Get Set With Early Analysis of the New Barbarian, Demon Hunter, & Wizard Sets

by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

This weekend, the Evolving Reaper of Souls panel dived deep into the annals of Diablo III history and relived some of the lowlights that we have overcome along the way. The developers didn’t stop there though as they continued on to the present day highlights and also teased some of the forthcoming future awesomeness. I want to focus on that list bit today by going over the three Legendary Sets that they plan to introduce for the Barbarian, Demon Hunter, and Wizard.

At first, I thought I might provide you with my own analysis of each of these, but rather than subject you to my simple musings, I thought I would call on the help of some high-profile members of the community that are masters of these particular classes.

The new Barbarian set, Wrath of the Wastes, returns the fantasy of the Whirlwind Barb to those that missed its dominant days in vanilla Diablo III. However, putting a new “spin” on things is a bit of synergistic love between Whirlwind and Rend via the different set bonuses. To talk more about this, I invited MVP Monstrous, whom most of you should know from several guest appearances on official Diablo stream sessions as well as from his work creating incredible mock ups for the community to discuss possible changes to the game, some of which have been implemented over time.

At first glance the new Barbarian set, Wrath of the Wastes, looks great and shares characteristics reminiscent of the popular Whirlwind build many players used in vanilla Diablo III.

The bonus to Rend damage is very strong, especially when combined with the mighty belt, Lamentation, which allows Barbarians the ability to apply Rend twice. In patch 2.0.6, there was a bug which allowed Rend to crit on top of the newly introduced damage calculation (Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage were directly included in calculating Rend damage), essentially meaning that a critical Rend was benefiting from Critical Hit Damage twice. The bug made Rend ridiculously strong for a short while before it was eventually hotfixed. This set should actually place the new Rend damage numbers above where it was with the bug although now we’ll need items to provide such bonuses.

The 6-piece set bonus also grants a huge damage boost to Whirlwind, but brings to the surface a new problem in regards to Fury generation. Current Whirlwind Barbarian builds rely heavily on the Fury generation provided by the synergy between Legendary gloves Tasker and Theo, the 4-piece Immortal King’s set bonus (Call of the Ancients last until they die.) and the skill Call of the Ancients – Ancients’ Fury (Gain 4 Fury every time an Ancient deals damage.). Since the new set will require 6 items that share slots with these other key items used to provide enough fury to fuel Whirlwind, we might run into the issue of being Fury starved without another reliable source. It’s important to note that the vanilla Whirlwind build made use of the old Battle Rage – Into the Fray skill (While under the effects of Battle Rage, your critical hits have a chance to generate 15 additional Fury.) to provide enough Fury, which was changed with the introduction of Patch 2.1.

Another concern with this set is an issue that we see plague another melee set in the game – Roland’s Legacy. The amount of damage a melee character takes when attempting higher Greater Rifts eventually leads to abandoning these types of sets/builds in favor of a ranged or crowd control type build. Stopping to cast Rend in a pack of mobs will surely result in some frustrating deaths. It was however mentioned during BlizzCon that they are aware of the damage scaling issue and we could see changes in the future.

Overall, I’m really excited for this set and can’t wait to test it out during the next PTR build. I expect there will be some slight changes to either the skills or the set itself to make Wrath of the Wastes truly shine. To close, I’ll leave a couple of my own suggestions to improve the set:

• Combine the 2-piece and 4-piece bonus: Rend deals triple damage and lasts three times as long.
• Add a new bonus which provides Fury generation.
• Speed up the Rend animation or allow it to be cast while channeling Whirlwind, similar to Overpower. Rend could then actually benefit from Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan.

Unhallowed Essence, the new Demon Hunter set, seeks to upheave the Marauder set from its spot as the go-to, end-all-be-all for Demon Hunters. Not only providing for mighty area-of-effect (AOE) damage in major buffs to Multishot, the set is also balanced by providing utility through defensive bonuses and almost unmitigated access to your defensive skills through allowing your Hatred generators to also generate Discipline. For more detailed information about this set, I cornered our very own Neinball – known Demon Hunter guru around these parts – to speak on why this set shows great promise.

The new Unhallowed Essence set for Demon Hunters looks truly amazing. We finally have something that could start competing with the Marauder’s set (M6) in terms of raw power. This set offers a potentially huge damage boost with every point of Discipline giving your Hatred Generators and Multishot a 10% damage increase. It’s pretty easy to get your Discipline into the 70s, which would grant you 700% bonus damage. This will make Bolas and Multishot better than Cluster Arrow. Demon Hunters can already generate practically limitless Discipline already, so you should be getting the max damage bonus a vast majority of the time.

Damage isn’t the only thing that made M6 great; you had the freedom to move around freely and focus entirely on avoiding damage. This freedom, in turn, greatly increased your survivability, but the Unhallowed set has you covered here as well. If there is an enemy within 20 yards of you, you gain 40% increased damage reduction. This set is clearly designed to compete with M6 on every level and I cannot wait to get my hands on it to see how the damage really balances out.

The new Wizard set, Delsere’s Magnum Opus, seeks to compete with the mighty Firebird set. Early assessments from the showroom floor at BlizzCon made this set hard to pin down as the difficulty level wasn’t turned up very high. Performing well in medium Torment is all good and well, but we want to know whether these sets will help players push the limits going forward and upend arguably some of the most efficient and devastating class sets. In order to do a bit more theorizing, I turned to MVP Jaetch, whom we recently just interviewed for an episode of Westmarch Workshop. This man needs no introduction in the Wizard community and it only made sense to see what his early thoughts were on the merits of Delsere’s Magnum Opus.

Looking at Delsere’s Magnum Opus, the very first thing that a seasoned Wizard should ask is:

1. Is the 500% more damage from the 6-piece bonus additive or multiplicative?

We have to be really careful when throwing around these numbers. Sometimes they look interesting on paper, but don’t translate well in-game. Just take a look at the first iteration of Firebird’s Finery and what happened to Raiment of a Thousand Storms.

Now, if enemies take 5x more damage from the spells, that could be pretty interesting. Hard to say how well it’ll perform until we get to try it out ourselves.

Final bonus aside, let’s take a look at the 2-piece and 4-piece bonuses. The 2-piece bonus can potentially be incredibly powerful, especially when combined with another Slow Time-centric item, Gesture of Orpheus. I’m sure many Wizards thought of that synergy as soon as they saw “X reduces the cooldown of Slow Time.”

The thing is, there’s really no point in having the 2-piece on its own. We have to run the 4-piece bonus to get anything out of the set. That’s when we turn a normally defensive skill in Slow Time into an offensive weapon. The 4-piece bonus is great. It’s incredibly strong for four pieces of gear, especially when you’re looking at the freebie 2-piece bonus that really brings out the set’s potential. Good return on the investment, I would say.

Now the second thing a seasoned Wizard should ask is:

2. When you stack the Slow Time bubbles, will the 1250% DPS per bubble stack? What about all the Slow Time bubbles that Mirror Image illusions can cast?

That could make the set super powerful or make it relatively mediocre. Also, what kind of weapon damage does the Slow Time bubble deal? Arcane? Fire? Lightning? Cold? That will play a huge role in the spec.

If we look at the set and the set alone, I think it’s worth testing out and using. I believe, on paper at least, that it could be very strong. I don’t think it’ll be as competitive as Firebird’s mainly because it doesn’t offer the same mobility. However, depending on how other items can fit into the picture, this build could offer the “burst” aspect of the Wizard’s arsenal while Firebird’s handles the “run and gun” aspect. The latter kills things off over a longer period of time while gaining the ability to roam free; the former kills things off in shorter periods of time at the cost of staying in close proximity to the targets. As a result, Firebird’s could still reign as the go-to set for Greater Rifts while Delsere’s could see more use in standard farming runs, especially when combined with Aether Walker.

Arcane Orb still sucks, though. It remains to be seen how it all plays out. Mirrorball Magic Missile users will find the set handy. I actually can’t wait to see if I can squeeze this set in with my fake Reaper of Souls Critical Mass Wizard. Energy Twisters, yo.

Also, the set looks pretty hawt on a female Wizard. I’ll take the transmog at the very least.

Well, there you have it. It’s hard to say, for sure, just how viable these sets will be, since we are only viewing them in a vacuum and we also don’t know what other supporting Legendary items the developers may have in store for us. Until they unleash these items on us for testing, we are left to theorycraft what sort of greatness may be in our future. What do you all think? Any one set stand out as being better than the others? Perhaps one gives you hope for saving your favorite class? Are we on the right track to providing more options for builds? Let us know in the Comments section below!