I had the idea of creating this thread when the damage nerfs came in and multiple DW melee builds have a danger of dying much more often due to the lack of defensive options. I wanted to quote this message because it encapsulates the danger of nerfing certain strategies without adding anything to make up for it:
By the looks of the theorycrafted builds in FG, S&B with heavy Retaliation is going to be the new “meta” and I’m not fond of the cycle of having certain build archetypes dominate only for them to be nerfed into oblivion and having the next type dominate. First it was the DA meta, then casters with invulnerability skills and Time Dilation, then pet builds, then heavy weapon damage melee with Ghoul and Dying God for the Crit damage. Sometimes the nerfs are appropriate, sometimes the nerfs are so much that it outright kills that particular archetype.
I’d personally like to see more balance in the types of build archetypes that have a good chance of succeeding in Crucible, Shattered Realms, etc.
- DW Melee - Often seen as “The Best Defense is a Good Offense.” Offensive builds are much harder to build around because whether you survive or not is wholly dependent on how much damage you output. I’m not a fan of “Stack ACDTH and then get Dying God for massive Crits” because it highly reduces the number of viable devotion combinations, but you definitely want to reward people who smartly stack damage with getting the appropriate secondary resists (Slow, Trap, Stun, Freeze).
Having auto-attack abilities that also give great bonuses like Shaman’s Savagery and Oathkeeper’s AA is a great start, but I’d like to see great damage somewhat mitigated by forcing the player to forego the highest damage devotions and build for more defense. After all, if massive damage made everything a non-threat, there’s no point in build for anything outside of increasing numbers. Having Nightblades atone for their squishiness by Shadow Dance + Fumble + Impaired Aim is fine, but %Dodge and %Deflect are useless for most enemy abilities, and %Fumble is far too RNG for people to rely on it to withstand heavy Nemesis barrages.
- Invulnerability or DoT Casters - These builds went off the map after the Arcanist nerfs - outside of the Agrivix set, the type of Caster builds that could see success fell off drastically. With movement runes becoming more often, it’s a lot easier to use big DoT skills like transmuted DEE or Calidors and then smartly kite until the big AoE damage spells and invulnerability abilities come off cooldown. A big reason they drifted off is because there’s little difference between 12/12 Mirror and 22/12 Mirror. I think casters should be as invulnerable as Ptiro’s old Clairvoyant Spellbinder if you can somehow combine 22/12 Mirror with 20/10 MoT. After all, you’re sacrificing to hardcap those abilities, and it could give use to lesser known items that would otherwise have no purpose.
- Heavy Tank Builds - These will probably hit FG strong, as the combination of high health, high armor, high damage absorb, high DA and the new Retal to Attack method will diversify the types of builds that would succeed. The larger issue with these builds was a combination of low OA and low damage to the point that no defensive options would keep you from a Nemesis Barrage.
It would be nice for heavy defensive equipment builds to be able to use heavy damage devotions, while medium defensive builds would not be able to use them because they’re defenses would not be enough. Building in this way would increase the diversity of devotion options, because now there’s little that prevents the dominance of Ghoul / Revenant / Dying God combo.
- Healing /Regeneration Builds - It would be wonderful to see more builds like these, but outside of sets that specifically build for it like the Avenger set, there’s no reason to build around these.
Adoomgod is on the hunt trying to buff more regen items so that they can be a viable strategy. Kiters would love to have something like this so that if they mess up and get swarmed, they can retreat and heal up before the next barrage begins. In my experiences, having 2 active heals + decent regen (over 500 Health Regen) is the minimum for a healing build to comfortably fight hard enemies, but there aren’t many ways to combine this and have the necessary damage.
Perhaps classes like Demo who don’t have active heals should instead have great regen abilities. There’s no reason for something like Blood of Dreeg to not only have much higher regen than Vindicative Flame, but better benefits like OA and flat damage too.
- Debuff Builds - Sadly, I have not seen many builds rely on massively crippling even Nemesis level enemies with -Slow, -OA / DA, reduced damage, fumble, impaired aim because Nemeses just hit too hard for those to really make an impact. Now that the DA meta is dead, there’s no point in having those massive OA debuffs, and Nemeses have so high Slow Resistance that you need massive amounts of Slow just to get some spacing against them.
Thank you for the sets that allow you to Blade Trap / OFF bosses, it’s nice to see more build options like this that rely on medium damage and heavy debuffs instead of all damage, all the time.