Updated 2.5 Patch Notes - Sunder Charms Nerfed (except for cold sorcs)

https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/diablo2 ... 5-now-live

Blizzard wrote:

Sundering Charms

Conviction and

Lower Resist effectiveness will be 1/5 effective even after a Sundering Charm's applied effects. (This change will go into effect on October 6 once Ladder Season Two begins).

Developer’s Note: We have heard much of the community's thoughts on how the new Sunder Charms work with the sorceresses

Cold Mastery ability. Looking at the percentage of monsters that are cold immune, the trade-offs of having to gain and equip a new grand charm, and re-checking our damage output, we feel the current behavior of

Cold Mastery is not significantly more powerful than many of the other abilities affected by Sunder and does not need to change at this time.

Hmm, a step in the right direction I think but

Cold Mastery should be penalized too. They already have tons of edges over other classes, I don't think they need more.

True, but I'm sad, that the auradins are dead now, before they even lived..

Ganonvillage wrote: 2 years ago

True, but I'm sad, that the auradins are dead now, before they even lived..

Why? Dreamers are great. They don't even need that charm.

3 days before ladder 2 and the back and forth about the new sundering charms and now this seems to me that the developpers dont know what they are doing.

On one hand they introduce something to allow every classes to deal a bit of damage to would-be immune monsters...
On the other hand, they modifying old game mechanic* to nerf the most powerful gear to deal real damage at the end game.

And yet they dont nerf the Sorceres'

Cold Mastery?
Are they trying a create a new "Next Ladder" specialy optimised build once again like the Fohdin was for 2.4?
And fuck any others builds theorycrafted by the community this past month?
Two steps forward one step backward...
* IF enemy resistance is 99% or below, then

Conviction Aura work at full effect.
EXCEPT not really if you use the sundering charm effect that reduce enemy resistance to 95% for immune monsters.
Making the game even quirkier Blizzard?
MrLlama thoughs on the

Cold Mastery:

People: Cold sorc will be OP.
Blizz: Ok let nerf Pally and Necro.

If they treat

Cold Mastery in the same fashion it would be fine I think.
Although I'm still not sure what to think about something game breaking lime sunder charms in general.

I am not sure I understand this. So if a moster is not affected by the Sunder charm (less or equal to 95 resist) the Infinity will work at full power for this monster, but if it is affected by the sunder charm, Infinity works at one fifth, is this what they are saying?

k88lech wrote: 2 years ago

I am not sure I understand this. So if a moster is not affected by the Sunder charm (less or equal to 95 resist) the Infinity will work at full power for this monster, but if it is affected by the sunder charm, Infinity works at one fifth, is this what they are saying?

Yes

Verband wrote: 2 years ago

Ganonvillage wrote: 2 years ago

True, but I'm sad, that the auradins are dead now, before they even lived..

Why? Dreamers are great. They don't even need that charm.

Yea, but the thing was, that before the recent patch, the enemies would be guaranteed at a res of -55%... w/o facets etc.
And now they will be at +65% res w/o facets etc.
I think I was just so hyped for that experience, that I was even more bummed, when the nerf struck
I still think it's viable.

I just remember playing a Dreamer 10 years ago, and it would easily rip through anything. With Grief and Fortitude, it was phys + lightning.

Tetra wrote: 2 years ago

3 days before ladder 2 and the back and forth about the new sundering charms and now this seems to me that the developpers dont know what they are doing.

Plot twist: they didn't know what they were doing all along.

So basically an Infinity merc remains the better option to break lightning immunes as opposed to the sunder charm.

k88lech wrote: 2 years ago

I am not sure I understand this. So if a moster is not affected by the Sunder charm (less or equal to 95 resist) the Infinity will work at full power for this monster, but if it is affected by the sunder charm, Infinity works at one fifth, is this what they are saying?

Not specifically sunder charms but immunities.

Since the olden days, when a monster was immune to an element and was then hit be either

Conviction or lower res (or both), either of those would only work at 1/5th of its normal effect. That's why there's so many immunes you can't break with just those because at 1/5th, they're often times not quite enough to take them below 100%. IF they do break however, all other -res effects (facets,

Cold Mastery and the like) do work at full effect. If not, those other effects just don't do anything as they can't break immunities.

Sunder charms initially flat out made a monster "not immune" as a first and separate step. Because of that, when

Conviction or lower res got applied, they followed the rules for non-immune mobs, meaning they hit with their full effectiveness.

Now - as indeed proof of having no clue I guess - sunder charms got shifted to basically hitting in the same step as

Conviction/lower res, meaning they all hit a still immune mob, taking it to 95% (sunder) and then lower by 1/5th of whatever your (combined)

Conviction and/or lower res value is, all without any actual real open play-testing for proper feedback.
They're basically just making stuff up as they go along, as always.

All that having been said, personally, I don't see the issue with

Cold Mastery remaining as is.
It will get a new advantage at mid-levels of gear in that you can do your full damage on immunes, opening up more (all) areas to "full cold performance".
At the same time however, there's a reason folks have traditionally used lightning sorcs over cold sorcs even when farming areas with no cold immunes. The mere fact that blizz still has a cooldown means your farming speed has a hard

Cap as you can only kill so many mobs/that big of an area at a time before having to wait whereas lightning just plows on. As a result, once you reach true end-game levels of gear, I for one still fully expect most sorcs to stick to light over cold. Even more so since the massive

Nova buffs last patch making that a top-end build again.

What's annoying the hell out of me here though is the fact that being able to take res that low actually opened things up to a lot of other builds that traditionally pretty much just failed. They're now back to being kinda crap, without ever seeing the light of day on live. So much for variety increasing...
Plus it makes trapsins far less flexible once again as they still can't even stack a single % of -res apart from the now nerfed again Infinity/lower res wands. Was actually looking forward to speccing mine out of fireblast. But oh well...

Ravoc wrote: 2 years ago

So basically an Infinity merc remains the better option to break lightning immunes as opposed to the sunder charm.

Depends on the mobs. Infinity = -85 = -17 on immunes. With sunder hard forcing to 95%, that means that Infinity is better on mobs that start with 111 or less, the same at 112 and worse at 113+. Basically, that's 110 and less because base res on mobs always comes in 5s.

Out of the Infinity-breakable light immunes, you have x at y res:
5 at 105
8 at 110
5 at 115

Anything higher than that (7 more) can't be broken with Infinity, making sunder infinitely better. So basically, sunder beats Infinity on 12 immune types, Infinity wins on 13.

Though in either case, the combination remains ideal as even at 105 (best case), Infinity only takes them to 88% whereas the combination of sunder + Infinity will always take them to 78%, no matter what.

I wanted to share a video I could deploy quickly tonight when I finally had free time.

Most players/forums are focused on the "nerfing" of Sundered but missed a surgical and significant 'silent' update embedded within the notes - the introduction to the Desecrated TCs that, for now, has broken Sundered Drop Rates.

I hope you all found this helpful - time will tell if they amend/modify before S2 hits Thursday.

Th3ory wrote: 2 years ago

I wanted to share a video I could deploy quickly tonight when I finally had free time.

Most players/forums are focused on the "nerfing" of Sundered but missed a surgical and significant 'silent' update embedded within the notes - the introduction to the Desecrated TCs that, for now, has broken Sundered Drop Rates.

I hope you all found this helpful - time will tell if they amend/modify before S2 hits Thursday.

Wow, just wow. I predicted all along that this dev team was incompetent and/or reckless, but this is beyond what I could have imagined.

I am so glad I am officially bowing out of ladder season 2 and this mess. I'm taking my talents to South Beach non-ladder for one more season and I think I'm done with any major effort in this game after that.

This is software development malpractice. I swear ATVI is competing with Riot for the worst game studio of all the games I've played.

Can someone explain about Desecrated TCs. What is the different before and after.

Th3ory wrote: 2 years ago

I wanted to share a video I could deploy quickly tonight when I finally had free time.

Most players/forums are focused on the "nerfing" of Sundered but missed a surgical and significant 'silent' update embedded within the notes - the introduction to the Desecrated TCs that, for now, has broken Sundered Drop Rates.

I hope you all found this helpful - time will tell if they amend/modify before S2 hits Thursday.

Well, they did specifically say they're just rushing random crap for the sake of doing something..

Bumping the drop rate actually kinda makes sense, considering how "obligatory" those charms will be and how they're basically just a worse version of the "remove immunities" idea. Evening the playing field doesn't really work when they're nigh impossible to get. Every single champ+ though...well, makes the perfect ones easy to get as well I suppose (and seems an obvious bug/failure in implementation).

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Ravoc wrote: 2 years ago

So basically an Infinity merc remains the better option to break lightning immunes as opposed to the sunder charm.

Depends on the mobs. Infinity = -85 = -17 on immunes. With sunder hard forcing to 95%, that means that Infinity is better on mobs that start with 111 or less, the same at 112 and worse at 113+. Basically, that's 110 and less because base res on mobs always comes in 5s.

Out of the Infinity-breakable light immunes, you have x at y res:
5 at 105
8 at 110
5 at 115

Anything higher than that (7 more) can't be broken with Infinity, making sunder infinitely better. So basically, sunder beats Infinity on 12 immune types, Infinity wins on 13.

Though in either case, the combination remains ideal as even at 105 (best case), Infinity only takes them to 88% whereas the combination of sunder + Infinity will always take them to 78%, no matter what.

For non-breakable immunes, the sunder charm is the only way, but I meant for breakable immunes.

If the merc breaks it with

Conviction, your griffon's, Crescent Moon and facets will all still work at full effect; but as soon as you carry a sunder charm, all that gear is only 20% effective vs original immunes. Or am I reading the patch notes wrong?

Ravoc wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Ravoc wrote: 2 years ago

So basically an Infinity merc remains the better option to break lightning immunes as opposed to the sunder charm.

Depends on the mobs. Infinity = -85 = -17 on immunes. With sunder hard forcing to 95%, that means that Infinity is better on mobs that start with 111 or less, the same at 112 and worse at 113+. Basically, that's 110 and less because base res on mobs always comes in 5s.

Out of the Infinity-breakable light immunes, you have x at y res:
5 at 105
8 at 110
5 at 115

Anything higher than that (7 more) can't be broken with Infinity, making sunder infinitely better. So basically, sunder beats Infinity on 12 immune types, Infinity wins on 13.

Though in either case, the combination remains ideal as even at 105 (best case), Infinity only takes them to 88% whereas the combination of sunder + Infinity will always take them to 78%, no matter what.

For non-breakable immunes, the sunder charm is the only way, but I meant for breakable immunes.

If the merc breaks it with

Conviction, your griffon's, Crescent Moon and facets will all still work at full effect; but as soon as you carry a sunder charm, all that gear is only 20% effective vs original immunes. Or am I reading the patch notes wrong?

I believe you are.

Conviction and lower res will work at 1/5th, same as they always have, everything else (facets, griffon's, ...) will still work at full effect. So sunder charms don't make things worse, they merely make Infinity "less better".