Consider that some classes don't even give you the option of using the build you love. WDs seem to suffer the most from this.
Yeah I know, but I think they are working towards making all the classes more flexible. There will be a lot of upset people if the next few major patches don't fix it.
1. Working as intended and any type of cc/stun/snare/root/lifeLEACH is reduced by % on inferno [75% if i`m not mistaking]. So your 2s stun is actually ... do the math, only 25% of actual duration.
Which means there is no reason to use those skills unless you completely devote to a specific build. Build diversity demands that they be useful in any build :|
About the % weap damage, perhaps there are some bugged skills/runes that are not working as they are supposed to but just an example cyclone monks: a huge part of theyr damage 50-70% is entirely made by that skill which deals only 20% of weapon dmg.
I don't know, if it were a bug I figured they would have fixed it by now. I'm just basing this off of my own observations. Of how using certain skills feels like your trying to tickle opponents to death.
Could you post something about your class/spec?
Basic example:
Spell A. 10k dmg - casttime: 1s
Spell B. 4k dmg - casttime: 0.4s
You see how that math adds up? Cast-times are ofc totally random in my example, but I can't stop wondering if you maybe see more "small numbers" compared to big? Like maybe 2.5x as many 4k-numbers as 10k-numbers when you change spec?
Ofc there are specs you just can not get to work - like building a wizard with pure defensive skills(i.e.: diamond skin, teleport, force armor, mirror image, time warp and magic weapon), so a part of the game is also figuring out what works and what doesn't. I play a wizard thus I'm obviously inclined to inspect more wizards, and I've yet to see two wizards with the same build(except wicked-wind melee-build, but that's probably only because it has been quite hyped lately).
I had a tank wizard. I stacked resistances and armor, had a board and helm of the command, decent string of ears.
I had mirror immage, duplicates and illusionist, energy armor (started with force armor but swapped to several others when i had some better gear). My damage was really low but once i used damage reflect on diamond skin and meteor - comet (cause it is very good with life on hit) I did some decent damage. Very fun build, but it can't kill stuff as fast as Archon, thats why i only use it sometimes in groups bt hardly ever for solo farming
So perhaps they need to make everything less of a gear-check? It would sure solve a lot of problems. The biggest one being the feeling that you have to use the AH.
No, why should they Inferno is not for everyone.
You have a skill set you like you need to get the gear to compliment it - this is the Diablo way.
In what difficulty you'll be able to use it successfully is another thing
So perhaps they need to make everything less of a gear-check? It would sure solve a lot of problems. The biggest one being the feeling that you have to use the AH.
No, why should they Inferno is not for everyone.
I think the game was structured incorrectly to foster the idea of Inferno as "optional" or not for everyone.
I think it is correct to assume if you are playing D3 you want the best gear. If the best gear is in Inferno, I think you must assume it's for everyone. If you want Inferno to only appeal to a subset of the player-base, you need to find rewards that (generally) only appeal to them for completing that content. Obviously, no matter the reward, there will be some who don't want to work for it. The best gear is WAY too universally sought after to be the carrot in the "optional" content.
@Rade
That build is surely why you're having trouble killing things. Blizzard never promised that we'd be able to just take any skills and throw them together and have a successful spec. They did promise that all abilities will be useful (which they're currently working on). However there is a difference between all abilities being useful and ANY random combinations of said abilities being viable.
For example, looking at your build... what is the theme? What exactly are you trying to do? How does your build handle elites? When you run into a Fast scavenger pack what happens? When you run into a Teleport + Fire Chains pack what happens? When you run into a Reflects Damage pack what happens? Have you made a spec that handles mob abilities? Are you thinking about how your spec handles different situations? Because, looking at your sheet, that seems to be the glaring shortcoming to me. Did you plan to Magic Missiles + Arcane Orb everything to death?
@xenocow
NV is hardly what limits build diversity. NV only serves to discourage people swapping builds for every single champion pack. There's a pretty big difference between the two. We are supposed to have balanced builds - that's one of the reasons that many WDs hate VQ-based builds... that passive actively discourages "balance" in favor of basically bursting the fuck out of everything before it kills you.
It is possible for us to attain a diverse amount of well-balanced builds without allowing us to swap specs every elite pack we stumble upon. This just requires numbers balancing including ability damage, ability design, mob damage, and fucktarded things like double-fast mobs.
Agreed. I like the way NV works. I decide before I start a farming run on my barb if I want full tanky run or if I want to drop the shield and go for a few more offensive talents. Once I start getting NV, I am discouraged from changing...for that run. If I go eat lunch, I get to decide again. I do feel locked in while I have NV, but I am not forced to reroll if I feel differently next run or decide to run something harder next time. Win-win in my book.
Also agreed about Rade's build. I am not seeing the synergy in the build. You can pick passives and actives that compliment each other to make the build work but cherry picking may not work for just any skill. Also, the all res seems pretty low and would make me nervous in Act 1 much less anything after that.
I had a tank wizard. I stacked resistances and armor, had a board and helm of the command, decent string of ears.
I had mirror immage, duplicates and illusionist, energy armor (started with force armor but swapped to several others when i had some better gear). My damage was really low but once i used damage reflect on diamond skin and meteor - comet (cause it is very good with life on hit) I did some decent damage. Very fun build, but it can't kill stuff as fast as Archon, thats why i only use it sometimes in groups bt hardly ever for solo farming
TBH the CM wiz build is by far the best tank build in the game, because it sticks the mobs to the floor so they don't get loose and aggro on your dps.
Check it out sometime, its slow, but fun, and does crazy damage if you have the gear, if you have a CM wiz in your party you can clear Act3 with the lowest possible dps.
Also the reflect diamond skin caps out based on hp now so the shards popping one is way better dps wise now.
NV is what kills the diversity, if I could i'd swap out one or 2 skills per pack depending on affix, it would make the game so much more dynamic and fun, however i'm forced to run with a build that can kill any pack, ie. I have to rock DS incase of reflect dmg, I have to rock energy armor becoz of AR and Inferno's negative resist bonus.
So yea, NV kills build diversity. Its the lock or lose your stack that does it.
NV is what kills the diversity, if I could i'd swap out one or 2 skills per pack depending on affix, it would make the game so much more dynamic and fun, however i'm forced to run with a build that can kill any pack, ie. I have to rock DS incase of reflect dmg, I have to rock energy armor becoz of AR and Inferno's negative resist bonus.
So yea, NV kills build diversity. Its the lock or lose your stack that does it.
What you're implying is that, swapping skill X in only in certain situations, is an increase in diversity?
I submit that you don't understand what Blizzard says, one bit, when they say they want build diversity. It is a FAILURE if people are swapping in an ability only when they come across, say a Fire Chains mob, and it gets left unused otherwise. That is why we have NV, and that's why skills/runes/passives are being re-evaluated and balanced.
If you think that building a system that encourages people to never put a skill on their bar unless they absolutely need it actually encourages diversity then I say that you just want to rag on Blizzard as normal and haven't really thought out the actual ramifications of your ranting and raving.
Furthermore, Blizzard has always said they want to reward players for finding a balanced build that can handle 99% of stuff thrown at it and they don't want to reward people for playing Swap-a-Skill every time they see a new champion pack. What you suggest takes a large degree of "action" out of the game in favor of playing the World of Warcraft "must swap two talent points around for this next boss guys" game.
SRY GUIZ I GOTTA STOP TO CHANGE SKILLZ AGAIN... I LUV THIS DIVERSITEE!!! PLZ WAIT CMON MY STUFF IS ON CD GUIZ CMON THAT'S NOT FUNNEE!!! STOP KILLIN STUFF I HAF TO CHANGE SKILLZ AGAIN!!!
Yeah, that's exactly what I want public games to be like. Exactly. To a "t."
I suggest you give blizz/hydra build a try, which I think is the least gear dependent build, I had used that build to clear inferno act 1 with merely 12k dps.
OK, I've tried Hydra and I'm 99% certain that the Venom Hydra rune is bugged or it's description is wrong. Any other rune (all of which should deal more damage than Venom) nets me 3.5k-5k damage per hit against every type of opponent, but the damage of Venom Hydra inexplicably goes up against stronger opponents. The damage on champion packs was 10k-12k, WAAAY more than 18% of my dinky DPS! If it's a bug, I'll refrain from using it, since it's a hotfix waiting to happen.
For example, looking at your build... what is the theme? What exactly are you trying to do? How does your build handle elites? When you run into a Fast scavenger pack what happens? When you run into a Teleport + Fire Chains pack what happens? When you run into a Reflects Damage pack what happens? Have you made a spec that handles mob abilities? Are you thinking about how your spec handles different situations? Because, looking at your sheet, that seems to be the glaring shortcoming to me. Did you plan to Magic Missiles + Arcane Orb everything to death?
It's actually a pretty fun build where you cycle the 3 crowd controls to buy your teammates time to reposition, get out of a Molten/Plagued/Fire Chains pit or to grab a health globe. You start by freezing them with Frost Nova, then once that wears off blast them with Wave of Force for knockback, then again with Calamity. Then rinse and repeat. Works awesomely against Act 1 packs, Act 2 is a bit more tricky because everything runs around like crazy. When faced with crazy elite affixes, I use the freeze and knockback for kiting instead, and the Teleport to get away if Jailed or Vortexed. And the reason I use Arcane Orb + Magic Missile is because it gives me the best damage in a single hit, which, as I've described, reduces the toll resistances have on my DPS. Granted, there are better options for damagers, but I have neither LoH nor a high crit. chance or any other high stat at the moment.
If i change my build, thats diversity, if I use the same build, the same skills, the same runes, every single day, every single run, thats not diversity.
You, sir, clearly don't get it, do you?
The idea is devising a build you love so much you're willing to use it for months. And then learning it to the point where it makes for your at least somewhat unique playstyle. And how much you've perfected your playstyle should be your measure of skill.
If every single Barbarian plays the exact same way in any given circumstance, cycling mandatory builds for every circumstance, then what's the point of leveling up your own Barb? It's like you're passing some sort of exam of Barb science. A chore to grind away at. Which is boring .
Posion hydra dmg ramps up because the poison stacks, if you can get them to hang around the same spot it increases exponentially.
Well that's strange. Shouldn't it be the case of 2-3 simultaneous strikes for 3.5-5k rather than a single strike for the stacked 10+k damage? That kind of seems like an unfair advantage for that one rune if the resistance reduction only registers once for 3 or more strikes. Especially since the other spells like Energy Twister don't stack this way.
I'm almost inclined to call it an exploit. Something likely to be changed in a patch.
Two things, one: Please provide good evidence for how you think resistance reduction works because I think you are wrong about a single flat number reduction. The other, what Zergie said is consistent with 2-3 separate strikes too,
Two things, one: It may be that something else is at work. All I'm saying is my observation that that skills that deal a lower percentage of weapon damage deal far less damage than they should, making them obsolete.
The other, I restate - when I tried Venom Hydra, it was 10-12K damage at once, as in, a single number over the head. At times it even spiked to 18k without a crit! Which is what? 100% weapon damage? How does that equate to "18%"? Troll math?
The numbers above the head is the damage done over a smal time window(0,5s i think). That is to prevent flooding the screen with small numbers.
I don't think that's true for all spells. The Meteor trail, for example, does in fact register a lot of quick numbers. And don't forget the red stream of numbers from Reflect Damage.
Regardless, I can hardly imagine it was Blizzard's intent to let venom pools stack that way. It sure kills any reason to use other Hydra runes.
And as said before, the mage has quite a few different builds, we are in a good position.
Perhaps, but they should be accessible from the very point you start Inferno. So that the actual farming for loot to access the next act is fun. That's the ideal. And it's not only the Wiz we're talking about, I just used that to illustrate things.
Also there's word of upcoming posts about 1.04. Fingers crossed.
As opposed to what we have now, where I use the exact same build everyday.
Yea, thats diverse.
If i change my build, thats diversity, if I use the same build, the same skills, the same runes, every single day, every single run, thats not diversity.
Type in all caps if you want, doesn't make you less of an idiot, and if your swapping skills not in town, your 4x the idiot your post makes u look like.
WoW you don't swap two talents for every boss.
You use the same build week in week out for every boss, like every one else of the same class..
If anything its more wow-like with NV buff than without.
What you're suggesting, though, is that every person of X class stops doing what they're doing and swaps to Y skill/rune for a mob with Z ability. How is that diverse? That's not diversity, that's more cookie-cutter bullshit except that instead of playing an ARPG, we stop to swap skills on every goddamned elite pack. Ooooooh fun gameplay! Please, sign me up for that!
What's worse is that you just want to blindly hate the game so badly that you're attributing the problem to NV, which is absolutely not the problem. Diversity will come from each ability/rune/passive being able to contribute something to a working build, not from completely destroying the flow of the game to respec for every damned elite pack we hit. NV assures that we have to think about our build BEFORE we engage the mobs, not when we see "amg fier chanz betta change mah skillz bros."
There is a huge difference between being devoted to a set of skills for a run and "killing diversity." Enough so that even the guy who created this thread and is taking it for not knowing his class can tell you how ridiculous your argument is.
Furthermore, I never said what we had now was "diverse." That's a great strawman to attack, though. What I said was that NV has nothing to do with the actual diversity that Blizzard promised us - that we'd have access to lots of viable builds based on the selection of skills/runes/passives (which theoretically should start to come into fruition once we get 1.0.4). They never, ever, promised us that we'd get diversity by rifling through our abilities on a mob-by-mob basis.
In fact, I remember when they instituted NV they specifically said they felt that changing up skills for every single elite pack was generating some pretty bad gameplay and that was one of the reasons we got NV to begin with. That stopping to change your skills at every elite pack causes a lot of interruptions in flow and that just like swapping gear for MF on chests the object of the game is to kill stuff not to stand around swapping spells and gear every 30 seconds.
Lastly, the system you describe is EXACTLY like WoW. Oh, I'm a Frost DK. I'm going to take this general-purpose spec and use it 90% of the time. Oh, there's a fight with adds? Hold on guys, if those adds need to be slowed I should go respec Chilblains. WoW talents are nothing but a cookie cutter general-purpose situation with some small variations based on situational usefulness - which is basically the exact same thing you're pushing for with your NV hate. So while you rail on D3 because you want it to be less like WoW, your proposed solution of letting us tweak our spec on-the-fly to deal with different elites is.... strangely similar to what players do in WoW.
You can dislike the design all you like, but NV has absolutely nothing to do with the diversity of builds. The game has been designed that we change our builds between farming sessions and not during them. It is still abundantly possible to achieve diversity within those parameters. I can't help that you're so blinded by your rage that you can't see something as simple as that.
NV is probably the best system in the whole game right now. Not only does it entice working on your build, it also keeps people who know nothing about one another together for actual runs, rather than leapfrogging from session to session, searching for the perfect party. Because once you get that first stack, it's kind of pain to leave that game and regain it in another one.
It also serves to bring some tangibility to the loot drop system, because you know you're guaranteed two gold items if you have 5 NV stacks. This tangibility is probably the reason why so many people are still playing D3. I'd personally wouldn't even bother with Inferno if it weren't for NV.
Well, what do you know. Patch 1.04 notes finally here and a lot of what I've talked about is addressed - manageability of elites, effectiveness of DoTs (they're receiving buffs), build diversity affected by skill output, and even how much Venom Hydra stands out.
Yeah I know, but I think they are working towards making all the classes more flexible. There will be a lot of upset people if the next few major patches don't fix it.
Battle.net Profile / Diablo Progress Profile
I had a tank wizard. I stacked resistances and armor, had a board and helm of the command, decent string of ears.
I had mirror immage, duplicates and illusionist, energy armor (started with force armor but swapped to several others when i had some better gear). My damage was really low but once i used damage reflect on diamond skin and meteor - comet (cause it is very good with life on hit) I did some decent damage. Very fun build, but it can't kill stuff as fast as Archon, thats why i only use it sometimes in groups bt hardly ever for solo farming
No, why should they Inferno is not for everyone.
You have a skill set you like you need to get the gear to compliment it - this is the Diablo way.
In what difficulty you'll be able to use it successfully is another thing
I think the game was structured incorrectly to foster the idea of Inferno as "optional" or not for everyone.
I think it is correct to assume if you are playing D3 you want the best gear. If the best gear is in Inferno, I think you must assume it's for everyone. If you want Inferno to only appeal to a subset of the player-base, you need to find rewards that (generally) only appeal to them for completing that content. Obviously, no matter the reward, there will be some who don't want to work for it. The best gear is WAY too universally sought after to be the carrot in the "optional" content.
That build is surely why you're having trouble killing things. Blizzard never promised that we'd be able to just take any skills and throw them together and have a successful spec. They did promise that all abilities will be useful (which they're currently working on). However there is a difference between all abilities being useful and ANY random combinations of said abilities being viable.
For example, looking at your build... what is the theme? What exactly are you trying to do? How does your build handle elites? When you run into a Fast scavenger pack what happens? When you run into a Teleport + Fire Chains pack what happens? When you run into a Reflects Damage pack what happens? Have you made a spec that handles mob abilities? Are you thinking about how your spec handles different situations? Because, looking at your sheet, that seems to be the glaring shortcoming to me. Did you plan to Magic Missiles + Arcane Orb everything to death?
@xenocow
NV is hardly what limits build diversity. NV only serves to discourage people swapping builds for every single champion pack. There's a pretty big difference between the two. We are supposed to have balanced builds - that's one of the reasons that many WDs hate VQ-based builds... that passive actively discourages "balance" in favor of basically bursting the fuck out of everything before it kills you.
It is possible for us to attain a diverse amount of well-balanced builds without allowing us to swap specs every elite pack we stumble upon. This just requires numbers balancing including ability damage, ability design, mob damage, and fucktarded things like double-fast mobs.
Agreed. I like the way NV works. I decide before I start a farming run on my barb if I want full tanky run or if I want to drop the shield and go for a few more offensive talents. Once I start getting NV, I am discouraged from changing...for that run. If I go eat lunch, I get to decide again. I do feel locked in while I have NV, but I am not forced to reroll if I feel differently next run or decide to run something harder next time. Win-win in my book.
Also agreed about Rade's build. I am not seeing the synergy in the build. You can pick passives and actives that compliment each other to make the build work but cherry picking may not work for just any skill. Also, the all res seems pretty low and would make me nervous in Act 1 much less anything after that.
TBH the CM wiz build is by far the best tank build in the game, because it sticks the mobs to the floor so they don't get loose and aggro on your dps.
Check it out sometime, its slow, but fun, and does crazy damage if you have the gear, if you have a CM wiz in your party you can clear Act3 with the lowest possible dps.
Also the reflect diamond skin caps out based on hp now so the shards popping one is way better dps wise now.
NV is what kills the diversity, if I could i'd swap out one or 2 skills per pack depending on affix, it would make the game so much more dynamic and fun, however i'm forced to run with a build that can kill any pack, ie. I have to rock DS incase of reflect dmg, I have to rock energy armor becoz of AR and Inferno's negative resist bonus.
So yea, NV kills build diversity. Its the lock or lose your stack that does it.
What you're implying is that, swapping skill X in only in certain situations, is an increase in diversity?
I submit that you don't understand what Blizzard says, one bit, when they say they want build diversity. It is a FAILURE if people are swapping in an ability only when they come across, say a Fire Chains mob, and it gets left unused otherwise. That is why we have NV, and that's why skills/runes/passives are being re-evaluated and balanced.
If you think that building a system that encourages people to never put a skill on their bar unless they absolutely need it actually encourages diversity then I say that you just want to rag on Blizzard as normal and haven't really thought out the actual ramifications of your ranting and raving.
Furthermore, Blizzard has always said they want to reward players for finding a balanced build that can handle 99% of stuff thrown at it and they don't want to reward people for playing Swap-a-Skill every time they see a new champion pack. What you suggest takes a large degree of "action" out of the game in favor of playing the World of Warcraft "must swap two talent points around for this next boss guys" game.
SRY GUIZ I GOTTA STOP TO CHANGE SKILLZ AGAIN... I LUV THIS DIVERSITEE!!! PLZ WAIT CMON MY STUFF IS ON CD GUIZ CMON THAT'S NOT FUNNEE!!! STOP KILLIN STUFF I HAF TO CHANGE SKILLZ AGAIN!!!
Yeah, that's exactly what I want public games to be like. Exactly. To a "t."
It's actually a pretty fun build where you cycle the 3 crowd controls to buy your teammates time to reposition, get out of a Molten/Plagued/Fire Chains pit or to grab a health globe. You start by freezing them with Frost Nova, then once that wears off blast them with Wave of Force for knockback, then again with Calamity. Then rinse and repeat. Works awesomely against Act 1 packs, Act 2 is a bit more tricky because everything runs around like crazy. When faced with crazy elite affixes, I use the freeze and knockback for kiting instead, and the Teleport to get away if Jailed or Vortexed. And the reason I use Arcane Orb + Magic Missile is because it gives me the best damage in a single hit, which, as I've described, reduces the toll resistances have on my DPS. Granted, there are better options for damagers, but I have neither LoH nor a high crit. chance or any other high stat at the moment.
You, sir, clearly don't get it, do you?
The idea is devising a build you love so much you're willing to use it for months. And then learning it to the point where it makes for your at least somewhat unique playstyle. And how much you've perfected your playstyle should be your measure of skill.
If every single Barbarian plays the exact same way in any given circumstance, cycling mandatory builds for every circumstance, then what's the point of leveling up your own Barb? It's like you're passing some sort of exam of Barb science. A chore to grind away at. Which is boring .
I'm almost inclined to call it an exploit. Something likely to be changed in a patch.
The other, I restate - when I tried Venom Hydra, it was 10-12K damage at once, as in, a single number over the head. At times it even spiked to 18k without a crit! Which is what? 100% weapon damage? How does that equate to "18%"? Troll math?
Regardless, I can hardly imagine it was Blizzard's intent to let venom pools stack that way. It sure kills any reason to use other Hydra runes.
Perhaps, but they should be accessible from the very point you start Inferno. So that the actual farming for loot to access the next act is fun. That's the ideal. And it's not only the Wiz we're talking about, I just used that to illustrate things.
Also there's word of upcoming posts about 1.04. Fingers crossed.
What you're suggesting, though, is that every person of X class stops doing what they're doing and swaps to Y skill/rune for a mob with Z ability. How is that diverse? That's not diversity, that's more cookie-cutter bullshit except that instead of playing an ARPG, we stop to swap skills on every goddamned elite pack. Ooooooh fun gameplay! Please, sign me up for that!
What's worse is that you just want to blindly hate the game so badly that you're attributing the problem to NV, which is absolutely not the problem. Diversity will come from each ability/rune/passive being able to contribute something to a working build, not from completely destroying the flow of the game to respec for every damned elite pack we hit. NV assures that we have to think about our build BEFORE we engage the mobs, not when we see "amg fier chanz betta change mah skillz bros."
There is a huge difference between being devoted to a set of skills for a run and "killing diversity." Enough so that even the guy who created this thread and is taking it for not knowing his class can tell you how ridiculous your argument is.
Furthermore, I never said what we had now was "diverse." That's a great strawman to attack, though. What I said was that NV has nothing to do with the actual diversity that Blizzard promised us - that we'd have access to lots of viable builds based on the selection of skills/runes/passives (which theoretically should start to come into fruition once we get 1.0.4). They never, ever, promised us that we'd get diversity by rifling through our abilities on a mob-by-mob basis.
In fact, I remember when they instituted NV they specifically said they felt that changing up skills for every single elite pack was generating some pretty bad gameplay and that was one of the reasons we got NV to begin with. That stopping to change your skills at every elite pack causes a lot of interruptions in flow and that just like swapping gear for MF on chests the object of the game is to kill stuff not to stand around swapping spells and gear every 30 seconds.
Lastly, the system you describe is EXACTLY like WoW. Oh, I'm a Frost DK. I'm going to take this general-purpose spec and use it 90% of the time. Oh, there's a fight with adds? Hold on guys, if those adds need to be slowed I should go respec Chilblains. WoW talents are nothing but a cookie cutter general-purpose situation with some small variations based on situational usefulness - which is basically the exact same thing you're pushing for with your NV hate. So while you rail on D3 because you want it to be less like WoW, your proposed solution of letting us tweak our spec on-the-fly to deal with different elites is.... strangely similar to what players do in WoW.
You can dislike the design all you like, but NV has absolutely nothing to do with the diversity of builds. The game has been designed that we change our builds between farming sessions and not during them. It is still abundantly possible to achieve diversity within those parameters. I can't help that you're so blinded by your rage that you can't see something as simple as that.
+1
It also serves to bring some tangibility to the loot drop system, because you know you're guaranteed two gold items if you have 5 NV stacks. This tangibility is probably the reason why so many people are still playing D3. I'd personally wouldn't even bother with Inferno if it weren't for NV.
What can I say? I'm a happy camper :Thumbs Up:
Guess this thread is done then.
Your crystal ball is amaze.