^exclude Fabby from crit/oa and player “marked” in fabby session mutators now, and grava (+Slathsarr) from timewarped ? 
even on casual shards/SR those aren’t really fun… not gonna bother imagine on 80-85+
Why isn’t Reaping Arc a 500% WD 10 meter AoE nuke yet?
3 Likes
Came back to check out some new-ish melee stuff, notably the set for fire Sabo and the green fire two-handed sword (with commando). Made the builds more tanky than i usually did to account for my absence and rustiness.
Both builds performed well, new items are pretty good. I could facetank any 4 Nems in Crucible. Except for Grava. I even died to him solo. In that regard nothing has changed: solo Grava vs fire/lightning melee >> 4 Nemesis.
If you guys plan any balance changes regarding the enemies, i’d look at this boss first of all. Not just at raw numbers, but rather actual gameplay of fire/lightning/ele melee builds vs him. I specialized in melee and Crucible, but i played my fair share of casters and SR. Nothing in this game is as extraordinally imbalanced as Grava, to the point where it kills any motivation to play endgame (did it with me last time, did it again).
I remember Z repeatedly said Grava’s fumble pools’ effect is halved in Crucible. But the windows of not dealing dmg to him (and not leeching anything) are very long. I’m not in the position to speculate on what is happening in the fights against him, i’m just reporting my experience. This boss is solely responsible for cutting more than half of otherwise perfectly capable melee builds off of Crucible.
12 Likes
Banana_Peel : Grava is too strong and limits the gameplay of melee builds especially in end-game.
Z : Hmm, you’re right; I’m going to add a high DoT/debuff to reaper only acticates when you move so now there is a nemesis to destroy kiters aswell.
Perfectly Balanced.
Besides from joke. I can only ask if pools/fumbles had to stay as they are for concept; diminish the Fire and Lightning resistances of the Grava so atleast those melee builds can kill it with more ease.
2 Likes
I bought this up a while ago but since its still a playstyle which I am interested in trying, I will bring this up again. Currently skills like Ring of Flame, Ring of Everlasting Flame, Rimfire and Kilrian’s Flame are only really of use when facetanking enemies due to their very small radius of 4m or less which does not increase on higher gear verisons.
I never really had a big benefit of those procs (damage wise) to be honest. Lately I am also experimenting on aura builds a bit and it would be so great to use those skills also on casters which don’t are built to completely facetank enemies and use it also when kiting enemies around a bit. Therefore I propose the idea of having an increased radius at least for higher gear level versions.
1 Like
I was tinkering around with Venomlance rifle and came up with… a Paladin? It’s such a meme concept really, cuz why would you go acid Paladin if you can go fire, aether, pierce, physical and with Goredrinker - bleed? The answer is: because Venomlance is a rifle that is intriguing, but doesn’t have much to offer when you actually try to build around it. But 1.1.9.0 changes to it and Gulgazor’s Heart were a push in the right direction.
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/d2jQdlEN
This is what I came up with. Affixes are the best I happen to have in my possession.
I have no idea how viable it is in-game, because I can’t waste a week or more for leveling and gearing just to feel dissapointed. On paper though, I can see multiple problems with this concept:
- Lack of skillpoints. +2 to OK and +1 to Inquisitor is not enough, sadly. I barely managed to cover the basics. If by some chance this rifle received +2 to Inquisitor instead of +4 to Ravenous Earth (no one will play acid RE with a rifle - no one!), it may have a chance at being something.
- Righteous Fervor transmuter converts fire to vitality - this means all fire from Smite and Bursting Round are wasted. You can’t ignore this transmuter either, because we can only have ~75% physical to acid, and we lose +% acid/poison from charges (just checked this, it only adds % physical and fire even with transmuter). Is it possible to change this conversion to acid? Or at least remove it completely? RF on its own has only burn damage and it is already half converted by Path of the Three. Gulgazor’s Heart now gives 100% fire to acid, which are useless with this transmuter in effect. For vitality RF it’s even more harmful. So basically the only purpose of this conversion is to botch retal builds I guess?
- Rather low health. This can be somewhat fixed with affixes and more points in Vigor and Haven (which we don’t have). But even that will raise it to ~13k. Raising Health on the rifle to ~700 would be decent. Maybe add some health to Widow’s Sting as well?
- Physical resistance is only 10-12%. Armor isn’t that high too. Bloodied Crystals can help with that, but stun res will be bad (and less health).
- This you cannot combat, but still: RR is rather low - only 78%. Maybe Manticore’s RR can be buffed a bit? Even to 30, that would still be an improvement.
Surprisingly, resists are fine, attack speed can be capped with lucky rolls, sufficient crit damage, rank 24 RF and 22 Consecration. That’s quite an achievement to be honest.
@eardianm, seeing you as a ranged weapons expert, what’s your opinion on the matter?
murmur belt and ditch dreeg reproach maybe?
would also allow 2 more points in Torch for meteor with great conversion
And lose even more skill points (and 9th charge on RF) on a skill-point starved build? Doesn’t sound like much improvement to me =\
make it up elsewhere? sounds to me like dreegs reproach is hurting you more than helping tho 
I mean, if I am to use Kaisan’s amulet instead of Gulgazor’s, might as well go Sentinel or Dervish at that point. And Ravager’s helmet would be too much glory I suppose, although it would help with RR and health as well.
swap prefix on helm or necklace to make up for RF loss, wont be a +1 cover all, but will maintain RF charges
I would like to see a small change to the skill “Provoke” of Anchorite’s Seal and Mythical Bladewards Courage to prog on attack, rather then block (with adjusted prog-probability ofc). Witch would it make it actually useful in multiplayer while staying pretty much the same in singleplayer, where you don’t really need aggro-management.
At the moment the “additional thread” is pretty pointless, since it is useless in singleplayer anyways and in multiplayer you rarely get to block when playing tankbuilds, since mobaggression is usually on any build that deals more damage then yourself.
Aggro in general might need a little push on the prog- and ability-side, to help pure blocktank-builds or any non-retaliationtank to do their job in multiplayer. Right now the experience is more like a walking simulator, following your kiting glascanons with the occasional warcry or aegis changing pretty much nothing in terms of mob-control.
Maybe even a general mob-aggro-reset after X amounts of time, could help to make fights more dynamic, especially when they last longer and aggro pools are getting static (I don’t know if that is actually the case but it sure feels like it).
I know it only affects multiplayer, but I like multiplayer…and tankbuilds that aren’t retalitationbased.
Apologies if something doesn’t make any sence, english isn’t my first language. Hope I comunicated well enough.^^
You do know that the RF transmuter will turn all flat fire damage on RF and WPS into vitality and not acid (from your global fire > acid conversions)
also small suggestion about Ember’s Calling set:
the pierce->fire conversion is w/o doubt one of the easiest one to get (from green axes, from green ammy, from gloves, from belt) and EC helm can be used also in chaos builds like Sabo and Witch Hunter.
I propose to remove the conversion from helmet as it’s very easy to obtain it other ways and it derails a bit possible chaos builds.
2 Likes
Pierce to fire conversion could potentially be very nice for fire blade spirits + canister bomb sabo (without needing fire BS conduit), but I have yet to test that build.
1 Like
But then you would use the MI axe that already has ton of pierce to fire conversion. And fire blade spirits… you want the conduit so you can get their color changed 
@afanasenkov26 perhaps changing it to conversion to fire from cold, lightning or vitality instead? As you mentioned, pierce to fire is kinda “overkill” here
Uh, it was my second point?
Also I was pretty convinced Venomlance is not an “overperforming” weapon. But I guess people use it on Ravenous Earth builds after all and it doesn’t need any buffs =)
RektbyColorchange
mhmm with removal of head conversion I’d have max 96% pierce to fire, which is pretty unlikely unless you GD stash (at least the weapon roll is). Can’t use rings for conversion since I need those for +skills to either blade spirit or canister bomb.
If head armor conversion got removed but chest conversion got increased, that’d be fine with me.
1 Like
I was drunk when I wrote 
What amulet would you use instead of fire blade spirit conduit?
15% fire RR conduit ofc
1 Like