Quote:One of our primary goals with class changes in patch 1.0.4 is to help improve build diversity. Of course, this has been a goal for the Diablo III development team since launch, but our approach this patch has been a little different. For 1.0.4, we're taking a good look at some of the most unpopular skills for each class, figuring out why they aren't being used in your builds, and then seeing how we can make them better -- either by redesigning how they work or just buffing the hell out of them.
For barbarians, we focused on improving the following areas:
Bash and Cleave are not very attractive compared to Frenzy
Many of the damage-oriented Fury Spenders don't do enough damage to justify the spot on your bar
Fury Generators
Frenzy:
Itâs easy to see why Frenzy is the most popular Fury Generator right now. It generates a solid amount of Fury, it has the highest single-target damage of any Fury generator, and it has the highest single-target healing using Life on Hit. The bonus attack speed also provides good combat mobility as well as the option to focus all your damage on a single target or distribute it between multiple targets as needed. We're going to buff Bash and Cleave to be viable alternatives to Frenzy for people who would like to try a different play style.
Bash:
From a design perspective, Bash should be the definitive choice when it comes to maximizing your Fury generation. Thatâs not currently the case, and given the current state of the game, this means attacking the problem from two sides. First, we need to make Fury a more attractive resource to build up (which also means making Fury Spenders more attractive, which I talk about below). Second, weâre going to increase the amount of Fury generated by Bash from 6 to 8, as well as the amount of weapon damage done by Bash from 150% to 165%. The goal is to make Bash not only a very compelling option if you decide you want to focus on Fury generation, but also an appealing single-target alternative to Frenzy if you donât enjoy its mechanics (like having to manage Frenzy stacks). Currently, Frenzy surpasses Bash in single-target damage as soon as you have your third stack of Frenzy, and it feels like the breakpoint should be around the fourth stack instead. These changes should help better balance the appeal of the two skills.
Cleave:
Looking at the three basic Fury Generators (Frenzy, Bash and Cleave), the role of Cleave is fairly straight-forward: it should be the clear winner when there is more than one target to hit. In a single-target situation, however, Cleave will always perform worse than Bash and Frenzy. While this is intended to a degree, the amount of single-target damage you currently have to give up feels too great to make the trade-off worthwhile. At an extreme, if Cleave did almost exactly the same damage as Bash or Frenzy, but had the ability to hit a second target when one was around, Cleave would definitely become that âclear winner.â So, to make it more appealing to some players, our goal is then to find that sweet spot between where Cleave is now and doing the same single-target as Frenzy and Bash. Weâre going to increase both the damage and proc coefficient on Cleave to close the gap when fighting a single target.
Fury Spenders
For many players, using Hammer of the Ancients, Seismic Slam, or Rend just doesnât seem worth it. To make these skills more attractive, we're going to straight up buff their damage across the board. How much? Well, we noticed that more players useBattle Rage than any of these other Fury Spenders, but Battle Rage is less exciting to use and doesnât quite evoke the same visceral joy. So, we used Battle Rage and Frenzy as our starting point. We basically asked ourselves the question "How much damage would Hammer of the Ancients have to do in order to make Frenzy + Hammer [of the Ancients] as appealing as Frenzy + Battle Rage?" Players who really want to go the extra mile for the most damage could go so far as to combine all three skills together, so we kept that in mind as well.
Hammer of the Ancients vs. Battle Rage was a simple starting point, but we used similar approaches with Seismic Slam, and Rend. The basic idea was: Fury generation isnât attractive to players because Fury spending isnât attractive to players, so what do the numbers need to be to fix that? To continue using Hammer of the Ancients as an example:
We're increasing its base damage from 200% to 325%
We're increasing the damage for Rolling Thunder from 155% to 275%
Weâre increasing the damage for Smash from 270% to 406%
And to provide another example, hereâs what weâre doing with Rend:
Weapon damage increased from 210% over 3 seconds to 700% over 5 seconds
Lacerate weapon damage increased from 271% over 3 seconds to 903% over 5 seconds
Bloodbath weapon damage increased from 60% over 3 seconds to 100% over 5 second
With these improvements (Whirlwind and Seismic Slam will be receiving similar tweaks to improve their viability), we hope to see Fury Spenders become more appealing for all levels of play.
Let's really hope they hear you. Otherwise me and my chars will never make it past nightmare diff where i stopped playing weeks ago because i'm simply bored by the game.
Strongly agree. It is nice that they are looking to improve the late game experience, but what about all the game prior to that? The whole "the game begins at Inferno" mindset always makes me ask why they included all the previous difficulty levels. Punishing your customers with many hours of drudgery before they "get to the REAL game" is a very strange business model.
haphazard1 Wrote:Strongly agree. It is nice that they are looking to improve the late game experience, but what about all the game prior to that? The whole "the game begins at Inferno" mindset always makes me ask why they included all the previous difficulty levels. Punishing your customers with many hours of drudgery before they "get to the REAL game" is a very strange business model.
It's not odd, it's just boring. The only difference between difficulty levels is health and damage, there's nothing that changes the gameplay. You always either endlessly kite mobs or just mow them down before they can mow you down. Wow is more advanced, and that's just amusing.
I would not say that nothing changes between difficulty levels. The player unlocks more abilities and runes (up through partway through Hell, anyway) giving more options. And the difficulty of elite packs becomes greater as tougher affixes and combinations of affixes become possible.
But otherwise, yes. The storyline, the areas, the quests all remain fixed. And the item grind just gets deadly boring after a while. Searching through scores of items to find even a single item that is a 1% improvement over something you already have...it just doesn't quite capture the imagination.
More interesting abilities and item powers would help, as would a better balanced progression with items. Why do white/gray items even drop once you get past the first act of Normal? Does anyone even pick them up (intentionally, anyway) after that? Why don't major bosses give better drops? I just killed Belial in Nightmare (I have been advancing my wizard again after a several week break) and got all of three (total junk) blue items -- no yellows, and of course no legendaries. That's late game content, wouldn't want a player to even glimpse one before they get to Inferno.
Still, I do enjoy the game for the solid action smash/burn/fry/slice/dice/julienne some monsters experience. If I am in the mood for that kind of gameplay, Diablo 3 has delivered pretty well. I feel I have gotten my money's worth from the game, even though I have not yet gotten a single character to Hell.
I am looking forward to Torchlight 2 to see how it compares; I really enjoyed the first one.
From a development standpoint, we love Hydra and put a lot of effort into its design. In fact, Hydra took many times more development time to create than an average skill. There are more art variants, more spell effects, and more lines of code associated with Hydra than almost any other wizard skill in the game (except potentially Archon). We did this because Hydra is an iconic skill in the wizardâs arsenal and we wanted it to stand out. When youâre in a multiplayer game and you see that Hydra spawn, itâs instantly recognizable. And for those who are familiar with the class, you can also immediately tell which rune variant a wizard is running with.
Our goal for Hydra is to not just have each rune variant be visually distinct, but also for it to be better at something than the others. Specifically:
Arcane Hydra: Best at AoE
Lightning Hydra: Good against targets that move a lot
Venom Hydra: Good against targets that stand still
Frost Hydra: Good for snaring
Mammoth Hydra: Best in hallways
Despite these goals, it doesnât take long to figure out that Venom Hydra is simply the best Hydra to use, regardless of the situation. This is mostly to do with its very high damage output. Although (technically) against fast-moving targets the Lightning Hydra does slightly more damage, Venom Hydra does three times more damage if you get the target to stand still, and that difference is simply too big to pass up.
The other rune variants have similar issues. The range on the Frost Hydra is too short to be useful. The DPS loss Arcane Hydra takes for being good at AoE makes it too weak versus single targets (especially when you consider that most of the hard fights are against high health Elites). The niche for Mammoth Hydra is very narrow and, if you can get a target to stand still, Venom Hydra does more damage in hallways than Mammoth Hydra anyways.
To address these issues, weâve decided to boost the damage of Lightning, Frost, Arcane, and Mammoth Hydra. Venom Hydra will remain the best against stationary targets, but if the targets are moving in any way, Lightning should be a clear winner. The range of Frost Hydra has been more than doubled as well, which should allow it to fill the intended role of snaring. Arcane Hydra will do less damage than Venom Hydra versus a single target, but rather than doing approximately 60% less damage, choosing it should only cause about a 15-20% DPS hit against single targets -- and you should be much better against groups. Mammoth Hydra will be getting a modest bump, but ultimately "good in hallways" just doesn't seem like a very good specialty. We're going to keep an eye on this one for now, but down the road weâd like to find something much cooler for the Mammoth Hydra -- like giving it the ability to move around the battlefield without needing to be recast (just as an example).
One concern is how this change will affect skill diversity. If our goal is to promote a large variety of builds, why are we taking one of the most powerful wizard runes and then bumping all of the variants to match it rather than simply nerfing Venom Hydra?
From our point of view, it's okay for Venom Hydra to be extremely powerful. One of the trickiest things throughout our design process has been creating lots of appealing skills. You only have six skill slots, so the more appealing skills we can make, the more significant your choice becomes of which skills earn a spot on your bar. If a Signature skill is on the strong side, it starts to trump the other Signature skills. If a Signature skill is way too strong then it starts to trump your Arcane Power spenders as well. This hurts build diversity. Similar situations exist for Arcane Power spenders, many defensive skills, and the trio of Armor skills (Ice Armor, Storm Armor, and Energy Armor).
However, in the case of Hydra, the risk of trumping other skills is much lower. Itâs totally okay for Hydra to be one of the most used skills because thereâs still a lot of flexibility beyond making it your only source of DPS. If you can spare the skill slot, youâll almost certainly want to combine it with a Signature skill to cast while the Hydra is out. If you can spare two skill slots, you can do even more damage by adding a secondary Arcane Power spender.
While patch 1.0.4 has very few nerfs, one of them does affect the wizard. Rather than waiting for players to discover this change in the patch notes or while playing, I wanted to call it out here because it affects a build that I find to be quite cool and enjoy a lot.
Energy Twister is having its proc coefficient reduced from 0.25 to 0.125. For players who may not know what proc coefficients are: they affect how effectively a skill triggers procs (or effects that have a small chance to activate). Many skills (like Magic Missile) have a proc coefficient of 1. Skills that hit multiple targets or pulse multiple times have lower proc coefficients.
In the case of Energy Twister, specifically Wicked Wind, the 0.25 proc coefficient causes the skill to generate more procs in a given time period than any other skill. Currently, this is used in combination with Critical Mass to lower the cooldown on skills like Frost Nova and Diamond Skin. By reducing the proc coefficient from 0.25 to 0.125, the build still works and remains fairly strong, but it wonât be quite as good as it is now. (For those with extremely high Crit rates, you may not even notice much difference, but I wanted to call it out anyway. )
Originally, we werenât going to make this change, but 1.0.4 also brings with it a number of new Legendary items, and many of them have phenomenal new proc effects. If we left high proc coefficients as they were, then a handful of skills with higher coefficients would become the de facto choice to use with these sexy new items. We were faced with a choice: we could either reduce the proc coefficient, or we could make it so these skills could not trigger the procs on Legendary items at all. We opted for the former because it seemed like getting a Legendary with a proc effect but never seeing it trigger would be very disappointing. Regardless, having well-balanced proc coefficients on all skills is not only better for Legendaries, but also for the game in the long term.
The reduced proc coefficient is just a drop in the bucket, and overall wizards are seeing their fair share of buffing.
In addition to the Hydra buffs, we're also increasing the damage of some lesser used Signature skill runes. A few skills are very popular right now such as Seeker (Magic Missile) and Piercing Orb (Shock Pulse), so weâll be buffing the other runes to match. We'll be revisiting all of the other Signature skill runes with much the same philosophy as Hydra.
Meteor and Arcane Torrent are both going to get buffs, as well, since neither of those feel strong enough to justify the Arcane Power expenditure. Meteor requires the player to correctly predict enemy movement in order to deal maximum damage, and Arcane Torrent requires you to stand still for extended periods of time to do damage. Since a player is putting in some extra effort to use these skills, some extra damage seems justified.
I feel like a lot of these problems were caused by them just not beta testing a larger part of the game. They should have started characters at 30 (when you get the last skill) or even 60 and just scaled up the mobs in tristram to match. With out that they didn't get the large scale testing that would have immediately showed them what spells would get mass picked and others mass ignored.
I agree Tyrmith. I wish they would have allowed normal, nightmare, hell and inferno act 1 in the beta. Oh I forgot!, they didn't want to spoil the wonderful story. :neenernee . If only they could have made a "no story" mode. Then they could test more of the game in beta and after release we could play through the game for the 7th time in "no story" mode without the quest text being pushed in our face.
Negativity aside, these previews of patch 1.0.4 look good. I like the focus in the barb preview: making fury spenders better and improving fury generators. I think most of the game is fine it just needs better tuning of the numbers. Makes me wish they allowed modding because thats one simple thing mods can usually do(well, 99% of mods are XTREME TO THE MAX POWA!!! but 1% are usually somewhat balanced)
ellman Wrote:Makes me wish they allowed modding because thats one simple thing mods can usually do(well, 99% of mods are XTREME TO THE MAX POWA!!! but 1% are usually somewhat balanced)
The only place D3 will ever see a mod is on privat kept pirated game servers.
Going public with such a thing would be like raising a "sue me Blizzard" sign!
Arthur pulls tiles from the Scrabble bag which by random form into "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?"
Arthur: "Six by nine? 42?"
Ford: "I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."
