The State of Balance: Elemental Types
by JR Cook - 10 years ago show comments
Game Balancing is a subtle art, small oversights often lead to some skill, character or item being absurdly overpowered and chosen by most players in spite of the rest of the content the devs worked so hard to produce. In this series we will look at Balance in Diablo 3 and see how fair things are right now.
Streamlined Elemental Types are one of the most underated features that 2.0 brought to life, hidden a bit behind Pools of Reflection, Nephalem Glory, New Stats, Loot 2.0 and the pre-expansion hype. These days, having a mono-elemental build and adding +Elemental% is one of the best ways to increase your DPS. While this particular DPS increase will not show on your character sheet DPS and thus was originally neglected by a big part of the player base, the fact that you need some sort of Elemental Damage if you want to excel is now starting to become widely accepted.
That being said, are all elements born equal? Should we choose a particular element if we want to be the best?
We are going to take a deeper look into those questions, and we are going to analyze this from two perspectives.
Elemental Boosting Items.
Everyone can get Elemental Damage on any normal Bracer and/or Neck, you can also use the Stone of Jordan Ring, the Andariel’s Visage helmet and the Lidless Wall shield to boost your element of choice. Other than that you can only get specific Elemental Damage from a select few Legendaries. Lets take a closer look to them.
Likely the best elemental item in the game right now.
Fire:
You can get an extra 60% Fire Damage from items or 80% if you are a Wizard. Cindercoat has beast secondary ability and Magefist even has 5 Primaries. Fire is clearly heads and shoulders ahead of the competition.
Cold:
You can get an extra 60% if you Dual Wield and 50% if you are a Wizard. If you want to use a Two-Hander then 20% extra is all you can get. Azurewrath and Utar’s both give us Cold Damage as one of the Weapon’s 4th primary stats, this hurts them a lot compared to other Legendary Weapons that get a unique affix on top of the Primaries.
Lightning:
- The Eye of the Storm
- Storm Crow
- Thundergod’s Vigor
- Schaefer’s Hammer
- Won Khim Lau
- [d3item name=”Odyn Son”]
- Triumvirate
There are Helmets you can use as alternative to Andariel’s Visage for both the Wizard and the Monk, with the Monk even getting an extra 10% lightning damage. Thundergod’s Vigor is great as 20% elemental damage on belt is a powerful DPS increase. Won Khim Lau has 5 Primaries which makes it really good. If you are a Monk then Lightning is a pretty good Element for you to focus on, otherwise you likely only have 20% extra from your belt and maybe 20% more from Odyn Son.
Poison:
20% Extra Poison on Pants might not be much, but at least it’s on a slot where you don’t have many DPS options. Not a really strong element, but at least you are not Physical.
Physical:
20% Extra is all you can get, and that’s counting on one handed swords being good for your build. You’d also lose out on many great Legendary Weapons, at least the Doombringer is nice enough to give us the Physical Damage as a 5th primary affix.
Holy:
If you Sword and Board those two you can get 40% Extra Holy Damage, but you would be giving up the set bonus for the Hallowed Set. You might actually be better off just using the set.
Arcane:
Pretty tame really unless you decide to include Slorak’s Madness. That beast of a Weapon gets Disintegrate damage on top of the 4 Primaries, it also laughes when you die.
General Thoughts:
The best slots to get extra Elemental Damage seem to be Chest, Belt, and Pants since there aren’t many good offensive stats you can normally get there. Weapons look like the worst way to get the bonuses as that means you will lose out on other Legendary Weapons that can have build defining special abilities. Besides that, you are competing against 10% Damage, 750 Main Stat and Socket, which are all superior or at the very least equal to Elemental Damage.
Consider that you already have 60% Elemental Damage in other slots, you would be going from 60% to 80%, 1.8/1.6= it is only a 12.5% Increase, barely superior to 10% damage (unless you are dual wielding, in that case it becomes vastly superior to 10% damage to just half of your attacks.)
The best options at first glance are Fire anything, Lightning Monk and Dual Wield Frost, the problem with the latter is that Monk’s don’t really have a great Cold arsenal, on the other hand a Barbarian Cold build could be worth looking into.
Elemental Skill Builds:
oops, wrong game.
Fire:
- Demon Hunter: Godlike.
- Wizard: Godlike.
- Barbarian: Awesome.
- Crusader: Very good.
- Monk: Completely Viable (as far as Monk’s go).
- Witch Doctor: Firebats just got buffed, we might have a great build here.
Fire is good across the board, any Class can choose to go Fire and get a very good if not the optimal build for the class, once again Fire is the cream of the crop.
Cold:
- Wizard: Frozen Orb might have been nerfed, but Cold is still a strong option for Wizards that are feeling chill.
- Barbarian: Frenzy, Hammer of the Ancients, Whirlwind, Revenge, Seismic Slam, Avalanche, and Earthquake. Barb has a lot of options for Cold and I think it can take a big advantage of dual weilding +Cold% weapons
- Demon Hunter: Frost Arrow and a Cold Rapid Fire are the notables for this build, Kridershot might enable a Cold Build but I doubt it is anywhere near as effective as the Cluster Arrow variants.
- Monk: Lashing Tail’s Kick Cold Rune is super awesome, but that’s almost everything Monks have to boast about their Cold arsenal, the biggest strenght of that is that enables a range build for Monk, too bad that build is better served with a slow two hander.
- Witch Doctor: The Witch Doctor has some Cold skills but at first glance they don’t seem particularly strong. Maybe someone could make it work but it would require quite a bit of creativity.
- Crusader: The Crusader has a laughable Cold arsenal, any type of Cold builds would likely end up being a very gimmick way to spec.
Cold might look to have a decent gear set, but it lacks in terms of Skills. Cold’s high end viability rests mainly on the shoulders of Wizards at the moment.
Maybe we could take a deeper look at some other Cold builds in the Hellforge.
Lightning:
- Monk: Gear wise,Monks are the kings of Lightning and luckily they have the skills to support it, a good Lightning Monk has a chance to be the best Monk there is.
- Wizard: Electrocute Builds are super fun and can be super good, to be honest Wizards are one of the few classes that have good builds for all their possible elemental variants.
- Barbarian: Thunder Barbarian had its time in the limelight with the OP Shard of Hate, after it’s fix though Lightning Barbs seem to be less popular as there are other stronger options for them. Lightning Barbarian might still be viable though if it is built smartly.
- Crusader: If I’m being honest, Crusaders are the class I’m least familiar with. Still, this holy warrior boasts pretty good Lightning skills to zap your opponents to pieces.
- Demon Hunter: Overlooked because of CA’s supremacy, Rain of Vengeance, and Vengeance have Strong Lightning runes that make a CDR build worth looking into. Lightning DH might need a bit of polish in order to be truly viable.
Lightning suffers from lack of synergy on it’s possible skill builds, classes that have decent Lightning Skill tend to have better combinations avaliable in other trees.
Poison:
- Demon Hunter: Once again overlooked because of the power of Cluster Arrow, there’s some good stuff here though. If you want to try something different, Poison DH might just be your thing.
- Witch Doctor: The Witch Doctor has plenty of Poison skills to choose from, the thing isPet WD seems to be all the Rage these days and with good reason. The Doctor’s direct damage spenders could use some love so they can actually complete with the awesomeness of the pet build.
With only two classes having access to Poison skills, there isn’t much to talk about.
Physical:
- Barbarian: Despite the terrible itemization for Physical, Barbarians can still go this route thanks to the awesome Boulder Toss rune on Ancient Spear. You’d need a lot of gear to make it reliable as Raekgor’s becomes a must.
- Witch Doctor: The Witch Doctor has a few workable Physical Skills like the Angry Chicken and a Tower of Zombies, more importantly Fetish Sycophants and Fetish Army are Physical Damage. You can definately get an elite Physical build with the Witch Doctor. Too bad you’ll likely want a Starmetal Kukri and thus lose out on using the Doombringer.
- Monk: Monk lost a lot of its Physical Capabilities on the latest patch as many formerly physical runes went to other elements. I sent a few Monk Physical Builds to the Westmarch Workshop once, I might feature them on the site pronto.
- Demon Hunter: Cluster Arrow – Shooting Stars with the Ballistics passive is even better than Loaded for Bear, the horrible itemization stops it from competing with Fire CA builds but if you are like me and just can’t score a Dex Cindercoat this is a pretty good option.
- Crusader: a CDR oriented pet build could end up working wonders for the Crusader. A bit more theory would be needed though.
There are still some classes that allow interesting Physical Builds, the main problem with the Physical typing is its itemization. Hopefully this will be fixed with the next wave of Legendaries that will come in patch 2.1, until then you can only wait.
Holy:
- Monk: Fulminating Onslaught is a beast rune for Seven Sided Strike, it might be even worth basing an entire build around it.
- Crusader: Come on, Holy is the Crusader’s thing right? There’s likely a few competetive builds that are Holy.
Again, only two classes can use Holy. Monk could definately use some upgrades on its Holy options since as of right now, they feel a bit lack luster.
Arcane:
- Wizard: Archon builds are still pretty strong for Arcane, Disintegrate is also super beast with Slorak’s Madness.
Arcane is the Wizard’s domain, it is well represented.
Conclusions:
loosely related to the topic, i guess.
Fire emerges tall and in terms of both skills and itemization, leaves everyone else in the dust. While some specs might have better alternatives, Fire is top 2 in most classes if not all of them. The problem seems to be that Elemental Typing wasn’t designed from the ground up and looking at possible build combinations but rather on class flavor and simply adjusting existing skills here and there. You can tell that our elemental typings on skill are a leftover rearrangement of D3 1.0 and the vast improvements that this very good 2.0 Streamlined Elemental System should’ve brought are kind of lost as they seem to drown on that outdated design.
But fear not, the Dev team has shown that they are actively looking to fix this issue. Just look at the latest patch where they have been tweaking elemental types to better represent our new system so that’s one half of the problem already being addressed.
Hopefully the next batch of Legendaries will help put the all Elements in a competitive place itemization wise, that would definately take care of the other half of the problem.
This isn’t as bad as our Weapon Gem problem last week, and it looks to have better solutions coming soon(tm). Until then hold on tight to your seats, and keep coming every Monday to BlizzPro for more The State of Balance.
