I agree with most of what you said. Reining in all builds back to a lower corruption ceiling is kinda necessary but they need to be careful of not overdoing it. People are used to running mostly slammed 2-3 lp gear which could get out of reach and then these people will rightfully feel bad.
D3 turned bad when Blizz overbuffed everything to the point that all endgame activities but greater rifts became moot for they didn’t scale. It’s on EHG to find that sweet spot of corruption ceiling where t4 dungeons and other endgame activities can stay relevant - in terms of difficulty.
You mention 2 overperformers, which do you mean? I consider Jelkhor Marksman and Frost Claw Runemaster the strongest builds and it’s been shown that they can go deep into 4-digits. However Healing Hands Paladin can do that too, albeit at a snail’s pace.
I was talking about classes, meaning Falconer and Warlock.
Most of the builds that are overperforming are ward based and ward will definitely get a nerf, so that will take care of those, including HH. So that just means you need to rein in the overperformers in damage, which are currently those 2.
Yes, runemaster is a close 3rd, being as it is the 3rd last to be added. It was already clearly superior in 0.9.2. So that will possibly get some nerfs as well.
But I expect that the older classes will also get some buffs. Mike has shown some teasers in his streams with new passive nodes for Shaman, Forge Guard and Spellblade, and I don’t expect those to be the only ones.
Shortly after 1.0, when it wasn’t yet clear how big the balance gap was, my opinion was that they would buff the older classes to bring them all closer, then buff monos again so 300c was again the norm.
But once we saw how vast the distance is between the top performers and everyone else, it’s not possible not to nerf them, imo.
Well, you are probably right that the three newest masteries are in general stronger than the old ones. This is quite normal balancing procedure to lure players into these new classes. Has been the same 20 years ago in D2:LoD or Dark Age of Camelot for example and still applies to modern games like LoL.
However I believe that individual builds are more relevant targets to be brought down. I have played both Falconer and Warlock in february, but neither of those does what Jelkhor MM does or Frost Claw RM. Feel free to point me to 3k corruption builds of Falconer/Warlock, I might try them out.
I’m pretty sure that there are warlocks doing 3k corruption when you consider that you also have necros doing 3k corruption.
Yes, lots of builds will have to be individually looked at. Including from older masteries. Though I expect that after the ward changes (if done right) there will be far fewer “offenders” left.
My point was just that you can easily make a Warlock that will outperform most older masteries simply because they make much more damage. Fissure will likely get nerfed, I think.
As for pointing you out to 3k+ builds, I won’t be able to help you much. I stay away from builds that do 1k+. I just see them every once in a while because they show up on my youtube suggestions.
To answer a few of your questions: I’ll get around to testing the glass cannon version sometime today. Furthermore, in my defense, some of the higher-ranked builds in my DPS tier list can survive an echo. For the rest, I simply couldn’t find a planner for them that was at all tanky.
For all the other builds I tested that could go low-life, that was the play. Because of that I assumed this build was no different, but I’ll probably test the life version too.
As for mana issues, the ballista prefix has severely reduced effectiveness for this build, to the point where mana regen rolls performed about the same. Obviously Julra’s rings will change that, which I plan to test today.
Being able to wear mountain boots is a big advantage the life setup has, but the ward build works pretty well without it. I think the reason I didn’t test the other setups is because at the time I had a ton more builds to get through, and I just never came back to it.
There we go! I throw out something that is extreme, and most probably wrong, just to generate a gentleman’s “nuh unh!”, I’m pleased that someone took me up on it.
So this is a 1.1 bet. If there are more builds that can exceed 1k than can’t, I win.
Bearing in mind a “build” would be any random combination of materially distinct skills (lets ignore combinations of passives 'cause that would be ridiculous) I would be shocked if there were more that could do it than couldn’t.
Sure , since I haven’t defined what a ‘build’ is, feel free to abuse the letter the bet.
Or, we could pick a build site, and if more of the builds that that build site lists can beat 1k, than can’t beat 1k AND there is at least one build for each mastery, than I win. You pick the build site.
Thumbs up for the effort. But one thing that you might have overlooked that can potentially flip the whole thing: the “boss” dummy in the arena doesnt count as “enemy” - thus negate alot of DPS mechanic from the character, one big example is the explosive trap. Using the “enemy” dummy can solve this
I created an original build that I never had a chance to try at the very high end of gearing (I play self found HC) and I wanted to see how it stacks up to all the other melee builds and Beastmaster EQ in particular because I have a feeling it will dump on them QoL wise and probably will be very competetive dmg wise. If you wanted to take it for a spin in offline mode that would be awesome. If not I totally get it.
I omitted clarifying that for the sake of brevity. Builds that rely on targeting enemies were tested on the dummy that counts as an enemy. I had to test a number of other builds on that dummy too in order to perform a fair comparison. Thanks for mentioning it though.
Oh, I’m hyped, thanks =) Been so long since I playd, but as an add-on to your convo with flickvn above my build might need the dummy to be an enemy target for the aftershocks to target, can’t 100% remember though but might be a thing to consider.
Ah yeah. it functions slightly (read totally, you’re proccing 7 aftershocks a second) different from trad EQ, you’ll see when you test it tho. Might be that it does not have to be an enemy target, I just have this image in my head of my gazillion aftershocks randomly appearing off-target instead of on the dummy when I was doing some testing, but again, was so long ago I might be off on that. Anyways, just wanted to point it in case that was a thing.
, since I haven’t defined what a ‘build’ is, feel free to abuse the letter the bet.