The real issue is how duration damage works with crits imo, full crit damage for the whole duration is just plain silly.
SS just exacerbates the issue with high % weapon damage and bonus crit damage.
Funny I could swear that acid/poison WH cant come even close to those times and not like poison dots are much weaker than frostburn 
Im intentionally skipping bleed and blade arc here.
@DaShiv i’ll be inclined to be agree with you but as JoV already stated the nerf pattern in the previous patches says otherwise
Yes they do consider a lot of things, Physical Builds an Pierce builds were nerfed
Shield was nerfed because it was considered too good at everything, but Pierce Blademasters were more of a DPS machines that required ADCtH for sustain. They were by no means “tanks” and yet their impressive kill time (which is still lower than the current Breaker Meta) were the reason why they got nerfed
See if a build can stand next to an end-game boss (by far the toughest one) for 30 seconds without taking damage it’s got some issues and if a build is taking down this boss before it can blink then it has issues
So yes, this Witching Hour build most certainly will get nerfed
This is highly inaccurate
I love DoT builds, and tried SS Poison WH few patches ago when Venomablade was new. While it was good it wasn’t anywhere near this level
Bleed Arc Warders get much higher DoT tick than any other type and yet they also don’t come close to Frostburn in the current state despite the Frostburn ticks not being as high as Crit Bleed Arc ticks
DoT has existed in this game for far too long, so has crit based DoT
Same thing for Spellbreakers, it’s an old class combination
Whatever is broken was introduced when they tried to “balance” the game two patches ago (1.0.0.8)
@Zantai/Eis/jiaco Great job moving this, i was about to make that suggestion 
Just waiting on Necro to come out and make another pet class with shaman or occultist. I am almost exactly identical to the Pokemon build with the exception of rings / main hand. I can kill almost every mob in the game save for the Avatar on ultimate; haven’t tried Fabius yet since my faction isn’t low enough. Can I kill MQ ? Sure, but not under 10 seconds as its a poison build. Maybe if i went witchfire… over whirlpool but I dunno. Even using a Blightstone Invoker which plays to the builds poison damage more so than the Black Hand I don’t see those numbers.
Do certain classes need adjustment? Sure, but don’t have a knee jerk reaction like most devs and nerf it into oblivion.
Well thanks for helping to better game balance. 
I don’t think this is really the mentality one should be considering when posting builds, but it’s one we - as the very-vocal minority forum-goers of the game - have created. The GD community is very very keen on optimality and shuns anything that isn’t performing to the best of its ability. Indeed, one may say we’re rather elitist. Making suggestions is fine and all, but I’ve seen far too many occurrences of people putting others down for posting or otherwise making content for a build or player that isn’t pushed to its limits. If one were to look at the Titan Quest forums, for instance, you would see a rather different scene for the types of builds being posted:
[spoiler]
See any kill times? I don’t. And it wasn’t for lack of benchmarks in TQ (frankly, TQ has better benchmarks than GD…)[/spoiler]
Anyways, if you’re presently posting builds with maximal clear times, sure, expect your builds to be nerfed a bit next patch because you’re operating at a high end of a spectrum that trivializes too much content (although, frankly, most content is trivial anyways). If you’re presently hiding builds because you don’t want Crate to foul your precious…well, that’s your prerogative I guess. Doesn’t mean Crate isn’t capable of learning about it anyways. If you’re posting a build because you find it fun and want to share your enjoyment with the community, great! Do so. Expect a couple elitist comments here and there (sometimes not to your face) but don’t let them get you down; you’re giving people a good time!
Don’t worry; Necro, from what we’ve been teased, is almost assuredly mechanically overpowered with the current meta and will see some nerfs. 
How exactly do you get 250k frostburn ticks? Because I deal around 50k with a build focusing on that.
Do you recall any such instance?
I understand the elitist part (cause it’s noticeable :D), but i do see people being appreciative of creativity
Plenty. Daily. Won’t publicly call people out on it, though.
That’s correct
Anyways, the entire thread seems to have been started to due to the sudden OPness of Cold builds
Well i said this once and i say it again:-
- Cold Breakers have existed for a ages
- Shadow Strike has been sticking around for a while
- Arcanist/Nightblade both masteries and their respective skills have been with use for a while
It is pretty clear the damage spike happened in patch 1.0.0.8, so that’s the point when things got broken.
Last time Night’s Embrace got nerfed because everyone copying each other’s builds made it seem that Night’s Embrace was the reason why Breakers were suddenly so broken. Not that i am against that particular nerf.
So I kindly request you guys properly look into this situation this time before nerfing the wrong stuff. I’d start by looking into the Cold related stuff you guys buffed in previous patches (Rings, Scythe)
Imagine all your flat frostburn multiplied with SS weapon dmg and than multiplied by 2 cuz you hit with both weapon, add to that NJE crit dmg, NF flat frostburn and innate crit dmg which can be really high on SB and you have your answer
But crits are highly underpowered in GD. They shine only for DoTs, or for abilities that provide extra crit damage for free (like SS does, BTW).
And how SS-spellbreaker feel in Cladiator Crucible? He may have superior DPS, but is he tanky enough to survive there?
So there will be an overwhelming balance patch coming before the expansion gets released? Hopefully. I died a total of 12 times on my conjurer but 100+ on other classes. :furious:
Tankiness is definitely something that cannot be overlooked in this game, especially when it is so challenging. Good God my Elementalist DO NOT survive.
Titan Quest’s forums is that way in a large part I think because over time people have recognized that the 5-10 second kill difference between an un-optimized build and a fun (but well-planned) one just boils down to nitpicking and being petty.
It was not something that came about spontaneously or even in the first few years after the original game came out though - the community had its own share of flame wars, rivalries, endless brag threads, player put down moments… hell even a dev or two was known to participate.
I guess ultimately people just kind of grew out of it. As standards changed, things kind of just settled on their own.
Also, the thing about TQ is from the get-go there is a universal “everyone has the potential to be OP” label attached to every class, even the single mastery classes (because individual skills were potentially OP more than actual builds).
It’s different from GD where synergy is required to make builds work, especially in ultimate.
Of course, this was also something that TQ forumers only realized like 5+ years after the game came out. Before that it was all “Haha, Sapros builds are GOD and you will kneel before me!”
Who knows, maybe it will also eventually become true for GD.
Figuring out synergies is going to take longer than unlocking all the mysteries behind a single skill line though.
talking about the full offensive set up, its doable, but not viable imo since its a bit about RNG and luck,
still from my experience, with 2 spellbreaker (me as dw and another with soulrend) both on offensive set up, really full offensive, just liked the last posted its a joke, a bad joke (with crucible buffs im saying), im pretty sure we broke some records there …
if im saying this it aint to bring a heavier and quicker nerf, but i think theres something really “unbalanced” in the game :
multiplayer difficulty scaling
imo, compared to solo game, multiplayer (crucible and campaign) is way to easy, 2 players is like x2 easier than solo, or you can say solo is x2 harder than 2players in multi depending on your way to see the thing.
with all the buffs players can add to themselves, i really think the difficulty should be higher, way higher.
every game i join, with decent chars and ok connection without lags every seconds become a speed run no matter what is being runned, even and especially skeleton keys.
i know its maybe a bit off topic, and even if many see GD as a solo game, its really fun to play in multiplayer with friends, and with that actual poor difficulty scaling we dont even have to bother about synergies between our builds since its already way too easy to kill any nemesis or boss or whatever
and no, i dont always play with my SB, neither the players i play with.
Balancing between stackable things that in normal cases shouldn’t be possible (like in multiplayer and double nemeses combos in the crucible) is just not a priority atm, I think. And it’s going to take a while to sort through all of those.
Most players who think Crucible rarely think about actually using tributes, oddly enough. It’s weird because people who do play Crucible a lot assume that everyone else uses them.
never said it was a priority, just thought it wouldnt be stupid to point that out, game aint balanced in multiplayer, thats all, and i wasnt focusing about crucible, its the same in main campaign, i just think mobs, bosses; lets just say everything should have more hp and hit harder, scaling better with numbers of players.
for example if its really hard for char to take down fabius in solo, and then you take another 3 chars, not exact same chars just around same efficiency; then fabius is easy to take down.
thats all.
Oh great, another nerf incoming to a non-cookie-cutter build I use because a top build with double-rare MI gear and high rolled legendaries is working better than your vision of the game intended. My 2h cold spellbreaker can’t get close to the kill times posted on top build threads, maybe it’s because I don’t have the “perfect” gear, maybe the issue is with flat cold and frostburn damage double-dipping with dw setups, maybe something else entirely, but obviously the easy way to “fix” dw spellbreakers is to nerf Shadow Strike and not give a fuck about other builds. Just like my non-saboteur dw fire strike build got nerfed “to counterbalance the buffs to Nightblade WPS skills”.
At what point would you say the game is balanced? When every mastery combination has only one viable build with best rolled MI and legendary combos and their damage and tankiness is within 5% of each other and their playstyle is all similar? Might as well just rename Grim Dawn to World of Diablowatch. And when someone dislikes such a homogenized experience, you can refer to them like Jay Wilson talked about David Brevik, because obviously they are losers for trying to play a single player game in a non-cookie-cutter way.
Reminds me of trying to kill Belial in D3 on HC soon after release, 3 players, 2 RIPs. Later they realized that people prefer to play solo cuz it’s much easier to kill boss when he doesn’t do tripled damage to you and removed extra damage.
I’m ok with hp scaling in multiplayer but damage scaling - nah. There is not so many tankiness synergy in this game. Ofc we can see some use of support builds with a healers sets but it will end in a really bad meta we can see now in some game with 3 supports and 1 DD party.
For sure, i explain myself a bit wrong; i didnt mean mobs should hit x3 harder when its 3 players; but they should imo hit a bit harder than now; in multiplayer i feel like the game is x3 easier when playing with total of 3 players; and it shouldnt be like this (imo again), but again it aint a top priority and multiplayer as it is atm offers fun,
i just think it could be balanced better