DISCLAIMER
I’m a complete necro-person. I love the class in all its forms, including pets. But even I support reporting imbalance that can be caused by random patch to one class or a global buff to a playstyle.
But recently, there’s been a persistent trend toward balancing one overpowered playstyle, which is hurting many others.
I’ll talk about skeleton-based builds and how attempts to balance one playstyle practically ruin the others.
First, a quick introduction. Skeletons are fundamentally the strongest pets in the game. But skeletons have two significant cons: they’re extremely fragile and they have no built-in critical damage (that’s why any +% crit is boosting dmg directly). That’s where the cons end.
Now, the pros.
Skeletons are summoned with a certain chance, but the reality is that it’s common practice to try to summon as many skeleton mages as possible. Here’s why:
Even with a base set of 10 skeletons, they deals 350% weapon damage in an AoE with a single auto-attack burst + built-in bonus damage x10 + DoT x10. No other fully maxed pet, even two from a mastery pet focused set, can compete with the base set of 10 skeletons. For the same reason Spectral Crown is rarely used, making Ascendant Cowl an universal to-go item: you can quickly regain 50-70% of your firepower, or get your mage-army ASAP before fight.
Also, skeleton mages are ranged attackers. And the damage output for single target + AoE + clear speed of ranged pets is incomparable.
As a result, we have a powerful glass cannon, the balance of which during the PTs 1.2.0.0-1.2.1.6 was a real nightmare. Looks like the decision was made to take the easy solution for the future. Simply removing everything that buffs overpowered skele-builds globally: cast speed, flat damage, DoT duration, and critical damage.
But since cast speed isn’t available on items, the only way is removing a total speed bonus. As you can see in the video above, this had little impact on ranged-casters, but it had a significant impact on melee pets: they now run, attack, and cast AoE abilities more slowly (which, unlike skeletons’ auto-attacks, have a long cooldown). This is especially noticeable when facing an enemy with any slow debuff: ALL pets lack built-in slow res, and slow resistance on items is very limited.
Also high OA + crit damage combo allowed to at least somehow compensate the lack of total damage bonus from double/high RR for any build. But instead of nerfing skeleboiz directly, now we have a real problem with all non-skele-non-double-high-RR builds.
I can't upload all video examples of comparison right now, but I'll try to do it later ASAP.
If you also have examples, please feel free to post them.
Spoiler:
