Well according to the initial outline by Wyatt, I'm a happy WD. Just about everything in my post back at the beginning of July is getting addressed. Really like the VQ change, I'm predicting a lot of spider builds coming out soon.
attack speed = faster animation. Do your homework before you complain.
The effects of AS% on animations makes sense, even with the nerf. But the fact that you need to stack AS% to make rather base abilities useful creates for extremely one dimensional play. Using an item affix to make base abilities functional is lazy mechanics.
The thread wasn't a complaint but rather adjustments I'd like to see, as well as we have all suggested.
Okay, so my love of Firebomb got the better of me. But I think that either needs the 100% base, or to hit more than once (maybe not all six, but at least twice)
Also, I think it's a multiplicative reduction. Otherwise it'd be doing negative damage on the last hit (as it stands now, starting at 85%)
And the point with increasing range on LS and FB isn't because we have trouble hitting with it, but because we get hit when we do hit with it. Also, they have to compete with longer ranged skills (such as dire bats) that do just as much damage, and in the case of LS, they do it much faster.
I still think that Firebomb suffers like the rest of the WDs abilities his animation is way too long and he's caught looking at the bomb. Sometimes it feels like an NBA star taking a jumper and waiting for it to drop rather than following it up for the rebound (just in case). Not a bad ablity otherwise, and all the runes are acceptable.
Somewhat unrelated but:
In 2008 Diablo 3 gameplay video the Witch Doctor was able to:
- Summon dogs one by one
- Sacrifice dogs one by one (by placing cursor on top of the one you wanted to sacrifice).
- Apply Locust Swarm on the pets to enhance their effectiveness.
Obviously I didn't count features such as "no cooldowns" and so on, but I really wonder why those features were removed in the 2012 release version we got (Even horrify had a better animation).
PS: Even the auction house was better in 2008. You could search by 6 stats and you could even sort the items by "time left". Another weird decision, but I believe it might have something to do with database-problems.
Thanks for bringing that up I remember this now. I imagine the locust swarm was scraped in favor of poison dogs and probably once they saw how stupid the dog AI was it became more annoying to chase after them with the 5 yard range of locust swarm.
And I constantly shake my fist to the skies at not having just ONE more field to search by on the AH.
The discussions I see about the WD tank or melee-caster make sense to me, compared to the wizard or DH the true range classes at least. The WD I always pictured as walking amongst the creatures he was fighting reaping decay and destruction. Walking amongst creatures in this game however will get you killed. At least not without spending millions of gold to get perfect gear. They have sort of given us tools, but I'm thinking more and more that they really didn't test them and relied on community feedback after the game was released. Whether or not that's an acceptable game-making process is an entirely different discussion however.
Apart from what people wrote about mana system and pets scaling or immune from aoe which i agree i'd like to see shorter cooldowns on some abilities. 60 or even 120 sec cd in dynamic game like D3 is just meh. Mass Confusin should be on 20 sec cd with 5 or 6 sec duration. Also Voodoo and Fetish Army. Why 120 sec? Its sometimes feels like forever? 45 sec i'd say is enough i think that people use it on elites only anyway.
I've thought about this as well, and you're exactly right. D3 is supposed to be "constant action" anything longer than 30 seconds is far too long. I think that it's in part due to the fact that Vision Quest exists. The WD has far more CDs than any other class, and the CDs themselves feel eternal. I think that's what leads to overall pretty boring gameplay.
I like your suggestion about a "tiered" regen for VQ, this way you aren't forced to use 4 (or 5) of your 6 abilities to basically be on cooldown all the time. There's a thread in this forum about the short cd VQ build keeping 5 abilities with CD is probably the closest to how VQ was intended to be used.
Additionally, I think all of the WD's primary attacks are pure rubbish. Spiders/Toads/Firebombs are too long of an animation and they spend a resource whereas every other class GENERATES their resource. And darts are just boring, as a skill I think it makes sense for what it does -- a ranged attack based on weapon speed -- it's just dreadfully boring.
I had to facepalm when I read this quote in regards to resource management. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, since you say you have played WD, Wizard and Monk, and have no clue about resource management for barbarians. I will simply point out for you, that nearly all of the viable builds for inferno barbarians (excluding those running around in tens of millions of gold worth of gear) have barbarians using absolutely zero resource spending abilities. I am literally at full rage at all times during combat. Virtually no barbarian uses any resource spending abilities whatsoever. This is why the Berserker's Rage passive, which grants a 25% damage increase while at full rage is so popular; we are always at full rage!!!
Sorry, that point I made got a little off target in that section. It's true what I know of Barbs is only what friends tell me, and they all play HC barbarians in Inferno, so I'm going off conjecture. My point was that just barbarians seem to be able to do a lot with a lot less gear than WDs do. Just based on my own philosophy of the game, a class that has more options with less gear is a class that has well-thought out abilities.
Let me first premise by saying Witch Doctor was the first class I leveled, so it's near and dear to me! But alas, I've decided to explore other aspects of the game after hitting a wall with him. Now I haven't been back since 1.03 other than an hour or two here and there, I feel it's a bit of an uphill battle when playing him. Currently I have a Monk with a Wizard on the way.
But with 1.04 and developer blogs soon to come out, I'm hopeful that I'll have good reason to come back and visit the WD as I think it is probably the most interesting class to play. Here are some things that I'm looking forward to, and I'm looking to see what other people are hoping to see Blizzard acknowledge about this class overall.
Animations: While the witch doctor has some of the neater animations (raining toads anyone!??) they're all far too long, even with a ceremonial blade or fast 1h. In inferno I feel sometimes that while running from Fast affixes or just faster moving creatures, stopping to cast grasp/wall of zombies runs a risk of taking damage sort of defeats the purpose of casting the abilities in the first place.
Mana: At this point after playing a monk fully through inferno and a wizard into hell (I actually play and not farm Leorics manor for each difficulty). Resource management on those classes just feels so much more natural. Diablo 2 felt like resource spending game, Diablo 3 feels like resource generation game. This point has been argued so heavily that if Blizzard doesn't make some kind of change -- whether it be in skill mana adjustment or a buff elsewhere -- I'd say it's clear that they don't play WD nearly as much as Barbarian (which seems to be the most well thought-out.
Pets and summoning: For a class that has 3 passives dedicated to pets, 1 of which is unlocked at level 45, this is lacking. Where the witch doctor has so much potential in the pet department it certainly falls short. But this has been acknowledged by Blizzard during their AMA (I think, if it wasn't there it was a blue tracker). Especially considering that the promotional video for the WD in the days before release featured "foul beasts" at your disposal, it would only seem right for this to be buffed. As it is, having sacrifice and zombie dogs on your bar is close to pointless at most difficulties.
Overall build variety: The truth is that you can get through this game with pretty much any build no matter how crazy. I'm sure somewhere there's someone angling to prove that pets can work with a toad of hugeness/spider queen build and will be posting within the next few days a youtube of them soloing various champion packs. There's just simply a lack of variety and at the end of the day most people are just increasing the amount of splinters they've shot. WD may be the least played class, but he's got the best lungs -- you don't blow that many darts through 4 acts and 4 difficulties without having nice lung capacity.
These are actually pretty general things that I would imagine Blizzard will be looking at and I hope they do. The class is really fun with some really cool abilities they just seem all over the place. I would really like to start playing him again and seeing more people doing the same.
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The effects of AS% on animations makes sense, even with the nerf. But the fact that you need to stack AS% to make rather base abilities useful creates for extremely one dimensional play. Using an item affix to make base abilities functional is lazy mechanics.
The thread wasn't a complaint but rather adjustments I'd like to see, as well as we have all suggested.
I still think that Firebomb suffers like the rest of the WDs abilities his animation is way too long and he's caught looking at the bomb. Sometimes it feels like an NBA star taking a jumper and waiting for it to drop rather than following it up for the rebound (just in case). Not a bad ablity otherwise, and all the runes are acceptable.
Thanks for bringing that up I remember this now. I imagine the locust swarm was scraped in favor of poison dogs and probably once they saw how stupid the dog AI was it became more annoying to chase after them with the 5 yard range of locust swarm.
And I constantly shake my fist to the skies at not having just ONE more field to search by on the AH.
The discussions I see about the WD tank or melee-caster make sense to me, compared to the wizard or DH the true range classes at least. The WD I always pictured as walking amongst the creatures he was fighting reaping decay and destruction. Walking amongst creatures in this game however will get you killed. At least not without spending millions of gold to get perfect gear. They have sort of given us tools, but I'm thinking more and more that they really didn't test them and relied on community feedback after the game was released. Whether or not that's an acceptable game-making process is an entirely different discussion however.
I've thought about this as well, and you're exactly right. D3 is supposed to be "constant action" anything longer than 30 seconds is far too long. I think that it's in part due to the fact that Vision Quest exists. The WD has far more CDs than any other class, and the CDs themselves feel eternal. I think that's what leads to overall pretty boring gameplay.
I like your suggestion about a "tiered" regen for VQ, this way you aren't forced to use 4 (or 5) of your 6 abilities to basically be on cooldown all the time. There's a thread in this forum about the short cd VQ build keeping 5 abilities with CD is probably the closest to how VQ was intended to be used.
Additionally, I think all of the WD's primary attacks are pure rubbish. Spiders/Toads/Firebombs are too long of an animation and they spend a resource whereas every other class GENERATES their resource. And darts are just boring, as a skill I think it makes sense for what it does -- a ranged attack based on weapon speed -- it's just dreadfully boring.
Sorry, that point I made got a little off target in that section. It's true what I know of Barbs is only what friends tell me, and they all play HC barbarians in Inferno, so I'm going off conjecture. My point was that just barbarians seem to be able to do a lot with a lot less gear than WDs do. Just based on my own philosophy of the game, a class that has more options with less gear is a class that has well-thought out abilities.
But with 1.04 and developer blogs soon to come out, I'm hopeful that I'll have good reason to come back and visit the WD as I think it is probably the most interesting class to play. Here are some things that I'm looking forward to, and I'm looking to see what other people are hoping to see Blizzard acknowledge about this class overall.
Animations: While the witch doctor has some of the neater animations (raining toads anyone!??) they're all far too long, even with a ceremonial blade or fast 1h. In inferno I feel sometimes that while running from Fast affixes or just faster moving creatures, stopping to cast grasp/wall of zombies runs a risk of taking damage sort of defeats the purpose of casting the abilities in the first place.
Mana: At this point after playing a monk fully through inferno and a wizard into hell (I actually play and not farm Leorics manor for each difficulty). Resource management on those classes just feels so much more natural. Diablo 2 felt like resource spending game, Diablo 3 feels like resource generation game. This point has been argued so heavily that if Blizzard doesn't make some kind of change -- whether it be in skill mana adjustment or a buff elsewhere -- I'd say it's clear that they don't play WD nearly as much as Barbarian (which seems to be the most well thought-out.
Pets and summoning: For a class that has 3 passives dedicated to pets, 1 of which is unlocked at level 45, this is lacking. Where the witch doctor has so much potential in the pet department it certainly falls short. But this has been acknowledged by Blizzard during their AMA (I think, if it wasn't there it was a blue tracker). Especially considering that the promotional video for the WD in the days before release featured "foul beasts" at your disposal, it would only seem right for this to be buffed. As it is, having sacrifice and zombie dogs on your bar is close to pointless at most difficulties.
Overall build variety: The truth is that you can get through this game with pretty much any build no matter how crazy. I'm sure somewhere there's someone angling to prove that pets can work with a toad of hugeness/spider queen build and will be posting within the next few days a youtube of them soloing various champion packs. There's just simply a lack of variety and at the end of the day most people are just increasing the amount of splinters they've shot. WD may be the least played class, but he's got the best lungs -- you don't blow that many darts through 4 acts and 4 difficulties without having nice lung capacity.
These are actually pretty general things that I would imagine Blizzard will be looking at and I hope they do. The class is really fun with some really cool abilities they just seem all over the place. I would really like to start playing him again and seeing more people doing the same.