Combination Strike Might Be Poorly Designed.

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro. I’m Dannie “Illness” Ray, and today we will be taking an in-depth look at a certain Monk passive skill.

What Does it Say it Does?

Combination Strike increases your damage for each resource generator recently used. At a glance, you would think that this passive has been implemented in order to allow for builds that use multiple different resource generators. While that most certainly was the intent, if you look at all of the builds that use Combination Strike you will realize that most of them use only a single spirit generator.

Why Does This Happen?

Using a single generator doesn’t really scream of “combination”. I doubt that the intent the developers had when they came up with passive, was for players to use it as a flat and boring 10% damage buff.

But why are players only using Combination Strike for the first 10% bonus? Why don’t they exploit this wonderful passive to the fullest? Let me tell you why:

1. Almost every Monk build out there uses at least one generator. You don’t have to give up anything in order to get the first 10% increase.
2. Using extra generators means that you have to give up other useful skills. Extra slots for generators mean less slots for things like Mantras, Serenity, Breath of Heaven, Blinding Flash, etc. While specific runes on generators may provide a certain level of utility, it is often inferior to actually using utility skills.
3. Using a single generator is way easier than alternating between three different ones, especially when you need to cycle them in an specific order to get the most benefit out of the strategy. This gets even more chaotic at high attack speeds.
4. The first generator will move your damage from 100% to 110%, effectively increasing your damage output by 10%. The second will move your damage from 110% to 120%, and that’s just a 9% increase. If we were to use all 4 generators, the last one would only grant us 7.7% damage. Diminishing returns put the final nail in the coffin for multiple-generator builds.

How Much is an Extra Skill Slot Worth?

This wouldn’t be a Dannie Ray article if we didn’t get into the numbers. Let’s compare how much do we give up numerically when we select a second or third generator.

Mystic Ally – Fire Ally: This is a straight 10% damage increase. When you factor in both the passive strikes from the companion and its active ability, it becomes hard to justify adding a generator instead of this.

Breath of Heaven – Blazing Wrath: 10% increased damage with 9 seconds duration. It’s base 15 second duration means a 60% uptime, that gives you 6% increased damage out of BoH. 50% CDR would ensure a 100% uptime for a total of 10% increased damage. Of course, an extra generator just won’t heal your party like BoH will.

Inner Sanctuary – Forbidden Palace: 30% increased damage with a 6 second duration. It’s base 20 second cooldoown means a 30% uptime, that’s a 9% damage increase that also affects your party members.  50% CDR would double the uptime to 60% and the damage bonus to 18%. The 50% damage reduction is also nothing to sneeze at.

Blinding Flash – Faith in the Light: 29% increased damage with a 3 second duration. It’s base 15 second cooldown means a 20% uptime, that’s 5.8% damage increase. 50% CDR would double the uptime to 40% and would set the damage bonus to 11.6%. The crowd control that this skill provides is a great help.

The Monk has a lot of other options, but these 4 skills allow me to showcase how Monk’s can use their skill slots to increase their damage. Although the above-mentioned skills can be a tad situational, Combination Strike still seems like the inferior option when we consider the 4 points that we discussed earlier.

Where Should This Be Adressed?

First of all, we need to let Combination Strike really fullfil its intent. You don’t want to tone down any of the Monk’s other skills or in any way upset the balance of the generators. What needs to be adressed is Combination Strike itself, it shouldn’t buff single generator builds and it should give us a strong reason to consider the harder to play Bi-Gen or Tri-Gen builds.

Combination Strike could read something like this:

“All your damage is increased by an amount based on the number of Spirit Generators you’ve used during the last 3 seconds.

• 2 generators: 20%
• 3 generators: 45%
• 4 generators: 75%”

75% might seem like an insane amount, but you would be giving up 4 skills slots to use generators. You would likely want to have 1 spender to actually use that 75% bonus with a hard hitting skill. That would leave you with just one skill for utility.

And these are just numbers of the top of my head, it would take a few hours work to actually determine what the ideal amount would be.

When Will This Be Fixed?

Sadly, that’s something I cannot answer you. If you’ve been itching to play a multiple generator build without feeling that you are gimping your character, patch 2.1 might be your best hope. The Monk has been promised a big revamp, and while combination Strike might or might not be reworked when 2.1 hits; at least you now know what the issues are and how they could be resolved.

Meanwhile, keep coming back to BlizzPro for some of the best Diablo 3 content on the web.