What should the new Mosaic look like

Mosaic is going to get a rebalance (= nerf).

I have some ideas how to nerf it without crippling it completely (and without removing it from the game). It would stay a strong build, maybe on a par with the Hammerdin and Furyzon, but probably less powerful than some Warlock builds.

1st idea: Lower the "chance for finishing moves to not Consume charges" to 40%. So, with two Mosaics the Sin would lose 20% of the charges with each hit. After some hits, she would have to recharge the weapon. The Mosaic build would still be very strong if completely charged (boss-killing would still be very fast), but it would lose some damage after some hits and it would get much slower due to the constant recharging. The Sin would also have to focus more on defensive stats to survive this constant recharging. This nerf would lead to a mixure of the old Mosaic (no recharging if timer does not run out) and the old MA builds (recharging after each finishing move).

2nd idea: Mosaic keeps the 50% chance for finishing moves to not Consume charges but it loses almost all other stats and maybe even gets penalty stat. +2 skills? Gone. +20& ias? Gone. +8-15& cold/fire/lighning damage? Gone. maybe you even get -8-15& cold/fire/lighning damage. The runeword would look pretty weak on paper, but the build would still be very strong, since most of its power does not come from the runeword itself but from the skills. So, this would only be a rather small nerf.

3rd idea: The Sin gets a maximum Cap of 5 charges. Mosaic would become a Lighning only build ( Phoenix Strike + Claws of Thunder). The damage and utility Martial Arts Charge-up skills is lost. No more Blades of Ice, Fists of Fire, Tiger Strike and Cobra Strike. However, the two most powerfull Charge-up skills would be intact. Or you might even lower the damage numbers of Phoenix Strike and Claws of Thunder a little bit to make the nerf stronger. I don't know if this change could be (easily) implemented technically.

4th idea: Significantly lower the damage stats on all Martial Art Charge-up skills. Easily done, but the downside is that all the other non-Mosaic MA builds would completely die. So, many it is not the best of my four ideas.

Maybe a combination of these ideas is possible, e. g. lower damage numbers overall, less mods on the Mosaic runeword etc.


What do you think about my ideas?

How would you change it?

From what I understand, they already have decided on what to do (according to MrLlama). If that is the case though, why haven't they released it yet!? Who really knows.

I will say, removing the 100% chance to retain charges just kind of makes the item useless IMO. Imagine you are knee deep in a mob about to release all your charges and they just run out lmao.

However, if they did just put a timer on it or something so you knew you had to refresh periodically, that could work.

mikelessar wrote: 6 months ago

2nd idea: Mosaic keeps the 50% chance for finishing moves to not Consume charges but it loses almost all other stats and maybe even gets penalty stat. +2 skills? Gone. +20& ias? Gone. +8-15& cold/fire/lighning damage? Gone. maybe you even get -8-15& cold/fire/lighning damage. The runeword would look pretty weak on paper, but the build would still be very strong, since most of its power does not come from the runeword itself but from the skills. So, this would only be a rather small nerf.

Won't work.
Suppose we want to balance Enigma. We strip it of all properties except Teleport oskill. Additionally, to give some alternative, we introduce a new armor with +20 All Skills. I guarantee you that Enigma would still be #1 armor. It's doesn't just give you more (or even the most) DPS. Teleport is a completely new mechanic, an entire paradigm shift.
The same applies to Mosaic: the single Chance Not To Consume Charges affix defines this RW and makes it so OP that all the other bonuses are just a decoration.

mikelessar wrote: 6 months ago

3rd idea: The Sin gets a maximum Cap of 5 charges. Mosaic would become a Lighning only build ( Phoenix Strike + Claws of Thunder). The damage and utility Martial Arts Charge-up skills is lost. No more Blades of Ice, Fists of Fire, Tiger Strike and Cobra Strike. However, the two most powerfull Charge-up skills would be intact. (...) I don't know if this change could be (easily) implemented technically.

I like it. Or limit charge-up skills to one skill only at a time. So the sin would be limited to a single element at a time, and switching between them or to leech life/mana with Cobra Strike would require her to slow down and build up charges of a different skill again.
Implementation should be rather easy - just make charges of different skills overwrite each other, not stack, like, say, Frozen Armor/ Shiver Armor/ Chilling Armor.

did they say its getting nerfed? i dont see the need for it TBH unless they balance other things too including the warlock. from my understanding though mosiacs current issue is that it melts the servers and out gpus/cpus

nihilninja wrote: 6 months ago

did they say its getting nerfed? i dont see the need for it TBH unless they balance other things too including the warlock. from my understanding though mosiacs current issue is that it melts the servers and out gpus/cpus

They did say a rework is coming, yeah. And we can only assume (hope?) that they will balance out the Warlock a bit. He is a supreme being right now.

the 50% chance to not use charges should only apply to the last charged skill. so no charging up 4 skills, just 1. that's how i'd nerf it imo.

Neither of those works.

Lowering the chance to keep charges breaks the concept. That's what we had on the PTR. If you can't rely on charges staying up, you somewhat have to assume they won't and stick to the non-Mosaic rotation, rendering Mosaic largely pointless. The speeds are too fast to adjust to any of that on the fly.

And even if you remove every single other stat on the Claws, giving them absolutely nothing else but the Charge-preservation, they will still be just as OP. None of the stats are needed for anything or even noticeable. Hell, realistically, that would actually be a buff as dropping the IAS on them would make it easier to hit the target kick frames without going too fast.

The only real ways I can think of to nerf Mosaic sins without breaking the entire concept behind Mosaic is to not nerf Mosaic itself but to nerf the related skills/MA sins in a way that really only affects Mosaic sins. I.e. specifically target the "massive infinite overstacking and overproccing abuse".
Excluding of course something cheap, boring and uninspired like slapping "you do 40% less damage with everything" on each Mosaic.

You could give all of the damage charges a shared internal cooldown to prevent stacking 3+ at a time.
You could give each damage Charge a far longer cooldown so that even if you stack 3+ at a time, you only get 1 massive hit and then a pause of kicking without procs.
You could limit the number of max charges an assassin can have at a time to e.g. 4 to prevent stacking all Charge-ups at once (4 being "1 Charge-up capped and 1 base Charge left for utility/leech").
You could add a limiter to the finishers themselves, only allowing 1 proc of each Charge level per execution.
You could...really there are tons of options on how to address it on the assassin skill level that would nerf Mosaic sins by varying degrees. And most of them generally wouldn't be noticeable for any non-Mosaic sin as those rarely overstack to that extent anyways, due to the immediate consumption.

Technically, I guess you could tie any of those restrictions to "only if 2 mosaics are equipped" which would then (again, technically) make it a Mosaic nerf and not an MA/sin skill nerf. But that should ultimately be a hardly noticeable differentiation.