Ladder Season 14 and Patch 3.2

Trang Oul wrote: 3 hours ago

[..]
If it's a spell, it shouldn't apply weapon damage, like, say, Sorceress spells. Otherwise, if it does apply weapon damage, durability should deplete as usual.
Yet another bad design decision to cater the crowd.

To be fair, that "half and half" approach isn't new. "As usual" doesn't apply all too often in D2 as it is a game that's always been full of exceptions and special individual rulings for all sorts of skills, for better or for worse.

Blade Fury for example follows the same concept of "use weapon dmg but don't drop durability".

Though personally, I'd love to see ES become a proper, full-on weapon attack. Not so much to enforce the loss of durability but rather to make weapon attack procs work with it, which they currently don't. Might need some additional nerfing after that, sure, but having 10 blades capable of each proccing various trigger effects could be quite entertaining and might make some currently completely unused weapon choices actually potentially very interesting.

Schnorki wrote: 56 minutes ago

Though personally, I'd love to see ES become a proper, full-on weapon attack. Not so much to enforce the loss of durability but rather to make weapon attack procs work with it, which they currently don't. Might need some additional nerfing after that, sure, but having 10 blades capable of each proccing various trigger effects could be quite entertaining and might make some currently completely unused weapon choices actually potentially very interesting.

If

Echoing Strike was changed this way,

Multiple Shot should as well. In case of the latter, only the two central arrows proc. I'm not sure if it's a bug or a conscious design for balance reasons, but having 24 procs would be wild!
Maybe ES should work with procs, but also be limited to 1-2 procs per cast?

Trang Oul wrote: 30 minutes ago

Schnorki wrote: 56 minutes ago

Though personally, I'd love to see ES become a proper, full-on weapon attack. Not so much to enforce the loss of durability but rather to make weapon attack procs work with it, which they currently don't. Might need some additional nerfing after that, sure, but having 10 blades capable of each proccing various trigger effects could be quite entertaining and might make some currently completely unused weapon choices actually potentially very interesting.

If

Echoing Strike was changed this way,

Multiple Shot should as well. In case of the latter, only the two central

Arrows proc. I'm not sure if it's a bug or a conscious design for balance reasons, but having 24 procs would be wild!
Maybe ES should work with procs, but also be limited to 1-2 procs per cast?

That would defeat the purpose of my thought behind it though.

If you look at MS, thanks to the fanning out and such, even if all

Arrows could proc, you still largely get one proc per target which typically doesn't change much about how attractive certain procs are/aren't.

If you simply enabled them for ES however - without an artificial limiter - you could get up to 10 of the same proc on the same target per cast. For many of the desirable ones (e.g. curses) that won't make too much of a difference beyond upping the proc chance as they'll simply overwrite each other. For some however, where "maybe 1 proc per cast/attack" just isn't worth ever using that weapon, being able to get up to 10 could suddenly make those options interesting.

But yeah, as I said, some nerfing around it might be necessary as well for those procs where it would become quite excessively good (e.g. adding a penalty for the effectiveness of crushing blow).