I think this is the problem. Character with great epic and low legendary items will struggle to kill those bosses, it would take him minutes and maybe some deaths but the exactly same character with full legendary endgame set can kill those bosses under 10 seconds pretty easily. Ofc it shouldn’t be just marginally stronger but the gap is too big right now.
It would be nice, i think Mad Queen and Sentinel were meant to be like that but as you can see, there are already people killing them in 3 seconds…
Wow, man…you are a smart, good and rational player - are you really going to judge the OP character of a high-cost, high cooldown devotion like TD based on a single 3 second video ?
Well, for ppl who were afraid to use TD due to possible nerfs let me debunk this myth as I have tested TD on a fairly large sample of caster characters as well as a fairly large number of bosses (read: all Ultimate Nemeses).
Mad Queen, like Log, is a special case because 90% of Devastation’s projectiles hit her. Because she has such an enormous hitbox, kill time is much lower than it would be vs. a highly mobile human enemy like Fabius (or even Valdaran). Try the ABC warlock build on Fabius and see what happens pls;
The video you are refering to is not of a “balanced” character that is HC viable. Even with Mark of divinity / Avatar of mercy your 8 second time window can become 5 sec or less vs guys like Valdaran or Moosilauke who can freeze/stun you. There goes almost 1/3 of your hypothetical dps.
The character you are refering to has 5.5k hp. If Fabius hits you hard enough (and 3k damage is nothing for him ) and activates his bladebarrier TD will do nothing. Your 8 second Fabius kill has just become a 1 minute one - yes, very overpowered ! LMAO
True - you can make a character that uses TD and kills every nemeses in roughly 8-9 seconds. However, that is the lowest you can go while keeping your death count to 0 across more than 100-200 trials. For me and many other players if I die even in softcore it is game over. I have deleted full gear lvl 85 characters before and will do it anytime if I die just once. If you have lower standards…yes, you can push 5-6 seconds, but those ARE NOT balanced characters, nor should they be judged by clearing time without taking into acount the time spent to get back where you died.
Ah yes. So comforting to know there are people in the world just as crazy as I am. I’m the same way and am not afraid to instantly delete a character I just dumped a motherload of hours into.
Technically, if you time it right, you can get an almost 14 second window… Mirrors gives you 100% damage absorption over 3 seconds. The amount of damage will not make it ware off early. I also can’t recall ever getting stunned or frozen with it up. Course that could just be my bad memory, but I thought the mechanism works similar to OFF with bosses…you can’t freeze them so no damage…with mirror you can’t take damage so no freezing…Again I could be totally off on that…
Either way, as you get 100% damage absorption for 3 seconds, if you can trigger it right before the 8 seconds, the skill will refresh and you can trigger it again right before those 3 seconds are up for another 3 seconds…8+3+3=14… Again, a bit tricky to get the exact timing, and you could be late getting it refreshed right before TD is done, but that should at least still allow for almost 11 seconds just by smashing the button…
Yes, you can do it and I actually did it, but I would not consider this procedure “noob friendly” or OP by any means. Even if you pull it off your damage window is still 8 seconds. In that period you have to kill whatever is in front of you. Outside of that time window your dps will drop like the NASDAQ stats.
I said it and will say it again: Time Dilation is not inherently OP, it can be borderline OP because of how it combines with the arcanist mastery - more explicitly mirror + the enormous percentage regen of IEE that lets you spam anything you want.
P.S: The Valdaran stun seems to be special, though…from what I remember it will go through everything even if you do not take damage.
Oh yeah, definitely not noob friendly as more noobs will struggle to kill in those 8 seconds. I tried it out with my AAR sorcerer. Mirror was the only skill I could really take advantage of with it (I don’t run CT or TSS). I actually despecced it back out as it hurt my overall DPS and lower my over clear speed. Yeah, I took bosses down faster, but don’t need it for heroes and getting to the boss so really wasn’t that helpfully for the “overall speed” of the build.
Some builds I think can make it OP though… Like a CT build or a spellbreaker with mirror and shadow strike… And ofc as the video showed, warlocks with doom bolt… TD will ADD soooo much DPS with those skills that it can be abused for sure…
I think in the case of the video, it wasn’t even the fact they could push out more DPS, but the reflect damage during that time. If you soft cap mirror that is 165 reflected and if you can somehow pull off maxing ultimate, then 325% reflected… Against the queen that does huge amounts of damage, especially when the pink aura drops you don’t need a lot of DPS yourself…
P.S…why is your window only 8 seconds instead of 14?
8 second is the damage window, not the protection one. If you go CT with commuter what are you going to do outside of that… spam PRM ? . If you go Doom Bolt - again, what are you going to do when TD is on CD ? Bare in mind I discuss only pure caster builds here, not spellbreakers
For every person that might read this thread: there is NO REAL Time Dilation build. There are only builds that ocassionaly use TD to take out nemeses. Those can work but need insane gear and enormous control from the player.
66% of possible caster (e.g. pyromancer, witch hunter) builds can’t even make use of TD offensively due to mana constraints and the other 33% will need god gear to use it effectively.
yeah, I noticed you’re talking pure casters and ignoring spellbreakers…or primal strike druids who also get Mogdrogen’s Pack for even more energy regen to combine with IEE allowing you to spam abilities…
Still though, if you can get mirror’s up for 14 seconds, high damage/burst monsters could kill themselves from mostly just the reflect… Fab proccing a notch reflected back to himself at 300%…hmmmm… I guess a monster’s DPS is no were near on par with a players DPS though…right?
I think I’ve read people using TD with dryad and/or turtle as fail safes to stay alive to at least let you avoid death during those 8 seconds… What actually constitutes a TD build, I’m not sure… Still don’t think that breaks the game though…
It was just an example. Maybe bad example if you take it literally…ok, so there are people who can kill Mad Queen in 12 seconds without cheesy build. The meaning is the same.
You are referering to other people but i have never heard of anybody doing this. The discussion would look different if everybody did it like this.
Powbam and krsboss - just two examples from the top of my head. Anyway, it is probably not a sane thing to do for most ppl but once you have more than 2k-3k hours put into GD you have to invent new challenges…
As Amonthar put it: once you have god gear you are expected to be godlike so the fact that a blademaster can destroy the Mad Queen in 10 seconds does not bother me. Even so, the risks are real even with god gear - for example in BoC.
What I wanted to point out about the ABC warlock video is the fact that what you see is NOT a univeral ultimate viable build. It is something the author made just to show that if killing the Mad Queen ad nauseam is your objective you can do it in 3 seconds (or…perhaps 4 now in hotfix 2). But if you do the math you will see that reaching the Mad Queen takes you about 40 - 60 sec and a warlock has no gap gloser. When sample size grows sufficiently large, a Blademaster will be better because he can easily jump from mob to mob even if he takes her out 2 times slower.
There are tons of builds that are godlike logically and item-wise, have all the synergies done right and things like this, but struggle to kill the queen or fabius even in a minute. I’m not as experienced as most of the guys in this topic, but I guess that any melee chaos builds, aether ray, tss, cadence, shield builds are a good example. Even in the godlike gear they can’t come even close to some other builds.
So when you say BM’s are OK as they are just look at those poor builds with whole sets and a pack of legendaries designed for them, that are crappy as hell. And think if the nerf that caused your kill time to increase from 8 seconds to 10 is such a crime.
From what I see the devs are trying to move those two subsets towards each other by nerfing what stands out and buffing something that’s UP. I hope we’ll see the UP stuff buffed in much larger amounts that OP nerfing.
Then the discussion is different if you play hardcore too. -> I play HC
On Topic:
I kinda feel like people are ok killing bosses/Nemesis in 10-20 secs, yet I wonder hom many of those actually kill other monsters. Are you guys only killing heroes/Bosses? Obviously if that’s the case, you will never really play a caster if you have that kind of efficiency in mind. So should the game be balanced around not killing monsters, only bosses/heroes, which make it an advantage for build like melee dualwield? I’d say no, yet I’d nerf the killing speed of those build on bosses to reach something closer to 30 sec instead of 10 sec.
Also, talking about dieing for the sake of efficiency shouldn’t be taking too seriously when balancing the game. I play HC and I use skills like maiven’s sphere of protection.
I feel like it is still somewhat fair. Blademasters go through BoC in 6-7 mins mostly going from boss to boss and only killing the mobs around the boss. Some other classes with strong AoE go through BoC in 8-10 mins killing all mobs in their way. Which is more efficient for loot farming? I don’t think anyone has really measured, but I think both ways are viable. If going from elite to elite, boss to boss is more efficient, maybe the solution would be to slightly buff drop rate from normal mobs instead so both ways of farming would be somewhat equal in efficiency and viability. More ways to play the game = more fun?
I think in your example the BoC farming is much more efficient. I actually enjoy killing trash and more or less full clear bastion a lot it’s fun but man you do not get jack fuckin shit from them.
Imma guess your super secret TD build somehow involves Phantasmal Blades with Falcon Swoop. If such is the case, I can understand why you’re reluctant to share it. But it doesn’t take a genius to come up with such a combo and understand why it’s so powerful and Crate would have eventually found out (a self-fulfilling prophecy, I know). Let us pray that they will wield their nerfhammer with mercy.
The only thing that needs a look at is the enormous amount of mana regeneration the arcanist mastery provides you. Not only can you decrese the cost of skills through Mental Alacrity, but Inner Focus gives you a massive boost to spirit while IEE gives percentage regeneration.
PB was already nerfed to the ground around B25-26 (don’t remember exactly) - the culprit here is how IEE + TD work transforming you into a nuclear power plant. Compare IEE with Mogdrogen’s Pact - percentage regen vs flat regen. The IEE is needed for AAR builds but the elephant in the room is the aether ray here. AAR is one of the worst skills in the game in terms of what it does per mana cost…and that’s why AAR builds need IEE. However, if you decrease the cost of AAR and make IEE flat mana regen at double the values of Mogdrogen’s Pact everything is solved with changing just two tires, not the whole car.
The purpose of the Resistance change was not to make things die faster, it was to make more builds enter viability and competitiveness by lessening the requirement of Resistance Reduction.
Thank you for that insightful feedback which will surely improve the state of the game.
