So I’ve finished reading the patchnotes and can say it’s awesome. Thanks EHG. I 'm just a bit concerned that all those nerfs to monsters and buffs (mostly) to skills will make the game too easy. But we’ll see.
P.S. I want the Chronomancer Julra’s staff… is it possible?
It’s going to go from a frequency of 1 abyssal orb every 0.81s to every 1.2s which is ~48% fewer Abyssal Orbs (in addition to the fewer Devouring Orbs you’ll have) but the base damage is getting a big increase, but but that’ll be diluted by the high amounts of base damage it would normally get from Vitality, but but but, you’ll also have more points available to put into more more modifiers on the skill tree.
TLDR, shrugs (I can’t be arsed to do the maths, which would depend on the specific skill tree & I don’t think I used the “preferred” one in any event) lets see how it feels, may not be as bad as you fear.
I feel you, but they pretty much had to nerf it somehow. That said, there are so many tweaks to it I’m not certain how it’ll feel either.
Crossing fingers
DO was too good for clearing trash. It had to be toned down.
The new main theme sounds a bit too aggressive to my ears. It is so… battle’ish. It would fit an area before a boss fight or something. For the main theme which we are going to listen to pretty often it needs to be more subtle and unobtrusive. All is my humble opinion of course.
It’s the feel I’m worried about. Even if the overall damage output is still there, reducing the rate of orbs can easily lead to issues where you’re just standing around waiting for them to finish off a pack. For non-rare/boss enemies the damage wasn’t a problem, so now the orbs are going to be massively overkilling trash enemies but it’s going to take a lot longer to get out enough orbs to hit them all.
I suspect that the thing the skill excelled at, clear speed, is going to be rather bad after these changes. In the world of ARPGs there’s one thing that is almost always true, a nerf to a single aspect of a build is usually fine but multi-pronged nerfs are often lethal. Nerfing the duration means half as many orbiting orbs, and nerfing Dark Torrent means those orbs are all firing 50% slower. The combination means it’s going to have around 0.33% of its previous fire rate.
Continues to impress!
If the change to DO is so bad that most people stop using it, they may simply retweak the skill later. We’re still in beta - everything is possible.
I agree with the multiple nerf part.
At the other hand i hate it when people didnt tried it yet and already think something is dead.
I heared way to many times at nerfs that whole communities screamed ITS DEAD (your not doing that btw like that) before trying it while the skill was still reallygood in realtime.
So lets try it first
This is OVER-NERF 
I’ll try it, I’m just not optimistic based on the numbers.
I assume you’re referring to PoE? The issue there is that nerfs always come with a new league, and new leagues are time-sensitive fresh starts. For many players it’s just safer to assume the heavily nerfed skill is dead, because spending the time to level a new character to try it out will put you way behind the league’s economy if it’s as bad as you think.
At least for right now I can just load up my DO character and see how it feels. My biggest concern is that if the fire rate really is a problem there’s not much that can be done about it. CDR/Duration/Echo were already prime stats so I can’t easily scale them much more than I already do, so if the fire rate doesn’t feel good after these changes there’s not really anything I can do to salvage the character.
You guys should be grateful they make an effort to balance by increasing base damage of DO and StaticO, instead of outright killing it without adding anything.
The changes makes it more in line with all the other skills that doesn’t have the same love.
Really like the changes to Maelstrom.
I’ll be interested to see how Shaman feels in 0.8.4 compared to Druid, particularly in two key aspects: totems and elemental damage builds.
I should be grateful that they’re making an attempt at good game design rather than making changes that are even more obviously terrible? I mean… I guess. It is kind of their job to make a fun game. If the skills aren’t fun to play, then their customers will go find a game that is. They’re not doing us a favor by trying to keep the skills functional, it’s in their own best interest.
That’s actually why I’ve even bothered to post my thoughts on the change. They seem to be competent game designers who are genuinely trying to make a fun game. That alone is sadly something of a rarity in this genre for some reason.
Personally, I’m what you’d call an alt-o-holic. While playing a character I’ll see an item drop that I want to try or just think of a build that I think will be fun, and so I’ll abandon the previous character and make a new one. Devouring Orb has been the only build I’ve played in LE that actually held my attention long enough to get into empowered monoliths and I still liked going back to him. It just felt fun to play, particularly in the way it let me focus on the positional aspects of the game.
With a functional 66% reduction to fire rate, I’m just concerned that my strongest character and the build I had the most fun with is going to now be something that I never want to go back to. It was also the only character I had that was strong enough to try to go for legendaries, so now that’s basically also off the table at least as far as things I can do right away with the new patch.
That one change kind of took me from “I can’t wait for the new patch!” to “Meh, I’m having fun with Siralim right now so maybe I’ll boot up LE at some point and take a look”.
Don’t worry, after 200 you’re done.
+1 for this question.
I know where you are coming from, but nothing stays the same in an ARPG, or in ALL ARPG
You can always take this opportunity to surprise yourself and play another build.
Are you sure this assembly has become unplayable?
The fact that it will stop cleaning the entire monitor at the touch of a button, as for me, does not mean that you cannot play through it.
Non-patch-specific question: when they update uniques or set items, are the ones we have automatically updated or do we have to find new ones?
I doubt it’s unplayable. But for me, the fun of that skill was very contingent on how it felt when using it to move through the monolith. It may still have a reasonable damage output for its investment and be totally playable as a result, but if the fun isn’t there for me anymore then I don’t care.
What is the pleasure of playing for you?
Passing high difficulty like a hot knife through butter, due to skills with overestimated efficiency?
Well, no offense, but I don’t think it’s objective and that developers should support this kind of gameplay.