Passive Skills can save Two-Handed Weapons.

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro, I’m Dannie “Imagination” Ray and today we will expand on what we talked during this monday’s State of Balance. Back then, we concluded that Two-Handed Weapons were in dire need of a buff. Buffing these weapons isn’t just a mindless task of increasing numbers; we have to remember that we analyzed Two-Handers against Off-Hands, not against Dual Wielding or Shields. So buffing Two-Handers to make them usable for Wizards and Doctors could very well make them OP for Barbs and Monks.

Most importantly, the Crusader’s Heavenly Strength gets in the way of balance; were we to buff Two-Handers then we would alter Crusader Balance.

The Crusader Paradigm

While Crusaders pose a problem for weapon balancing, they are kind enough to provide the solution: Passive Skills.

Passive Skills are perfect to give Witch Doctors and Wizards the possiblity to use Two-Handed Weapons and actually be effective with them. Just take a look at Fervor, it is the same principle. Crusaders have a choice between equipping a stronger option in Two-Handed weapons or a weaker option in One-Handed Weapons, Crusaders get a considerable buff in the form of Fervor when using the weaker option to bring it up to speed. With this type of design Blizzard brought build diversity back to their fancy new hero, the Crusader, so why don’t we use the same logic on our old friends the spellcasters?

Establishing a Baseline

We know we need to buff Two-Handers, but how much? Ideally, Two-Handers and One-Hander+Off-Hand should be rather balanced.

On Monday we established that both options were dead even on weapon DPS, but going the Off-Hand route provided us with:

• 375 Extra Base Stat.
• 10% Critical Hit Chance
• +15% Skill Damage.
• 8% CDR/RCR/Damage Against Elites or APOC/Mana Regen or Vitality.

Our Passive needs to compete with that. You don’t want to give any extra DPS because Two-Handers already have an edge when it comes to Damage per Hit, even if their slower attack makes the Damage per Second equal to Off-Hand builds.

My Suggestions

Wizard Passive, Battle Mage’s Gambit: While wielding a Two-Handed Weapon, your Primary Resource Spenders deal 15% more damage and have 15% additional Critical Hit Chance.

Witch Doctor Passive, Fury of the Tall Man: While wielding a Two-Handed Weapon,  you gain 15% Critical Hit Chance and all skills cost 15% less mana.

Fervor has already established the 15% to two stats figure. These passive skills are very similar to it and would look good to have similar numbers. Both passives get 15% Crit because Crit is the best stat in the game and losing 10% Crit Chance would be just too much. You could change 15% CHC for 150% CHD in one of the passives if you want to differentiate them more.

In the Wizards case, the 15% to resource spenders would be akin to 15% damage to a skill. It is a bit better as it affects all primary spenders so you don’t have to bother rolling 15% for a specific one, we will compensate that with the extra 375. The extra 5% CHC would compensate for those 8% RCR/CDR or the APOC that could be getting from Orbs.

For Witch Doctors, 15% resource cost reduction would be a much needed boon for builds that rely on direct damage spells. As of right now their damage is a bit low and they are outclassed by both Jade Harvester, Pet Builds and even DoT builds that don’t have Jade Harvester yet. The extra 7% RCR and 5% CHC might be a bit weaker than 15% to a skill and 375 base stat but not that much. This passive would go a long way towards enabling direct damage builds and bringing the much needed diversity.

Conclusions

Two-Hander weapons are hard to balance as they interact differently with all the different classes. Implementing passive skills for each class seems to be the best way to even things out for all clases and promote build diversity. Mages and Witch Doctors are just one passive away from greatly increasing their weapon arsenal.

The Dev Team has already implemented this elegant solution on the crusader, we can only hope that they extend it soon to the caster classes.