NO ability should have a cooldown longer than 30 seconds. Not BBV, not FA, not MC. Give them higher mana costs if you want to, but I'm still iffy on that.
Dogs and garg should be 15-20 seconds.
I think with this change, they wouldn't even need to adjust any numbers. Pets don't last long? well that's ok cause you can summon more in 15 seconds.
im Anti-Cooldown in general, but im ok with it on the support spells, mainly because they offer VQ to make it kinda worth it. Yes some are a tad long (im looking at you BBV) but I do think there are a few damage skills (like Dead Rush) that need to have the cooldown removed all together so they can be spammed. And pets need to scale with armor and HP better, because even with all the right passives, its still inferior to other non-pet build.
The class is fine indeed. Theres just a couple bad passives and runes, but all classes have those. All they need to do in order to fix the WD is make ccoc and hpr affixes more common, since the whole pet build needs then and they are super rare and expansive, making WD's signature build (pets) one of the most expansive ones.
Also some of the fluff will be Godly in PVP, so im sure some of the talents have the PVP aspect worked into them. That why i coudlnt see something like WoZ losing its CD as that would be so OP in PVP.
The thing with cooldown is not a power level matter but gameplay i believe.
When a good number of your skills has 15+ seconds cooldown on then, it's just fact that you will pass the majority of time running and shooting your primary attack (or tanking and shooting your primary attack). I think this kinda makes the gameplay a bit similar between classes. I was playing my brothers wiz this weekend (just to see if i like wiz and if i should start one) and i definetly felt the gameplay between the two classes were way to similar. WD gotta lock stuff on WoZ, but you only do that once every fight. Wiz can teleport, but again you only do that now and then.
I dunno how to reduce the cooldown of such abilities without breaking the game, but i definetly think that too much limit in the defensive spells definetly makes the class gameplay bit too generic because you're only applying your defensive tatics in pontual times, not all the time.
Another argument to prove my poin is that how different WD's gameplay gets when you make pet work. Execly because pets have 100% uptime, unlike other defensive tools.
The thing with cooldown is not a power level matter but gameplay i believe.
When a good number of your skills has 15+ seconds cooldown on then, it's just fact that you will pass the majority of time running and shooting your primary attack (or tanking and shooting your primary attack). I think this kinda makes the gameplay a bit similar between classes. I was playing my brothers wiz this weekend (just to see if i like wiz and if i should start one) and i definetly felt the gameplay between the two classes were way to similar. WD gotta lock stuff on WoZ, but you only do that once every fight. Wiz can teleport, but again you only do that now and then.
I dunno how to reduce the cooldown of such abilities without breaking the game, but i definetly think that too much limit in the defensive spells definetly makes the class gameplay bit too generic because you're only applying your defensive tatics in pontual times, not all the time.
Another argument to prove my poin is that how different WD's gameplay gets when you make pet work. Execly because pets have 100% uptime, unlike other defensive tools.
If pets could actually take a hit then I don't have an issue with the mana resource or damage the WD has. Hiding behind pets would allow such costly/weak spells to be spammed with less worry (compared to other classes).
Overall the WD does work but compared to the others classes he currently is very slow, most classes can spam 200% damage abilities with ease (I have yet to try a monk, so dunno about them) and the WD cannot (unless you go VQ or get all high end mana regen gear). All the classes have a jail free ability like the WD, the only thing the WD currently has as an advantage is ton of CC but no damage to back it up. Fix pets then it’s a level playing field.
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Playing Diablo since 97. I know nothing and having nothing good to say, I be a troll.
Cooldowns are absolutely fine and are in line with other classes' cd's. CD's also an essential part of VQ builds which adds good diversity. I do think VQ should only require 3 abilities on CD though because 4 is too limiting, or perhaps make it so that each ability on CD adds another 100% regen which would make regen smoother and allows much more variety (allowing to either either gear more regen with less cd's or gear less regen with more cd's).
a start would be fixing the pets. a playable build like in d2 with summoner necro is just needed to increase the diversity for wd's at least.
In order for pets to be viable they have to be made WAYYYY stronger (defensively) because they're only meaningful when they can tank champs without stacking defensive stats. Pets will never do damage in D3 because Blizzard specifically doesn't want people playing D3 like they played necros in D2.
No one will use pets unless they can hold champs in place.
Cooldowns are absolutely fine and are in line with other classes' cd's. CD's also an essential part of VQ builds which adds good diversity. I do think VQ should only require 3 abilities on CD though because 4 is too limiting, or perhaps make it so that each ability on CD adds another 100% regen which would make regen smoother and allows much more variety (allowing to either either gear more regen with less cd's or gear less regen with more cd's).
Cooldowns aren't exactly fine. Long cooldowns that is.
Here's why:
When you get to the point that you're encountering champs more than once every 2 minutes (or 90 sec for Devoted Following) they become really useless. You'll use BBV/FA on one pack, and then 1 min later fight another pack and be unable to use those cds.
You can swap between each cooldown using 1 per champ pack, but BBV is pretty awful without having a way to tank the champs.
Of course that's a tradeoff the player decides on. But the point is that the abilities are fairly useless if you don't stack MF gear (lowering your farming speed) and can kill champs faster than once every 2 min.
Also, the idea that long cds are good for VQ is wrong. Long cds are terrible for VQ really. They become placeholders.
White mobs don't matter in this game, all that matters is champs. If you spec into FA and it comes up 30 sec before you encounter a champ pack, you use it to clear a few white mobs, you've essentially just wasted a cooldown. Now you fight a champ pack without a really powerful ability. The alternative is to just run out of mana clearing the way to champ packs, depending on your damage. Or you spam 4 short cooldowns (Grasp / SW / Horrify / SH) just to fire off a few more Bats. Most people will go with at least 1 long cooldown even though it's useless a lot of the time, just to avoid having to spam 4 abilities in a row to get regen for 10 sec. The best for this is Devoted Following.
Pretty obvious that this style of gameplay is bad.
I mean I guess it's alright to have cooldowns that are good for lower gear levels (BBV / FA) and have ones that are more useful for higher gear levels (Horrify / ZW). But the problem is how it interacts with VQ. Once you get really good gear it makes sense to switch to VQ builds and drop the long cooldowns. But the long cooldowns make using VQ a lot easier, so people take something like Devoted Following, and just spam it everytime it's up just to use up a cooldown slot.
Cooldowns are absolutely fine and are in line with other classes' cd's. CD's also an essential part of VQ builds which adds good diversity. I do think VQ should only require 3 abilities on CD though because 4 is too limiting, or perhaps make it so that each ability on CD adds another 100% regen which would make regen smoother and allows much more variety (allowing to either either gear more regen with less cd's or gear less regen with more cd's).
Cooldowns aren't exactly fine. Long cooldowns that is.
Here's why:
When you get to the point that you're encountering champs more than once every 2 minutes (or 90 sec for Devoted Following) they become really useless. You'll use BBV/FA on one pack, and then 1 min later fight another pack and be unable to use those cds.
You can swap between each cooldown using 1 per champ pack, but BBV is pretty awful without having a way to tank the champs.
Of course that's a tradeoff the player decides on. But the point is that the abilities are fairly useless if you don't stack MF gear (lowering your farming speed) and can kill champs faster than once every 2 min.
Also, the idea that long cds are good for VQ is wrong. Long cds are terrible for VQ really. They become placeholders.
White mobs don't matter in this game, all that matters is champs. If you spec into FA and it comes up 30 sec before you encounter a champ pack, you use it to clear a few white mobs, you've essentially just wasted a cooldown. Now you fight a champ pack without a really powerful ability. The alternative is to just run out of mana clearing the way to champ packs, depending on your damage. Or you spam 4 short cooldowns (Grasp / SW / Horrify / SH) just to fire off a few more Bats. Most people will go with at least 1 long cooldown even though it's useless a lot of the time, just to avoid having to spam 4 abilities in a row to get regen for 10 sec. The best for this is Devoted Following.
Pretty obvious that this style of gameplay is bad.
I mean I guess it's alright to have cooldowns that are good for lower gear levels (BBV / FA) and have ones that are more useful for higher gear levels (Horrify / ZW). But the problem is how it interacts with VQ. Once you get really good gear it makes sense to switch to VQ builds and drop the long cooldowns. But the long cooldowns make using VQ a lot easier, so people take something like Devoted Following, and just spam it everytime it's up just to use up a cooldown slot.
You managed to completely ignored my post while replying to it. If you actually stop for a second and think about my proposed changes to VQ, either change would allow you to save your long cd's for champ packs while having extra mana regen whenever you want it. Not to mention that if pets ever do become viable, then they become great cd fillers for VQ builds.
If you run into a champ with a big cd down then you do what every other class does with big cd's down, either you kite until the cd comes back up or you're geared enough to not need them all the time but they still make things go faster.
It's whatever I guess... the cooldowns in this game are too basic anyway. A lot of them do the same kinds of things.
Once you have 1) A main attack 2) Grasp 3) Spirit Walk 4) An AoE if you use Darts, the remaining 2-3 abilities can be any of the cooldown abilities and you'll do fine. I'm sure a lot of people use BBV and FA with Bats and VQ even if it's not quite as good as other shorter CC abilities.
My point was just that it shouldn't be like that. There should be certain skills that fit together and increase your efficiently.
D3 isn't like that though. Which is why it's kind of pointless to talk about what's the best build beyond a certain point. Because once you have the core 3-4 skills, with the core passives, the remaining ones don't even really matter. And truthfully, once you have really high end gear, your spec almost doesn't even matter as long as you can spam an ability.
I dunno, it just seems to me that you should have all of your cooldowns for every champ fight, and be forced to use your cooldowns intelligently in order to avoid dying and kill the champs quickly. And that BBV and FA take away from that once you start farming faster.
But yeah, the way the game is now, most players (who have average gear) need Grasp, Spirit Walk and a Main Attack to kill most packs, not more than that. The other 3 slots are for 1) An AoE ability if spamming Darts is annoying for white mobs or 2) 3 abilities to have on cooldown in addition to Grasp to trigger VQ.
The 2-3 other abilities people get are just to allow them to play sloppier by overlapping cooldowns and having to kite less. So in that sense, BBV and FA are great because they trigger VQ and replace shorter cooldowns that aren't very necessary.
I think that's why you see a lot of people with dumb builds in Inferno because once you have your core skills (good gear?) the rest of the spec doesn't matter. I still don't understand why more people don't use LS though.
Cooldowns are absolutely fine and are in line with other classes' cd's. CD's also an essential part of VQ builds which adds good diversity. I do think VQ should only require 3 abilities on CD though because 4 is too limiting, or perhaps make it so that each ability on CD adds another 100% regen which would make regen smoother and allows much more variety (allowing to either either gear more regen with less cd's or gear less regen with more cd's).
Unless you lowered the regen factor, that would basically force everyone to go Bears/Bats because you'd get much higher return in killing ability for keeping three abilities on CD. This is not a smart idea for build diversity. All you're doing is lowering the opportunity cost for already-popular builds.
What we need is to get people off the PtV/VQ teat. The class is far too centralized on having one of those two passives for the most part. Either we're using low-mana cost spells which desperately need the 20% damage boost to be competitive, or we're using high-mana cost spells that couldn't work in most scenarios without massive mana regen.
Cooldowns are absolutely fine and are in line with other classes' cd's. CD's also an essential part of VQ builds which adds good diversity. I do think VQ should only require 3 abilities on CD though because 4 is too limiting, or perhaps make it so that each ability on CD adds another 100% regen which would make regen smoother and allows much more variety (allowing to either either gear more regen with less cd's or gear less regen with more cd's).
Unless you lowered the regen factor, that would basically force everyone to go Bears/Bats because you'd get much higher return in killing ability for keeping three abilities on CD. This is not a smart idea for build diversity. All you're doing is lowering the opportunity cost for already-popular builds.
What we need is to get people off the PtV/VQ teat. The class is far too centralized on having one of those two passives for the most part. Either we're using low-mana cost spells which desperately need the 20% damage boost to be competitive, or we're using high-mana cost spells that couldn't work in most scenarios without massive mana regen.
That's assuming they don't make many other balance changes which they said they would. Bears is really begging for nerfs with its high real dps even though it's such a short range with buggy pathing... The attractiveness of VQ and PtV can't be solved by changing them, other passives need to be buffed to be more attractive. For instance, one of them could give mana regen from life regen, or mana regen from any healing, at something like a 10 life to 1 mana ratio so that you could build life regen for you and your pets while also getting mana regen and not having to worry about CD's for regen. For low mana cost spells there could be a passive that boosts them further when you're at full mana or by a % of your mana regen... There's lot of room for them to improve build diversity while also making builds work more smoothly.
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Dogs and garg should be 15-20 seconds.
I think with this change, they wouldn't even need to adjust any numbers. Pets don't last long? well that's ok cause you can summon more in 15 seconds.
The class is fine.
When a good number of your skills has 15+ seconds cooldown on then, it's just fact that you will pass the majority of time running and shooting your primary attack (or tanking and shooting your primary attack). I think this kinda makes the gameplay a bit similar between classes. I was playing my brothers wiz this weekend (just to see if i like wiz and if i should start one) and i definetly felt the gameplay between the two classes were way to similar. WD gotta lock stuff on WoZ, but you only do that once every fight. Wiz can teleport, but again you only do that now and then.
I dunno how to reduce the cooldown of such abilities without breaking the game, but i definetly think that too much limit in the defensive spells definetly makes the class gameplay bit too generic because you're only applying your defensive tatics in pontual times, not all the time.
Another argument to prove my poin is that how different WD's gameplay gets when you make pet work. Execly because pets have 100% uptime, unlike other defensive tools.
If pets could actually take a hit then I don't have an issue with the mana resource or damage the WD has. Hiding behind pets would allow such costly/weak spells to be spammed with less worry (compared to other classes).
Overall the WD does work but compared to the others classes he currently is very slow, most classes can spam 200% damage abilities with ease (I have yet to try a monk, so dunno about them) and the WD cannot (unless you go VQ or get all high end mana regen gear). All the classes have a jail free ability like the WD, the only thing the WD currently has as an advantage is ton of CC but no damage to back it up. Fix pets then it’s a level playing field.
make spirutal attunement be 3% instead of 1%,
change zunimassas 4p to mana per hit or 1-2% max mana regen.
make pets toughter scale with vit.
have fierce lojality as a base pet skill instead of passive.
Wall of zombies, pile on and dead rush, reduce cooldown by 15-20 sec
Make haunt stack, reduce damage by 25% per stack.
remove maximum number of instances from "spirit barrage - phantasm" and "acid rain - lob blob bomb". (might be some more spells that has this limit)
some are annoyance and some are possible fixes.
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The class definitely isn't "fine" but compared other classes it's not as bad as some people claim.
The main issue is mana right now.
In order for pets to be viable they have to be made WAYYYY stronger (defensively) because they're only meaningful when they can tank champs without stacking defensive stats. Pets will never do damage in D3 because Blizzard specifically doesn't want people playing D3 like they played necros in D2.
No one will use pets unless they can hold champs in place.
Cooldowns aren't exactly fine. Long cooldowns that is.
Here's why:
When you get to the point that you're encountering champs more than once every 2 minutes (or 90 sec for Devoted Following) they become really useless. You'll use BBV/FA on one pack, and then 1 min later fight another pack and be unable to use those cds.
You can swap between each cooldown using 1 per champ pack, but BBV is pretty awful without having a way to tank the champs.
Of course that's a tradeoff the player decides on. But the point is that the abilities are fairly useless if you don't stack MF gear (lowering your farming speed) and can kill champs faster than once every 2 min.
Also, the idea that long cds are good for VQ is wrong. Long cds are terrible for VQ really. They become placeholders.
White mobs don't matter in this game, all that matters is champs. If you spec into FA and it comes up 30 sec before you encounter a champ pack, you use it to clear a few white mobs, you've essentially just wasted a cooldown. Now you fight a champ pack without a really powerful ability. The alternative is to just run out of mana clearing the way to champ packs, depending on your damage. Or you spam 4 short cooldowns (Grasp / SW / Horrify / SH) just to fire off a few more Bats. Most people will go with at least 1 long cooldown even though it's useless a lot of the time, just to avoid having to spam 4 abilities in a row to get regen for 10 sec. The best for this is Devoted Following.
Pretty obvious that this style of gameplay is bad.
I mean I guess it's alright to have cooldowns that are good for lower gear levels (BBV / FA) and have ones that are more useful for higher gear levels (Horrify / ZW). But the problem is how it interacts with VQ. Once you get really good gear it makes sense to switch to VQ builds and drop the long cooldowns. But the long cooldowns make using VQ a lot easier, so people take something like Devoted Following, and just spam it everytime it's up just to use up a cooldown slot.
If you run into a champ with a big cd down then you do what every other class does with big cd's down, either you kite until the cd comes back up or you're geared enough to not need them all the time but they still make things go faster.
Once you have 1) A main attack 2) Grasp 3) Spirit Walk 4) An AoE if you use Darts, the remaining 2-3 abilities can be any of the cooldown abilities and you'll do fine. I'm sure a lot of people use BBV and FA with Bats and VQ even if it's not quite as good as other shorter CC abilities.
My point was just that it shouldn't be like that. There should be certain skills that fit together and increase your efficiently.
D3 isn't like that though. Which is why it's kind of pointless to talk about what's the best build beyond a certain point. Because once you have the core 3-4 skills, with the core passives, the remaining ones don't even really matter. And truthfully, once you have really high end gear, your spec almost doesn't even matter as long as you can spam an ability.
I dunno, it just seems to me that you should have all of your cooldowns for every champ fight, and be forced to use your cooldowns intelligently in order to avoid dying and kill the champs quickly. And that BBV and FA take away from that once you start farming faster.
But yeah, the way the game is now, most players (who have average gear) need Grasp, Spirit Walk and a Main Attack to kill most packs, not more than that. The other 3 slots are for 1) An AoE ability if spamming Darts is annoying for white mobs or 2) 3 abilities to have on cooldown in addition to Grasp to trigger VQ.
The 2-3 other abilities people get are just to allow them to play sloppier by overlapping cooldowns and having to kite less. So in that sense, BBV and FA are great because they trigger VQ and replace shorter cooldowns that aren't very necessary.
I think that's why you see a lot of people with dumb builds in Inferno because once you have your core skills (good gear?) the rest of the spec doesn't matter. I still don't understand why more people don't use LS though.
Unless you lowered the regen factor, that would basically force everyone to go Bears/Bats because you'd get much higher return in killing ability for keeping three abilities on CD. This is not a smart idea for build diversity. All you're doing is lowering the opportunity cost for already-popular builds.
What we need is to get people off the PtV/VQ teat. The class is far too centralized on having one of those two passives for the most part. Either we're using low-mana cost spells which desperately need the 20% damage boost to be competitive, or we're using high-mana cost spells that couldn't work in most scenarios without massive mana regen.