So do you really mean you can’t make any good combo with Arcanist mastery?? 
Imo Arcanist is one of the strongest mastery to combine with in GD. It doesn’t need RR its have other advantages.
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EVERY mastery is strong…it just depends on your build.I didnt said Arcanist is weak or something its just at disadvantage in a certain aspect compaired with others.Thats all 
. If your builds dont need what i suggest just dont spend points on it there is usually plenty of options to spend your points.In my experience it feels like Arcanist should have its RR.
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In one of my guides did class combos, for purpose of balancing might try explaining current status in my opinion.
- Physical. Most of traditional combos involving Soldier struggles, cause best way to utilize that damage is to convert from something else bypassing armor and/or add some trauma. Soldier’s don’t have other native damage types for coversion.
Also - physical RR on OK is combined well with converted damage. So usually Oppressor or even Templar will outperform physical Commando or Tactician for example.
Physical range needs lot of help to be a factor and some typical physical devotions like Bear or Vire are still weak.
- Pierce. Usually BM outperforms Infiltrator despite double source of RR. Tactician have limited use of this class, due to less possibilities and ranged Cadence being weak. More range support will be welcomed for this class.
Also not lot of support for pierce casters. Stuff like Demo spells have untapped potential. Usually pierce gear don’t have +skills to essential spells and missing cast speed as well. Oleron devotion is still hard to justify on Pierce builds.
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Bleeding. Biggest problem is lack of set diversity. And Bloodrager blocks amulet slot, further decreasing it. I like idea by @rhylthar for better bleeding support to Blood Knight set and support for Bleed Reaper. Also more bleeding Pox/Vines support for cool Conjurer casters or even Witch Hunter. Shaman class is the bread and butter for bleed currently, especially Warder for 2H melee and Trickster for DW. Warlord is good for 2H Blade Arc, maybe more support for shield builds?
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Fire. Very good damage type for casters and it’s boosted by RR in so many masteries +skill mods to Arcanist and Soldier skills. Sorcs are masters of fire casters and one can argue that are even too good. Occultist have lot’s of damage type for conversion but casters containing it like Sentinel or Pyro are somewhat squishy and with small %fire damage. More love for fire Locks or Sentinel/Pyros like % damage increase to passive skills. And better support for fire DEE.
Fire melee is kinda limited and feels inferior to casters.
- Lightning. Also great damage type for casters, although most of the time you end up using Shaman and always wind up with maxed Totems/Devils and feels the same build. Lightning Elementalist needs more defensive boost and overall support to function. Also lightning auto attackers tends to lack, especially going DW. That’s really awkward, considering Savagery works really well with WPS skills.
Also devotion route is usually the same. Tempest needs to be more appealing.
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Cold. King of DW and lot’s of unfulfilled potential elsewhere. Ranged cold builds are extreme rarity. Also some casters don’t have enough support/skill points to function. Like cold Devastation or Bombs. Sabo class also feels miserable for casters. And Soulrend needs buff to support properly Reaper class.
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Tri-Elemental. Pretty rare damage type, considering limited amounts of set supporting it and especially skills that can fully utilize it. Deceiver or even Lock are not popular classes and needs better support to make them unique of supporting tri-elemental damage type.
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Vitality. Tale of two sides, great casters and weak pure melees. But vitality have it’s trademark style - inbuilt leech. But damage mods on gear is sometimes too much. You have to pay some price for this life steal. From classes actually all excel as casters, Conjurers, Ritualists, Oppressors, etc. Cabalist actually looks best on paper, but tends to lack behind them. DK melee needs more love.
Valguur set needs updating, it’s kinda meh compared to other vitality apparel.
Gallows devotion is one of the worse. Did you also know Affliction supports vitality damage?
- Acid. Dervish tends to perform significantly better than the rest of acid classes and they need some extra support to challenge OK with it’s Path of Tree CDR and Ascension+passive RR. Classes without OK and 1 source of -RR like Reaper and Cabalist. Also the gear with mods or -RR tends to overlap. Too much of acid ranged gear also overlaps, boosting solely Amarasta.
Acid devotions have great procs but lacks reliable stats, resistances, CC and damage absorb. So acid needs extra help from Aeon or Scales, which is pretty unfortunate.
- Chaos. Since best chaos class lacks -RR is tough to build around combos without any RR like Lock or Witchblade. Especially during leveling is really inconvinient.
Pyromancer needs better support of chaos damage mods and especially +skills.
Devotion map lacks meaningful +chaos damage, except for the duo of T3 skills of DG and Abomination, making chaos map similar, especially for builds using skills with Weapon Damage.
- Aether. Binders are limited to aether damage but aether damage shouldn’t be limited to Binders. Lot’s of untapped potential for stuff like Defiler or Apostate.
Aether spells like FoI or demo stuff needs more +skill bonuses and mods.
Route to Seru is also rarely worth it, even with perfect elemental to aether conversion, which is not a common thing anyway.
- Pets. Hellhound needs better support. Classes without real pet bonuses(most of them) are usually not worth it.
Hybrids are too niche. Hard to strike balance between pets/players skills. Results are underwhelming. Furthermore lot’s of pet gear is actually tailored for hybrids, but end up used only by players or pets. Like how many pet builds are using Winter Might weapon vs player builds? And Gate of many worlds non pets? I would prefer less hybrid items/support but when it exist, to be proper option creating unique style.
- Retal. Commando can use more retal support, since it have variety of skills that can be used.
Some skills also needs some specific support to make them as viable options.
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Callidor’s Tempest. Outside of Agrivix set, spamming CT is miserable, whatever your damage type is. Chaos or fire, lightning, even cold despite crazy damage! You’re caster in melee range. Needs better radius(at least mods) and AdctH.
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Grenado. Lot’s of skills points for skill with limited range, that needs boost. Also damage looks usually good on paper but in reality it’s behind Bombs.
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Forcewave. Skill was slightly buffed, but on CD version, both burn and trauma is weak. Needs better flat trauma and base version better Weapon Damage.
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Blade Trap. Needs more gear mods and items with - trap resistance.
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Horn of Gandarr? Needs either massive damage output increase or extra CC effects/perks to make it more appealing.
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Phantasmal Blades. Even if Demonslayer and Spite are still alive and kicking Pblades suffered from too many nerfs. And stuff like chaos Witch Hunter can still be reality. PB on CD for frost-burn damage also is still weak.
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Stun Jacks. Spam version range is really small, I hope it can be boost.
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My two cents on one way to improve gameplay.
Transmutation could be enabled for crafted items to replace the preffix or suffix. For example, rolling double rare boots is already pretty challenging and can cost around 3.5M (I think the chances are around 1.6% at 35K per roll). If someone wants at least one specific affix, the cost becomes quite insane (e.g. I spent 10M and couldn’t roll a ‘scorched ends’ stoneplate greaves). I would suggest a transmutation that locks forever the affix that is not being rolled. Obtaining well crafted items with one specific prefix/suffix would remain challenging (probably still costing 10-15M), but once rolled, then the other attribute can be easily improved. I honestly don’t see the point of wanting players to amass 100M to have a chance of crafting an awesome item for their builds.
A secondary suggestion would be to increase the number of blue items dropped at the Shattered Realm. Farming them just seems pointless, while legendary items are much easier to find than blue ones in the endgame.
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Nex and Octus swords could support other masteries. Maybe the Battlemage (soldier/arcanist)?
Shadow strike could be taken out, i could be wrong but no one seems to be maxing shadow strike with the set because there is way too many skill to take as a Saboteur.
The set could be supporting elemental damage (adding lightning damage to it, maybe?).
Pretty please God Zantai
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Good suggestion. I made a thread a while ago when the swords were redone to include Occultist support due to the Acid/Chaos Damage inherent to the mastery. I even posted a Pyromancer using the swords, but it was nothing to write home about. Hope it can be done since Elemental Pyromancer should be a thing!
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First and foremost, not every class combo needs to be perfect. A large point to the game is min/maxing your character creation and its choices; how you choose your components gear and devotion arguably attribute more to your character than the classes themselves. Is your warlock going to suffer from poor defenses? Absolutely, its something you should probably look into, as its just the nature of the class combination. The real question is the trade-off: what do you gain for having little/no hp/defense?
In my opinion, the trade-off is simply never worth it. Cunning and Spirit are far less desirable than Physique, and the same can be said for health and energy. (even after the hp per cun/spirit change) Nobody picks arcanist for the “pog spirit gain” you pick it for the cast speed and +%OA. Having 600 base spirit should be “build enabling” in its own way. It shouldn’t solve all your problems, but you’d think that 600 spirit would at least alleviate energy issues on Warlock casters. In reality, it has little to no effect, and all of your attributes are still dumped into physique for the much needed HP and defense. Why didn’t you simply pick a different class for your AAR caster? good question.
TLDR; Buff spirit and cunning (again), but not in a defensive regard. Give them desirable stats (attack / cast speed? action speed/energy regen(but good, i know it already does this))
My own personal gripe with class selection comes from distribution of damage types, and their perspective resistance reduction & in class support. Some damage types really have it rough. Trying to build a cold-damage character is an absolute nightmare. Just from the in-class support, its easy to see why your build would falter to other class combinations. Take reaper for example, Night-blade has the cold RR, which is awesome and Necro has the flat cold damage. Gotta be the best option right? Oops, here comes the chad-quisitor with his “totally not the best ultimate skill in the game” Aura of Censure, and he gives flat elemental damage, huge bruh moment for even thinking about picking reaper. But here’s an even better thought; why is this an issue? Is 33% RR really worth picking a whole other class over? It kinda is. External sources of RR are more of an afterthought, because they would be available to you regardless of what class combo you picked. It’s typically not a matter of “do I need more resist reduction” its “how much can I humanly fit without compromising my character”. Non physical solider variants are a good example (Looking at you, commando and battlemage!) These class combos are no-brainer avoids due to lack of overlapping RR. Does every class combo need overlapping RR? no. But the way I see it, its a trade-off that is almost never worth it, especially when the classes can offer comparable amount of support.
TLDR 2: RR is maybe too important, and is active part of class selection. Either more external sources of RR need to be in the game, or more in class damage type support to make the trade-off worth it.
The third point i’d like to make is kind of a mixture between the first two, but in regards to set bonuses. Does the “Vitality conjurer” set need to be broken as fuck? no. The classes clearly have some inherent synergy, and shaman has okay stat-line to boot. But consider a set or build enabling item for a non-physical fore-wave. That shit better be busted! since your playing force-wave, you’re already committing to a non physical class, meaning half your RR support is thrown out the window. You’d expect an item like Death’s Reach to be a little more tame, maybe the build enabling part of the weapon is for another class, but nope! its nutters! compared to (legendary two handed sword), or (legendary two handed mace) It just looks unfair. Why give already good, established class combinations more RR?
TLDR 3: Set bonuses and build enabling items need to focus a little more critically on what lacks in said class combination, especially when one of the classes is “locked” (based around a skill in the class) this is a set by set analysis, and can get messed up with tri-set items. Worse class combo = stronger endgame set.
So all of that being said, what do I think should be changed? I personally presume it unreasonable to write 500+ words and not provide any solutions or proposed changes at all.
For the first point, I am pretty sold on the idea of cunning giving attack speed, and spirit providing cast speed. Large amounts of either I’d gander are 900, but for math’s sake we’ll round up to 1000. I’d say that investment is worth 50% increase to each speed respectively, so 1% increased per 20 attribute point. As a reference, a Warlock with full mastery bar has 525 spirit, or ~26% increased cast speed. Do they need that? No, but it means the gear and devotions can be changed to accommodate, and you “lose” cast speed by selecting a different class.
For the second point, I’d suggest one of two things. The first, and more unreasonable of the two, is to do a pass on all RR currently available in the game, nerfing the in-class ones and buffing external ones, closing the cap between class combo RR capabilities.
The second, and more reasonable of the two, is to simply put more meat on the bones of the competing supporting classes, via transmuters. The technology for this already exists, It’s how Celestial presence is effected by Scion of Dreeg. BEHOLD:
While this might not be balanced, you get the idea. It’s not an overhaul to the entire class, its just a trasmuter that changes the damage types to be more accessible. I had made another mock up for the Inquisitor gaining chaos damage, but I’m only allowed to post 1 image and I’m biased to reaper. (I’ll leave a comment maybe)
For the final point, I don’t have enough data, nor know crates expectations for build viability. Perhaps the janky elemental force wave witch-blade just isn’t meant to be good. I’d say this is more of a personal frustration, and less of class viability than the other two points.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading my first forum post. (I literally made an account just to post this smh)
also something something crate good, 10/10 would buy again
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Here is another example of class transmutation that I made, also showcasing my amazing talent of leaving 1px of white space.
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So here’s a wild thought…
What if Crate replaced all Mastery-based sources of -RR with other debuffs (OA / DA / Speed / Damage / take your pick)… and had all -RR on only devotions and gear (buffing the commonality and, in the case of gear, scale of -RR on both to compensate)?
So you end up with roughly the same levels of -RR in play, but via differing sources?
All of a sudden, far more classes become viable, because it’s heck of an easy to weave some appropriate gear into your build than it is to re-choose your sub-optimal mastery…
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Your whole argument is made over the fact physique is far more desirable than rest of the attributes.
But you can check posted builds and you’ll notice almost every Crucible spec and most of SR characters even fully commits to spirit if they’re doing magic damage or cunning for physical/pierce/bleed.
The gain of damage is really noticeable, that’s why Arcanist can be on top of food chain, despite of no stackable RR. Spirit % modifier boosting your existing one, OA, so you can skip investing in cunning and get enough OA and active defense(Mirror) + passive one from Maiven allowing you to have low DA than optimal and survive. And you have %CDR from Star Pact as cherry on top. Actually is pretty impressive!
Cunning and spirit are fine are current state, one thing that doesn’t require further change in the final release of patch.
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Imo the main reason why phys soldiers struggle (at least soldier mains) is not because of the armor mechanic but mostly because their skills either suck or have some mechanic hindering them. No matter how much buffs cadence received after some patches it’s still just an okay skill overall just because fumble fucks it too much, unlike blade arc. And forcewave still sucks. Soldier as a support class tho is not really ideal at all imo.
If @mad_lee could post now he’d kill you for saying infiltrator is worse. Imo, the two just occupy different roles. Belgo is strong for both, noctirn is clearly made for infiltrator. Spite is for bm. Reaver is for bm. Nadaan (the proc build, not the rune build) infiltrator plays different compared to nadaan bm. Imo Tactician pierce should be looked upon as this is easier to support than say, elemental tactician.
Once upon a time witchblade was the second best bleeding class after warder. Now I don’t even know if someone still plays bleed witchblade. I’d love to see it again.
Imo chaos witchblade just needs one more bump to mirror we’ve seen with aether battlemage and Lucius arm. We have rah’zin which gives quite the amount of stackable RR to occultists - it needs a good weapon (preferably 2h cause wh exists and is already good) to make chaos wb competitive. Obsidian jugg isn’t really a great weapon imo.
Temporal arcblade should probably deserve a mention, tho that’s more of a “use every skill binder has” build. CT probably won’t see much support outside aether now cause if you give it fire or lightning then we’re just adding one more sorc to the existing list of top tier sorcs, while cold is… yeah.
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That’s true but most of your Cadence damage will have to go through armor, partial reason why Cadence for physical builds will be weaker than cold or aether (other than support)
So Cadence still can work, but only if you can go with brute force and have massive damage + AoE from elsewhere, example is the Lucius build.
I acknowledged Forcewave at the end of my topic. @mad_lee skipped it entirely on a build/set designed specifically around FW. That’s saying how bad it is. My try with burn Commando was also pretty bad.
I agree that Blade Arc is the best attack Soldier can offer.
Yeah, I agree, though cadence and blade arc builds normally have similar weapon damage values before deadly momentum and BA still comes out on top most of the time. Not really complaining tho. Cadence is better on DW at least and that’s a good thing. Crate better turn their eyes on other skills like DEE.
Hi
Great to so balances for weaker uhum hipster classes being thought of.
My only 2 cent would be to give necro COLD res reduction on the spectral wrath and maybe alter the values or remove the phys imo.
REAPER is one of my fav combos but cold red is hard to get. And in devotion there is only flat elemental and 1 cold reducing skill.
Great to read through this topic.
You’re doing it wrong. Valgur cabalist is one of the best naked crucy runners =)
khm, opressor, khm, ritualist . =) Both can run naked 150+ with 100% sucsess rate .
Only as AA, and that make sense, since OK provide AA replacer. WH is better for SS and sentinel is better for EoR(if Crate fix )
That’s fat 
Litteraly all pyro items provide chaos support and offer quite a lot of +skills.
I wonder where Harbringer find 80k weapon dmg must be a hallucination. 
This kind of talk killed Clairvoyant set. Ppl asked to buff a spell that did fine, Crate buffed , guess what happen next?
I do now and then. Still very good.
Back to Pyromancer - i’d kill for Sigil of consumption support on Infernal knight set. Just a few sigil/destruction/possesion points and duration or flat CDR mod will be supercool .
Have you tried farming high SR on Normal? Plenty of blue items there.
I have played both EoR and SS and Dervish is better. Especially SS with CDR from PoT, how can you match that?
Also it turns out ABB spam plays better as Dervish, despite items are suited better for Witch Hunter.
I am not doing it wrong. Just compare Valguur set with Dark One Conjurer or Ritualist, Blightlord Oppressor, Wildblood builds and even my Blood Knight Oppressor. All of listed builds are simply better.
Also set lacks OA/DA, mod to siphon souls? And Dark One and Blightlord have great procs, while Blood Knight have better skill mods.
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A tiny little idea.
Perhaps, a passive ability that allows the user to hold a 2h melee weapon and a shield.
It could be added by tweeking an item passive like Blademaster’s talisman or by tweeking/adding a Passive in Soilder, Oathkeeper or Shaman.
It could help combat the melee damage fall off that is present in late game, It could even allow for some intresting new build and mastery synergies to be constructed.