any meaningful way.
My feeling is that there are already legendary affixes, extra skills and paragon boards already developed as part of a roadmap for seasonal content. The affixes for S1 made it to the base game, just not via seasonal rewards. S2 will it melt add more.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see S3 and S4 introduce an extra paragon board and skill branch which will likely carry over into the first expansion along with a new class. These sort of things are ready to go at anytime, but the dev team seems to be chasing balance at this point, likely in anticipation of those new pieces being added. Remember the fundamental reasoning behind patch 1.1 was to get in front of power creep for the long term health of the game.
You can almost bet your life savings that crit and vuln are going to take a massive hit to make way for the changes to the OP mechanics and whatever powers are being added in S2. Translation: Builds will evolve but will never feel stronger. At least not in the first year or two.
That’s OK so long as other builds become more viable. To do that there needs to be token buffs beyond the 2% boosts they like to give. We are talking significant boosts to the bad skills 30-40% to make them competitive with the top skills everyone is choosing. To do that they have to know why people pick the skills we do.
Take shouts for instance, massive buffs are what players desire and there no reason not to take them. Presenting a real trade off of dropping one of those buffs for a skill that provides a different utility plus comparable damage is the only way to make things balanced, not nerfing the skills everyone is using and giving back some token buffs to offset.
For 1 point, it is still worth it for HoTA. I cannot imagine many builds skipping Hamstring to be honest and that 1 point be better utilized somewhere else.
I am curious however who would ever invest 3 points into it. Slow only slows Movement speed and for a Melee class, this is almost entirely worthless. If it Slowed Attack Speed and Movement Speed now when enemies are Uninjured, it would be really good.
Yeah I understand blizzard cut content for future release. Just slowly drip feed them so players have something to chase after. But a whole new branch of skills? Nah that’s going to take more planning. More foresight. The Pre Season was all number tuning. The first Season is seeing what players can do with what they got. And players did a lot with what’s been given. Balance and tuning is an ongoing process for sure. Goes with bug fixes. If you look at all of barbarian’s aspects, skills, and paragon nodes, you can tell there’s potential. We just can’t do much with them currently. Or their numbers are lower than other builds.
Hota here, hamstring has been crippled but i still have 1 point on it + no mercy 3 points.
The only option i can think of to replace hamstring is audacity aspect (stun enemies for 4 sec when there are 5 nearby.)
But it can only happen every 20 seconds interval which is a bummer.
Barb in its current state isnt going to match the top 3 classes, just no way as blizz is adamant on keeping us down with no end in sight.
Yeh well, when the Barbs got crushed at Mount Arreat they lost most of their strength. Will take a while to re-build. Just stay strong, keep at it and we’ll build a new stronger nation.
Audacity, 100,000 Steps, Ground Stomp, Key Arsenal, Exploiter, Violent HoTA, Bash, Shared Misery, Accelerating, Earthstriker, Rapid, Retribution, Bonbreaker Paragon, Ranks to GS - Max Crowd Control Duration, Max Attack Speed, Max Overpower Damage, Max Rubies, Max Life and Fortify
S2 - 2H Bludgeon Overpower buff with perma Stuns, Overpowers and Stagger