I might be wrong, but i don’t think that such things should be balanced around green items with specific affixes. Because, in that way, one could say that lacking pierce res on fire casters (for example) isn’t a problem, just use green with “impervious” affix. Of course i’m over exaggerating, but the point is simple. Every class can acquire tons of OA simply having several “Aggressive of Attack” affixes.
That’s too much and may break the whole balance. But a sub transmute skill like Guardian of Empyrion converted VoS - res cold/acid/pierce -> fire or lightning or bleeding would be great, more diversity.
And for Battlemage, would be nice for some extra -rr from sets, also this class thirst for skill points (both masteries have to invest 50/50 to reach the significant skills), so a minor buff for extra points is welcome. Saboteur same way.
I doubt it, because naturally NB doesn’t have fire/lightning support -> it’s going to be like elemental builds with Occultist without dedicated sets (good mid tier builds)
Retaliation builds in the vanilla game suffer quite a lot.
I mean, to my knowledge, things like “Retaliation damage added to attack” are almost completely lacking in the main game, which means that retal builds have literally nothing outside of retaliation to deal with enemies.
This, by the way, meant that at one time I couldn’t progress into Ultimate because my char’s damage wasn’t enough to kill Loghorrean and I hadn’t enough levels to equip good retal gear.
Saboteur in the main game sucks even more than in the expansions, itemization is nearly non-existent, stats are lacking and the only conversion possible is Fire to Cold from Warpfire.
Spellbreakers, even with pumping crazy damage on paper, lack armor, DA, HP and Phys res. Outside of Blade Barrier and Mirror of Ereoctes gimmicks, survivability is too low to get anything done for the most part.
Battlemage is terrible in the base game. Itemization for it is lacking if non-existent and pretty much the only way you can go to get a decent char is use Beronath, Reforged to use a physical AAR or maybe Phys CT.
Outside of converting Arcanist spells so they deal physical (which makes finding Energy Regen a pain because items that support Phys don’t boost regen), a Soldier build that uses Arcanist’s passive buffs is just a pretty meh builds stat-wise that is outmatched by almost every other Soldier combination.
Elemental Cadence is kinda useless when you can get Beronath’s Fury.
Which is not exactly the ultimate auto-attack, it just does everything Elemental Cadence does but better and without wasting any skill points.
DEE is perhaps the worst skill in the game right now. I mean it in terms of utility, the damage is awful, the projectiles don’t pierce through monsters, AOE is minimal, DOT damage is sub-par. I’ve never seen anyone post a decent builds that uses this skill, like ever. Also, outside of picking Soldier, Occultist stats are pretty low in terms of survivability, so without a damaging skill and life-leech you die pretty easily. DEE hasn’t got decent damage and this means even with absurd life leech it doesn’t keep you alive at all.
Maybe with more flat damage, and bigger AOE it could fare better?
Flash Freeze is useless unless you use it as a leveling skill because it pretty much doesn’t affect bosses and champions at all. If it worked a bit like War Cry maybe it could get better? I mean, reducing enemy damage or speed even if it doesn’t freeze them.
4 Likes
Easy solution would be to put back the Energy Leech into Curse of Frailty that existed for 1 patch in the early Alpha - it literally solved any Energy issues that were present in the Occultist Mastery and was amazing! It proved to be a little to high, but could be toned way down to balance it out.
Before the forum wipe I had suggested adding Casting Speed to Solael’s Witchfire which can help Occultist out as well. I don’t think it would be OP, but hopefully we’ll see this happen.
Some thoughts for now, sorry for the long post.
Improving underwhelming Masteries in general
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Battlemage
I think Battlemage overall is a better class than people think, it’s really tanky, good for beginners, very good for hardcore, works well with forcewave due to mental alacrity and has some decent endgame variety with 50 shades of krieg set (mindwarp, theodin scepter, lucius’ blade arm) aswell as physical AAR and spellscourge and potentially also physical forcewave.
Now I am totally aware that when it comes to kill speed and clearing crucible all of these builds are better as a DK, Spellbinder or Templar except for spellscourge and maybe lucius’ blade arm.
So while I think the class itself is better than most people think (low dmg, high tankyness + nullification), it could still need more unique builds. Lucius’ blade arm was a great addition and maybe more items/sets like this could be introduced.
When it comes to Battlemage’s masteries and their skills, terrify is a terrifyingly terrible transmuter. One way to improve on it would be higher values for its RR (~6-7 per point) or to remove its RR and give it a debuff that affects bosses aswell like e.g. fumble. OR give terrify freeze RR (no idea if that’s possible), so that battlemage can do warcry + OFF, a combo no other class could do. -
Pyromancer
DW ranged Darkblaze, Obsidian Juggernaut and couple of fire/burn or chaos casters come to mind. All of which are rather squishy unless you play Juggernaut with SR set. At least this class has some very unique builds and also the new rag’nadar’s maw gun is very interesting. -
Commando
indeed… similar to how battlemages are most of the time overshadowed by deathknights, commandos are by warlords. The recent Shar’Zul buff has hopefully helped though? Other than that Turrion’s is pretty much the only build unique to commando.
It’s not a bad class at all imo (like battlemage), but overshadowed and has very few unique builds (less than battlemage and sabo even).
- Defiler
Melee Defilers use either dw blazehearts + Justice set, which has no necro support, or used to use old iskandra’s set for aether afaik. I have not seen new setups with e.g. Krieg or Bonemonger set yet (maybe because they are just terrible?). Also Light’s Defender + Aether Jacks conduit should make a decent Defiler, but worse than Purifier.
Very good example on improving an otherwise underwhelming class indeed.
- Saboteur
Either that or simply buff both for Saboteurs. The last changes that were made to N&O, which made only demo benefit from the acid conversion were a good way to improve sabo instead of infiltrator. Maybe improve those Sabo specifiy bonuses even further?
Improving on any of the points Ceno listed would help saboteur.
Feel free to try this build instead if you wanna try Grenado Sabo. Rimetongue makes you lose so much damage due to its fire to pierce conversion.
Skills & Items
- Vindictive Flame
+1 to this^.
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Grenado
Increase projectile speed please. Maybe a small damage buff, other than that it’s fine imo. -
Devouring Swarm
Would also be a little better with higher projectile speed and a little longer duration. I personally don’t like the idea of making it spread like Ill Omen aswell, RR would have to be reduced by a lot to balance that. -
Callidor’s Tempest
100% agree, also Harra’s set is too squishy for a melee caster imo.
- Doom Bolt
I’ve played two Doom Bolt builds, one vitality and one lightning and on both of them I wish I had the +radius from Clairvoyant’s Wand. The skill is really easy to miss (at least for me) and it already rewards you with double damage for perfect hit in the center. Imo the base skill should have at least +1m radius to have better AoR on non Clairvoyant’s want setups. To compensate reducing the +2m radius to +1m on Clairvoyant’s seems fair.
- Curse of Frailty
As long as it’s a lowish amount (similar to its physical RR), I’d agree. Chaos builds are in a much better spot after the global chaos res reduction to enemies though.
- Veterancy
I think the skill has its purpose as a one pointer in some builds for physique reduction on cunning dump builds, other than that it’s underwhelming (unless maybe for full HP regen builds, which I’ve never played).
- Arcane Will & Nullification
Arcane will is pretty mediocre indeed, but Arcanist is also strong enough overall.
Nullfication is REALLY good at soft cap, it doesn’t need a buff imo.
- Aura of Conviction
Censure > Conviction on basically every elemental build, maybe I misunderstood your wording.
^is something I wanted to suggest for a long time already.
- Blade Trap:
What about Blade Trap indeed? Why is nobody talking about it? Did people already accept that it’s trash and will never be used? I think Blade Trap is a cool skill and has really good potential on e.g. Phantasmal Blades builds, but it lacks item support. OFF got couple of useable items/sets with freeze RR, and blade trap got… rimetongue set? I’m not 100% familiar with trap res on enemies across the board, but they seem similar to the values of freeze res. So why does rimetongue’s trap RR not match mage slayer’s freeze RR? There is also a conduit for blade trap, which has the same low value (30%) for trap RR that the OFF conduit has for freeze RR. Another possibility would be to give the new Bloodfeast’s Mark ~20% trap RR.
- Olexra’s Flash Freeze:
Agree with what @Evil_Baka said.
Removing the freeze RR on Luminari Regalia while increasing the freeze RR on this conduit aswell as on night’s embrace’s active to up to ~50% freeze RR would be apprechiated.
- Dreeg’s Evil Eye
Agree.
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Quillthrower of Dreeg
Kind of terrible item right now. It needs a %WD mod for DEE instead of flat damage for ABB or you instead make it the ranged version of the Amarastan Crusher, 0 CD ABB. It would need attack speed then. -
Horn of Gandarr
It’s supposed to either be a meme damage spell with decent proc synergy for devotions or to be used as a damage debuff similar to Warcry. The problem is that it’s only useful for builds that don’t use Aura of Censure or any other damage reduction. For those specific builds that can use it however I think it’s a good ability. Increasing the physical damage reduction debuff to 25% at soft- and 30% at hardcap and/or increasing it’s duration to 6 seconds would be great imo.
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Counter Strike
specific issue with the bloodknight set could be resolved by giving the set a much stronger damage mod to counter strike or make the base non retal damage of the skill scale a lot better with points. -
Mortar Trap
What’s the current situation with “The Big One”? I have never played a mortar build yet, but I’ve seen several people say it’s straight up a dps loss. If that hasn’t been fixed yet, it should be with next patch. -
Raise Skeletons
Could Will of the Crypt have its phys to vit conversion moved over to master of death instead? Would free up damage for fire and aether skeletons. Also it should get %aether damage aswell now. -
Call of the Grave
Still very underwhelming skill with low satisfactory impact, you one point this, you press it basically whenever it’s off cooldown, basically nothing happens. This might aswell be a toggle like Bonds of Bysmiel unless it gets changed to something that feels like it has an impact. Maybe add total speed for pets to this? -
Master of Death
Overall rather underwhelming aswell imo, %OA is useless on pet builds. Could change that to some defensive stat, like some CC res. -
Hyrian’s Bulwark
1+ nightblade is literally useless afaik and +2 celestial presence is not good enough to not go for mage hunter. A elemental dmg mod to either IEE or Aegis of Menhir would be nice. -
Mythical Stormreaver
lightning cadence’s damage feels a little underwhelming, especially due to the fact that you have to use savagery every now and then in between. Increasing the damage mod a little would be nice. -
Bone Lance
#buffbonelance2020 -
Cold Grenado
doesn’t have the same damage as e.g. fire shieldbreaker with adversary and is a lot squishier due to the class and on top of that needs to be more in melee range while shieldbreaker can just kite. The playstyle and squishyness is hard to adress with balance patches, but the damage could be improved on. I feel like it would be a fair trade for a build like this to have at least the same or ideally even more damage than e.g. an adversary shieldbreaker when it feels that squishy due to being a sabo and having to be more in melee range.
This feedback is based on generic gameplay experience, I can post videos if nessessary.
22 Likes
I wish that War Cry transmuter can be changed a bit from flat to percentage one as Battlemage especially Krieg one already have many source of flat RR, besides flat RR are easy to get most of the times while percentage is not.
I also wish WPS that provide aoe for melee like Zolhan, Necrotic Edge, Feral Hunger work a bit more like Smite or Burning Void in the sense that it also provide aoe for ranged in the form of pierce through or explode on contact. So ranged build are not obliged to take Demolition, Inquisitior, or Jaxxon ring for more aoe wps.
5 Likes
From what I’ve played, Warlock feels too weak outside of TSS builds. The low HP and lack of synergy can be crippling, and characters are often outclassed by Mage Hunters or Spellbinders. Some creative Conduit options sadly lock out needed RR that’s available on amulets.
Most of the power differences between classes I’ve noticed come from expansion masteries. I’ll give examples:
- Oathkeeper seems too good for acid/poison (vs. Witch Hunters, Reapers) and physical damage (vs. Warders, Commandos)
- Inquisitor seems too good for elemental damage types (vs. Elementalists, Battlemages) and ranged weapons in general
- Necromancer’s superiority for all things Aether
I love this idea.
Thought about it before, but a de novo transmuter is probably unrealistic.
2 Likes
This is a nice way to to buff elemental damage without introducing RR to arcanist.
2 Likes
That won’t solve anything. It would just enhance the DPS metet. GD clearly works with RR. Therefore you can do a quick math. 37 to 300 means + 263 eytra dmg. Juicy at the first glance but what does it do when you face 90% Resistance? exatle it would give you + 26.3 dmg. What GD need is better chances to lower resistances. Tinker with abilites or having new items or even components.
So a few words about the skills that in my opinion are needs some up
Fighting Spirits - reduce cd from 16 to 10 or 8 seconds
Terrify- change flat rr to X% Reduced Phys/Bleed Resistances (such as viper/hand of ultos)
Brak Morale - posible increase flat rr to 35 on softcup and 45 on 22/12
Supercharged - increase scale crit damage to 30% on 12/12 and 40% on 22/12
Shattered Star - change chance of damage to flat damage (this also applies to Static Strike)
1 Like
So many good points made here in your post, and really everyones posts, but you articulated everything I wanted to say but dont know how due to noobiness, particularly relating to Battlemages and Sabos, which im really glad everyones talking about. Thank you!
Awesome idea. I am now playing a Sentinnel EoR build and getting enough energy regen is painful.
Mindblowing… +1
It needs more support.
I played a Battlemage with MoE axes and it needs something to kill faster https://www.grimtools.com/calc/8NKq6BpV
It isn’t.
Reading your comment makes me want to see a Nullification-based Battlemage set (with some Soldier damage source, for once not necessarily Cadence) with Nulli applying nonstacking RR and having 5-6 seconds off its cooldown. Think that’d be a neat concept/playstyle.
Fumble on Terrify is a great idea too.
Edit RE: Zantai
My sabo post was not suggesting for new items to be introduced, if that wasn’t clear. This post is, though. 
Edit 2: I was so infatuated with the idea above that I decided to throw it together in a mod. Check it out here.
7 Likes
What difference between Flame Touched and IEE/Solael’s Witchfire?
It doesn’t have a transmuter that they could just edit.
Since i don’t have the game for a long time, this is the first post i reply to seriously.I don’t have too much end-game experiences,but i’ve done a lot of building-theorycrafting, but no, i’m not gonna talk about numbers,instead,i’d love to see some change that can be related to the lore,while also,it could help masteries confirm their roles.
It’s really hard to reply,this is about the 4th time i rewrite my whole message xD
What kind of rebalancing do you imagine?A communityfeedback based(what most players prefer/want)?
Or one that offers more builds possibilities(expanding general gameplay)?
Or something totally different(you are expecting new ideas)
Like you said,it is impossible to make perfect balance,so try to base this re-balance on lore and role.
You can build around most mastery weaknesses,so if someone really wants their favourite skill to be their main, they will probably be able to pull it of with a certain build.It doesn’t matter what you buff/nerf/change.You can mostly build any character you imagine.
Or,a great way to make mastery combos sync to eachother or offer more interesting builds is to change weapons.Not the affixes or prefixes,…the base attribute of items.I still don’t feel dual guns are different enough from dual melee wielding.For example, dual wielding guns should increase attack speed,which could result more attack pers second.So a lower gun damage would be justified if the guns attack rate would be SIGNIFICANLTY higher.(I still don’t understand how one handed guns are the slowest AND the weakest weapons at the same time)This would create an obvious difference between dual wielding ranged and melee,becuase dual melee usually comes with either dodge or hp+armor.But ranged dual wielding should about attack rate so in shorter period of time (while the enemy closes in) the character could dish out as much dmg as the melee dual wielder,who has enough survivability to tank while dealing damage,while runing for ranged dual wielding be reserved for tougher enemies.
Obviously,other weapons should be reviewed as well,two-handed swords could be much slower but do much higher damage,while it would be very interesting to make two-handed axes faster than two-handed swords with their lack or armor pierce, and high min-max dmg difference.This change would suit a berserker themed character well,it would be a bonus, if two-handed weapons could deal a little aoe dmg on every attack,but i imagine that would take a lot more work.
Anyways,feel free to reply if you liked any ideas and also if you didn’t and why.
1 Like
On the subject of soldier skills, Zolhan’s Technique is the weakest WPS in the game right now. Compared to the other 3-target melee WPS like Necrotic Edge and Smite, it’s lacking in terms of damage (both flat and WD) and secondary effects. The only times it’s worth taking is for 4pc Avenger, retal warlords, and 1pt for ranged/2h builds.
If keeping its identity as a one-handed WPS is important, it can have a similar effect to Shattering Smash, letting it hit with a shield. Otherwise, it should join the club of WPS that hit with both hands.
3 Likes
I`d love to see more EoR support in the game.
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/lV7YPzaN
plz add phyz to vitality conversion on Wrathblade to make it a okaysh blue solution . And a pantsu slot with +soulfire skills won’t hurt anyone.
1 Like