Embodiment of the Marauder Design Concerns – Part 2

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

I’ve said a lot of things about Marauders Lately. I’ve said its too strong compared to the other options we have to build a DH, I’ve said that it’s too strong compared to other class sets, I’ve also said that its mechanics make it bad for build diversity.

Today, I’m flat out saying that it’s mechanics are maybe too gamebreaking to stay as is.

Core Game Conceptions

In Diablo 3, you have 3 basic types of attacks. You have your resource generators or signature spells, those are the abilities that you can spam to your heart content. Then you have the resource spenders, heavy hitting attacks that you must use sparingly since they are constrained by your resourced. Finally you have cooldown-based attacks, these are constrained by their own cooldown time and can be some of the most powerful attacks in the game like the Monk’s Seven Sided Strike or the Barbarian’s Earthquake.

The relation between all three of these attacks is part of Diablo 3’s core, managing your resource is key to establish a dominant damage rotation. But even closer to the core of the game stands the fact that in order to damage your opponents, you have to actively attack your enemies. There’s skills that will allow you to damage your enemies while you move around, but you’ll immediately notice that their damage is minimal.

Marauder’s 6-piece bonus completely shatters both these conceptions.

How Marauder’s breaks the game

Lets say you drop a single turret, this turret then will repeatedly cast spenders, if you have the right combination of skills in your bar the turret will never stop to fire a normal blow, it will be an endless chain of spenders.

Can you fire an endless chain of spenders yourself? Unless you have a Kridershot the answer is likely a resounding no. You might be able to sustain a Chakram Spam Strategy if you stack enough Hatred per Second and Resource Cost Reduction, but even that is a stretch.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that a single turret will out-damage you. A single sentry will inflict more punishment to the hordes of hell than you could ever dream of, what happens when you have 2 turrets down, or 3, or  what about 5?

When you have all five of your sentries down, is it even worth to fire a single shot? While every bit of damage helps, you might be better served running for your life. So what does this all mean? Not only you don’t have a pressing need to actually go after your enemies, but you don’t really have to worry about your hatred resource at all. Suddenly all hatred regeneration becomes nearly useless, resource cost reduction sees its effect constrained to your discipline skill.

Aren’t sets supposed to feel game-breaking?

I understand that sets are mean to be special, they are meant to bend game mechanics to the max and all you to do things that otherwise wouldn’t even be possible. So the question I pose is rather simple…

Is this turret placing and running for your life a valid style of play?

You might argue that it is, and that properly placing your sentries and moving around the map requires a considerate amount of skill. But even if you were to consider it valid, still it shouldn’t be the only viable build on higher GR levels.

Balancing M6

M6 needs a sort of nerf, which is painful to say. I feel as M6 is the DH’s Exploding Palm, a skill so powerful that manages to mask the weakness of the M6-less DH. So what do you do? Do you reduce the potency or do you change the mechanics?

If you were to make the sentries only do a % of your actual damage, you might be able to make other non M6-builds competitive. You would of course have to (greatly) buff other areas of the DH to compensate, but one problem would still persist. All M6-builds would look very similar to each other.

So how could we change the mechanics then? Lets go back to my initial concerns, we need to get hatred involved, and we need to reward actively attacking your enemies.

So what do we do then? Basically, I’d severely increase the internal CD’s on all the spenders that the sentries will automatically cast. That way the damage the sentries do on their own wouldn’t be as relevant, so you would still be forced to actually attack your enemies. There’s a slight problem with this approach though, the set would lose a lot of it luster as its power would be heavily decreased. We need to do something else then, we can’t just punish the player that doesn’t attack…we need to reward the attacker instead. So what about this: “every time you fire a hatred spender, your turrets fire it aswell.”

Now we are really onto something, with this small change Hatred becomes key in making you the most powerful DH you can be. Knowing when to attack, and when to reposition, will heavily reward skilled players. M6 would stop favoring high cost spenders like CA and Hatred Efficiency would become what we would be after, which means that depending on your RCR and Hatred Regen amounts, different spenders and different builds could actually become viable.

Then again M6 could just be that niche-spec that allows you to play without attacking. But whatever you think about the issue, something needs to be done. I’ve highlighted many options, but maybe someone else can come up with something better.

If you are that someone else, please share your solution on the comments below.