PRM was in a great place after one of the recent patches which saw its complete overhaul. However recent changelog says this:
Distortion: reduced Aether damage scaling with rank
Supercharged: reduced Elemental damage scaling with rank
As someone who created few prominent PRM builds I don’t really see the reason for it. If you look at its single target damage - it was still pretty tame, like Ravager timers were hovering around 1:15-1:25 mark for fully decked out specs. Its aoe was excellent and a lot of it was coming from shotgun overlapping.
Reducing its damage will just make its single target go from mid to bad and will affect its sustain as well. Is there a reason to bring down PRM builds like that?
The best PRM builds are among the best builds period, and it’s very easy to play. So i can see slight nerfs to flat being justified. I think 5-8% flat nerf for both nodes at max rank should be enough.
But what i would also like to see is more PRM line ranks on gear. Right now they are really scarce which forces you into the same selection of items for all dmg types which makes building and farming for a PRM build kinda dull and repetitive.
I only agree with one part of it - they were among the best. Not the best, but definitely up there. I don’t agree about “very easy to play”. If you wanted speed runs out of it you absolutely needed to group up and line up bosses. Which is not easy by any means. Moreover it’s risky and requires a very polished spec and very good piloting. And then of course there are so many boss rooms where you physically can’t line up bosses (like with Zantarins and Moosies and Slathzaar’s etc.).
I imagine casual player who plays PRM on a homebrew spec will clear packs and normal chunks fast but then will slow down a lot against boss rooms since they will not be grouping up/lining them up as well as we do with fully min-maxed specs.
EDIT:
Recorded a run with what is probably the strongest PRM spec. Nerfs are still not live. It’s good but as you can see here, boss rooms weren’t ideal (but were far from worst). And I had to play risky to reach this timer. It’s a casino build if you want speed from it: depends on layouts and boss combinations a lot and held back by one teleport.
My only conceptual PRM build get massive buff with recent patches that in my expectation even excess.
So, may be reason for nerf is just different perception of build level.
After playing aether PRM myself i can say that this one is not OP and probably doesn’t need these nerfs that make more sense for elemental versions.
Which brings back my point of PRM ranks on gear. Aether has no ranks to the hardest to cap PRM nodes on: main hand, rings, pants, gloves, chest, belt. There are two aether dmg MI chests that are very rarely used because they give very niche ranks to skills. I suggest to add to one of those pieces +3 to Distortion or Supercharged.
I would suggest buffing Groble Stone Effigy’s flat to PRM but in a way that doesn’t buff Elemental builds that might be tempted to use it over Mythical Tome of Names. Like maybe if it has 20-30% Elemental to Aether conversion but only at high item levels (so people can still level with it with Elemental PRM) it wouldn’t make it op for Aether PRM but would make it unusable endgame Ele PRM. So you can increase flat to PRM on it knowing it only benefits Aether PRM.
People kept comparing buffed PRM to other skills. Usually that’s an easy way for Zantai to nerf something if that something is getting constantly referenced favorably to other things.
