2.5 Patch notes TL;DR

In which I will attempt to summarize meaningful lines out of the notes: (commentary by me in bold)

-We have a new league, Breach

-55 new uniques, 35 of which are specific to Breach
-New Cast When Channeling support gem
-Vaal Breach gem (no sign if corrupted version of Portal)
-Act 1 looks a little nicer

-Melee targeting improved Ok, so what? like we wanted to use melee anyways... :P
-Essence is in the core game at 1/6 the occurance rate (or so was said)
-Essence of Woe grants less ES
-Essence of Horror grants less attack speed on gloves
-Decay damaged reduced by 25% (Essence of Delirium)

-We have some new map mods

-Melee ranges increased Ok... but we still have to get pretty close, right?
-Masters will be easier to level
-Some monsters in endgame maps will now do more damage which ones, though?
-Chaos Warbands do less damage probably a good thing
-Lightning Warbands do more damage hope this doesn't affect the ball lightning thing they leave when they die
-Totem nodes buff across the tree more on this later
-Bleed and poison duration now affected by more modifiers than before

-Cospri's and Mjolner proc rate reduced by 60% (10/s -> 4/s) I don't think Mjolner needed that. Now both will do basically 60% less DPS. Ouch. RIP
-Rumi's block reduced by about 33% no longer always used flask?
-Facebreaker crit multi halved (90%-45%) no longer always bis for crit builds then
-Grand spectrum (elemental) now is 4% ele damage instead of 5% 10 jewels is now 400% instead of 500%
-Energy from within grants 2-9% less ES than before (3-6 vs 8-12) Small nerf for ES builds (like 1 6% node)

-Blade Vortex behaves a lot differently. It now hits 1.67 times per second, as a base, and hits 5 times per second with 20 stacks. Base damage is 70% of what it was before but deals 30% more damage per blade.
Old hit rate was 20 blades x 1s/blade x 1 eff = 20. New effectiveness is 600% more x 5 hits x 0.7 eff = 24.5. So the skill deals 22.5% MORE dps, with max stacks. With one stack it deals 0.7 base dmg x 1.67 hits/s x 1.1 increased hit rate x 1.3 more damage = 1.67 versus 1 base x 1 hit/s = 1 before. So it deals 67% more damage with one stack than before. You will have less frequent, more powerful hits with max stacks. This is actually a buff.
-SRS max reduced to 20 but damage increased to compensate. Performance buff but clearspeed nerf. Should require less cast speed/duration investment though
-Warchief totem does 10% less damage and has a little less range but all totem nodes are getting buffed
-Scorching Ray deals 10% more damage Skill will probably be top tier material now
-Spectres get +30% ele res there's a lot more minion buffs coming
-Decoy totem can't evade and has a 4s cooldown RIP decoy spamming as a defense
-Blade Flurry's more attack speed got reduced to 60%. AoE got reduced slightly damage unchanged, will range be retained with melee range increases?
-Blight does more damage, 35% more at high level but it's still worse than ED
-Totems, minions, and golems have better base ele res. = harder for them to die
-Golems and summon skeles do more damage but 2 x 0 = 0 (they will do a little more)
-Ranged attack totem deals more damage but probably still won't get used (unless a wander?)
-Minion and totem ele res gem grants 10-19% more ele damage I guess totems will do a lot more damage now....

-Trickster is tankier if you spend a lot of mana

-Raider gets a lot better bonuses, like 100% effects on kill and frenzy on hit abilites instead of just on kill.

-A character can now only gain 5 flask charges/s from crits, shared across flasks RIP perma uptime flask builds, big time. This translates to 1 charge/s per flask if all of them can recharge. So it will take about a minute to recharge Vinktar's (instead of a few s)
-The Harvest and Master Surgeon(now 100% to gain a charge from 15%) follow the above rule, and grant a charge to 1 flask instead of all. This kills wormblaster, and again, is part of a large gutting of the BV Pathfinder build




I could rant a little, but I'm going to withold for now.

Your thoughts?

-Savage

EDIT: fixed BV damage calcs. It's actually a DPS buff...

How exactly are summoners gonna be meta from this patch?

"

Enzari wrote:

How exactly are summoners gonna be meta from this patch?

There's a reason I put a ? by it.

Summoners are lurking under the radar atm. An aurabot modified slightly for summons can be extremely powerful (I had a friend that did this last league). With the increases to minion ele res, the survivability of the minions will go up which only strengthens these builds.

Blade Vortex

Was ((14+264)/2) * 20 = 2780
Now ((14+264)/2) * 0.7 * 7 * 5 = 3405.5

This is a nerf.

Number of hits reduced to 5 from 20
Damage increased by 22.5%

Raider is sick now. Perma frenzy charges without frenzy.

Which could mean perma phasing.

Could mean perma poison with snakebites also.

"

ropumar wrote:

Raider is sick now. Perma frenzy charges without frenzy.

Now just to think of a way to maintain Onslaught during boss fights with few/no adds... Looks like we'll have to sacrifice a flask slot for it. That unique silver flask might be good.

"

XerxezBreak wrote:

Blade Vortex

Was ((14+264)/2) * 20 = 2780
Now ((14+264)/2) * 0.7 * 7 * 5 = 3405.5

This is a nerf.

Number of hits reduced to 5 from 20
Damage increased by 22.5%

I was fixing that while you were typing.

Made incorrect assumption that BV was hitting 2x a second before when it was really just 1x.

"

zSavage wrote:

"

Enzari wrote:

How exactly are summoners gonna be meta from this patch?

There's a reason I put a ? by it.

Summoners are lurking under the radar atm. An aurabot modified slightly for summons can be extremely powerful (I had a friend that did this last league). With the increases to minion ele res, the survivability of the minions will go up which only strengthens these builds.

You do realize that their 40% elemental resist is up from 35%, chaos res is the only thing buffed kinda. It went from 0% to 20%. Spectres don't die in the first place, so their res is good, but useless endgame

My thought? not sure if many will care, but this game learning curve is getting steeper and steeper.... can't imagine a new player starting up and understanding all the hidden mechanics required to successfully make an end game build (mapping) even half viable....

I was here since closed beta, and missed few leagues, went I came back totems were not trigger-able, cries worked differently all together, and many more changes i had to learn to even run my old builds... after the changes to flasks, ms cool-downs for triggers in mjhoner and cosprils, BV hit calculations became much less intuitive, I think you know where im going with this.

I guess GGG already got enough players not to care about new ones, but from what i saw this league new players felt very lost and left out when they were asking questions in chat that nobody had time to really explain in details to them. This game is going in a very weird direction. The same direction that I go when I have a code that has some bugs but I make it work by bunch of sketchy lines instead of tackling the real problem, and after I'm done no one can clearly see what i did to make it work.....

P.S.

"

XerxezBreak wrote:

Blade Vortex

Was ((14+264)/2) * 20 = 2780
Now ((14+264)/2) * 0.7 * 7 * 5 = 3405.5

This is a nerf.

Number of hits reduced to 5 from 20
Damage increased by 22.5%

can you explain this "(14+264)/2" part? not that it matters since they are not changed but still curious

I like most of the changes. BV got nerfed on low charges and buffed on very high amount of charges, but with the changes to Flasks it lost one of the biggest reasons it was used.

"

but all totem nodes are getting buffed

Buffs to totem nodes hardly affect the damage of Warchief positively. Warchief totems already had the benefit of getting powerful weapon nodes and those nodes granted often ore damage than your average totem node. So since you already had a lot of increased physical damage (also you get the benefit from strength) this hardly matters. It is an overall nerf to Warchief Totems and a buff to all other totems.

"

-Blade Flurry's more attack speed got reduced to 60%. AoE got reduced slightly damage unchanged, will range be retained with melee range increases?

AoEs are not affected by Melee range increases. The only exception is Cyclone which gets a nice buff from this. For all other skills the only thing that changes is how far the center of the AoE could be away from your character (if you hit the ground with the skill like Ice Crash or Earthquake).

"

-Blight does more damage, 35% more at high level but it's still worse than ED

It might actually be possible to supplement ED with Blight now, but I'm not sure.

"

I guess totems will do a lot more damage now....

Nice for RF-Totems early on and might bring back a few of our classics :P. Good thing it doesn't affect Bladefall Totems.