@Zantai, just an idea, rather than flat out gut SnB soldier (which you threw the entire kitchen sink at to make viable), try and avoid deleting them in a single patch. Short of perfectly optimal BIS gear, it can already have rather significant issues with clear speed, especially showcased in Port Valbury where it’s dps is lower than the healing rate of the bosses there.
On Mihnir’s Bulwark - physical damage. Perhaps change it to IT? And swap the IT on Oleron’s to flat physical? Swap Shield Training’s physical to IT as well, rather than flat remove. Shield builds were heavily depending on applying as much flat physical amps as they could to apply it over an absolutely insane number of weapon damage multipliers. But they are eating aprox 10-15 nerfs. Considering sheer amount of work you guys took to make people not consider soldier builds a troll thing, seems odd to go back on that now. A massive part of their meta dominance was the OA buffs in ult means you needed tons more DA, and they happened to innately have it. Now you are nerfing them, buffing DA access across the board, nerfing mob physical damage (Although we still don’t know by how much), and nerfing most of the life-save procs.
Pretty sure I can call the meta the moment this patch drops to be DEE witch hunter, sabo, Savagery elementalist, perhaps primal VoS with the new revnant, and that would be replacing the WBs and Commandos. PRM still has shitty single target, and until that is fixed won’t ever really be viable (replacing the electrocute damage on Supercharged to more flat elemental would do a lot for this, even if you make it so it only applies to the initial hit and none further somehow).
I’m just worried, a lot of the squishier builds won’t be saved by +DA, but the massive sweep of nerfs across a lot of sustain and life save procs hurts almost all the builds equally. I’m glad I already didn’t depend on Mark/Tinker on my elementalist, who I’m now going to have to go back to with the gutting of the commando I was working on (Before you say it wasn’t a gutting, he was going pure cunning as a challenge character. He won’t survive losing his damage base damage when his damage was already weak).
You guy’s have been struggling with physical damage for a while now, it may be time to scrap mob armor so that you can make it more consistent, like the other damage types. For a fire build, 50 fire damage going into 50% fire resist leaves 25 damage. For a physical build, 50 physical damage going into 50 armor is 0 damage. Many physical builds do many small hits, rather than just 1-2 really big ones. Armor messes with the small ones more than the big ones, meanwhile, the big ones get a practically free pass thanks to low base physical resistances on most enemies. Especially if you are going to nerf the base access to shield build damage, they need to at least be sure to actually DO some of that damage through the mob armor.
Anyway, moving away from the long ass talk of doom and gloom, I do hope the update is good. Can’t wait to see the new legendaries. Also, will the Port Valbury update ever be added to Crucible? It feels weird that this fairly decent chunk of content isn’t in use for Crucible, but the other two rogue-like dungeon bosses and heros are.