The range is probably a bug. But even then you the sentries need you to see tehir targets to take aim last I checked. And of course any build that isn't EA spam is more or less hatred gated.
There isn't anything wrong with Sader but there is something wrong when you compare it to dh/barb.
Add Firebird wiz in that list because they just have to nuke to 3000% and things will die guaranteed, and all of a sudden you're saying there's only something wrong with sader when compared to half of the classes. Also, I'm hearing DH got buffed which is hilarious.
DH was buffed... As long as you're just spamming elemental arrow and staying near your enemies.
How I think it should be fixed : The requirements for perma akkhan will have to come down , (say 40% CDR for perma akkhan?? =p) more crusader gears MUST have CDR as smart loot , Our skill damage have to go up and possibly the whole Akarat's champion skill will have to be buffed where we can use all the different runes with cheat death and armor bonus but differing bonus to actually see some build diversity. Eg Fire = firestarter effects but retains cheat death and 150% armor.
PS : The pony build is our only build besides condemn that works for high GR as "fate of the fell" build simply died as the damage could not keep up , but we cannot bloody kill a corrupt angels or wither moths flying OUT of our hit zones like a CLIFF for example and it is stupid. fix it blizzard.
Or... you know...
Roland's could have "Gain 30% armour for 30 seconds stacking up to 5 times on use of shield bash or sweep." There you go. Now roland's is viable.
Let's get away from math for a second, you don't seem to understand that when you start with a negative amount of something any addition that puts you into a positive value isn't a total number buff, its only a buff when you've over come the negative value. That's the buff amount, what your left with after clearing the negative value.
What level gr progression is your highest, on any character in solo play? I'm 39 on my Crusader, 37 on DH,36 on WD. I ran the wd/dh for some change of flavor when I get sick of losing a ton of damage from stampede to horrid maps.
That's not how "buffs" work. In fact that's not how math works at all. Further that's not how the functional benefit of HS works out.
HS is balanced relative to 1H weapons. For better or worse. And equipping HS is equivalent to a +20% damage BUFF over using a 1H. It's in direct competition with Fervor, but for the purposes of this discussion that doesn't actually matter. It happens to be in indirect competition with no-shield. But for the purposes of any build that isn't holy shotgun this, once again, does not matter for the purposes of this discussion. And it barely matters for shotgun.
When you're using HS (for the purposes of this discussion you're not using Holy Cause). And you cast AC. You gain 43% damage. Done. That's everything you need to know. There's no weaseling out of it. Doesn't matter if you have a 1H weapon on (like an idiot). Doesn't matter if you have a 2H weapon on. You just gained 43% damage.
Now let's go equip an imaginary 1H passive that says "+20% Damage"
You cast AC. How much damage do you get? I'll give you a hint: it's not 35%.
It's 30%.
That's how relative damage works. HS amplifies the relative bonus of ANY +% damage global modifier you have effecting you. Just because you have some value of negative modifier does NOT mean other bonuses are weaker.
Heavenly Strength allows you to equip weapons that are 50% more damaging (actually on average a bit more than that in the damage department, but true enough for DPS) while retaining the use of a shield. The catch is you take a 20% penalty to total damage (mechanically this is a -20% global modifier). This results in a total (1.5*0.8) = 1.2, or 20%, bonus to damage. HS never put you in the negative, unless you want to insist that losing a bit of top end damage compared to just having a 2H equipped (+"50%" damage) counts, but given how the class mechanics works you'd have to be an idiot to make that argument.
Edit: Average 2H raw damage is 90% greater than 1H.
You are clearly an idiot, the bonus granted by ac while using a 2h is 15%, check your character screen for proper numbers, and please have class knowledge before coming in here and trying to sell anyone that this class is "fine" when its getting dominated on the leader boards. Big reason? damage. Reason number 2 mostly melee. You're also saying that being able to equip a shield, any shield is a 20% gain to damage flat. Wrong dead wrong. Don't need any math to know that, because I play the game.
Toe to Toe Crusader gets shit on by barb,dh,wd and maybe wiz @ a decent level of optomization. My wd can drop a gr 40 rg in under a minute, my dh can do a 40 in 70s. My Crusader? 3 fucking minutes. 180s. You have zero understanding of how the debuf for AC/2h works, you still think that the -20% goes to base weapon damage, which it does not. Stop posting.
Do you understand how multipliers work?
Prior to AC you have a "-20%" bonus. after AC you have a "+15%" bonus. you've gained +35% from activating AC and the effective change (how much your damage actually increases) is a 43% bonus. It's basic math.
And I will repeat: Crusader is being shit on because they have no force multipliers on gear. Phalanx shield and that's it. Other clssses are running +3000% weapon damage DoT effects, 15billion DPS procs, 5x full damage spenders. Crusader is running "here's a mediocre spender, twice".
HS and AC are both global factors. They're additive with each other and multiplicative with other factors. They are in FACT analogous to base weapon damage multipliers.
Auto, Dude if you remove the items mentioned you'd be left with the fact that those classes have passives that buff them no matter the weapon choice. My argument uses those items to overkill my point, its why you apply your argument to some examples I used, not all, and in an incorrect way to boot. In the case of BF you tried, but since you don't seem to understand how barbs generate/maintain fury you end up coming out on the weaker side of the argument once again. It is very easy and fluid to use ww in a EQ t6 farm build, and never ever dip below 90% fury even single target on a rift guardian.I do it all the time and never do I go below 90%. As far as endgame EQ from what I've seen they don't use spenders, so no punishment there what so ever. Raekors falls into the same catagory. In the case of GF, globe generation can be assured with several talent selections, and further augmented by an amulet equip, I.E. in that case it is up to the player to maintain the buff. Failure to do so means that player must get better at keeping stacks up if the talent is to remain optimal.
Oh so you mean that those passives work when you're doing what they're designed to do? Who'da thunk it.
There's no reasonable situation in which the 20% penalty on HS is causing the passive to be a negative effect.
Gruesome Feast/Pierce the Veil etc, were mentioned for the specific reason that they are part of end game builds, and do not in any way interact with weapon selection, none of the passives I mentioned interact with weapon selection in that way, nor should they, it creates poor diversity choices, and a glass ceiling for progression. Not saying that the current set based meta doesn't do just that it does, but not on the same level. Neither does the base damage of Companion Call: Wolf, Big Bad Vodoo, nor Wrath of the Berzerker see any sort of modification to damage to 'preserve balance' within those classes
There are precisely two Crusader weapon-interactive passives. One of them gives +20% DPS, the other doesn;t get used because it's a 1H passive.
If I were wrong about HS being a debuff, then you could remove it and not see a difference in damage. As it is, it does lower damage in a very specific way, by removing 20% of the 35% bonus from AC based on the weapon used. An affix that lowers damage or performance in that way is a....debuff. If you removed that debuff you would see a gap widen between 1h/2h for crusaders, and as stated this is an end game thread, not a T6 or lower thread so if you're not O.K. with that you have every right not to post, or to say you disagree. Don't monopolize this thread with false information please, because I for one don't believe that great big -20% is anything but a punishment for using tools that we need to use to progress. Neither do I believe in the idiocy that leads people to believe that it is O.K. to remove performance from one area of a class/build to cover a bigger lack of performance in another area. I'm talking about the opinions you've stated multiple times in your posts.
You obviously don;t understand math.
Go put oin a 2H weapon. Now turn on HS and equip a shield. Congrats you just gained 20% damage. Furthermore the -20% penalty EXAGGERATES the effect (read: amplifies) any flat % bonuses including that of AC. The -20% does nothing except keep the passive in line with the other damage passives available to the class. No more, no less.
I understand from your posts that you are a passionate person about 1h, so I invite you to create a thread that looks at what would be needed to buff them. Because at the end of the day we as a class are not doing enough damage for high progression, and the first thing that jumps out at me is a giant -20% next to damage granted by skills, which becomes +15% when I activate AC. Not 35%, as advertised. Trying to tell me that I'm actually buffed by 43% is laughable when you consider that damage for all 2h weps regardless of class was buffed. Not just damage for crusaders, all classes.
I'm not passionate about 1H. I'm passionate about stopping stupid ignorant BS. If you actually understand how math works you'd understand that the -20% penalty doesn't turn AC into a 15% damage buff. It turns it into a 43% damage buff.
For non HS
100% + 35% = 135%, +35% relative damage
For HS
80%+35% = 115%, +43% relative damage
That's it. No smoke and mirrors. No fantasy land math. The benefits from AC are GREATER when you have HS than when you don't.
Unless your math shows crusaders doing 20% more baseline damage than every other class, I see no reason for this debuff that is HS. If you want to bring the shield argument up, your more than welome to it, but Unrelenting Phalanx/FR don't stack up to other "class specific" slot equips, such as Vial Ward, Bombadiers Rucksack, Met.Bolts, Mask of Jeram/TMF. WD's have their own set of issues in progression, but damage done when pets are alive isn't one of them trust me. Which is not to say nerf others, leave them alone. In the case of barb it seems a bad joke to give them tools capable of clearing trash to RG in a GR 52 then leaving them with nowhere near enough single target to get the job done. Does not sound rewarding in the slightest. This is also not a 'nerf furnace/unity/soj" etc thread. We like those things, they help with progression and are standards for end game. RROG as well.
HS is competing with other passives. Not with other classes. A Crusader wielding a 2H weapon without a shield does more or less EXACTLY the damage a Barbarian or Monk does. +/- passive damage choices of which Crusader, completely ignoring HS, generally has superior or more reliable multipliers from.
Finery is +15%, No clause
Holy Cause is 10%, No Clause
Lord Commander is 20%, No clause, On the only skill being used
Then comes HS, providing another 20% damage all the time, another 6% while akarat is up, and has absolutely no downside unless you're a complete dumbass.
That's 4 damage passives that in a WORST CASE scenario (additive) are providing a 55% damage bonus. In reality the bonus is more like +86% damage
How's that compare to damage multiplier on passives form barb? Well I'll assume the bonus is all multiplicative, since that's the best case scenario (and three of the damage bonuses on Crusader are multiplicative in nature).
Ruthless +40% damage 30% of the time (+12% damage)
Berserker Rage +25% damage
Rampage +25% damage (except against rift bosses taking longer than 8 seconds, but we'll assume that can be ignored)
Total damage bonus form passives +75%
Wait. You mean the top damage multiplier from a crusader's passives is better than a Barb's? Yes. Yes it is. And you get to keep a cheat death from akkan. And let me clarify: the top ranked crusader and the top ranked barbarian on diabloprogress (accurate enough) have for all intents and purposes the same elemental sheet DPS and is running a damn condemn build. There isn't any kind of problem with the available passive multipliers for Crusader.
Unless you operate under the premise that crusaders do that much more damage than other classes baseline, which we don't. We don't even have the best weapon scaling, that goes to barbs and dh next I believe. As far as the validity of your math, sorry but you'll have to actually top the kill time of a crusader with roughly the same stat with the only difference being a 1h for me to believe. Reason being that type of D3V gear testing leaves out crit/crit damage/leg affixes which do affect game play/performance in a huge way. The reason that DH/WD use spread sheets was to get around this and remove any bias in results from omission of data.
Crusaders are shafted in damage multipliers on gear, and WD on skills. That has absolutely nothing to do with HS.
As far as your oppinion that HS is better than its peers, you just had the bad luck of trying that argument on someone who plays WD/Sader/DH/Barb. A lot. Every other 20% passive destroys HS based on the fact that you can use whatever weapon you want without losing damage from your class specific on use cool down outside of base damage lost for weapon selection. Those talents even leave room for further reward, an aware WD who uses spirit walk well will have a much greater uptime on 5 stack GF. if you want to bring up the mana usage from PTV that is negated in several ways, which involve playcraft and gearing. So too with a demon hunter who is well practiced with Steady Aim and Nightstalker. NS is a defensive talent but a very powerful and engaging one that is a blast to play with.
HS is at the very least equivalent to all other 20% damage passives. The fact that it's "weapon specific" has no bearing. 1H has fervor, which as I've admitted is undertuned as of the HS rework. And of course the only weapons in the game for non-int non-dex classes worth using are, get this, 2H weapons. Even including class specifics.
And by "only weapons" I mean to say "Furnace"
Please feel free to make a thread regarding the state of 1h v2h in game currently, I'd support it. As far as this thread is concerned, the guy who I asked not to post provided more factual information with one sentance than you've managed in numberous posts, that sentance being " we don't clear trash as fast as a barb." Look at the vid for the 44 clear by Alkizer, then look at at the video of Wudjio's 49 clear or the R1 Barb clear. Either of two mentioned would have done that 44 rift in probably under ten minutes, I'm not slighting Alkizer in the slighest.I'm glad people are pushing this class and hope for further progression. Doesn't have to come from me, would be nice but if its not then the world keeps spinning. If you think that Crusaders deal 20% more baseline damage than other classes then I think our conversation is over, much to the relief of the mod's I'll bet, and I bid you good day.
There is precisely 1 reason why Crusader is behind everyone else. No free damage. The "best" build is stuck with a 490% weapon damage spender, while other builds are running 1000% damage non-cost skills and have affixes granting 3000% free weapon damage every few seconds.
And now. Let's get this clear.
I never once said Crusader's dealt 20% baseline better damage than other classes. I said that the -20% penalty on HS is not in fact a punishment and does not in fact make the passive weak. It converts a +50% damage passive into a +20% damage passive. It amplifies untyped +% damage. It happens to have no real competition. That is all truth.
What is not truth is that the penalty is in any way a "punishment".
Crusader base DPS with a 2H weapon (no shield) is not in any significant way different from other classes. The presence of a penalty on HS does not in any significant way effect Crusader DPS such as to unduly handicap them. It serves only to keep the damage bonus from HS on par with most passives. What is significantly impacting performance is complete lack of effective crowd management without resource burn, and a complete lack of power multipliers on Akkan (Roland's has plenty of power multiplier, it suffers from GR scaling) or other gear slots.
It is punishment 100%, if you knew anything about any other class at all you would realize that that far greater multiplier mechanics are already in game. Barbarians have several to pair with Raekor's/Vial Ward, Mask of Jeram OR Sacrafice PTP stacked with Pierce the Veil and/or Gruesome Feast, attack speed breakpoints for demon hunters combined with passives like Steady Aim/Cull, all of which provide massive damage upgrades far in excess of 20%. Not to mention that each class has at minimum on use bonus 20% dmg, and some higher.
What we have is a penalty stroke 20% while using 2h, again a unique mechanic to this class. Jade doc's don't do 20% less damage for use of a 2h as opposed to a 1h/mojo, Raekor barbs don't lose 20% dmg for not using 2x1h weps. What we have is nothing even close to what I've mentioned above, those things that I've listed are just there, regardless of weapon used, and as every class except dh that I listed uses Furnace in an end game build I'm having a difficulty grasping how/where the imbalance would be with the removal of this debuff. As others point out we lack damage, HS is not balance it is a piss poor penalty stroke for people using 2h a weapon that was the endgame design to begin with.
Also, the debuff from HS is 20%, not 50%. You're confusing the difference in base weapon damage with how the HS skill interacts with the class.No other class loses 20% off of its major damage boosting skill for the sake of "balance." I'm not interested in any imaginary fantasy land math either, I've done enough in game testing between the two to know that's accurate.
That debuff is applied to the bonus granted by AC, so that's why I say its punishment, and it is. It is not balance in the slighest, as the group of people who'd be using one handers on a steady basis won't be pushing a gr 50, you wouldn't likley make 40. So what we come to is the corner that you've argued yourself into. This season one handers are not viable end game. Where they are viable is t6, where you wouldn't notice the damage difference thanks to the relatively low hp of mobs compared to grift 40+. HS punishes the player looking for next level progression for the sake of a group of people who as you're so aptly demonstrating have not a clue as to how damage is fully applied or the content level we're trying to apply it to.
Shitty quality of life choices for the sake of balance, and most ironic the people who this balance is there for have 0 idea what they're missing anyway.
What I would like to see is a set of passives that reward both styles of play, like a barb or dh, instead of one that punishes the player who uses the 2h for the sake of people like yourself who believe that there needs to by this type of balance for us, when it exists no where else that I've experienced.
I'll go down by paragraph
Paragraphs 1+2 - You're comparing a passive to powerful item affixes. That is completely incomparable. Stack HS versus any single damage passive on any class and it's a fair comparison (and HS is better than 90% of other damage passives). There are a handful of damage passives that beat HS in terms of the damage multiplier they provide (Gruesome Feast), and those passives have conditional clauses that have significant effect on their use. As it is HS is a non-conditional +20-30% damage bonus as a passive, comparable with (as I've said multiple times) all other damage passives. Without the penalty HS would be a +50% damage passive. It's not punishment to ensure a mechanic is comparable to its peers. You're sitting there doing fantasyland comparisons ignoring the actual math and the actual facts.
Paragraph 3+4 - I at no point anywhere have said HS had any debuff value other than 20%. And if you sat and actually did the math you'd know that the relative DPS gains from AC's damage bonus while using HS are HIGHER than if you don't use it. AC without HS is + 35% damage, AC with HS is a relative +43% damage. AC is actually IMPROVED in effect by having that debuff, not weakened.
Paragraph 5 - Mechanics that retain DPS parity are needed. These aren't shitty QoL choices (they aren't even QoL choices) they're balancing mechanics to make sure a passive isn't brokenly out of line with all other passives. If HS did not have the damage penalty the issues with 1H weapons would be even further magnified, and even after 1H was "fixed" for other classes Fervor would need buffing on the order of "While wielding a 1H weapon 50% increased damage" just to compete with HS. And I repeat that's assuming 1H is viable for every other class.
Paragraph 6 - Fervor is the sister passive meant to represent 1H play. It's currently mildly undertuned, it wouldn't hurt to be buffed up to +20 or +30% AS with 1H weapons. All other passives are balanced with their competition in all other classes, HS is too. It;s not some special case. Just because it has a penalty doesn't mean it's somehow out of line with how passives work. It just means that if it didn't have the penalty it would be TOO GOOD compared to its competition (and would be a better damage amplifer than any other passive).
Here's I'll take your "punishment" point of view and just run with it for a second.
Gruesome Feast "punishes" WDs who don't stack pickup radius or don't have access to health globes.
Ruthless "punishes" barbarians when they'e fighting enemies above 30% health. (Also only works out to +12% damage hahaha suckers)
Berserker Rage "punishes" barbarians who spend fury (which they're supposed to want to do aren't they???)
Brawler "punishes" barbarians who use any kind of ranged attack
Elemental Attunement "punishes" wizards who don't have multiple element types
Glass Cannon "punishes" wizards by reducing their defenses (and it's still only +15%, when even after "punishment" HS is +20-30% damage)
Audacity "punishes" wizards who fight at range
Sharpshooter "punishes" DHs with high crit chance (also it's a pretty bad damage bonus if you do the math)
Ambush "punishes" DHs fighting enemies with less than 75% health (and it's an even worse damage bonus than Ruthless, at 10%)
Single Out "punishes" demon hunters who are fighting groups
Many passives "punish" the user when they're not using them correctly. Some just plain suck (Ruthless, Ambush), with big awesome numbers that work out to not much of a bonus. HS doesn't have that problem. It has a big "punishing" penalty that still leaves the user with a substantial bonus, that's still better than almost all of its peers among other classes, and still better than all the other damage passives for saders. And that's crazy when you realize it's competing with multiple +20% damage passives (most classes have only one or two of those, several don't even have 1).
The greater issue is not "HS punishes you" (because it doesn't, and hasn't since the MS penalty was removed) the greater issue is that there are almost no supporting core mechanics in the game that reward using any weapon that isn't 1H+(source/Mojo) or 2H. And even if there were there are no mechanics that reward sustained DPS melee play (where 90% of Crusader's power is), every mechanic pushes raw weapon damage and ranged play. Remember in Vanilla when DW>>>>>>>>>>>>>EVERYTHING? That's what's going on now, just in the opposite direction. The 1H-2H disparity is completely unrelated to Crusaders (who have a far more balanced DPS between the two than most other classes).
@Bagstone: Crusaders perform weakly in comparison because they have almost no "free damage" affix support on gear and their "premier" build spams a 490% weapon damage skill and otherwise relies on mechanics available to all other classes for damage. Even factoring a free 35% damage from Champion they're trying to compete against even the WEAKEST other builds spamming a 1000+% AoE weapon damage skill with no cost and no cooldown. While they flail away wit ha laughable 490% AoE with exorbitant cost and little to no mobility.
]What I actually did was use a real scenario to prove the fault of your logic. Because in game Furnace is the end game weapon, nothing else comes close. Daydreaming and using abstract and invalid points of measure doesn't change the fact that its a poor design to punish people for using the necessary tools to do endgame content. Saying poor weapon optimization is just plain wrong, and saying that you'd be more or less right if we just ignore things like leg. affixes is even more wrong. Those are the defining attributes of weapons that set them apart from others, and I refuse to ignore something like that because someone feels like arguing an abstract point. In truth the passive Heavenly Strength punishes the end game player on this class, it bites right into the bonus granted by AC, for no real reason.
One final point, the actual topic in this thread is improvements necessary to the class to be able to hit gr 50. Since that's not happening with a 1h, can we forgo any further digression on this moot point?
I agree about the survival issues with rolands as well, but I have doubts that it would match Phalanx in terms of output. I'd have to see actual testing where someone would be able to run a grift 40 against a stampede or condemn build.
My point is that 1H weapons are not bad mechanically. They're bad because they have no mechanical support.
There's no reason improvements cannot be made that make 1H able to do GR50. None at all. The only thing preventing such a thing is thinking like you. Confusing "This has no current mechanical support" with "this has no potential mechanical support that can make it viable"
They could release a 1H weapon with "all your skills deal quadruple damage"
Boom 1H is now only weapon type worth using. They're not going to because it's bad design, much in the same way that furnace is bad design (though that one snuck through because it looks reasonable on paper). Nothing is precluding a reasonable attempt at making 1H weapons interesting other than lack of creativity both among developers and among players.
Now. Heavenly Strength is in no way a punishment in endgame. Without the penalty the passive would be a greater than 50% damage passive, far and away more powerful than any passive for any other class. With the penalty it's a 30% damage bonus with no important conditional clauses and no significant drawbacks other than "You have to use a weapon type that's already better than the alternatives". It's not punishment, it's balance.
The damage gained from the Roland's set is another smoke and mirror show, there isn't a set up you could use that would give Rolands swing for swing the damage of stampede, even after all the debuff/damage capping.
Unless I've forgotten a legendary weapon Stampede is a 490% weapon damage skill + bonuses, vs the 1500% weapon damage of phys shield bash build. Swing for Swing without Roland's +100% skill damage shield Bash crushes stampede for single target attack spam. It's the AoE that roland's loses out on, not damage dealt to a specific target.
You can maintain that 1h damage is fine all you wish, math and testing to the complete contrary over rule conjecture.
The raw sustained DPS on 1H weapons is absolutely fine when supported by Fervor compared to HS. There's a minor DPS gap, but it's not some cripplingly huge amount.
Let me paint a very very basic picture. When something is bad about a class in a Blizzard game, the typical M.O. is to make something else WORSE to gloss over or change public opinion about the original under performer. I give you 2h v 1h, Akkhan v Rolands. I'll repeat myself one last time, somthing that is shit, predicated on shit mechanics (1h) doesn't become less shit by nerfing something else (2h dmg). All it does is fool simple minded people. When I say shit damage I'm saying that in context to gr 40+, not T6. You can face roll T6 with l25 leg gems and decent gear with nearly any weapon.
The HS damage debuff was and is because of the massive 2H weapon damage boost that happened going into RoS. It has nothing to do with trying to make 1H weapons attractive and everything to do with making sure 2H crusaders don't absolutely crush the DPS of any other class by virtue of the effective +50% DPS offered by HS before the damage penalty.
One last thing, how long do you think it would take to go through 50 billion hp with a 1h, any 1h vs a Furnace? The guy using a Furnace will have killed the rg, gone for a smoke break and started the next rift before you got through that 50B rg with a 1h. I'm not knocking people who like 1h or the builds around them. However those are casual builds, not ment for endgame content.A 1h that increased Phalanx by 100%? Too bad a Furnace applied Pain Enhancer tick from my 45 gem would likley do more damage, not to mention the actual cast as elite damage is on a different dr table than items/skills that boost another skill, a 1h that buffed Phalanx dmg would likley dr with Lord Commander passive, making something like that far from optimal. Also, base damage from a Furnace or 2h flail being so much higher would crush Pain Enhancer, which ends up being a good portion of damage.
You're confusing poor design with bad weapon class balance. If you sat and compared a "vanilla" 1H weapon with a "vanilla" 2H weapon on a crusader and just timed how long it took to stampede a target to death without a bunch of procs they'd take about the same time, favoring 2H slightly. Why? Because the two weapon types have very similar base DPS.
The difference that you're seeing is because a weapon that already has a 50% damage lead is getting another 50% damage lead (well, closer to 35% after SoJ) and then tick based procs don;t compensate for AS in any way. Should they compensate? Probably not.
Now. If that 100% Phalanx damage bonus 1H weapon was stacked against anything that WASN'T a furnace? The difference would be much less noticeable, and rather than running all Toxin all the time you'd parley the large AS difference into point-cast procs (that 2H weapons are weaker with). that further muddy the actual difference.
You're sitting here trying to compare 1H weapons to the single most powerful per-hit damage weapon in the game, and then assuming that you'll be approaching the use of the weapon types exactly the same. Furnace has been brokenly powerful for a long time, it's not a particularly good comparison point. If (for instance) Sun Keeper had the same legend effect and you were comparing "1H Furnace" to "2H Furnace" the difference would be pretty small, and something that is compensated for by making use of better suited mechanics rather than just approaching the problem the same way.
I hope I was clear that this isn't a discussion about T6 farming, while I welcome your posts I disagree with both, and here's why. One handers are awful. As it stands that's not changing, so making 2h's slightly less bad but still bad to gloss over how poor 1h are wasn't an answer.
On the topic of Rolands I can't see any reason for the set's introduction other than to make the Akkhan set seem really good in comparison, when in point of fact it is dating itself very quickly. As far as energy management for roland's goes, again you're fine running no generator in T6. Try that set in gr41 and 42 and feel free to share results. That's why this thread is here. I like the set but its pure trash and a smoke screen.
I don't mean to offer any insult, but seeing the class as it is intended to work in high progression is the point of the thread, and there isn't a one hander in the game that's going to end up on a curz with a 50+ rift.
Yes stampede is ranged. That's why it's the build that gets used, and that's why Roland's is "bad" (not ranged). It's why Akkan is premier (ranged synergy) etc
On the topic of Roland's: It's a set that ramps up to 4x DPS. It's basically +300% damage, which FYI is better than basically all other damage options on non-weapon gear, with the caveat that you have to melee and you have to stand your ground. As an offensive option it's far and away better at multiplying damage than Akkan is. It's just not good at keeping you alive without making gear concessions (that nobody is willing to make, despite the fact that you've still got a DPS lead after the concessions relative to akkan). That isn't Roland's fault, that's a design issue with GRifts and with akkan paving the way for a 20s CD cheat death, and the way rifts scale that's worth more than doubling relative DPS.
And I maintain: 1H damage (ignoring legend affixes) is fine more or less in comparison to HS. It's just predicated on a stand-and-fight mentality mixed with CD skills. Which is the problem, followed marginally closely by the lack of good offensive affixes for skills compared to 2H sader weapons (or Furnace). With the upcoming changes to health and defensive options melee should be much more viable than it was/is in S1, which will by extension make 1H more viable. It won't be the weapon loadout that gets used for high level rifts, but that will be more because 1H offensive options are mediocre than because 1H raw damage output is bad. If there was, for instance, a 1H flail that said "Phalanx deals 100% increased damage" you can be sure that it would be BiS as a weapon. Unfortunately every 1H weapon is focused on more or less utility bonuses, which would be fine if there were some options to make those utility bonuses useful for clearspeed.
Gonna take the time to point out that it's possible (though require's specific gear) to get around resource costs on Sader's. In fact I'm working ona set of gear for a full on Shield Basher in Roland's without need for a generator or akkan. It's going to work, but it's also going to need gear that is generally considered "weak" (ie Piro Mirella to half Shield Bash Cost)
I would also like to point out that it is probably Blizz's intention (to some degree) that classes not just spam spender's constantly and actually have to rely to some degree on generator's.
If Sader spender's hit harder the slower ramp up would be less annoying. Or if sader generation was higher the lower damage would be less annoying. I'd rather see the former as a solution than the latter, if only because monks have seemed to have been intended for the latter and it feels bad for many players as far as I can tell.
Really the only thing holding current best geared saders back is being melee. Some of the stuff coming up on the PTR will change that significantly. Once some of the 1H crusader options get tweaked we'll probably see them more, but from a raw DPS perspective HS is equivalent to its 1H counterpart. It's just the damage support on legendaries that is significantly lacking (though not entirely across the board *stares at thunderfury)
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Roland's could have "Gain 30% armour for 30 seconds stacking up to 5 times on use of shield bash or sweep." There you go. Now roland's is viable.
HS is balanced relative to 1H weapons. For better or worse. And equipping HS is equivalent to a +20% damage BUFF over using a 1H. It's in direct competition with Fervor, but for the purposes of this discussion that doesn't actually matter. It happens to be in indirect competition with no-shield. But for the purposes of any build that isn't holy shotgun this, once again, does not matter for the purposes of this discussion. And it barely matters for shotgun.
When you're using HS (for the purposes of this discussion you're not using Holy Cause). And you cast AC. You gain 43% damage. Done. That's everything you need to know. There's no weaseling out of it. Doesn't matter if you have a 1H weapon on (like an idiot). Doesn't matter if you have a 2H weapon on. You just gained 43% damage.
Now let's go equip an imaginary 1H passive that says "+20% Damage"
You cast AC. How much damage do you get? I'll give you a hint: it's not 35%.
It's 30%.
That's how relative damage works. HS amplifies the relative bonus of ANY +% damage global modifier you have effecting you. Just because you have some value of negative modifier does NOT mean other bonuses are weaker.
Heavenly Strength allows you to equip weapons that are 50% more damaging (actually on average a bit more than that in the damage department, but true enough for DPS) while retaining the use of a shield. The catch is you take a 20% penalty to total damage (mechanically this is a -20% global modifier). This results in a total (1.5*0.8) = 1.2, or 20%, bonus to damage. HS never put you in the negative, unless you want to insist that losing a bit of top end damage compared to just having a 2H equipped (+"50%" damage) counts, but given how the class mechanics works you'd have to be an idiot to make that argument.
Edit: Average 2H raw damage is 90% greater than 1H.
Prior to AC you have a "-20%" bonus. after AC you have a "+15%" bonus. you've gained +35% from activating AC and the effective change (how much your damage actually increases) is a 43% bonus. It's basic math.
And I will repeat: Crusader is being shit on because they have no force multipliers on gear. Phalanx shield and that's it. Other clssses are running +3000% weapon damage DoT effects, 15billion DPS procs, 5x full damage spenders. Crusader is running "here's a mediocre spender, twice".
Damage = Base Damage * (Elemental+sSkill) * (Global Factors) * (Elite Damage)
HS and AC are both global factors. They're additive with each other and multiplicative with other factors. They are in FACT analogous to base weapon damage multipliers.
Oh so you mean that those passives work when you're doing what they're designed to do? Who'da thunk it.
There's no reasonable situation in which the 20% penalty on HS is causing the passive to be a negative effect.
There are precisely two Crusader weapon-interactive passives. One of them gives +20% DPS, the other doesn;t get used because it's a 1H passive.
You obviously don;t understand math.
Go put oin a 2H weapon. Now turn on HS and equip a shield. Congrats you just gained 20% damage. Furthermore the -20% penalty EXAGGERATES the effect (read: amplifies) any flat % bonuses including that of AC. The -20% does nothing except keep the passive in line with the other damage passives available to the class. No more, no less.
I'm not passionate about 1H. I'm passionate about stopping stupid ignorant BS. If you actually understand how math works you'd understand that the -20% penalty doesn't turn AC into a 15% damage buff. It turns it into a 43% damage buff.
For non HS
100% + 35% = 135%, +35% relative damage
For HS
80%+35% = 115%, +43% relative damage
That's it. No smoke and mirrors. No fantasy land math. The benefits from AC are GREATER when you have HS than when you don't.
HS is competing with other passives. Not with other classes. A Crusader wielding a 2H weapon without a shield does more or less EXACTLY the damage a Barbarian or Monk does. +/- passive damage choices of which Crusader, completely ignoring HS, generally has superior or more reliable multipliers from.
Finery is +15%, No clause
Holy Cause is 10%, No Clause
Lord Commander is 20%, No clause, On the only skill being used
Then comes HS, providing another 20% damage all the time, another 6% while akarat is up, and has absolutely no downside unless you're a complete dumbass.
That's 4 damage passives that in a WORST CASE scenario (additive) are providing a 55% damage bonus. In reality the bonus is more like +86% damage
How's that compare to damage multiplier on passives form barb? Well I'll assume the bonus is all multiplicative, since that's the best case scenario (and three of the damage bonuses on Crusader are multiplicative in nature).
Ruthless +40% damage 30% of the time (+12% damage)
Berserker Rage +25% damage
Rampage +25% damage (except against rift bosses taking longer than 8 seconds, but we'll assume that can be ignored)
Total damage bonus form passives +75%
Wait. You mean the top damage multiplier from a crusader's passives is better than a Barb's? Yes. Yes it is. And you get to keep a cheat death from akkan. And let me clarify: the top ranked crusader and the top ranked barbarian on diabloprogress (accurate enough) have for all intents and purposes the same elemental sheet DPS and is running a damn condemn build. There isn't any kind of problem with the available passive multipliers for Crusader.
Crusaders are shafted in damage multipliers on gear, and WD on skills. That has absolutely nothing to do with HS.
HS is at the very least equivalent to all other 20% damage passives. The fact that it's "weapon specific" has no bearing. 1H has fervor, which as I've admitted is undertuned as of the HS rework. And of course the only weapons in the game for non-int non-dex classes worth using are, get this, 2H weapons. Even including class specifics.
And by "only weapons" I mean to say "Furnace"
There is precisely 1 reason why Crusader is behind everyone else. No free damage. The "best" build is stuck with a 490% weapon damage spender, while other builds are running 1000% damage non-cost skills and have affixes granting 3000% free weapon damage every few seconds.
And now. Let's get this clear.
I never once said Crusader's dealt 20% baseline better damage than other classes. I said that the -20% penalty on HS is not in fact a punishment and does not in fact make the passive weak. It converts a +50% damage passive into a +20% damage passive. It amplifies untyped +% damage. It happens to have no real competition. That is all truth.
What is not truth is that the penalty is in any way a "punishment".
Crusader base DPS with a 2H weapon (no shield) is not in any significant way different from other classes. The presence of a penalty on HS does not in any significant way effect Crusader DPS such as to unduly handicap them. It serves only to keep the damage bonus from HS on par with most passives. What is significantly impacting performance is complete lack of effective crowd management without resource burn, and a complete lack of power multipliers on Akkan (Roland's has plenty of power multiplier, it suffers from GR scaling) or other gear slots.
Paragraphs 1+2 - You're comparing a passive to powerful item affixes. That is completely incomparable. Stack HS versus any single damage passive on any class and it's a fair comparison (and HS is better than 90% of other damage passives). There are a handful of damage passives that beat HS in terms of the damage multiplier they provide (Gruesome Feast), and those passives have conditional clauses that have significant effect on their use. As it is HS is a non-conditional +20-30% damage bonus as a passive, comparable with (as I've said multiple times) all other damage passives. Without the penalty HS would be a +50% damage passive. It's not punishment to ensure a mechanic is comparable to its peers. You're sitting there doing fantasyland comparisons ignoring the actual math and the actual facts.
Paragraph 3+4 - I at no point anywhere have said HS had any debuff value other than 20%. And if you sat and actually did the math you'd know that the relative DPS gains from AC's damage bonus while using HS are HIGHER than if you don't use it. AC without HS is + 35% damage, AC with HS is a relative +43% damage. AC is actually IMPROVED in effect by having that debuff, not weakened.
Paragraph 5 - Mechanics that retain DPS parity are needed. These aren't shitty QoL choices (they aren't even QoL choices) they're balancing mechanics to make sure a passive isn't brokenly out of line with all other passives. If HS did not have the damage penalty the issues with 1H weapons would be even further magnified, and even after 1H was "fixed" for other classes Fervor would need buffing on the order of "While wielding a 1H weapon 50% increased damage" just to compete with HS. And I repeat that's assuming 1H is viable for every other class.
Paragraph 6 - Fervor is the sister passive meant to represent 1H play. It's currently mildly undertuned, it wouldn't hurt to be buffed up to +20 or +30% AS with 1H weapons. All other passives are balanced with their competition in all other classes, HS is too. It;s not some special case. Just because it has a penalty doesn't mean it's somehow out of line with how passives work. It just means that if it didn't have the penalty it would be TOO GOOD compared to its competition (and would be a better damage amplifer than any other passive).
Here's I'll take your "punishment" point of view and just run with it for a second.
Gruesome Feast "punishes" WDs who don't stack pickup radius or don't have access to health globes.
Ruthless "punishes" barbarians when they'e fighting enemies above 30% health. (Also only works out to +12% damage hahaha suckers)
Berserker Rage "punishes" barbarians who spend fury (which they're supposed to want to do aren't they???)
Brawler "punishes" barbarians who use any kind of ranged attack
Elemental Attunement "punishes" wizards who don't have multiple element types
Glass Cannon "punishes" wizards by reducing their defenses (and it's still only +15%, when even after "punishment" HS is +20-30% damage)
Audacity "punishes" wizards who fight at range
Sharpshooter "punishes" DHs with high crit chance (also it's a pretty bad damage bonus if you do the math)
Ambush "punishes" DHs fighting enemies with less than 75% health (and it's an even worse damage bonus than Ruthless, at 10%)
Single Out "punishes" demon hunters who are fighting groups
Many passives "punish" the user when they're not using them correctly. Some just plain suck (Ruthless, Ambush), with big awesome numbers that work out to not much of a bonus. HS doesn't have that problem. It has a big "punishing" penalty that still leaves the user with a substantial bonus, that's still better than almost all of its peers among other classes, and still better than all the other damage passives for saders. And that's crazy when you realize it's competing with multiple +20% damage passives (most classes have only one or two of those, several don't even have 1).
The greater issue is not "HS punishes you" (because it doesn't, and hasn't since the MS penalty was removed) the greater issue is that there are almost no supporting core mechanics in the game that reward using any weapon that isn't 1H+(source/Mojo) or 2H. And even if there were there are no mechanics that reward sustained DPS melee play (where 90% of Crusader's power is), every mechanic pushes raw weapon damage and ranged play. Remember in Vanilla when DW>>>>>>>>>>>>>EVERYTHING? That's what's going on now, just in the opposite direction. The 1H-2H disparity is completely unrelated to Crusaders (who have a far more balanced DPS between the two than most other classes).
@Bagstone: Crusaders perform weakly in comparison because they have almost no "free damage" affix support on gear and their "premier" build spams a 490% weapon damage skill and otherwise relies on mechanics available to all other classes for damage. Even factoring a free 35% damage from Champion they're trying to compete against even the WEAKEST other builds spamming a 1000+% AoE weapon damage skill with no cost and no cooldown. While they flail away wit ha laughable 490% AoE with exorbitant cost and little to no mobility.
There's no reason improvements cannot be made that make 1H able to do GR50. None at all. The only thing preventing such a thing is thinking like you. Confusing "This has no current mechanical support" with "this has no potential mechanical support that can make it viable"
They could release a 1H weapon with "all your skills deal quadruple damage"
Boom 1H is now only weapon type worth using. They're not going to because it's bad design, much in the same way that furnace is bad design (though that one snuck through because it looks reasonable on paper). Nothing is precluding a reasonable attempt at making 1H weapons interesting other than lack of creativity both among developers and among players.
Now. Heavenly Strength is in no way a punishment in endgame. Without the penalty the passive would be a greater than 50% damage passive, far and away more powerful than any passive for any other class. With the penalty it's a 30% damage bonus with no important conditional clauses and no significant drawbacks other than "You have to use a weapon type that's already better than the alternatives". It's not punishment, it's balance.
The raw sustained DPS on 1H weapons is absolutely fine when supported by Fervor compared to HS. There's a minor DPS gap, but it's not some cripplingly huge amount.
The HS damage debuff was and is because of the massive 2H weapon damage boost that happened going into RoS. It has nothing to do with trying to make 1H weapons attractive and everything to do with making sure 2H crusaders don't absolutely crush the DPS of any other class by virtue of the effective +50% DPS offered by HS before the damage penalty.
You're confusing poor design with bad weapon class balance. If you sat and compared a "vanilla" 1H weapon with a "vanilla" 2H weapon on a crusader and just timed how long it took to stampede a target to death without a bunch of procs they'd take about the same time, favoring 2H slightly. Why? Because the two weapon types have very similar base DPS.
The difference that you're seeing is because a weapon that already has a 50% damage lead is getting another 50% damage lead (well, closer to 35% after SoJ) and then tick based procs don;t compensate for AS in any way. Should they compensate? Probably not.
Now. If that 100% Phalanx damage bonus 1H weapon was stacked against anything that WASN'T a furnace? The difference would be much less noticeable, and rather than running all Toxin all the time you'd parley the large AS difference into point-cast procs (that 2H weapons are weaker with). that further muddy the actual difference.
You're sitting here trying to compare 1H weapons to the single most powerful per-hit damage weapon in the game, and then assuming that you'll be approaching the use of the weapon types exactly the same. Furnace has been brokenly powerful for a long time, it's not a particularly good comparison point. If (for instance) Sun Keeper had the same legend effect and you were comparing "1H Furnace" to "2H Furnace" the difference would be pretty small, and something that is compensated for by making use of better suited mechanics rather than just approaching the problem the same way.
Yes stampede is ranged. That's why it's the build that gets used, and that's why Roland's is "bad" (not ranged). It's why Akkan is premier (ranged synergy) etc
On the topic of Roland's: It's a set that ramps up to 4x DPS. It's basically +300% damage, which FYI is better than basically all other damage options on non-weapon gear, with the caveat that you have to melee and you have to stand your ground. As an offensive option it's far and away better at multiplying damage than Akkan is. It's just not good at keeping you alive without making gear concessions (that nobody is willing to make, despite the fact that you've still got a DPS lead after the concessions relative to akkan). That isn't Roland's fault, that's a design issue with GRifts and with akkan paving the way for a 20s CD cheat death, and the way rifts scale that's worth more than doubling relative DPS.
And I maintain: 1H damage (ignoring legend affixes) is fine more or less in comparison to HS. It's just predicated on a stand-and-fight mentality mixed with CD skills. Which is the problem, followed marginally closely by the lack of good offensive affixes for skills compared to 2H sader weapons (or Furnace). With the upcoming changes to health and defensive options melee should be much more viable than it was/is in S1, which will by extension make 1H more viable. It won't be the weapon loadout that gets used for high level rifts, but that will be more because 1H offensive options are mediocre than because 1H raw damage output is bad. If there was, for instance, a 1H flail that said "Phalanx deals 100% increased damage" you can be sure that it would be BiS as a weapon. Unfortunately every 1H weapon is focused on more or less utility bonuses, which would be fine if there were some options to make those utility bonuses useful for clearspeed.
I would also like to point out that it is probably Blizz's intention (to some degree) that classes not just spam spender's constantly and actually have to rely to some degree on generator's.
If Sader spender's hit harder the slower ramp up would be less annoying. Or if sader generation was higher the lower damage would be less annoying. I'd rather see the former as a solution than the latter, if only because monks have seemed to have been intended for the latter and it feels bad for many players as far as I can tell.
Really the only thing holding current best geared saders back is being melee. Some of the stuff coming up on the PTR will change that significantly. Once some of the 1H crusader options get tweaked we'll probably see them more, but from a raw DPS perspective HS is equivalent to its 1H counterpart. It's just the damage support on legendaries that is significantly lacking (though not entirely across the board *stares at thunderfury)