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No more lifesteal and how that can change combat!

Quote from RasAlgethi24

Why are people crying about the DH. Yes it needs a buff, and they got it. All the damage dealers have been buffed and resource costs lowered.

The only nerf is to shadow power which needed it for two reasons. One, it seems they're changing their philosphy on LS and nerfing it across the board for skills so that huge 15% LS had to go. Second, it was too good compared to any other defensive skill that it made it pretty much mandatory. Reducing to 25% DR instead of 35% isn't going to make the skill useless. It's still a great skill.

Shadow power needs a re-work. Not a nerf. It doesn't have innate dmg reduction, that is a rune. They should make that rune the default purpose or change it entirely. It use to be attack speed for 10 seconds, I'd like that back.

The reason why it needs a rework is since the primary source of healing is going to be health globes. (which is great btw) Then you aren't going to need or even want a secondary healing source on your active skill bar without a more impactful ability to go with it. It needs something else to make it appealing. The base skill as 266 LOH for 5 seconds with the new health regen philosophy is simply not useful enough to warrant use.

I say 266 so you actually think about how little 800 is going to be in the expansion when health pools are much larger. Basing that of course on all healing skills and weapon dps being increased by about 3x.

They could band-aid that with improving the runes, but the skill itself should be reworked and then runes to compliment it. There are already too many skills where the rune makes the skill.

Quote from Penduliar

Did lifesteal just disapeared from the game? ;O

Probably. Here's an interesting read on the topic.

Wyatt: I agree that if we cut incoming damage and healing rates in half, players would run with half as much EHP, like you predict. So we can’t just go in there, make that change, and expect everything to be okay. I like the way you broke things into EHP and Sustain, it’s a good way to look at the problem.
I think that framework also hints at a potential solution too. We need to look at ways to test both your character’s Sustainability as well as your EHP. Melee classes already experience a good deal of this, which is why they were the first to adopt Life On Hit when the game first came out. As a melee class you are constantly taking melee damage from enemies, so your sustain is tested every second.

Right now we don’t have many ways to stress the EHP of the ranged classes without it feeling bursty. I think this is because the game has an plethora of “Do the right thing and take 0 damage, do the wrong thing and take 100K damage”. Since the outcomes are so binary, the correct way to build a ranged class is to try to do the right thing as often as you can, and maybe build enough survivability so you can make a mistake once in a while.

What I think we need more of is “Do the right thing and take 20K damage, do the wrong thing and take 80K damage”. You’re still trying to do the right thing, but you’re still taking damage either way. Besides, Sanctuary is a dangerous, violent and hazardous place – some amount of damage comes with the territory. When I play, I want to feel stress on my EHP and my Sustainability while still feeling satisfied for making smart plays. I also want to value incremental survivability choices I make on my gear and my skill build.

P.S. LpSS scales with attack speed too since you get more attacks per second which translates into more spirit generation.

Well if you can’t depend on health globes for healing when you need them most, wouldn’t it make sense, as a player, to instead build around one of the life regen affixes like LS or LoH instead? If LoH or lifesteal are strong enough to cover a 30-second gap in health globes, they’ll be way more than enough to sustain yourself through the trash.

It just seems that the inevitable outcome is that health globes become the secondary source of healing instead of the primary source.

Wyatt: Yes. I think your analysis is correct. I think your assessment is why healing from health globes feel marginalized in the current live game at high levels of play.

One possible solution would be if you weren’t starved for 30 seconds on the elite. Like if the elite dropped a health globe every 20% health, then you’d get a health globe every 6 seconds while fighting this high health elite.

TL;DR Lifesteal is too strong of a stat, they didn't like it going into diablo 3 which is why it was nerfed from what it was in diablo 2. However, that just delays the inevitable when gear improves. As you can see by looking at June of last year to June of this year. Where items were considered trash with lifesteal instead of loh. Now it's completely the other way around.

So they are going to make the primary source of healing - health globes. Life from spirit/fury spent will be buffed and minor loh and absorbs look to be the secondary source of healing.

Quote from RasAlgethi24

Build your DH correctly and you wont have any ehp problems. I face tanked everything on my dh. Gloom was correctly nerfed as it was way too op compared to any other dh ability that it made it a mandatory skill. They are nefing LS across the board it seems for all classes, so a 15% LS skill is way too powerful and needs to go. Bringing gloom down to 25% damage reduction does not make it useless by any means.

Besides that, they are buffing nearly every damage skill and reducing its its resource cost.

I stopped playing my demon hunter back in June/July of last year with nearly 500 hours played. But I'm pretty sure I'm one of few demon hunters who had 680 res all,800 physical resist, 2.8% ll, 70k + hp, 4500 armor and 120k dps without ss in June of last year. This is when the majority didn't have 120k dps with sharpshooter and the ones that did had about 30k hp and 200 resist.

Quote from Emwe

@Everyone who cries about Shadowpower nerf or ignores how nearly all %LL abilities got removed.

1. %LL might get so broken in the addon(well it alrdy is now) that every mob would need to nearly oneshot everyone so they would take dmg.

2.%LL will get phased out(even from item's) and our mainsustain will be 1) Healthregen 2) Healthglobe's 3) Health on hit 4) Shield's and at the same time enemy dmg will get lowered to a point where they can kill us without the need to oneshot us.

I already assumed they were going the same route as they did with consoles. Which is health globes are much more valuable. However, you're failing to realize that in itself nerfs shadow power even more so. If the majority of healing comes from globes, then there's no reason to have a minute amount of loh for 1 skill slot.

What they should do is go with their original plan with shadow power where it increased the attack speed. Then again they could make gloom default shadow power and spice up the runes a bit more. Either way it has to either be reworked completely or they need to buff the loh. Otherwise it will never be used.

Quote from riptide

I think everyone understands the disclaimer. I think people also understand there is a process to tuning abilities. So when there's drastic changes like the shadow power one, which is not an appropriate number, people will call them on it for even thinking that was a valid number for testing.

I didn't get your point. You say the Shadow Power change is uncalled for? Btw, it's not really a number change. It's a concept change.

I never said it was uncalled for. If you had read any of my previous posts I said it could use a changing. Also while it's a concept change in your eyes. It's a numbers shift in mine, I've already said 3% life steal = 900+ life on hit ala item budget, it's actually 956 if we're being specific. The idea is to regen hp while attacking enemies. That didn't change.

As I've already said they could be removing life steal entirely since all life steal abilities have a LOH or an absorb effect now. But this doesn't address the issue of the gear scaling and how useless even 800 life on hit is now vs 3% life steal.

Giving a character the ability to have an on-demand 15% lifesteal is problematic. Because except for Barbs (which can get 9% lifesteal, or I guess could ;)), classes like the Wizard and WD will never come even close to that sort of sustain. It also means that class doesn't need to care about any sustain in gear, and pretty much all that matters is getting enough Discipline to keep that up all the time.

DH defense is shit compared to wizard and barb. Things that are frozen can't hit you, also having a 40% armor + resist bonus is huge. I'm not saying they should nerf wizard or barb, but demon hunters have always been awful in the ehp department. DH's need better defense, not less of it. It's been that way since day 1.

DH's don't have the highest dmg but have the worst EHP. If they are suppose to kite they should hit harder than witch doctors. But instead WD can just face tank anything with good gear and only 3% lifesteal.

Math doesn't leave room for debate, feelings or opinions. Again unless they change the coefficients for demon hunter to something ridiculously high, like 4-6x , this number is way off for practical testing purposes. So the only way that their judgment wouldn't be rightfully ridiculed.. would be if they just randomly typed in a number.

Having a hard time understanding this part. As I said, it's not even a "math" change. It's a concept change. 800+ Life on Hit is significant, and we don't even know what they're doing with proc ratios. So really? No room for debate or explanations? At all?

We know what the proc rates are currently and as far as we know they have not changed. So it's definitely room for concern.

As an aside. I'd rather be the guy that jumped the gun and made a case for something that didn't need one. Rather than say nothing and watch the change come to pass, because of lack of foresight on their part. (i.e. attack speed values @ launch)

You mean the Attack Speed change shouldn't have happened?

No I mean it should have never made it live to begin with. I thought I was pretty clear. I was saying they demonstrated a huge lack of foresight. I also insinuated that they are very capable of doing it again. Hence my concern.

Also, I didn't mean: "do not criticize any change whatsoever". If you're against the Shadow Power change, discuss it, voice your opinion, say it's unreasonable, think of alternatives, try to prove how the skill isn't broken (you're gonna have a hard time with that one).

But there's no need to go overboard with the reactions.

It could use a change and I've already shown that 3% life steal is 956 loh in terms of budget. I've also stated in MP7 gear 3% life steal is significantly better than 956 loh. This is essentially reducing shadow power to less than 10% of it's current power, rendering it useless in any form.

So just so we're clear 15% -> 3% -> 800 loh = worse scaling
RoS= stat inflation 3x over at the very least. 800 life on hit then is like 266 loh on now, which is less than 1% life leech now.

Does it all make sense now? They are nerfing the effectiveness of shadow powers purpose to about 1/15 of what it was. Hopefully it does change and it probably will. But I really question why even start there, it's not efficient.

The number is WAY too low. The end.

My point was: we don't even know if these changes are gonna make it to a PTR/beta until they do. Big skill changes like this will very likely go through a PTR testing. And that's the adequate moment for strong and well informed feedback, not now.

I am questioning their rationale. Since you need to have a reason to change something and an idea of the direction you want to go. So unless they randomly put a number there, their methods have issues. If a person is willing to nerf or buff something by over 1000%, even as a test, they have little foresight. I mean unless their goal is to see how useless or mandatory an ability becomes.

Quote from Zero(pS)

Seriously, people really need to understand the disclaimer there. None of these are final, and some are probably only there for "testing purposes". This is like a pre-alpha build of those changes.

We will only know what really changed when they release patch notes. And only know if it was for the best or the worst after actually playing with the changes.

I think everyone understands the disclaimer. I think people also understand there is a process to tuning abilities. So when there's drastic changes like the shadow power one, which is not an appropriate number, people will call them on it for even thinking that was a valid number for testing.

Math doesn't leave room for debate, feelings or opinions. Again unless they change the coefficients for demon hunter to something ridiculously high, like 4-6x , this number is way off for practical testing purposes. So the only way that their judgment wouldn't be rightfully ridiculed.. would be if they just randomly typed in a number.

As an aside. I'd rather be the guy that jumped the gun and made a case for something that didn't need one. Rather than say nothing and watch the change come to pass, because of lack of foresight on their part. (i.e. attack speed values @ launch)

Just noticed, they also changed blood magic to not be life steal.. I wonder if they are removing life steal from the game or just skills.

Quote from RasAlgethi24

Some interesting changes.

Looks like no more perma wrath or archon.

WW/sprint build seems to be slightly nerfed as well as hurricane no longer lets you move at ms speed and into the fray is drastically changed.

I actually like that they nerfed shadow power, it was too op to the point that you had to use it. They buffed the other damage skills so its a nice change.

I don't think nerfing it would be bad. I think nerfing it to about 20% of what it was is bad and that's just basing it on item budget. 3% life steal easily surpasses 900 loh with even mp 7 gear. It's going to go from a "must have" to a "never use".

I know it's not even a beta build. But even I can look and tell you that unless they change demon hunter coefficients to something like 5.+ it's pretty much useless. Not even niche. It's a pretty absurd number to start at when nerfing.

That's like saying instead of X doing 500% dmg it's going to be 2500% dmg. It doesn't even need testing to know how drastic that is.

Quote from inkcheese

Other than healing buffs, seems not much has happened the the monk. Biggest changes are Fist of Thunder where they did as I suggested no knockback but a teleport to the base skill; DS has become more expensive but deals more damage and AoE but I don't think I can sustain it anymore with Implosion in my Backlash Monk. Inner Sanctuary seems to have become awesome and'll need some playtesting. Other than that I hope more changes come because I'm not that impressed.

I love the possible changes the Wiz (my alt).

I use Dashing strike in all my farming builds and I am somewhat concerned with the huge increase. (I essentially zig zag around the map rounding up mobs) Seems like I may be forced to use the Legendary that has the "if target is 25 yards away, the cost of dash is refunded". On the other hand they removed the cost of spirit of a lot of things, particularly BoH. They also increased spirit from a couple generators, so it's something I'll have to actually play or see somebody play before I can say if it's a nerf.

Not really a fan of nerfing DH's in any way. Not that I've played mine much since the 600 hours pre paragon system. The Shadow power nerf going from 15% life steal to 828 loh is a huge nerf. Especially considering the LOH/healing buffs everything received meanwhile in the current game 3% life steal = 900+ loh in terms of item budget.

Quote from medozg

everyone was crying about it,but it looks like noone will be close to 100 in next few months

You underestimate the determination of the hardcore gamer.

Quote from Vook

"They want to legitimize PvP in Diablo III."

Oh great, we're going to have the game balanced around PvP now? Wonderful...

They have specifically stated in interviews that "get out of here pvp guys this is first and foremost a pve game, we will not ruin the experience for the pve players"
They went on to say they have 2 calls for spells. Think of it as 2 different hungering arrows, 2 different x, y, or z ability.

One has a Normal PvE function and the other can be changed which only affects pvp.
That doesn't mean that every ability will be different but you could look to the first guild wars to get an idea of what they might do.

Quote from omnihk

Guarentee that's whats going to happen. How will they control Barbarians Heroic Leaping over fences etc. or their ability to use an entire rage bar to sprint for 30 seconds non-stop? Say goodbye to the most fun abilties, at least in their current forms.

See above.