by Hotstreak - 10 years ago     show comments

This week was a busy week for the Diablo Community Team as they were constantly giving designer insights about various gameplay systems. They addressed questions and concerns about various popular topics like Legendary Gems, Two Handed Weapons, and Depth Diggers. Life on Hit and Tempest Rush got some attention as well. Check it out down below!

A new patch for the 2.1.0 PTR was released this week and it brought some tweaks to Legendary Gem numbers. Players were concerned that some of the gems were too overpowered.

Hi everyone. I wanted to pop in here while discussion on Legendary gems is ongoing.

First off, our philosophy on Legendary gems is that, when you pick one up for the first time, you should immediately want to use it (assuming it’s for your build – some gems obviously don’t apply to all builds/needs). This puts a minimum bar on the starting power level. After that, the power increase per upgrade is directly related to the frequency of upgrading, which is closely tied to the Greater Rift reward scheme and is still being iterated on. In the end, we’d like gems to be infinitely upgradeable when it makes sense, but not be outrageous.

Additionally, all Legendary gems have been disabled for followers. These powers were not designed for followers in mind, and this way we can ensure the gems are of a high power level because you can only have 3 equipped. In the future, if followers need avenues of advancement we would likely make Legendary gems specifically designed for them.

Now for the details. The existing stats you see on Legendary gems on the PTR today are somewhat placeholder. So, to steer further discussion in a direction that’s more in line with the next PTR build, here are the freshly tuned numbers (with some of my notes) for each gem.

Bane of the Powerful

• Gain 30% increased damage for 20 seconds after killing an elite pack.
• Upgrade rank grants: +1 second buff duration.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Gain 20% bonus damage to elites.

Enforcer

• Increase the Critical Hit Chance of your pets by 20%.
• Upgrade rank grants: +0.4% Critical Hit Chance. Max +20% upgrade (+40% total).
• Rank 50 unlocks: Your pets are unkillable.
• Notes: As was discussed in another thread, allowing this this gem to rank up to +100% pet Crit would likely cause undesired gearing issues and probably be a little out of line.

Moratorium

• 30% of all damage taken is instead staggered and dealt to you over 3 seconds.
• Upgrade rank grants: +0.1 second to the stagger duration.
• Rank 50 unlocks: 10% chance on kill to clear all staggered damage.

Zei’s Stone of Vengeance

• Damage you deal is increased by 6% for every 10 yards between you and the enemy hit. Maximum 30% increase.
• Upgrade rank grants: +0.1% for every 10 yards (+0.5% to max).
• Rank 50 unlocks: 30% chance on hit to Stun the enemy for 1 second.
• Notes: The max of 50 yards was added not because it was too powerful (even though it was too powerful), but so that you wouldn’t be incentivized to stay offscreen while your pets killed everything. At 50 yards, I expect you to be in range to actually still use your skills (crazy right?).

Simplicity’s Strength

• Increase the damage of primary skills by 25%.
• Upgrade rank grants: +0.5% damage.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Primary skills heal you for 2% of maximum health on hit.

Bane of the Trapped

• Increase damage against enemies under control-impairing effects by 20%.
• Upgrade rank grants: +0.5% damage.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Gain an aura that reduces the movement speed of enemies within 15 yards by 30%.

Wreath of Lightning

• 15% chance on hit to gain a Wreath of Lightning, dealing 500% weapon damage as Lightning every second to 1-2 nearby enemies for 3 seconds.
• Upgrade rank grants: +10% weapon damage per second.
• Rank 50 unlocks: While under the effect of the Wreath of Lightning, gain 25% increased movement speed.

Gem of Efficacious Toxin

• Poison all enemies hit for 1000% weapon damage over 10 seconds.
• Upgrade rank grants: +20% weapon damage over 10 seconds.
• Rank 50 unlocks: All enemies you poison take 10% increased damage from all sources.

Pain Enhancer

• Critical hits cause the enemy to bleed for 500% weapon damage as Physical over 3 seconds.
• Upgrade rank grants: +10% weapon damage over 3 seconds.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Gain Blood Frenzy, granting you 2% increased Attack Speed for each bleeding enemy within 20 yards.

Mirinae, Teardrop of the Starweaver

• 15% chance on hit to smite a nearby enemy for 1000% weapon damage as Holy.
• Upgrade rank grants: +20% weapon damage.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Smite a nearby enemy every 5 seconds.

Gogok of Swiftness

• 50% chance on hit to gain Swiftness, increasing your Attack Speed by 2% for 3 seconds. This effect stacks up to 10 times.
• Upgrade rank grants: +1% chance.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Gain 2% Cooldown Reduction per stack of Swiftness.

Invigorating Gemstone

• While under any control-impairing effects, reduce all damage taken by 30%.
• Upgrade rank grants: +1%. Maximum +50% upgrade (80% total).
• Rank 50 unlocks: Heal for 20% of maximum life when hit by control-impairing effect.

Boon of the Hoarder

• 30% chance on killing an enemy to cause an explosion of gold.
• Upgrade rank grants: +1% chance on kill.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Gain 30% increased movement speed for 3 seconds after picking up gold.

Taeguk

• Gain 1% increased damage for 4 seconds after spending primary resource. This effect stacks up to 10 times. Gaining a stack refreshes all existing stacks.
• Upgrade rank grants: +1 max stack.
• Rank 50 unlocks: Gain 1% increased Armor for every stack.
• Note: This buff duration on this gem was chosen so that it’s easier to keep up with cheap spenders and not trivial with expensive spenders.

As always, these numbers are not final and we’re keeping a close watch as PTR goes on. Please continue the discussions and let us know what you think.

There was finally some designer input on the state of two handed weapons from John Yang. He stopped by the forums to let players know that they are aware of the problem with them and are buffing their damage retroactively. A lot of players like myself are rejoicing over 2h’s getting some love as they are outclassed in every way by dual wielding. You can check out Dannie Ray’s thoughts on the buff here.

We’ve been discussing 2-Hander buffs for a while now. Right now on live, 2-Handers are almost always less powerful than dual-wielding 1-Handers for a few different reasons, and we wanted to rebalance them for Patch 2.1. We had two options to address the issue:

1) Make new 2-Hander passives and buff existing 2-Hander passives for Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, and Wizard.

 

2) Buff all 2-Handed weapons baseline and adjust Heavenly Strength accordingly.

After trying both options out internally, we decided to go with option 2. This solution has two desirable benefits: 1) it’s immediately noticeable to all players when they pick up a 2-Hander and see the DPS number both significantly higher than a 1-Hander and higher than pre-Patch 2.1 2-Handers and 2) changing 1 passive is less of a jarring overall change for players than changing/adding 4 passives.

In the upcoming PTR patch, you should see the DPS of 2-Handed Melee Weapons increased by 23-26% across the board. The goal is to get the raw DPS of a 2H build to be close enough to the raw DPS of a Dual-Wield build that the weapon choice is mostly determined by the legendary powers on the item and by the build you are using. Some of the tradeoffs of 2-Handers vs. Dual-Wielding are that 2-Handers are intended to make more efficient use of resources and hit harder for skills with cooldowns while Dual-Wielding is intended to generate more procs, Life on Hit, and give more of certain stats. Currently, the raw DPS gap is large enough that Dual-Wielding feels like it is always the right answer.

To summarize the changes:

• The DPS of 2-Handed Melee Weapons has been increased by 23-26% across the board.
• This applies to the following weapon types:
  • 2-Handed Maces
  • 2-Handed Mighty Weapons
  • 2-Handed Axes
  • 2-Handed Flails
  • 2-Handed Staffs
  • 2-Handed Swords
  • Daibos
  • Polearms
• In direct response, Heavenly Strength will now reduce damage done by 20%. With both changes, Crusaders using a 2-Hander should see a very small DPS increase.
• This change is retroactive to existing live items.
• This change only affects level 70 two-handed melee weapons.
• This change affects two-handed melee weapons of all rarities.

We are still considering additional changes if needed but this should be a solid step towards making 2-Handers viable again for all classes.

Grimiku stopped by the forums to talk about why the Wizard’s and Witch Doctor’s signature spells aren’t affected by the new Depth Diggers. The reasoning behind this is because those signature spells aren’t considered resource generators.

The philosophy behind the decision to prevent the bonus damage given by Depth Diggers from working with Witch Doctor and Wizard Signature spells was two-fold. 

• First, Signature skills are not the same as resource generators, and typically have higher damage. Even with Prodigy and APOC, it doesn’t change the fact that, at their core, Signature skills do not generate resource. At present, Depth Diggers are only intended to benefit/boost resource generators, which does restrict their value to Barbarian, Crusader, Demon Hunter, and Monk skills.

 

• Second and more importantly, we don’t want to create an environment where Wizards and Witch Doctors are driven to only cast Signature skills because of a single item. Wizards and Witch Doctors also happen to already have items that make some of their Signature skills incredibly powerful (Mirrorball and Rhen’ho Flayer, for example), and there’s a risk that with Depth Diggers this could funnel gameplay into something that’s very one-dimensional. Ideally, we want your skill usage to be thoughtful and engaging, at least more so than just holding down left-click until an Elite pack or Rift Guardian dies.

That said, we are more than happy to hear your feedback about the changes we’re making, and we encourage you to continue to do so. If you feel that Depth Diggers should benefit Signature skills, be sure to let us know how and why (these are two very important pieces of information). 

Thanks to those of you who’ve posted thus far!

Life on Hit is getting another buff to try and make it a more appealing stat. This change buffs LoH on items by 100% and in Paragon by 50%. LoH is also getting some mechanical changes.

Life on Hit has undergone a number of changes, and it can be little confusing at first. I’ll go over how LoH is currently working on the PTR, but it’s also good to keep in mind that it’s still subject to tuning.

The bullet-point basics:

• You gain your Life on Hit amount per cast, so long as you’re doing damage.
• The amount healed per cast does not change based on the number of targets hit.
• You continuously gain a portion of your Life on Hit value while channeling.
• We’re increasing LoH on items by another 100%, and LoH in Paragon by 50% in an upcoming PTR build
• We’re aware that this needs tuning, particularly with large packs of monsters, or those with Reflect Damage.

More long-form explanation:

Currently in the live game, you’ll receive Life On Hit when an ability hits an enemy, and then that mechanic is run through the proc coefficient of the ability itself. As a general rule, this means that many AoE skills give very small amounts of Life On Hit vs. single targets, and you typically get large amounts of Life on Hit against multiple targets.

We want players to be able to heal consistently at the times you need it most: Boss fights and Elite fights. To support this, we’re altering some of the conditions of Life On Hit. Life On Hit will now trigger once per ability activation as long as that ability requires an animation*. This means casting Magic Missile, Frozen Orb, and Blizzard all provide the same Life On Hit per cast. Channeled spells provide an equivalent amount of healing over any given period of time to non-channeled spells.

Not only does this allow you to gain more Life when you’re attacking a low number of targets with AoE skills, it provides more consistent healing between various skills, and it also separates Life On Hit from the proc system. This last benefit is important as it means we can be more generous with allowing Legendary items to proc various effects.

All of that said, there is still some tuning to do now that we’ve adjusted how Life on Hit works. We’ll be keeping an eye a close eye on it, and continue to make the necessary adjustments to get it in line with where we want.

*Attacks that deal damage, but don’t animate (like Overpower, or Frost Nova) do not trigger Life on Hit. The intention is to prevent double LoH procs per animation cycle since these skills can be cast while attacking, or channeling.

Witch Doctors are getting a nice Quality of Life change for their Fetish summons. Fetish Sycophants will no longer replace fetishes spawned by the Fetish Army skill. Along with that change, WDs will also get two counters to help keep track of both your Fetish Sycophants and Fetish Army summons.

For anyone who may be unaware, there is a bug with the Witch Doctor Fetish Sycophant summons from the passive replacing fetishes spawned from Fetish Army. We’re still working on a solution for that issue, but it hasn’t been implemented yet. It’s currently being worked on.

In addition to that, I have some more news about fetishes that some of you Witch Doctors will be glad to hear. Wyatt Cheng mentioned in the Theorycraft Thursday livestream that we’re also planning on adding two fetish counters, so that there is one for your Fetish Army and another for Fetish Sycophants. 

We don’t have a current ETA on when these will be implemented to the PTR, and as for the usual caveat, it could possibly be changed, especially since it’s still in development.

Last but not least, Game Designer Don Vu came by the forums to talk about their design philosophy behind the PTR changes to Tempest Rush.

Hey all,

I wanted to chime in and explain the philosophy behind the most recent Tempest Rush changes on our Public Test Realm.

We want to make Tempest Rush damage comparable to other moving-while-doing-damage skills (like Strafe and Whirlwind). Increasing the damage also meant increasing the resource cost, though.

As our internal tests have shown and some players have figured out by playing on the PTR, Tempest Rush is still infinitely sustainable with some gear and skill specialization. However, we’ve heard your feedback and are looking at ways to help improve that sustainability further. At the moment, we’re exploring increasing both the Monk’s base Maximum Spirit and Spirit regeneration from skills (which will have class-wide benefits as well). In addition to this, the next PTR build fixes an issue where Tempest Rush incorrectly has an upfront cost of 30 Spirit in addition to the channeling cost. The end goal for all these changes would be to make Tempest Rush sustainable with fewer items and skills as it is now in PTR, but still deal meaningful damage.

We don’t have an ETA on when these changes might be on live the PTR. And, full disclosure: since this is a PTR, such changes are subject to iteration before the patch goes live.

Thanks for the discussion!