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.

2.1 has hit the live servers and with it the game has been greatly reinvigorated, Greater Rifts are now an important part of the game and they have brought us Leaderboards. Leaderboards are an interesting tool to measure balance, as they can show us how do the different classes fare inside Greater Rifts. This is where we can appreciate the dominance of DH’s, in most categories the DH’s have the best time. The latest I’ve seen them at is second place. And when we go to the team rankings, DH also show great representation, having at least one if not multiples in almost every single one of the high ranked teams.

So why are DH’s so powerful? A quick look at the armory of almost any of the ranked DH’s shows the magic formula.

The are all running the Full Marauders set, also known as M6. Their skill sets look pretty identical aswell. Cluster Arrow, Elemental Arrow, Multishot, Vault, Sentry, and Companion.

• Embodiment of the Marauder
  • (6) Set:
    • Sentries cast your equipped Hatred spenders.

But is that enough evidence to call them OP? I mean, we are only talking at a little difference in solo leaderboards. M6 is pretty powerful, but it isn’t insanely powerful compared to the other class sets. M6 might be the only truly viable build for the Demon Hunter, but that can easily be fixed by powering up some other tools on the DH’s arsenal, right?

The answer is both yes and no.

You’d have to power up tools that M6 builds wouldn’t think about using. If you power-up anything that overlaps with a M6 build then the difference between using M6, and not using it would still be the same.

So there’s two ways to proceed here, and you could choose either of them or go with a bit of both:

1. Nerf the M6 bonus and Buff the skills that M6 uses. This way the relative performance of a M6 build remains the same, but other non-M6 builds start to become viable.
2. Buff Skills that M6 wouldn’t use.

Obviously, number 2 should be a bit of a priority. So what can we power-up?

Hatred Generators: Hatred Generators haven’t seem much use in RoS, with the old Preparation: Punishment, and things like Reaper’s Wraps, Hatred was pretty easy to come by. Generators were mostly used if you didn’t have enough RCR, and to slow your enemies for the Cull the Weak passive. Significantly buffing the  DH’s Hatred Generators could definately open up some other build possiblities.

Spenders and CD-Based Damage Skills that sentries won’t cast: You could try and promote build diversity by Buffing things like Rain of Vengeance, Fan of Knives, Strafe, Rapid Fire, and Spike Traps.

Other Full-Sets bonus: Natalya’s Vengance, and the Shadow’s Mantle aren’t exactly bad sets, but they pale in comparison to the sheer damage output that M6 can provide. If 4-piece Nats would also reduce the CD on Vengeance and Fan of Knives, a CDR-based build could rise to prominence.  Shadow Power is a good skill, and having all the runes on it is a huge tool. Sadly, it’s not worth passing on M6 so you would have to find a way to make Shadow’s Mantle more useful.

Ok, we’ve figured out what to buff. But one question still remains, how much could we buff those things? First of all, we need to know exactly how powerful M6 is.

That’s exactly what we will be tackling on part-2 of this series, coming to you soon ™.

Meanwhile, sound-off in the comments below and tell me how you would make other DH’s builds more appealing to run.