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The State of Balance: Is Marauders-6 OP? – Part 2

by - 10 years ago

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.


 

Last week we asked a dangerous question, is the Demon Hunter’s Marauder’s set overpowered? The question was only half-answered as our previous article focus on the qualitative aspects of the set. Today we take a look at the numbers behind the power.

Sadly, the numbers on Marauders aren’t explicit so a bit of research was needed. Luckily for me, forum user Jaybird had compiled some of the most relevant information about our beloved turrets. This left me a lot of time to do what I do best, analyze the numbers.

Using Jaybird’s numbers and asuming a build with 1.1 attack speed, Cluster Arrow, Multishot, and Elemental Arrow. Then EACH turret will fire all three skills every 2.7 seconds. That adds up to around 2200% weapon damage per second to a single target, but most of the damage hits on a pretty decent area aswell.

That’s a whooping 815% weapon damage per second, PER TURRET.

So normally, I’d account for losing the around 300% weapon damage per second that the sentries would do without the set, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that the increased AOE capabilities of that the spenders have over the turrets more than make up for it.

in any case, 515% weapon damage per second, per turret is still pretty significant. 3 turrets up would give you 1545% weapon damage per second, and more like 2445% weapon damage when we consider the increased AoE.

For the sake of comparison, Helltooth does 300% weapon damage per second, and Rainment of 1000 Storms does 3000% every 8 seconds, or 375% per second.

But then again, those sets only require 1 skill to be used. Our M6 set up requires 4 skills, the sentries and all 3 spenders. So lets compare with a Leap Barb, which needs 2 skills.

Leap barbs manage to get pretty much 100% uptime on Earthquake, that’s at best 637% weapon damage per second. Now, if you can stack multiple Earthquake together with Lut Socks, things start to get more interesting. 1900% weapon damage per second is finally something comparable with M6.

What about Jade Harvester, which needs 3 skills?

Jade Harvester can do about 6000% weapon damage every time you Soul Harvest. Imagine you have enough CDR to harvest every 5 seconds. That’s 1200% weapon damage per second. So even this really strong set only amounts to one and a half turret.

But there’s another plus to Jade, you can scale its damage using a +elemental damage% of your choice, and +skill damage% of not only the spenders you are using, but of Sentry aswell.

So M6 is really powerful, but it takes away most of your bar for skills that you aren’t actually going to use much. This trade-off is what makes Marauders “balanced” and not as OP as it would originally seem.

But, are those extra skills worth that much? Fan of Knives is like 60% to 100% weapon damage per second depending on runes, but heavy CDR could take it to about 320%. Rain of Vengance amounts to about the same damage.

So when we remove the two extra spenders needed, 1500% weapon damage could be more like 900% damage per second. This is Still way higher than Helltooth or Storm’s Rainment.

Once again, this isn’t a simple case of M6 being too powerful. The real issue is that it is way too more powerful than anything else the DH can do, and it is also very powerful when you compare it with other class sets.

Last week we realized that M6 might need to be taken down a notch, and some other DH skills should get a boost to compensate. This week we realize that some other class sets could use a little extra love.

This is it for now, but in the next edition of this series we will look at another core problem of M6 builds. The issue of Diversity.

 

 

 

 


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


0 responses to “The State of Balance: Is Marauders-6 OP? – Part 2”

  1. Apexhero7 says:

    i think more builds will come about i dont like the m6 turret thing im using 4peice set with wolf clock chakram and impale and all hunting skills hardcore t5 currently demon hunter is a high risk high reward kill purples and yellow fast get clocked you die fast the risk with m6 is all you can do is lay turrets, turrets have a cool down cd reduction on dh just for turrets wasted stat to set up 3 turrets takes time or 5 turrets with bombquiver and custom engineering. so you lose dps in the time setting up and between locations, i can crit 50m + on a impale with only 350pc crit chakrams doing 6-9m and 7 pets running wild single out for the impale to give it a high crit chance. more fun than turrets biggest con of turret build its boring,slow and does not feel skill rewarding. sorry for bad grammar

  2. Apexhero7 says:

    i am getting this kind of dps without a stone of jordon once i get one them it will be crazy