I’ve always heard of this legend. Also jajaja had the same complaint on his sabo, which I assume, had undergone the same treatment. Can you guys enlighten me what kind of monsters the dw builds of old were? The only ‘OP’ dw build I had the pleasure of seeing was 1.0.0.9 spellbreaker and it’s said that it wasn’t quite on the level of the older ones.
It all started with this guy/build.
Back then:
- SS % weapon dmg was way stronger at ultimate levels, 430% wp dmg or so (this hurt pierce SS…bad…it effectively killed thisbuild I posted too after the already existing nerfs below )
-You didn’t need flat dmg from deadly momentum or LA to kill up Fabius/Sharz in 9 secs or less in that 0.4 uberjaeger build. You didn’t even care about the conversion from Shard of Beronath. It replaced cadence line successfully (shard was also nerfed btw)
- Blego relic had 2 sec CDR over 3 seconds ! - same for MArkovian (flat dmg on it also nerfed), Big deal. for SS and…
- Blades of Wrath had 1 sec CD and could be procced by each Blade Spirit individually!
- Night’s chill gave -2% rr to Pierce, acid, cold after lvl 10
- Blind fury %dmg was 80%
- Assasin’s mark nerfed (this is kinda fixed in AoM)
All of the above are off the top of my head. Since then they have systematically nerfed pierce and whenever they gave something back, a buff, it was with the utmost prejudice. A tiny bit of flat dmg here and there like Blades of nadaan… Even after Jov’s full cunning DW cadence BM after patch 0.4, they kept the nerfs comming. They are are generally super reluctant to give it anything but are biased towards acid/ poison, cold/frostburn. Two damage types that are not just stronger but have very good afferent DoTs…
Wow. That old build really looked OP, but yeah pierce needs some love now. I’m no game designer though so I don’t really know how to fix it but unknown soldier looks obviously weak.
Yeah nerfs were warranted. but it all went overboard at some point after Jov’s DW cadence version
So I watched the video. Probably was strong back then, now it’s not even impressive.
I think they should un-nerf all they did to pierce. Looking at what casters can do now - yeah, pierce needs all that to be un-nerfed to have some chance to compete. It still remains a total glass cannon, but maybe if it had enough damage we could sacrifice some for defenses.
I disagree. It’s a glass cannon, it gets hit for half its HP just in regular BoC. Hell, it would have problems surviving even AoM content, let alone the crucible! Damage output is zero when you are dead.
You can’t compare with the same mindset as today. DA was totally different back then. 1850 was ok then. Some time after they added MQ it became 2250. It killed before being killed like my Belgo BM in 0.2 AoM.
It did that much damage without deadly momentum…People improved upon it. That DM build i referred to could do fabius in 8 sec too but i never posted it. For those times it was an amazing build that inspired many players at that time including me, jajaja or JoV
They will never undo the nerfs to belego relic, BoW, SS etc. Idk what they would do really:) But nothing big.
Which had the highest dummy kill time and was the first BM to use Valdun for melee purposes
Oh yeah if I am thinking about the right build then I remember you doing that. There’s also Avatar of Oleron that still has shit support imo (zero Legendary Pierce swords)
Watch me 
JK, what I meant is that if it wasn’t nerfed at all and lived to this day it still would have hard time competing with builds of today. At least it seems so to me. Probably was op back then, I won’t argue with that.
Not un-nerfing is the wrong thing to do in my opinion. They are making pierce type unusable leaving it as it is now. Hell, it would even be better if they removed it at all, at least then physical weapons wouldn’t be spoiled by stupid conversion.
Sir, please accept my big gratitude and respect for your work on this topic. And even bigger if you didnt use character editing mod.
Thats all, i just wanted to thank you. Have a nice day
Not un-nerfing is the wrong thing to do in my opinion. They are making pierce type unusable leaving it as it is now. Hell, it would even be better if they removed it at all, at least then physical weapons wouldn’t be spoiled by stupid conversion.]
Well, pierce had a long story of oupiness, it started in Titan quest and ended at 1.0.0.6 in GD 
Funny how everyone forgot how Oupie AAR been. You could literally delete anything during 3sec mirror couldown with it =) Unfortunately current AAR suck donkey-balls =(
Lol yes, forgot, it seem the whole pierce thing is pathological:D
Thanks, man! Nice day to you too!
Didn’t know that. RIP, I guess. So they just intentionally killed some good stuff to encourage people to try new good stuff?
At first this thought seemed weird to me, I wanted to say that all nerfs I remember were actually nerfs, not complete butchery, like Siegebreaker shield, Untouchable, even nerf to Belgothian set.
But on second thought I remembered blademasters, Targo’s hammers, Markovian set.
So yeah, they have done that before.
How come no pet builds are on the 150-170 list? With the nerfs to crucible and buffs to things like primal bond, beastcaller’s medal, eldritch fire (completely buffing witching hour build) you’re telling me none of them can get on that list? Calling bs or they’re untested.
It depends what do you mean by competing.
If you measure DPS output, with slight changes, it would definitely be among top ones. No CD on crit DM weapon proc if you had high crit chance (high OA) was unbelievably strong even for up to date standards (not sure was it nerfed before that build). Not to mention BS/blades of wrath combo w/o shared CD for all BSs and with much higher base damage due to more projectiles. Also SS had way higher dmg, with lesser CD due to belgo relic and even now SS setups have highest dmg output. Worth mentioning is that build had on its disposal much higher pierce rr than you can acquire now (iirc BSoD had 30 flat rr and night chill was stronger rr vise). So basically only thing that could compare or outdps that build would be another SS build.
If you by competing mean tankines and how much punching it could take before it goes down DW builds were always way below shield tanks and CD/CDR casters in that matter. Playing DW build was always on the edge, meaning if you know how to play you will kill and survive if you dont you will die. Thus I could argue that playing DW build in GD requires higher level of skill from a player than playing tank or caster.
Here, for the record and for newer generations of GD players, maybe it would be worth mentioning in short what happened and what changed in history of GD from back than till now:
Since DW builds had incomparably higher DPS than tanks and casters devs significantly reduced their dmg output (iirc in just two patches upper mentioned cadence BM setup efficiently lost 30% of single target DPS output and large chunk of AoE). By doing so devs didnt just reduced dps output of DW builds they reduced their survivalbility also (since survivalbility of DW builds largely depends on their dps output due to ADCTH mechanic). Also devs nerfed ADCTH sources available (unknown soldier nerf, haunted steal nerf,…) further gimping DW survivalbility options. They didnt gave anything in return to DW builds to even slightly compensate their loses. In same time casters overall received significant buffs (buffing some skills, making strong caster dedicated sets,…)
Back in 1.0.0.8 as conclusion for all the changes that happened in few previous patches I wrote personal conclusion that roughly explained what happened to GD: DW BMs went long way from hero to zero, welcome to new casters meta GD.
Unfortunately injustice that was done to DW builds and overall all melee builds than is not yet undone. Hopefully it will someday, though its a thin hope.
In his “latest” videos it’s already nerfed. He updated his videos in 0.4 and wore a Slicer in main hand.
Also, the best slicer you could find today does not beat a Mythical Reaver in AoM, even if you don’t use cadence but use Belgo strikes. At least back then it was an ok replacement.
The testing is done by one guy, he is not a clairvoyant. We actually recommend him builds to try out OR he goes around scavenging the forums to look for builds. Point is if no pet user recommended a crucible build then Zhug has no reason to try one out.
Safarel, DaShiv, AoD or TPOM are some of the names who test pet builds a lot so maybe they can shed some light on the matter.
Actually even before the big nerfs to Physical and Pierce there was a brief period of Caster meta. It was back when TD removed your CD for a short duration. So basically you could chain-mirror (a lot more broken than how we do it now).
And it is worth mentioning the worst damage type that got hit during the DW nerfs was Pierce
On a side note I am not sure what Fluff and Ptiro are talking about, at what point was AAR OP?
Personally I am okay with this. I like my plus skills and the vanilla Reaver’s Claw was pretty bad imo.
Oh i’m ok with Reaver for sure. Just not ok with slicer. A Heartpiercing slicer of Fury just barely out dps a myth reaver on paper.
All pet builds you can find in my thread are located in Honorable Mentions section. That means all pet builds I saw and tested were not good enough even for 100-150 crucible from my point of view, let alone 150-170.
This is because pet builds have fundamental problems in crucible - whey are all super fragile and crucible requires pretty good defences. Also there are a lot of things in crucible that melt down pets like dot effects on the ground or special boss attacks.
Recent buffs/changes were minor, they do not solve this fundamental issues at all.
This. I haven’t seen any strong new pet build, no one showed up with videos where he demolishes crucible with pets.
And I highly doubt this will happen.
I mean comparable clear times with the same effort. I have dw spellbinder here that can clear in 13 min or less and chains Miror and MoT to stay immortal. But there are casters here that can clear in the same time with like 5 times less effort. Compared to dw they are easy, relaxed and forgive mistakes and end result is the same.
I totally agree with this. DW should be unnerfed, they should reward you for the effort it takes to play them.
It should also be noted that Zhuugus’ standard method of testing is 2 blessings, 0 banners, which is the opposite of what pet builds would use in Crucible. Blessings are useless from pet builds’ perspective because the best pets (Conjure Primal Spirit, Primal Instinct, Raise Skeletons) are all temporary pets, and thus none of them benefit from Crucible’s blessings. Banners are the only thing that benefit pets, but that would mean revamping Zhuugus’ testing methods, and I doubt he’d be willing to upend his own method of comparison just for a certain type of build.
From what I’ve seen, sneaky parrot’s Witching Hour Cabalist would be the closest thing to a surefire 100-150 Gladiator farmer, and from what I recall, he was going to upload a video of it manhandling Crucible, but his laptop wasn’t able to handle it or something like that. In fact, I doubt that some of the builds already there like the Dracarris build or Reapersgaze’ Skelemancer would even be able to farm the new 100-150 because of the new challenges 1.0.4.0 brought to it. I’d be glad to be proven wrong, but those builds don’t have nearly the defenses that sneaky parrot’s Cabalist has, and Primal Instinct-focused builds don’t have too good of a shot with all the AoE death pools being splattered about.