Nah, WoD provided new content, that content just sucked. S7 doesn't provide any new content at all.
- DisposableHeero
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Member for 11 years, 7 months, and 7 days
Last active Thu, Dec, 5 2019 21:26:41
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Aug 4, 2016DisposableHeero posted a message on Patch 2.4.2 Roundup & Season 7 CountdownPosted in: News
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Mar 17, 2016DisposableHeero posted a message on Shadow Mantle x Marauder Interaction on PTR, Patch 2.4.1 DH SummaryPosted in: News
It will never be a viable build on live. If the shadow 2 piece does not buff the damage of the sentry fired spenders, it will essentially always be strictly inferior to the Marauder 6 piece.
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Sep 12, 2012DisposableHeero posted a message on Diablo III Blog on Class Changes Coming, PTR Download Button Active On Launcher, Blue Posts, Curse Weekly RoundupPosted in: News
His point about barbarian gear is moot. Barbarian gear is more expensive because of how fast they farm exp and blast through content, and consequently how popular they are, it is not a justification for the efficiency ceiling differential. It probably takes similar amounts of gold to put together most builds (Critical Mass, Double Tornado, or equivalent DH, WD, and Monk builds) to the point of being able to farm act 3 comfortablty, but the payoff at the end is clearly weighted towards barbarians right now when we talk about very high end gearsets. I'd rather they focused on making other classes and other builds of barbarian just as viable but its hard to see them doing that efficiently without tying moving faster into killing faster the way the tornado build does, which won't lead to a lot of build diversity.Quote from phatosen
This guy truly has it figured out. Don't kill mah WW-barb! Being disconnected every 10 mins because of WW is bad enough...Quote from AlucardIX
http://us.battle.net...opic/6521343540
People always bash on WW barbs nowadays...
As to 1.0.5's mystery changes that will wind up as buffs even though they look like nerfs, I suspect as others do something like the following. How damage reduction is calculated is going to change substantially through a buffing of the baseline damage reduction of armor and resistances, and to compensate for that skills like War Cry and Energy Armor and passives like them are going to be nerfed to roughly the same effect they have now in terms of damage reduction gains. The reason for this being two fold: first, for pretty much every class that has an effect like this, it is the most ubiquitous skill of that class, and in the case of some (wizards primarily) it is locking out other skills and runes because of it, making those skills under-utilized. Second, damage relative to EHP probably needs to come down some before PVP goes live to prevent it from being an affair made up completely of one shots where temporary damage immunity skills reign supreme. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
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It is reasonably cheap to get a basic set to use critical mass build on live, I don't disagree. However live builds perform very well with respect to gear required. You can easily farm act 3 with under 2 million gold worth of gear (and I have seen videos of sets produced for under 1 million performing reasonably in act 3). However, to get the same performance using energy twister on the PTR that you get out of live strom chaser requires you to generate 4 times as many ticks (since ET has 1/4th the coefficient) and since the nerfs to meteor it remains the most effective proc producing skill in the wizard arsenal. Assuming 35% crit, and 1.5 attack speed would do the trick before, it would now take 70% crit, and 3.0 attack speed to get the same level or performance. I don't think I really need to tell you that 70% crit and 3.0 attack speed is actually not possible with current gear (somewhere around 60% crit is the unbuffed maximum and you could add 8% to energy twister specifically and get close). So billions of gold in gear for the same performance is hyperbole I grant you.
Now what I assume you are getting at is part and parcel with these changes comes a nerf to inferno (and if you've played on the PTR as I have, a substantial one). However, the bottom line is this. Any build that could do act 3 before can do act 3 on MP3 on the PTR if it wasn't nerfed, or act 1 on MP4 or 5, however critical mass basically can't. If you want to say too bad, go down to MP1 and farm there, well you don't need critical mass there, its like playing in act 3 hell is now, just stack damage and nuke everything, you don't even need diamond skin let alone critical mass.
I liked the frantic pace of CM builds, and the idea of being able to leverage syngery to out perform my gear level. Thats gone now, there is essentially no reason to use critical mass, its not effective enough for high monster power and not necessary at low monster power.
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They essentially increased the gear requirement by a factor of four for energy twister, and that is still stronger than the new coefficients on meteor, and I laughed a little inside when they nerfed spectral blades because comparatively it is terrible.
CC locking breaks higher monster power settings which is likely the motivation for these nerfs, but nerfing the coefficient instead of the CC lock is breaking the builds at the low end. Its an unavoidable cost of their lazy programming making every remotely RNG element of their game dependant on a single static coefficient for each spell. This after they released a block saying infinite CC builds would be watched but wouldn't be changed in 1.0.5.
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Ray of Frost has a tick coefficient of 3, meaning it produces thrice your attack speed in ticks per second, and ticks 3 times before it drains its arcane power cost again.
I'm going to take some pie in the sky stats and model this quickly. A theoretical wizard with 18 Arcane Power on Crit, 40% Crit Chance, and 1.7 attacks per second.
Sleet Storm will tick 5.1 times per second, and cost 27.2 arcane power per second. The baseline regeneration of a wizard is 10 arcane power per second, netting us a deficit of 17.2 arcane power per second of combat. Each second of combat against a single target in which we channel we strike 5.1 times, generating on average 2.04 critical hits. Our 18 APoC and the coefficient of 0.185 causes us to generate 3.33 arcane power return per critical hit, or 6.79 arcane power per second, reducing our deficit to 10.41 AP per second.
This gives us just over 10 seconds of continuous channel time against a single target. We also generate 0.3774 critical mass procs per second, making our cooldown spells cool 1.3774 seconds per second, adjusting the cooldown of diamond skin to 10.89 seconds.
If we use Diamond Skin (Prism) we get 55% uptime (6 second duration, 10.89 second effective cooldown). This effectively reduces the cost of Ray of Frost by 3.85 arcane power. This reduces our mana deficit by 6.56 arcane power per second bringing it down to 3.85 per second, which means 26 seconds of unterrupted channel time.
Against two targets, we start to see the right thresholds:
Two targets produces 4.08 critical hits per second, resulting in 13.58 arcane power per second, reducing of deficit to 3.62 arcane power per second, giving us a channel time of 27.6 seconds. If we add in the astral presence passive this time instead of the slightly more effective but higher opportunity cost Prism skin, our arcane power deficit shrinks to 1.62 arcane power per second, and we get a channel time of 74 seconds, which should be plenty.
If I redo the calculations for slightly better gear, 2 attacks per second, 45% crit chance, 20 APoC (sticking with 2 soruces), we find the following numbers:
Single Target
6 ticks per second, 32 AP per second, 22 AP per second deficit, 12.01 AP per second after APoC. This results in less sustainable channel time than the lesser geared wizard, so we want to stay away somewhat from attack speed gear and optimize crit first.
0.4995 crit mass procs per second, 10 second effective cooldown on diamond skin
4.667 AP cost reduction from Prism, resulting a 9.333 AP deficit reduction, leaving 2.67 AP/second, or 37 second channel time
Two targets
12 ticks per second, 32 AP per second, 22 AP per second deficit, 4.02 AP per second after APoC, 2.02 with Astral Presence, 60 seconds with astral presence, and with prism we would be generating net AP letting us add in explosive blast spam.
In terms of AP sustainability, Prism > Power of the Storm > Astral presence > Conduit. Sustainability for 3 or more targets can be attained at virtually any gear level. Sustainability at 2 targets can be done with 2 APoC sources and Prism/Critical mass and 40-45% crit chance. Sustainability at 3 targets can be done at very low gear level, which is a solid plus for farming elite packs.
How you build it will depend on what you intend to farm.
I'm not sold on shocking aspect being big for this anymore, this produces around a third of a proc per second per target for critical mass and shocking aspect which is substantially lower than the 3-5 procs per second against a single target wicked wind can generate at similar gear levels, so this is really going to be a melt face DPS build like archon more than a critical mass build and is probably going to bank on high DPS and life steal to survive more so than refreshing diamond skin (and its not going to nova lock because you drop the channel when you cast nova, while twisters and meteors still tick.
Attack Speed works against you a little bit in terms of arcane power sustainability but it works for you in terms of delivering DPS, so its a neutral stat, you'd weight your stats towards crit, but you wouldn't avoid IAS, and if you were less worried about the critical mass aspect, using a two hander is distinctly possible here.
Having 1.0 attacks per second means you start with only an AP deficit of 6 AP/second, which with just astral presence is sustainable for 30 seconds of channeling. If we're talking 100K DPS at 333% per second before modifiers and over 500% after them, then you're talking 15 million hp enemies before you have to stop and take a breather single target.
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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3595370796#10
I beleive its been confirmed that the arcane power cost is equal to the base AP cost multiplied by your tooltip attacks per second. More IAS means faster AP drain but it also causes a faster return from APoC for a given crit rate, so there is some combination of crit chance and APoC that will reach an equilibrium. If you're going for a CM based build, I think most of your AP sustainability concerns can be removed by running Diamond Skin (Prism).
A channeled spell is inferior to a cast and forget ticking spell for CM, so I would not plan for CM to be the center of the build, and make it more about life steal and insane face melting (or freezing in this case) DPS, however, CM + DS(Prism) will give you the largest boost in channel sustainability available to a wizard without changing your stat priority.
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1) I have heard reports that volume of loot steps up dramatically at higher monster power, I'm not sure what your metrics for analyzing drops are, or how many runs you are doing to validate your findings beyond just RNG.
2) Do not discount the possibility that running Act 3 Hell on very high MP could potentially be more efficient than any setting in inferno.
3) While infinite archon thrives on the mob density in Act 3, do not dismiss the possibility that farming acts 1 or 2 at different monster powers could yield stronger results for other builds. There was an interesting proposal on this forum for a sans archon build attaining similar damage output using the newly buffed ray of frost (sleet storm) and getting slightly better damage returns than disintegration wave does without having to manage the archon buff.
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The 1.25 second onset delay with better than about 1.6 attacks per second means three meteor casts before you start getting any damage or arcane power refunded, so you need to have an arcane power pool big enough to support three meteor casts.
Thats fine except the only rune of meteor that competes with old wicked wind or storm chaser in proc efficiency is not star pact, its liquify, which means you need either a lot of +max arcane power and energy tap, or more efficiently, you need gear reducing the cost of meteor.
On the plus side, using meteor as your proc carrier with Shocking Aspect and Diamond Shards and explosive blast would deal incredible damage.
I might if I can find say, a -5 Meteor Cost/+15 Max Arcane Power Oculus have to give this a try:
http://us.battle.net...XYTQ!gWe!cccYca
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Archon (Improved Archon) lasers at 375% weapon damage and doesn't stack Cold Blooded on top of Glass Cannon, Force Weapon and Sparkflint. This compares favorably to that in terms of damage output so it should have similar results with respect to life steal without having a large buff to manage. I'd also consider that a 1.875 proc coefficient on a DoT is stronger than wicked wind which is still used to pretty strong effect at high crit chance with Shocking Aspect, which could add considerably more damage to your channel, though that would favor a high attack speed setup which will make for more arcane power consumption.
If this triggers shocking aspect well on the PTR with a high attack speed and crit setup, I'd consider swapping Frost Nova (Bone Chill) for Diamond Skin (Prism) and Astral Presence for Critical Mass. You can cast Diamond Skin mid channel which you can't do with Frost Nova which seems like it would make this more useful.
Edit: With respect to ranged mobs, you are going to have to chase them but you have a 60%, 4 second slow as your primary attack and teleport (potentially with critical mass), so I don't think getting them with sleet will be a problem if you melt them as fast as I think you will, I'd try the following:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#ZQXTjS!WYX!YYZcac
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Doesn't this mean that every rare that drops in act 3 is now essentially ilvl 63 since they can roll lvl 63 affixes.
Furthermore does this mean that wizard hats, voodoo masks, etc can now roll ilvl 63 affixes?
for example, could this hotness exist?:
Wizard Hat
300 Intelligence
200 Vitality
80 Resist All
10 Arcane Power on Crit
6% Crit
Socket
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It is a massive increase in damage output though, especially when facing elites where you have 3 or less targets for the majority of the fight.