Spirit Barrage's mana cost has been reduced to 98 from 108.
Plague of Toads mana cost has been reduced to 17 from 34.
Pets will now receive 33% less damage from molten, plagued, arcane sentry and AoE skills.
I say leave SB where it is. The issue isn't mana, so unless you dropped it to like 60, it wouldn't be all that useful.
Plague of Toads - I have a similar issue. The issue is that you have to be so close to use it, and the spread is so random. I would say reduce the cost and add another toad (so it's a little less random up close).
I would also add that Corpse Spiders need to leap by default. Otherwise they just can't hit moving targets.
Runes:
Zombie Charger - Zombie Bears rune has been modified. Bears can only hit one target once (The same as DH's Nether tentacles).
I feel no one would ever use ZB then. It's basically a short range version of Dire Bats then. My suggestion would be that if this happens, they need to add a buff somehow. Maybe a little less mana, or just fix the cast rate so it matches attack rate.
Things I would Add:
Toad Of Hugeness now applies one hit damage and knockback to champ packs, dealing 80% of the damage it would normally do over time to a white. Additionally, damage is buffed to 40% per second for up to 5 seconds against whites. It uses it's tongue attack at 75% of your APS when it doesn't have something in your stomach.
Splinters - splinters now spread out a bit randomly, meaning that at long ranges there is a chance that at least one splinter will miss.
Firebomb - base damage increased to 100% (which is still the lowest damage of the WD's primaries). Additionally, all "repeat" runes such as Roll the Bones and Flash Fire can hit the same enemies repeatedly.
Locust Swarm - Base range tripled. The speed of the cloud reduced by 50% every original length (not sure what it was).
Fire Bats - Range doubled. Fire bats spreads out so that it does less damage the farther away the enemy is. Dire bats range not not changed.
Sacrifice - Able to sacrifice dogs one at a time. Remove Cooldown. Having both Sacrifice and ZD skills on your skill bar decreases the cooldown for ZD by 15%
Big Bad Voodoo - The fetish teleports to your side after 10 seconds.
I also feel that Blood Ritual needs to be changed to be more of a risk reward thing (as 15% of mana at level 60 is nothing compared to your life). I just can't figure out how to make it not overly complicated to explain.
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.
if I'm building a tank, why would I need the tankiest pets? Wouldn't I want damage pets? Or, if the only way to make them viable is to be a tank already, then again, what's the point?
I agree with everything you said except this.
Zombie Dogs, especially, is categorized as a "defensive" ability. And it's plenty clear that both Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan are supposed to give the DK a measure of control. They absolutely must scale with defensive stats (and I believe they already do). If you want to build a tank witch doctor then you'll probably not want to take pets. It's really not going to change much.
I just don't see a logical way to make pets scale on the opposite role you take. That's a ton of work for very little reward.
The issue with WD pets scaling with defensive stats, is that it's counter-productive for a defensive ability meant to keep enemies from attacking you in a build where you would be gearing for defensive stats. They either need to be able to effectively do damage in tank build, or effectively tank for a decent amount of time in an offensive build. Therefore they need to scale defensively with offensive stats, or offensively with defensive stats. Otherwise they'll only be effective in higher gear levels where you already have high amounts of both offensive and defensive stats.
IMO the Garg should be effectively as hard to kill as a decently geared Templar, even with low levels of defensive stats, and ZDs should be able to survive a decent amount of hits, longer with leeching beasts. Obviously this would be with pet/defensive-based passives. Also, pets should have the ability to taunt, or at least cause high amounts of threat so that enemies won't just run past them and attack the WD.
Easy way to do that imo is scaling their life with the WDs Int, and increase the amount of resists they get from the WDs resists, etc.
I'm not even going to bother to point out the 10+ reasons that your proposition is ineffective and accomplishes nothing aside from your insistance on forcing Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan to work with a niche spec like a tankdoctor. I assure you that you have not thought this through to see the absolutely glaring holes in what you're saying, though.
What you are doing is taking abilities which were clearly designed for defense/control and tailoring them to a very niche playstyle, and that's akin to me complaining that Horrify doesn't have enough of a direct offensive use (like 50% weapon damage) which makes it useless for my spec. Abilities do NOT need to by hybridized like that. We take abilities like Horrify and Mass Confusion and Hex because they primarily provide control. The idea that every ability should be both offensive and defensive absolutely negates the choices we're supposed to be making. The point of the matter is that if you don't need control then you don't need Horrify.
Abilities are supposed to have roles they fill. The goal of making a good spec is (in theory) supposed to be finding the proper synergy between your abilities and your playstyle. What you are doing is saying that you want Zombie Dogs to be viable in every single spec out there which is no more logical than me saying that Poison Darts has to be viable in every single spec out there. The bottom line is that they aren't and that they shouldn't be. If you need more offense in your tank build you probably should pick an offensive ability.
I don't see what's so damned complicated about that. All you have is a solution looking for a problem.
I'm pretty sure you just barely skimmed my post because I said the opposite of that, I said that for pets to be viable at all, they either need to be:
1. a defensive ability (what they are now, ineffective as they may be), which should be viable in a DPS (glass cannon) based build, as it will really only be needed if you are playing a NON TANK BUILD as a tank build will already be able to facetank mobs. This means having your pets scaling from defensive stats is useless, because you're not going to have defensive stats to make them useful in any build other than a tank build. Therefore their defensive stats would need to scale with the WDs offensive stats, int being the most obvious.
OR
2. an offensive ability, to be used in a defensive/tank build. This could easily be accomplished by giving them higher base damage, but make their defensive stats FAR more dependent on the WDs defensive stats, so that they would not be OP in a glass cannon build.
I feel more strongly that the former should happen. Pets should not die to white mobs unless they're a huge mass of them attacking all at once, or big damage mobs left to whack on the pet for a while, but a WD shouldn't be forced to wear defensive-based gear for that to happen. The simple fact is, as a WD, if you're using defensive stats, you're either building a tank build, or you're rich and working on farming act 3-4 with ease and trying to get so you can steamroll everything.
You seem to think I was saying the pets should be useful to a tankdoctor, but on the contrary, I'm saying that they should make sure that the changes they make (the intended fix being letting pets health scale with the player's vit) will actually accomplish the intended effect, which is making the pets viable in inferno, an issue which at the current time, is due to them both dying far too quickly to be an effective defensive/control ability, and them being far too weak offensively to be used to do anything else. It's quite unlikely that they will be able to accomplish that by allowing pets to scale off of defensive stats, because only tankdoctors (the niche build you seemed to think I was trying to make them viable for) will have defensive stats to actually fix the whole "pets die too fast" issue. I want pets to be viable WITHOUT stacking defensive stats OR make them offensively viable to defensively geared WDs.
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Nerd: When you say it, you best say it with awe,
'Cause I'm the type of nerd that will bust your jaw.
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.
I want pets to be viable WITHOUT stacking defensive stats OR make them offensively viable to defensively geared WDs.
This sums up exactly why your whole point is absolutely ridiculous. You want Blizzard to mold pets to work for glass cannons, or make them work for tankdoctors.
If you've chosen to forego defensive stats then that's your choice, but you shouldn't be rewarded with UBER TANK PET because that's absolutely ridiculously counterintuitive. Your solution is 100% about circumventing a very basic gearing choice. No defensive stats... too fucking bad. You have the option to get some defensive stats and if you choose not to do that then that's your perogative. It's completely ridiculous to suggest that pets should be uber tanks for glass cannons though.
Seriously... why are you suggesting this? You are basically suggesting to make glass cannon WDs brutally overpowered. We need reasonable suggestions not "MAKE MY GLASS CANNON HAVE SUPER DEFENSE WITHOUT USING DEFENSIVE STATS BLIZZ PLX PLX PLX" stupidity. Do you not understand the ramifications of what you're suggesting here? It seems to me that you simply don't otherwise you'd know exactly how ignorant your suggestion is.
Fierce Loyalty being rolled into deafult stats would be nice. 2min cooldowns for the big spells does feel long, but I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable with a shorter cooldown without a nerf, having those abilities up (same with all other classes) for every pack would make them must have abilities.
As for zombie charger (and bears), the problem goes beyond bears being so good, but that all the other runes aren't that great either. Am I missing something or is wave of zombies a crap version of zombie bears? Leperous zombie effect doesn't feel like it'd ever be worth using, along with it being slow and feels like it misses everything, which also affects undeath. Undeath I think could be really cool, and I think it's a fun mechanic, but one zombie's arc vs a wide pack of mobs that are constantly moving means you're doing less damage compared to bears, and any chain spawned zombies may end up not being able to catch up if you're kiting. Add in that the rune isn't of any value unless you can kill the mobs quickly, and an arguement that if you can kill mobs quickly you won't need zombies spawning after the mobs are dead and it's stuck in a weird place. I leveled up using explosive beast, I liked it, and I think it's viable for being a nice safe ranged aoe that's main drawback is a mob getting in the way and causing the explosion early and hitting nothing. That and envrionment collision, which is understandable given the mechanic/flavour.
I think the thing that bothers me more than anything about wd pet problems is that nobody thought to go DOWN THE HALL to the wow team to ask them about pets.... sigh, stupid stupid stupid jay wilson....
I think the thing that bothers me more than anything about wd pet problems is that nobody thought to go DOWN THE HALL to the wow team to ask them about pets.... sigh, stupid stupid stupid jay wilson....
Diablo is packed with a LOT of things that are head scratchers of the, "wait, didn't Blizzard already figure out this was a bad idea in the first year of WoW?" The auction house, for example. The auction house search function looks like the kind of thing I would have made 15 years ago when I was just learning programming and picked up Visual Basic. It is laughably simplistic and amateur.
I want pets to be viable WITHOUT stacking defensive stats OR make them offensively viable to defensively geared WDs.
This sums up exactly why your whole point is absolutely ridiculous. You want Blizzard to mold pets to work for glass cannons, or make them work for tankdoctors.
If you've chosen to forego defensive stats then that's your choice, but you shouldn't be rewarded with UBER TANK PET because that's absolutely ridiculously counterintuitive. Your solution is 100% about circumventing a very basic gearing choice. No defensive stats... too fucking bad. You have the option to get some defensive stats and if you choose not to do that then that's your perogative. It's completely ridiculous to suggest that pets should be uber tanks for glass cannons though.
Seriously... why are you suggesting this? You are basically suggesting to make glass cannon WDs brutally overpowered. We need reasonable suggestions not "MAKE MY GLASS CANNON HAVE SUPER DEFENSE WITHOUT USING DEFENSIVE STATS BLIZZ PLX PLX PLX" stupidity. Do you not understand the ramifications of what you're suggesting here? It seems to me that you simply don't otherwise you'd know exactly how ignorant your suggestion is.
Once again you fail to read my whole post. Unless you have EXTREME amounts of gold, it's impossible to get gear that will let you mix defensive stats and offensive stats. PERIOD. The only viable ways for someone who isn't rich to play a WD right now are either going all out for defensive stats, and getting any cheap dps stats as extras that they can, or going all out with dps stats and getting the occasional defensive stat if they can as an extra. Either method would not use pets if they simply make them scale with our defensive stats. Defensive geared WDs won't use them because they'll be pointless, because they want to do more damage with their skills since their gear will keep them alive. Offensive geared WDs won't use them because they'll still die in 1 or 2 hits from white mobs and be just as useless as they are now.
What I would like to see is have pets be effective enough tanks in dps-centered gear build to allow the use of close range skills like locust swarm without taking an instant smack to the face. That doesn't mean they need to be invincible, but it means they should be able to handle getting whacked on by a couple white skeletons for a little while. I would fully expect the dogs to get killed by elite packs, but hopefully survive long enough that you could viably get close to them to use the close-mid range skills that are currently just wasted space in our skills window. The gargantuan on the other hand, should be able to survive through most of an elite pack fight, as long as it isn't some rough affixes/mobs.
I'm mainly pointing out the fact that requiring a player to gear up defensively to make a skill, which is intended to function as a "defense/control" ability, aka keeping you from getting hit, is counter productive. If you are not getting hit, you don't need defensive gear, but if you want to use a skill meant to keep you from getting hit effectively, you need to have defensive gear. How do you NOT see that this is a problem.
Numbers and ratios can be tweaked to make sure that its not OP for one spec or another, but the base needs to be there, and simply having pets scale with defensive stats is NOT the right base. In both of my posts, I listed the two possible bases that could potentially make pets viable, even if its only in one spec or another.
Honestly, I would even be happy if dogs had their damage reduced to 5% weapon damage, or even completely removed baseline (leave the runes as is, change lifesteal to LOH), as long as they didn't require you to gear like a tank to keep them from dying. Garg could go either way, make him more defensive and hit like a wet noodle (or more like a wet noodle than he already does) or make him hit a bit harder but die more often. The sheer fact is that pets need to have some justification for giving up a currently more potent defensive (or offensive) skill such as mass confusion/horrify/BBV/fetish army/etc.
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Nerd: When you say it, you best say it with awe,
'Cause I'm the type of nerd that will bust your jaw.
if I'm building a tank, why would I need the tankiest pets? Wouldn't I want damage pets? Or, if the only way to make them viable is to be a tank already, then again, what's the point?
I agree with everything you said except this.
Zombie Dogs, especially, is categorized as a "defensive" ability. And it's plenty clear that both Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan are supposed to give the DK a measure of control. They absolutely must scale with defensive stats (and I believe they already do). If you want to build a tank witch doctor then you'll probably not want to take pets. It's really not going to change much.
I just don't see a logical way to make pets scale on the opposite role you take. That's a ton of work for very little reward.
The issue with WD pets scaling with defensive stats, is that it's counter-productive for a defensive ability meant to keep enemies from attacking you in a build where you would be gearing for defensive stats. They either need to be able to effectively do damage in tank build, or effectively tank for a decent amount of time in an offensive build. Therefore they need to scale defensively with offensive stats, or offensively with defensive stats. Otherwise they'll only be effective in higher gear levels where you already have high amounts of both offensive and defensive stats.
IMO the Garg should be effectively as hard to kill as a decently geared Templar, even with low levels of defensive stats, and ZDs should be able to survive a decent amount of hits, longer with leeching beasts. Obviously this would be with pet/defensive-based passives. Also, pets should have the ability to taunt, or at least cause high amounts of threat so that enemies won't just run past them and attack the WD.
Easy way to do that imo is scaling their life with the WDs Int, and increase the amount of resists they get from the WDs resists, etc.
I'm not even going to bother to point out the 10+ reasons that your proposition is ineffective and accomplishes nothing aside from your insistance on forcing Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan to work with a niche spec like a tankdoctor. I assure you that you have not thought this through to see the absolutely glaring holes in what you're saying, though.
What you are doing is taking abilities which were clearly designed for defense/control and tailoring them to a very niche playstyle, and that's akin to me complaining that Horrify doesn't have enough of a direct offensive use (like 50% weapon damage) which makes it useless for my spec. Abilities do NOT need to by hybridized like that. We take abilities like Horrify and Mass Confusion and Hex because they primarily provide control. The idea that every ability should be both offensive and defensive absolutely negates the choices we're supposed to be making. The point of the matter is that if you don't need control then you don't need Horrify.
Abilities are supposed to have roles they fill. The goal of making a good spec is (in theory) supposed to be finding the proper synergy between your abilities and your playstyle. What you are doing is saying that you want Zombie Dogs to be viable in every single spec out there which is no more logical than me saying that Poison Darts has to be viable in every single spec out there. The bottom line is that they aren't and that they shouldn't be. If you need more offense in your tank build you probably should pick an offensive ability.
I don't see what's so damned complicated about that. All you have is a solution looking for a problem.
Hats off.
The whole argument: why should i grab defensive gear for pets since i'm becoming the tank myself? It's simple. WD can't tank shit and will never tank shit unless ridicolously overgeread. We don't have 50% armor and resist buffs, we don't have huge healing abilities.
Pets are the way WD can work towards a tanky build. WD's cant reach 13k armor and 1.5k all resistances like wizards, barbs and monks but they can creat bodies to tank damage for him. What about damage ? The very fact that you don't need to kite all the freaking time is already a huge damage booster. Barbs face roll act 3 with only 20k DPS while WD can't kill belial before the enrage timer with that damage.
Character who can hold ground can do the same damage having more then half the DPS of kiter. Just pick a kiter build. Calculate the amount of time you pass running proportionaly to the leght of the fight. Thats the amount of DPS an chaarcter who can hold still have compared to a kiter but it's not counted on the DPS statistic.
Ex: if you pass 80% of your time running and have 40k DPS someone who doesn't run at all during the fight can kill as fast as you do with only 5k DPS.
Honestly, I would even be happy if dogs had their damage reduced to 5% weapon damage, or even completely removed baseline (leave the runes as is, change lifesteal to LOH), as long as they didn't require you to gear like a tank to keep them from dying. Garg could go either way, make him more defensive and hit like a wet noodle (or more like a wet noodle than he already does) or make him hit a bit harder but die more often. The sheer fact is that pets need to have some justification for giving up a currently more potent defensive (or offensive) skill such as mass confusion/horrify/BBV/fetish army/etc.
I'm probably not the only one who did not read your previous posts in that manner. You are asking, in this last section that I quoted, for something that all WDs most likely want. Pets *do* have to be viable out-of-the-box without lots of defensive stats, of course.
But if you go back and re-read your other posts that's very much different from the direction you are going by saying that pets should be "viable" for glass cannons. It may be a minor misunderstanding based on the word "glass cannon" versus what I'm thinking of, which is the word "baseline" or "out-of-the-box" but it just sounds like you're saying something different now than you were.
The most reasonable ways to make pets viable out-of-the-box is to do the following:
1) Add in vitality scaling. The fact that they made it live without this blows my mind. It's a drastic shortcoming - of course raw HPs only go so far, but having pets that have the same life in Act 3 Hell as they do in Act 3 Inferno is a horrible thing that makes the other problems even worse...
2) PvE AoE damage reduction Hell, possibly PvP too (but I'm not going to commit to that because I don't even know what PvP will be like). Our pets should not be AoE targets, just like pets in WoW. Pets are dumb, they just attack shit, they don't know how to move out of stuff. Yet they take full damage from ground effects that wreck them to pieces. They are particularly suceptible to arcane sentries since you tend to get melee range overlap with them.
3) Better scaling on Armor and Resist All - give them diminishing returns for all I care, the scaling does not have to be linear, but the baseline scaling is absolutely inadequate.
4) Baseline 30% damage reduction. If Barbs and Monks need it because being in melee range constantly is a problem in Inferno then our pets need it too. Maybe just make Jungle Fortitude baseline and change the part on the WD to 15%. If we're supposed to be a hybrid ranged-melee class then we should get some reduction love too.
5) Not require a passive for regen scaling - then just tune the regen scaling so that regen/LoH/etc are not massively OP statistics. Make Fierce Loyalty into an ability that isn't TERRIBLY BLAND!!!!
Anyway, if they did those things I think it would truly make the pets reasonable to begin with, and like I said, the armor/res all scaling does not have to be linear such that you don't feel totally forced to stack defensive stats. What it needs to be is a higher baseline than it is now because, AoE aside, pets still get wrecked by melee attacks pretty easily.
However, pets do not need to scale on int to achieve what you want. Being an int user, we have some baseline resist all, even as a glass cannon, and we do have baseline armor. It's just a matter of those stats not helping our pets out sufficiently. Perhaps the pets need X baseline armor + Y% of owner's armor. I don't know the exact solution or what the equation should be, but it is clear that something like that should be done.
I'd be perfectly happy if they reworked dogs and garg into skills with a limited duration but they could actually tank while they are up.
For example, I'd be happy to have Garg last 15 seconds and be able to take A LOT of punishment (i.e. very unlikely to die unless the entire screen is full of hard hitting mobs).
Same goes for Dogs but they could possibly last a bit longer but able to handle a bit less damage than the Garg. Another option for the dogs would be to buff their survivability a bit and decrease their cooldown by a lot. They could still be fairly disposable (I'd expect them to last at least 2-3 hits) but you could recast them fairly quickly (15 second cooldown with a decent mana cost maybe?)
I don't think that's asking for the world and we would see people actually using the skills then. I would be interested in trying out the passive to reduce cooldown and try to make a neat Garg build... it'd be fun.
Firebomb - base damage increased to 100% (which is still the lowest damage of the WD's primaries). Additionally, all "repeat" runes such as Roll the Bones and Flash Fire can hit the same enemies repeatedly.
Locust Swarm - Base range tripled. The speed of the cloud reduced by 50% every original length (not sure what it was).
Fire Bats - Range doubled. Fire bats spreads out so that it does less damage the farther away the enemy is. Dire bats range not changed.
Hehe, you might wanna rethink that bouncing on the same target for Flash Fire. You are saying that you want it do do 100% + 85% + 70% + 65% + 50% + 35% = 405% dmg / cast ^^?
I have 0 problems hitting with Locust Swarm.
I wouldn't mind having the non-Dire bat runes reach a little further. That's the main reason everyone runs ONLY Dire bat runes in a VQ spec.
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.
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.
I'm probably the only one who thinks this, but as I've said many times, I find mana regeneration to be fine. There's a reason why there's 3 pieces of gear with mana regeneration (weapon, off-hand, helmet). Currently my mana regeneration is 53 without any passives. However, I feel like there are a few skills that could use a reduction in mana cost. Those skills are acid cloud and spirit barrage (probably 10-20 mana cost reduction to both would be fine in my opinion). You can also "generate" resources by choosing a rune on poison dart or corpse spiders. Of course you can argue that "other classes don't need to rely on gear to get proper resource management" and so on, but then is that a problem with WD or a problem with other classes' resources? In my opinion it's the other classes' resources.
I don't understand your way of thinking here.
The best way to illustrate my point would be to compare mana with Arcane Power.
Mana
* The only popular builds right now either use Vision Quest or a Primary Skill to spam. If you don't do either of these, you will have mana problems.
* Even with mana regen items, you'll still have issues spamming high cost spells without VQ. Arcane Power
* Even without AP on crit gear, you can spam many (I'm not talking Arcane Orb or Meteor here) AP spenders fairly well.
* Arcane power gear (especially AP on crit) makes you have basically infinite AP with certain builds.
See the difference? You could argue that different classes should behave differently... but the problem is that the design goal of mana failed. The design goal was to have a big pool that slowly regenerates. What we got instead was a small pool that slowly generates. We can go from full to 0 mana in a few seconds without VQ.
For reference, I have a 60 Wiz and WD (although I play the WD MUCH more).
Granted, I haven't played wizard so I don't know how it is with that class. However, I can use grasp of the undead, locusts, and a couple of acid clouds every 8 seconds while using primary attack without having mana issues. Acid cloud I have usually runed with Acid Rain or Slow Burn (depending where I farm). It's hardly effective to "spam" these skills except for Acid Cloud, but even that has a 3 second DoT-effect (so I guess they wanted us to wait that 3 seconds before using it again).
I also play with firebats sometimes, however I use the plagued bats instead of dire bats and it works fine. I can spam all of my mana on it and still have mana for other stuff like primary and debuffs. Since the plagued bats also does damage while I am regening mana, it's hardly out from my DPS. I don't need to regen to full mana after I've used all of my mana either. Even half the mana is enough for plagued bats to kill the remaining mobs after using the debuffs (and then the fight is over and I regen mana while searching for new enemies).
There are other secondary skills you can spam and have basically infinite mana as well. For example spirit barrage with rush of essense passive and spirit is willing rune makes it spammable without basically losing any mana. Then there's haunt, which is free to use if you rune it with draining spirit. I already said that I "somewhat spam" acid cloud as well, because I always wait at least the 3 seconds to get the full effect from the skill (which is how I believe the skill is meant to be used).
Now we are left with Zombie Charger and Firebats. The two biggest hitters WD has (when runed with dire bats and zombie bears). I don't think other runes are even worth considering for these skills, except for plagued bats, which is perfectly spammable with my mana regen (since it does damage.after you've stopped casting it). Shouldn't they be compared with Arcane Orb or Meteor? They seem to be in the same damage range.
If other classes can't spam their most powerful skills, why should the witch doctor be able to do it? (even though it is possible with VQ). Hopefully this gave insight to my way of thinking
PS: I have lv60 WD with around 200+ hours on it on SC. I had lv60 HC WD with 50 hours on it, but it died in Inferno Act 1. I also have lv40 barb on SC and I had lv60 barb on HC too, but it died in Inferno Act 2. I have lost lv41 demon hunter and lv52 monk on HC as well. Currently I am leveling a new WD on HC (lv50 at the moment). My point is that my playstyle is probably different to yours since I currently play on HC.
That's the problem though. What you described as how you play WITH your mana regen gear is the same way the Wizards play WITHOUT AP on crit gear. That is why mana is broken.
Once you get enough crit hit and AP on crit gear, you will basically have an unlimited amount of AP with certain builds.
Poison Dart costs 15 mana / sec with 1.5 speed. That's a net gain of +5 mana a sec with base regen. If you cast Grasp of the Dead once you're running a deficit. Sure you aren't casting all the time, but the fact is that our primaries are basically useless. They aren't good for regenerating mana at all.
And if you get Pierce the Veil (which is basically needed to make Poison Dart competitive) you're looking at 19.5 mana / sec with 20 regen. So essentially you're regenerating nothing... and that's without even using Grasp or anything.
People only use Poison Dart because they don't like VQ gameplay or have too much IAS to use Dire Bats. People use RoT, but that's with VQ too for the LoH.
The bottom line is that every good WD build requires 1) Vision Quest or 2) Mana Regen or 3) Both. Even if you're using only Poison Dart with 1.5 speed even without PtV you still need regen. The only imaginable alternative is SA w/ Honored Guest, but SA isn't a good passive over JF and using SW for mana regen is a mistake. Using a mana regen attack like Devouring Swarm is a possibility but will leave you worse off than if you got another CC ability, so no one really does that if they're trying to use a good build.
People have to take a passive that multiplies our regen by 4 and/or get specific gear with mana regen on it for the class to be viable.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but mana is definitely not right.
An easy solution to make em viable with both a tanking specc and a glass cannon specc is to just not have them scale with gear at all, or just a fraction. say 10-25% of what it is now.
Instead have everyting in the runes and passives.
Jungle Fortitude is fine.
Zombie handler: add more hp% 50-100% add in 75-90% AoE Reduction.
Fierce loyality. give them 100-200% from life regen and thorns. add in 50% reduction from normal damage.
Circle of life, increase range to 20 yards. pickup bonus range the same. also for every dog lost reduce CD of your summon Zombie dog by 10 secs. Also increase summon chance to 10%
Tribal Rites: Include gargantuan.
This would buff the pets conciderable witout being to gear dependant. OFC numbers may need some tweaking but thes are my toughts. could possibly have come up with something for the rune effects but they are pretty fine as it is already.
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An easy solution to make em viable with both a tanking specc and a glass cannon specc is to just not have them scale with gear at all, or just a fraction. say 10-25% of what it is now.
Instead have everyting in the runes and passives.
Jungle Fortitude is fine.
Zombie handler: add more hp% 50-100% add in 75-90% AoE Reduction.
Fierce loyality. give them 100-200% from life regen and thorns. add in 50% reduction from normal damage.
Circle of life, increase range to 20 yards. pickup bonus range the same. also for every dog lost reduce CD of your summon Zombie dog by 10 secs. Also increase summon chance to 10%
Tribal Rites: Include gargantuan.
This would buff the pets conciderable witout being to gear dependant. OFC numbers may need some tweaking but thes are my toughts. could possibly have come up with something for the rune effects but they are pretty fine as it is already.
I think these changes would be very good if you managed to balance it out with the numbers, because it would provide variety in how you can dynamically play with your pets (Do you wish to have them very tanky or more a DPS thing so you can keep spam and sacrifice them?)
I really don't think that would work at all. That's essentially what you have *right now* with pets. I mean, sure you could buff the numbers, but you are still stuck in a place where the pet's value is more or less static because they're not scaling appropriately with gear. This is important in Inferno where gear is the only scaling factor, but difficulty is not constant.
Not scaling on gear doesn't work when you look at the difference in stats we have (and more importantly the mobs) between, say, Hell Act 4 and Inferno Acts 3/4, even though it's likely that you're doing that content at level 60. If your pets were never to improve between those two extremes, except for choice in passives, you basically have the current situation all over again, just with bigger % modifiers which mask the problem for longer. We don't really need a "mask" for the problem that delays it from becoming a problem, we need a total solution for the problem such that we never revisit it again.
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.
QFT. The mana resource system needs a complete overhaul. We can burn our mana in 4-5 sec and have to 20-40 sec for it to regen. No other class has that huge a difference between spending and earning resources. Sure all classes could burn their full resource even quicker, but they can also regen them in a few seconds.
Summon Zombie Dogs cooldown reduced to 14 seconds.
Hex - Angry Chicken rune's cooldown has been reduced from 15 seconds to 10 seconds. In addition, the skill now knockbacks nearby enemies with the explosion.
Hex - Hedge Magic rune now heals for 5% of the players max HP instead of 1861 HP. In addition, the skill now heals nearby allies as well instead of choosing the one with least HP.
Big Bad Voodoo - Rain Dance rune will now regenerate 20% of the players maximum resource per second. In addition, the skill now affects allies as well.
Zombie Handler will now have an additional effect. One pet will survive from fatal damage and heal themselfs to 50% HP. This effect cannot happen more than once per 120 seconds. The skill is global among all pets meaning if a dog uses the skill, gargantuan needs to wait 120 seconds.
While under the effects of Spirit Vessel, the player can move through units like in Spirit Walk.
-Summon Zombie Dogs cooldown reduced to 14 seconds. -Zombie Handler will now have an additional effect. One pet will survive from fatal damage and heal themselfs to 50% HP. This effect cannot happen more than once per 120 seconds. The skill is global among all pets meaning if a dog uses the skill, gargantuan needs to wait 120 seconds.
Make a mix out of these two and you might be on to something. Use the second effect, but allow it to proc at something like once every 20 sec for dogs. Keep the CD for dogs at 60sec. And just make the Garg more robust, as he can't tank more then 1 target at the time anyway.
-Hex - Angry Chicken rune's cooldown has been reduced from 15 seconds to 10 seconds. In addition, the skill now knockbacks nearby enemies with the explosion.
I thought it already did a knockback???
-Hex - Hedge Magic rune now heals for 5% of the players max HP instead of 1861 HP. In addition, the skill now heals nearby allies as well instead of choosing the one with least HP.
ALL the heals should work in a % manner (with a minimum fixed value). Not just the WD ones. I think the Monks would agree.
-Big Bad Voodoo - Rain Dance rune will now regenerate 20% of the players maximum resource per second. In addition, the skill now affects allies as well.
I like it. And sure it might sound OP, but remember, that fetish circle isn't that big, how often can a group of 4 gather up and stand in place for 20 sec ^^
-While under the effects of Spirit Vessel, the player can move through units like in Spirit Walk.
I think they fixed/or was about to fix this as well.
Firebomb - base damage increased to 100% (which is still the lowest damage of the WD's primaries). Additionally, all "repeat" runes such as Roll the Bones and Flash Fire can hit the same enemies repeatedly.
Locust Swarm - Base range tripled. The speed of the cloud reduced by 50% every original length (not sure what it was).
Fire Bats - Range doubled. Fire bats spreads out so that it does less damage the farther away the enemy is. Dire bats range not changed.
Hehe, you might wanna rethink that bouncing on the same target for Flash Fire. You are saying that you want it do do 100% + 85% + 70% + 65% + 50% + 35% = 405% dmg / cast ^^?
I have 0 problems hitting with Locust Swarm.
I wouldn't mind having the non-Dire bat runes reach a little further. That's the main reason everyone runs ONLY Dire bat runes in a VQ spec.
Something I would really love to see changed, is Haunt. Atm there is 0 incentive to use this skill at the higher lvls due to 3 things:
It's mana cost is just to friggin' high.
It doesn't jump between targets nearly as good a Locust Swarm does.
Is inferior to Locust Swarm in almost every way, so if we just have 1 slot left for an extra spell we pick Swarm over Haunt.
One of the most fun times I had on my WD was at the low lvls just having gotten 2 sec duration Haunt, which was still fairly cheap in mana at those lvls. So I used that INSTEAD of my primary (was kick ass fun) and used Locust Swarm as my secondary ^^!
Sadly, even with maxed out mana regen gear this is just not possible at the higher lvls UNLESS you use a VQ spec, and since you are using 2 attack spells that forces you to keep the rest of your abilities on constant CD... I don't know about you, but I like to keep my Spirit walk handy while playing HC Inferno
Ohhhh and the BIG P.S. Blizzard you fixed the issue with dots not scaling with crits, can you plz fix it so that they scale with attackspeed so I can actually use my class specific items instead of walking around with my big phat pole-arm >.<?
I"m currently farming Act 3 and i use Haunt in my spec. Haunt is great skill vc. packs. You can cast it from a safe distance and it deals more damage per mana then any spender skill WD have (meaning it won't canniblize mana of spenders skills).
The differences between Carrion Swarm and Haunt are huge. CS is pretty mana intensive and have decent DPS, meaning it does really works like a secondary skill such as acid cloud, zombie chargers and firebats. I can't picture an WD using an primary ability, a secondary one AND CS.
Haunt is cheap and its duration is big, meaning you don't need to recast it very often. Haunt is sustanaible damage skill. It more or less fits the role of Hydra and Damage buffs - an situational damage buff meant to make you bit stronger vs. elites. Also, Haunt is free if you use the mana return rune, despite the number of targets available. They could definetly buff other runes though
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Plague of Toads - I have a similar issue. The issue is that you have to be so close to use it, and the spread is so random. I would say reduce the cost and add another toad (so it's a little less random up close).
I would also add that Corpse Spiders need to leap by default. Otherwise they just can't hit moving targets.
I feel no one would ever use ZB then. It's basically a short range version of Dire Bats then. My suggestion would be that if this happens, they need to add a buff somehow. Maybe a little less mana, or just fix the cast rate so it matches attack rate.
Things I would Add:
Toad Of Hugeness now applies one hit damage and knockback to champ packs, dealing 80% of the damage it would normally do over time to a white. Additionally, damage is buffed to 40% per second for up to 5 seconds against whites. It uses it's tongue attack at 75% of your APS when it doesn't have something in your stomach.
Splinters - splinters now spread out a bit randomly, meaning that at long ranges there is a chance that at least one splinter will miss.
Firebomb - base damage increased to 100% (which is still the lowest damage of the WD's primaries). Additionally, all "repeat" runes such as Roll the Bones and Flash Fire can hit the same enemies repeatedly.
Locust Swarm - Base range tripled. The speed of the cloud reduced by 50% every original length (not sure what it was).
Fire Bats - Range doubled. Fire bats spreads out so that it does less damage the farther away the enemy is. Dire bats range not not changed.
Sacrifice - Able to sacrifice dogs one at a time. Remove Cooldown. Having both Sacrifice and ZD skills on your skill bar decreases the cooldown for ZD by 15%
Big Bad Voodoo - The fetish teleports to your side after 10 seconds.
I also feel that Blood Ritual needs to be changed to be more of a risk reward thing (as 15% of mana at level 60 is nothing compared to your life). I just can't figure out how to make it not overly complicated to explain.
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'm pretty sure you just barely skimmed my post because I said the opposite of that, I said that for pets to be viable at all, they either need to be:
1. a defensive ability (what they are now, ineffective as they may be), which should be viable in a DPS (glass cannon) based build, as it will really only be needed if you are playing a NON TANK BUILD as a tank build will already be able to facetank mobs. This means having your pets scaling from defensive stats is useless, because you're not going to have defensive stats to make them useful in any build other than a tank build. Therefore their defensive stats would need to scale with the WDs offensive stats, int being the most obvious.
OR
2. an offensive ability, to be used in a defensive/tank build. This could easily be accomplished by giving them higher base damage, but make their defensive stats FAR more dependent on the WDs defensive stats, so that they would not be OP in a glass cannon build.
I feel more strongly that the former should happen. Pets should not die to white mobs unless they're a huge mass of them attacking all at once, or big damage mobs left to whack on the pet for a while, but a WD shouldn't be forced to wear defensive-based gear for that to happen. The simple fact is, as a WD, if you're using defensive stats, you're either building a tank build, or you're rich and working on farming act 3-4 with ease and trying to get so you can steamroll everything.
You seem to think I was saying the pets should be useful to a tankdoctor, but on the contrary, I'm saying that they should make sure that the changes they make (the intended fix being letting pets health scale with the player's vit) will actually accomplish the intended effect, which is making the pets viable in inferno, an issue which at the current time, is due to them both dying far too quickly to be an effective defensive/control ability, and them being far too weak offensively to be used to do anything else. It's quite unlikely that they will be able to accomplish that by allowing pets to scale off of defensive stats, because only tankdoctors (the niche build you seemed to think I was trying to make them viable for) will have defensive stats to actually fix the whole "pets die too fast" issue. I want pets to be viable WITHOUT stacking defensive stats OR make them offensively viable to defensively geared WDs.
'Cause I'm the type of nerd that will bust your jaw.
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.
This sums up exactly why your whole point is absolutely ridiculous. You want Blizzard to mold pets to work for glass cannons, or make them work for tankdoctors.
If you've chosen to forego defensive stats then that's your choice, but you shouldn't be rewarded with UBER TANK PET because that's absolutely ridiculously counterintuitive. Your solution is 100% about circumventing a very basic gearing choice. No defensive stats... too fucking bad. You have the option to get some defensive stats and if you choose not to do that then that's your perogative. It's completely ridiculous to suggest that pets should be uber tanks for glass cannons though.
Seriously... why are you suggesting this? You are basically suggesting to make glass cannon WDs brutally overpowered. We need reasonable suggestions not "MAKE MY GLASS CANNON HAVE SUPER DEFENSE WITHOUT USING DEFENSIVE STATS BLIZZ PLX PLX PLX" stupidity. Do you not understand the ramifications of what you're suggesting here? It seems to me that you simply don't otherwise you'd know exactly how ignorant your suggestion is.
As for zombie charger (and bears), the problem goes beyond bears being so good, but that all the other runes aren't that great either. Am I missing something or is wave of zombies a crap version of zombie bears? Leperous zombie effect doesn't feel like it'd ever be worth using, along with it being slow and feels like it misses everything, which also affects undeath. Undeath I think could be really cool, and I think it's a fun mechanic, but one zombie's arc vs a wide pack of mobs that are constantly moving means you're doing less damage compared to bears, and any chain spawned zombies may end up not being able to catch up if you're kiting. Add in that the rune isn't of any value unless you can kill the mobs quickly, and an arguement that if you can kill mobs quickly you won't need zombies spawning after the mobs are dead and it's stuck in a weird place. I leveled up using explosive beast, I liked it, and I think it's viable for being a nice safe ranged aoe that's main drawback is a mob getting in the way and causing the explosion early and hitting nothing. That and envrionment collision, which is understandable given the mechanic/flavour.
Once again you fail to read my whole post. Unless you have EXTREME amounts of gold, it's impossible to get gear that will let you mix defensive stats and offensive stats. PERIOD. The only viable ways for someone who isn't rich to play a WD right now are either going all out for defensive stats, and getting any cheap dps stats as extras that they can, or going all out with dps stats and getting the occasional defensive stat if they can as an extra. Either method would not use pets if they simply make them scale with our defensive stats. Defensive geared WDs won't use them because they'll be pointless, because they want to do more damage with their skills since their gear will keep them alive. Offensive geared WDs won't use them because they'll still die in 1 or 2 hits from white mobs and be just as useless as they are now.
What I would like to see is have pets be effective enough tanks in dps-centered gear build to allow the use of close range skills like locust swarm without taking an instant smack to the face. That doesn't mean they need to be invincible, but it means they should be able to handle getting whacked on by a couple white skeletons for a little while. I would fully expect the dogs to get killed by elite packs, but hopefully survive long enough that you could viably get close to them to use the close-mid range skills that are currently just wasted space in our skills window. The gargantuan on the other hand, should be able to survive through most of an elite pack fight, as long as it isn't some rough affixes/mobs.
I'm mainly pointing out the fact that requiring a player to gear up defensively to make a skill, which is intended to function as a "defense/control" ability, aka keeping you from getting hit, is counter productive. If you are not getting hit, you don't need defensive gear, but if you want to use a skill meant to keep you from getting hit effectively, you need to have defensive gear. How do you NOT see that this is a problem.
Numbers and ratios can be tweaked to make sure that its not OP for one spec or another, but the base needs to be there, and simply having pets scale with defensive stats is NOT the right base. In both of my posts, I listed the two possible bases that could potentially make pets viable, even if its only in one spec or another.
Honestly, I would even be happy if dogs had their damage reduced to 5% weapon damage, or even completely removed baseline (leave the runes as is, change lifesteal to LOH), as long as they didn't require you to gear like a tank to keep them from dying. Garg could go either way, make him more defensive and hit like a wet noodle (or more like a wet noodle than he already does) or make him hit a bit harder but die more often. The sheer fact is that pets need to have some justification for giving up a currently more potent defensive (or offensive) skill such as mass confusion/horrify/BBV/fetish army/etc.
'Cause I'm the type of nerd that will bust your jaw.
Hats off.
The whole argument: why should i grab defensive gear for pets since i'm becoming the tank myself? It's simple. WD can't tank shit and will never tank shit unless ridicolously overgeread. We don't have 50% armor and resist buffs, we don't have huge healing abilities.
Pets are the way WD can work towards a tanky build. WD's cant reach 13k armor and 1.5k all resistances like wizards, barbs and monks but they can creat bodies to tank damage for him. What about damage ? The very fact that you don't need to kite all the freaking time is already a huge damage booster. Barbs face roll act 3 with only 20k DPS while WD can't kill belial before the enrage timer with that damage.
Character who can hold ground can do the same damage having more then half the DPS of kiter. Just pick a kiter build. Calculate the amount of time you pass running proportionaly to the leght of the fight. Thats the amount of DPS an chaarcter who can hold still have compared to a kiter but it's not counted on the DPS statistic.
Ex: if you pass 80% of your time running and have 40k DPS someone who doesn't run at all during the fight can kill as fast as you do with only 5k DPS.
I'm probably not the only one who did not read your previous posts in that manner. You are asking, in this last section that I quoted, for something that all WDs most likely want. Pets *do* have to be viable out-of-the-box without lots of defensive stats, of course.
But if you go back and re-read your other posts that's very much different from the direction you are going by saying that pets should be "viable" for glass cannons. It may be a minor misunderstanding based on the word "glass cannon" versus what I'm thinking of, which is the word "baseline" or "out-of-the-box" but it just sounds like you're saying something different now than you were.
The most reasonable ways to make pets viable out-of-the-box is to do the following:
1) Add in vitality scaling. The fact that they made it live without this blows my mind. It's a drastic shortcoming - of course raw HPs only go so far, but having pets that have the same life in Act 3 Hell as they do in Act 3 Inferno is a horrible thing that makes the other problems even worse...
2) PvE AoE damage reduction Hell, possibly PvP too (but I'm not going to commit to that because I don't even know what PvP will be like). Our pets should not be AoE targets, just like pets in WoW. Pets are dumb, they just attack shit, they don't know how to move out of stuff. Yet they take full damage from ground effects that wreck them to pieces. They are particularly suceptible to arcane sentries since you tend to get melee range overlap with them.
3) Better scaling on Armor and Resist All - give them diminishing returns for all I care, the scaling does not have to be linear, but the baseline scaling is absolutely inadequate.
4) Baseline 30% damage reduction. If Barbs and Monks need it because being in melee range constantly is a problem in Inferno then our pets need it too. Maybe just make Jungle Fortitude baseline and change the part on the WD to 15%. If we're supposed to be a hybrid ranged-melee class then we should get some reduction love too.
5) Not require a passive for regen scaling - then just tune the regen scaling so that regen/LoH/etc are not massively OP statistics. Make Fierce Loyalty into an ability that isn't TERRIBLY BLAND!!!!
Anyway, if they did those things I think it would truly make the pets reasonable to begin with, and like I said, the armor/res all scaling does not have to be linear such that you don't feel totally forced to stack defensive stats. What it needs to be is a higher baseline than it is now because, AoE aside, pets still get wrecked by melee attacks pretty easily.
However, pets do not need to scale on int to achieve what you want. Being an int user, we have some baseline resist all, even as a glass cannon, and we do have baseline armor. It's just a matter of those stats not helping our pets out sufficiently. Perhaps the pets need X baseline armor + Y% of owner's armor. I don't know the exact solution or what the equation should be, but it is clear that something like that should be done.
For example, I'd be happy to have Garg last 15 seconds and be able to take A LOT of punishment (i.e. very unlikely to die unless the entire screen is full of hard hitting mobs).
Same goes for Dogs but they could possibly last a bit longer but able to handle a bit less damage than the Garg. Another option for the dogs would be to buff their survivability a bit and decrease their cooldown by a lot. They could still be fairly disposable (I'd expect them to last at least 2-3 hits) but you could recast them fairly quickly (15 second cooldown with a decent mana cost maybe?)
I don't think that's asking for the world and we would see people actually using the skills then. I would be interested in trying out the passive to reduce cooldown and try to make a neat Garg build... it'd be fun.
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.
I don't understand your way of thinking here.
The best way to illustrate my point would be to compare mana with Arcane Power.
Mana
* The only popular builds right now either use Vision Quest or a Primary Skill to spam. If you don't do either of these, you will have mana problems.
* Even with mana regen items, you'll still have issues spamming high cost spells without VQ.
Arcane Power
* Even without AP on crit gear, you can spam many (I'm not talking Arcane Orb or Meteor here) AP spenders fairly well.
* Arcane power gear (especially AP on crit) makes you have basically infinite AP with certain builds.
See the difference? You could argue that different classes should behave differently... but the problem is that the design goal of mana failed. The design goal was to have a big pool that slowly regenerates. What we got instead was a small pool that slowly generates. We can go from full to 0 mana in a few seconds without VQ.
For reference, I have a 60 Wiz and WD (although I play the WD MUCH more).
That's the problem though. What you described as how you play WITH your mana regen gear is the same way the Wizards play WITHOUT AP on crit gear. That is why mana is broken.
Once you get enough crit hit and AP on crit gear, you will basically have an unlimited amount of AP with certain builds.
Poison Dart costs 15 mana / sec with 1.5 speed. That's a net gain of +5 mana a sec with base regen. If you cast Grasp of the Dead once you're running a deficit. Sure you aren't casting all the time, but the fact is that our primaries are basically useless. They aren't good for regenerating mana at all.
And if you get Pierce the Veil (which is basically needed to make Poison Dart competitive) you're looking at 19.5 mana / sec with 20 regen. So essentially you're regenerating nothing... and that's without even using Grasp or anything.
People only use Poison Dart because they don't like VQ gameplay or have too much IAS to use Dire Bats. People use RoT, but that's with VQ too for the LoH.
The bottom line is that every good WD build requires 1) Vision Quest or 2) Mana Regen or 3) Both. Even if you're using only Poison Dart with 1.5 speed even without PtV you still need regen. The only imaginable alternative is SA w/ Honored Guest, but SA isn't a good passive over JF and using SW for mana regen is a mistake. Using a mana regen attack like Devouring Swarm is a possibility but will leave you worse off than if you got another CC ability, so no one really does that if they're trying to use a good build.
People have to take a passive that multiplies our regen by 4 and/or get specific gear with mana regen on it for the class to be viable.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but mana is definitely not right.
An easy solution to make em viable with both a tanking specc and a glass cannon specc is to just not have them scale with gear at all, or just a fraction. say 10-25% of what it is now.
Instead have everyting in the runes and passives.
Jungle Fortitude is fine.
Zombie handler: add more hp% 50-100% add in 75-90% AoE Reduction.
Fierce loyality. give them 100-200% from life regen and thorns. add in 50% reduction from normal damage.
Circle of life, increase range to 20 yards. pickup bonus range the same. also for every dog lost reduce CD of your summon Zombie dog by 10 secs. Also increase summon chance to 10%
Tribal Rites: Include gargantuan.
This would buff the pets conciderable witout being to gear dependant. OFC numbers may need some tweaking but thes are my toughts. could possibly have come up with something for the rune effects but they are pretty fine as it is already.
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I really don't think that would work at all. That's essentially what you have *right now* with pets. I mean, sure you could buff the numbers, but you are still stuck in a place where the pet's value is more or less static because they're not scaling appropriately with gear. This is important in Inferno where gear is the only scaling factor, but difficulty is not constant.
Not scaling on gear doesn't work when you look at the difference in stats we have (and more importantly the mobs) between, say, Hell Act 4 and Inferno Acts 3/4, even though it's likely that you're doing that content at level 60. If your pets were never to improve between those two extremes, except for choice in passives, you basically have the current situation all over again, just with bigger % modifiers which mask the problem for longer. We don't really need a "mask" for the problem that delays it from becoming a problem, we need a total solution for the problem such that we never revisit it again.
I"m currently farming Act 3 and i use Haunt in my spec. Haunt is great skill vc. packs. You can cast it from a safe distance and it deals more damage per mana then any spender skill WD have (meaning it won't canniblize mana of spenders skills).
The differences between Carrion Swarm and Haunt are huge. CS is pretty mana intensive and have decent DPS, meaning it does really works like a secondary skill such as acid cloud, zombie chargers and firebats. I can't picture an WD using an primary ability, a secondary one AND CS.
Haunt is cheap and its duration is big, meaning you don't need to recast it very often. Haunt is sustanaible damage skill. It more or less fits the role of Hydra and Damage buffs - an situational damage buff meant to make you bit stronger vs. elites. Also, Haunt is free if you use the mana return rune, despite the number of targets available. They could definetly buff other runes though