I’m going to be taking a look at a few items for the upcoming v1.1.4.1 hotfix.
If you have any strong opinions about particular builds underperforming (or overperforming, be honest), you can draw my attention to them here.
Note that a few changes from v1.1.4.0 that are in the changelog did not make it in, but they will be in the hotfix. If you notice any items like that, please report that as a bug. Thanks!
I am not sure whether this qualifies, but I found the Bloodied Crystal nerf slightly off-target: halving the bleed resistance created problems for a few of my casters, e.g. Skybreach and supporting items have 0 bleed resistance (all my Skybreach setups already used at least 1 Osyr’s Wisdom as well as 3 Ugdenbog leathers at the expense of armor absorption and movement speed).
The main concern with Bloodied Crystals is the multiplicative 6% armor bonus, which is not only rather generous but disproportionately benefits characters that are already well-armored. Returning a bit of bleed resistance, turning armor into a flat bonus and decreasing it slightly would be a better solution.
What fits in a hotfix? I have a few setups that I consider problematic (e.g. TSS-free Iskandra clears Crucible in 6:20 with 3b+vb), but I’m not all that positive a good solution can be just thrown in without collaterals.
I feel a bit strong about these two MI belts (I love the changes to the MI belts overall, so nice with damage conversions and +1 mastery on each MI belt)
https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/12196
I think the old “Increased armor piercing” was better and more useful in particular for lesser geared ranged pierce damage builds. Those builds do not have access to either Blades of Nadaan or Blessed Wheststone for increased armor piercing.
There is already MI chest armor with pierce to fire conversion (Korvan Armor)
Lunal’Valgoth’s Waistguard
Here I also preferred the old conversion, from vitality to chaos.
There are plenty of items that give vitality to chaos conversion, in particular Dark One’s set but not that many with global vitality to chaos conversion.
Seems like Blessed Whestone should just work for guns then!
Whatever we want to fit.
You can post your concerns and we can take it from there.
That would be dope!
The old Treacherous Means was put back into the game (it has armor piercing increase) and it’s pretty much the default belt for ranged pierce.
And that will help a poor player? I get it that end-game builds have these default BiS items but what about rest of the world?
I think these MI belts are meant to be much more than just placeholders. Plus Gargoyle belts are probably one of the rarest MIs because they hardly spawn in the main campaign.
https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/12205 I think a new player will drop one of these before they drop any decent gargoyle belt.
Ceno debates writing his thesis on the MI belts here or in a separate thread
The Vit to Chaos worked pretty well for Rah’zin Witchblade and Rah’zin Witch Hunter, I’ll give you that, and it is a damn shame that it’s no longer present. Indeed, before the 4/4 set was given the additional Chaos RR on CoF, 3pc Chest/Shoulder/Amulet was the call for Rah’zinblade in conjunction with the old version of this belt.
That being said, Chaos to Vit is very much nonexistent nowadays, ever since its one source on the Riftguard Grasp was deleted. So I’m very happy to see this conversion on this belt. What I’m not happy with is to see it supporting Necromancer. Tell me, in what universe is a Necromancer going to find meaningful sources of flat Chaos Damage that it can convert to Vitality and use in creative ways. I’ve heard three alleged claims to how this would be used, and they all sound awful:
None of the above seems like a good use of one’s time or that it’d ever conceivably be better than one of the existing +Necro belts.
On the flipside, Occultist would love this Conversion. Witchblades, Conjurers, Witch Hunters, Sentinels - they’d all benefit quite greatly from having Chaos -> Vit on the belt slot and, with good rolls, it could viably compete with the existing Girdle of Stolen Dreams in certain scenarios.
I also believe that Necromancers far and away would much prefer to have the bonuses offered by the +1 Occultist belt and that it’d simply be beautiful if these two were to be so-swapped, but that conversation is perhaps best left for my thesis-thread.
Valguur gloves have that conversion now.
And Valguur would also have a reasonable choice to consider using this belt over Girdle of Stolen Dreams if it wasn’t +1 Necro.
Probably true.
Edit: perhaps their drop chances could be increased a bit as compensation for their low spawn rate?
This is the item tuning thread and yeah that is a good proposal to also switch Necro with Occultist on the belts.
Well I’ll consider writing up a minithesis here, then, but for the time being I can at the very least timestamp my feedback from my mondo-patchnotes analysis on the subject of the MI belts:
Multi-thread shameless self-promotion, away!
If this was Reddit, I would have downvoted you all the way down man
Giving the conversion 100% physical to acid on Basilisk Fang effectively gutted it’s support for any Fire Aegis build.
It’s understandable that acid aegis needed to be brought from the depth of the ocean, but consider, that we have none, ZERO good medals for Aegis in this game, aside from Stone Will (Epic Medal) and Markovian (which is not really a fit). Both are physical.
+1 to this. I don’t understand why this change was made. The medal was awesome for acid and fire aegis alike and a very good item for oathkeepers while leveling (especially for new players).
The conversion makes this unusable for fire aegis, which is an unnessessary nerf to build variety and accessability imo.
Edit:
Adding to “nerfs i didn’t quite understand”:
If we self-promote, then why not…
It’s about two things.
First, the lack of ways to make fire skeletons work. I’m using aetherfire +flame touched here, (no cd means it gets the most out of skeleton rate of hits) with the plan of adding bysmiel’s phys->ele dagger and stormbringer of malmouth book to better align my skeletons. Other than that, I’m sadly limited in my choices. Korvaak Burning Blades rarely, if at all, come with good pet affixes, and mean giving up valuable pet poison resist. Chosen Gaze could be good, but again, lack of conversion to work off of, and needs specifix affixes to cover both resists and pet boosts.
The other thing is the physical to vit conversion I am forced to take, making sure that even with stormbringer and potential later patch items, my skeletons will deal a big portion of their damage as vitality. So why not move the conversion to the lunal’valgoth pet belt and leave necro’s pet necessities without conversion?
Plus one +1
Yup, now I have to find alternative budget medals for my Fire Paladin guide:
On the other hand my Acid Sentinel “blue” build got about 10% more Aegis Damage.
I have a lot of things about current balancing patch and I will write a big feedback later once I test more stuff.
But for now I can say that adding +2 to Inquisiotr skills to Mythical Stormreaver is an absolute madness. Build was ALWAYS overperforming, it is one of the oldest and most consistent Lightning Vindicator archetypes. It could always do 6 minute timers or less consistently. Adding +2 to Inquisitor is just wow, total madness, probably going to make it completely ungodly.