Embodiment of the Marauder Design Concerns – Part 1

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro! I’m Dannie “IAmDiR23” Ray 23, and today we will dabble on game design.

Lately we’ve been taking a closer look at the Embodiment of the Marauders set, a very pretty popular among Demon Hunters. Very popular would be kind of an understatement, a swift look at the rankings would show you that everyone and their mothers are running the M6-build. Build Diversity is the our primary concern this week.

Lets take a close look to the set bonuses:

• (2) Set:
  • +500 Dexterity
• (4) Set:
  • Companion calls all companion types to your side.
• (6) Set:
  • Sentries cast your equipped Hatred spenders.

The 2-piece set is pretty standard, but lets focus on the 4-piece: “Companion calls all companion types to your side.”

This is pretty straight forward, you need to have the Companion skill for it to work. This is nothing out of the ordinary, Helltooth procs off Wall of Zombies, Rainment of 1000 Storms procs off Dashing Strike, Akkhan needs Akarat Champion, and so on.

But when we go to the 6-set, we really start to see what the problem with Marauders is. Allowing Sentries to cast your equipped Hatred Spenders without a resource cost will push you into equipping the hardest-hitting spenders, regardless of their cost. This means that Cluster Arrow and Sentry are locks for any M6 build, and the M6 mechanics dictate that you also want to have two extra spenders on the build.

Multishot and Elemental Arrow are likely candidates to be in most of the builds. So, Companion, Sentry, Cluster Arrow, Multishot, Elemental Arrow? That’s 5 skills almost required to make the most out of M6…

What does this mean?

I think it is fair to say that M6 doesn’t leave much room for build diversity. Now, that shouldn’t be a problem if M6 was balanced against other DH builds. But is that the case?

We’ve analyzed the power of the set twice now. We check how it compares to both other DH builds, and other class sets. The answers were simple, M6 is head and shoulders ahead of the competition. But as we just saw the build requires a whooping 5 skills to work to its full potential. These extra free skills that other classes have, allow them to keep up with the sheer power of Marauders.

The problem then lays inside the DH class, there’s nothing else inside the DH’s toolkit that can match the whooping 4000%+ weapon damage per second that M6 can bring to the table. And that’s even before you start adding +Elemental and +Skill Bonuses.

If you want to get into the DH’s leaderboards you are likely putting together the best Marauders set that you can, and you are likely using the same skills as every other DH. And that’s IMO a very big problem, Competitive DH’s should be able to be play in more ways than just spamming turrets and then just avoiding attacks.

Why do we have this problem, and how do we fix it?

The source of the problem is that M6 commits to 4 skills, and while this would be a problem by itself, it’s also worsened by the fact that M4 also commits to using the companion skill aswell.

So how can we change M6, to allow build diversity and keep it in line with other builds?

Maybe you’d have to make it so Sentries can only fire one of your spenders, this way you’d only be commiting to 3 skills instead of 5. 3 Skills borders on reasonable, Jade Harvester also commits to 3 skills.

But if the internal CD on the different spenders were balanced enough, you would only be committing to Sentry and Companion. Since you could use any spender and they would all produce similar results. That would actually work wonders for Build Diversity.

Anything else that can be done?

Yes! Build Diversity isn’t the only design concern I have with the Marauders set. On Part 2 of this series we will take a deeper look at the M6 bonus and see what is exactly what makes it so powerful and desirable, and how that power is breaking basic game mechanics.

See you then!