GG sins. Blizz did it again.

BillyMaysed wrote: 1 year ago

MA sins, even post D2R improvements, still sucked balls compared to most lol. This is incredible and i REALLY hope they either don't nerf it or, if they do, they don't nerf it too hard so it at least stays as a viable option .

Mostly agreed.

Prior to this, DT sins were already insane. Just not for 99.9999% of people as the gear to make that work was basically impossible to get. Anyone who's ever tried to get a perfect base for White or Delirium or the like knows how rare those are. Now imagine that..except it also has to be magic and can't be the non-excep/elite version and only one of the various claw types and both affixes have to match and then

Larzuk needs to not be an ass and actually give you 2 socks. Twice. And that's just the weapons..

With this..I mean, as is, this is just dumb, honestly. But it is fun. And the light show is just glorious. So I'm kinda hoping they do bring it in line a bit but leave the concept and general viability in tact.

The more I think about this though and the more I played around with it, the more I question how you could even balance it. The entire design of MA sins is balanced too much around the

Charge-up as a trade-off to the rather hefty impact of a fully charged finisher. Not only in the case of talon triggering literally all of them over and over but even in the case of "only" tail with tiger. Or tail triggering everything as an in-between alternative. All three are frankly just absurdly strong without the trade-off of having to re-

Charge. And yet, if you re-introduce that trade-off, you're basically removing the entire point of Mosaic and pushing MA sins right back to where they were.

Lower the proc chance again and you effectively remove the entirety of it as it goes back to the same "can't judge in time, can't rely on it" we had on the PTR. Remove the timer refresh and you just make it annoying AF to deal with while still leaving a 15 sec godmode window for the tiger/DT variant (which is sufficient for everything you come up against). Balance the

Charge skill numbers/effects around always proccing and you basically render non-Mosaic MA sins completely pointless.
So...kind of a tough one here.

Though I will say it doesn't work nearly as well (as compared to the godmode approach) in the suggestions I've seen from youtubers and the like so far, as usual, so I kinda doubt there'll be enough well-built MA sins around to make blizz even consider looking at them again. Which is fine with me I guess since that'll just mean even a reduced hybrid version would remain more than viable (final building/testing of that one will have to wait until tomorrow though).

As someone who hated Blizzard's excuses for nerfing graphical effects and adding casting delays to allegedly address video lag back in the day, and as a current proud owner of an EVGA RTX 3080 Ti, I gladly welcome the screen spam.

Considering who's in charge of this product, I have my doubts as to whether they will let this slide because I remember D3 class balance being excessively micromanaged during its first couple of years. I hope it does stick though because MA sins have been long neglected and ATVI doesn't understand subtlety. Things are usually either OVER 9000(000)!!! or nerfed to oblivion.

Isn't this the first build which can use the main skill and all it's synergies at once?

I'm glad that the MA sin is finally viable endgame but it's sad that they did that with giving us one OP build.
They could have put the %to not consume charges and refresh timer onto skills.

Claw Mastery for instance, or make it a synergy that gets 1% chance for every hard skill point in the MA tree.

I guess technically you could do it before by just charging everything on each group quick enough...it was just never worth it as you had to keep re-charging and only got 1 proc out of it. So yeah, the first viable build to do it with.

Dual Mosaic’s mechanics should be multiplicative, not additive, so the chance not to consume charges is 1 - (1-0.5)*(1-0.5) = 0.75 instead of 1. MA build was based on the rotation between chargers and finishers, and Mosaic reduced it into one skill spam.

Makes the second one a bit less interesting than the others. Could do also 33% and additive. With one, 1/3 to save your

Charge, with 2, 2/3 to save it. Means you won't need most of the time to recharge but still lose often enough.

The problem being that anything <100% leaves you with the same idiotic behavior you had on PTR. Sins attack too fast to make that actually really reactively feasible. So if you have <100%, you have to guesstimate your rotation, assuming you lose the charges, even when you don't. That's the whole reason Mosaic "needed" that buff to 100% on DW and the whole reason noone is likely gonna be silly enough to just use 1 Mosaic.
Anything less basically breaks that entire new mechanic/behavior again.

Beyond that though, it is a numbers game.
If you remove the auto-refresh and just have the combined 100% chance to not lose a

Charge, you still lose your charges in the end. But you actually know when, meaning you can react and plan your rotations accordingly.

That could then be further balanced by adjusting the time to expiration. Say add a -3 (or 5 or whatever) duration penalty to Mosaic instead of the auto-refresh and you're suddenly looking at not losing charges on finishers but only keeping them for 5 or 9 or whatever seconds instead of the normal 15. That could then be tuned to take damage to more sensible levels, all while keeping a rotation that can actually be optimized and while preventing perma-stacking of everything at the same time.

Given, for me personally, either one would kill the MA idea as I always found the entire

Charge concept beyond annoying to deal with so expiration and/or any using up of them to me = no MA sin. But that's obviously purely a matter of personal taste and preference and not a question of balancing.

The reason I think building charges is so annoying is that it's tied to finding an enemy, attacking it in melee range (with

Claws) and successfully hitting.
Charges could have been a simple prebuff you could apply any time (even in town) and it wouldn't have made it broken.
Then Mosaic could simply be a "regenerate charges automatically" mechanic and it would make other finishers than

Dragon Talon sensible to use with it.

Charges are supposed to be a resource mechanic and Mosaic simply makes that resource infinite.
Compare it to Zerg larva in Starcraft: Imagine if there was a mechanic that would give hatcheries infinite larva, heads would explode...

Was theorycrafting last night. Think about this...

PS

Charge 1 + FoF

Charge 3 + Cobra + Tiger

Fire Sunder & Flickering Flame

Even just a single point into Talon and a point into

Dragon Flight (which adds another 1000% ED) for Single Target focus

Take

Fade, Claw Block, and wear a Hustle to proc +oevade --> walk around = quite literally Invincible

All in, this delivers arguably the highest DPS output of any build in the game dominating even the CS Zon

Let us also not forget that in 2.4, they changed the finishing moves for MA Sins to also make it hit 100% of the time just like

Smite...

This is just one of many absurd builds

Only downside of that is the

Meteor fall time from PS1. By the time that finally comes down, light/cold/everything variations have long moved on through the next 3 packs.

When the comparison is "instant aoe Death",

Meteor fall time is inexcusably long.

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

Only downside of that is the

Meteor fall time from PS1. By the time that finally comes down, light/cold/everything variations have long moved on through the next 3 packs.

When the comparison is "instant aoe Death",

Meteor fall time is inexcusably long.

10000% this LOL

Working on a viable (understatement of the year) hybrid build atm, pushing shadow over MA cuz..well, why not.

And ignoring the bonkers survivability, this entire concept is about as unintuitive as it gets.

The more you improve your character, the worse it gets.

Get more IAS -> dmg slows down (see Th3ory's hit delay topic as to why).

Get better (faster)

Claws -> dmg slows down (same as above).

Get more MA skills or invest points into

Dragon Talon -> runs slow down (massively). Even on P8, everything dies so fast that my current 7-kick talon lasts more than twice as long as it needs to. And since you can't abort it..you basically double your time per pack by being "too good" while even P8 mobs just die too fast...without focusing on your actual dmg tree...I mean, come on...

Depressing.
Just depressing.
P8, focused fully on utility over dmg on gear, lvl 1 talon still ends up at 4 kicks which is at least 1 too many, if not 2. Wtf?!

It really is a build of opposites.
Stuff that should make you better just makes you (far) worse.

And yet, stuff that everyone just hates actually makes you better.
Remember that

Shadow Master everyone hates so much because it converts 1-2 adds in your runs? Well guess what..those converted adds last just long (and short) enough to bridge the >15sec gap between popping the last seal in CS and Dia,

Baal waves or W5 to

Baal himself. So just flight onto the converted add as an interim trigger and start on any wave and any boss with the same full charges and never have to recharge anything because nothing drops off. Ever.
If you get unlucky (oh, the irony) and nothing gets converted, teleporting out of CS for a river add or out of throne room for a WSK3 add does the job just fine as well so Enigma is still fairly GG for this whole thing, despite

Dragon Flight replacing it for the most part.

Far as I recall, this is actually the first build I properly test exclusively on P8 because any lower player counts just result in

Dragon Flight instantly killing everything so you can't even evaluate things like talon.

This is just wrong...


Disclaimer:
Honestly not sure what the gap between

Baal waves is..ran CS first and that got me in the habit of blowing up converts pre-Dia as the seal-to-Diablo gap is sadly just above 15 seconds.

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

P8, focused fully on utility over dmg on gear, lvl 1 talon still ends up at 4 kicks which is at least 1 too many, if not 2. Wtf?!

It really is a build of opposites.
Stuff that should make you better just makes you (far) worse.

On that note, using

Dragon Claw doesn't make a noticeable difference for me, even while it should.
According to the calculator it gets 5 frame attacks with BoS and fast

Claws, which means you are animation locked for 10 frames instead of ~20.

Watching various twitch channels last hour or two, everyone is rolling assassin for S3

I wanted to tinker with some of this stuff, but I can't seem to be able to make them in SP. =( Am I missing something?

Also, good luck everyone in ladder!

GooberGirl wrote: 1 year ago

I wanted to tinker with some of this stuff, but I can't seem to be able to make them in SP. =( Am I missing something?

Also, good luck everyone in ladder!

What worked for me is creating the bases and the runes in the hero editor and making the rw in game.

Insomnia wrote: 1 year ago

What worked for me is creating the bases and the runes in the hero editor and making the rw in game.

Old school hero editor?

I've tried doing that, but I've been trying with some of the online ones and dropping the runes into sockets in game. Hmm... Maybe I am using the wrong editor and it's flagging something in my save, or I'm doing something faulty along the line.

I'll have to try again sometime. Thanks!

man i wouldnt mind testing this out in single player but im unfamiliar with hero editor

is there like a website i could just like download somebodies character save with everything all ready to go?

i kinda want to get a first hand feel for how this build plays out before i invest the time starting over. and i dont have any offline characters. at best i was thinking of maybe just grinding out ladder enough to get my 2 Mosaic

Claws and then bring them into non ladder to properly gear up with. but by the time ladder ends i'm sure they'll probably nerf it somehow anyways.

Snakecharmed wrote: 1 year ago

As someone who hated Blizzard's excuses for nerfing graphical effects and adding casting delays to allegedly address video lag back in the day, and as a current proud owner of an EVGA RTX 3080 Ti, I gladly welcome the screen spam.

i just want to see if diablo 2 will be the one game to bring my new 4070ti to its knees.

never thought i'd say that about a game that was released like 20 years ago lol. but from what i understand this build causes performance issues for some people.