Skills that have to be nerfed in order to achieve a balanced game

The large majority of my two accounts are melee characters and I have tried every flavor of melee there is. Cyclone is so popular because it's one of the very few melee skills that isn't complete trash. Because you're always moving, your clearspeed is an order of magnitude higher than most other melee skills, even with way lower dps. Always being in motion also gives you a defensive edge, as you're dodging projectiles and causing monsters behind you to miss their attacks as you move out of their range. The only melee skills worth using right now are cyclone, flicker, GS, and reave. GS and reave have much higher AoE than most melee skills, which is why they are among the best choices. The last - flicker - solves melee's problem of not having immediate access to the mob by teleporting you directly next to it. Despite the functional superiority, the biggest factor in the popularity of these skills is the fun factor. Each of these plays quite a bit different from your standard melee variants, which happen to be incredibly boring. Static strike is only popular because it's new; it'll soon go the way of every other melee-splash styled attack.

So the problem is not that those skills are too good, it's that the alternatives are too bad.

I agree about tornado shot and kinetic blast (wands in general are fucking ridiculous and I have no idea how GGG has never done anything about them). Being able to clear 3 screens worth of enemies in one attack isn't what I would consider balanced.

I agree about incinerate, flameblast and discharge. The former two require incredibly little offensive nodes to function well, and the latter has become something utterly broken now that there is such a plethora of ways to cast it. It used to require CI (as life based VP was incredibly risky) and volls (assuming you weren't burning discharge, which is also very broken but only because of prolif [which is also why flameblast is OP]), leaving you with gimped ES and mana pools. It actually had a very large trade-off required to use it. About arc: I'm not sure. I haven't actually gotten to use it in depth. It seems very strong, but I don't know if it's broken.

Edit: In retrospect, I suppose flameblast and incinerate are meant to be like that because they have ramp up time. While that's understandable, I'm still not sure that they have the balance just right yet. Maybe the upcoming nerf to cwdt will shift the paradigm a bit.

I disagree about blood rage though. I've made quite a few non-shavs low-life melee, and they're honestly quite lackluster considering what I'm sacrificing. When you have to invest halfway into life nodes, life regen, a lot into ES, and dedicate a large part of your gear to acquiring chaos res, you're not left with a whole lot of points to spend on offense. Blood rage is the only redeeming factor of such a build, usually giving marginally higher dps than its life based counterparts with the cost of quite lower defense. The problem isn't blood rage, it's the ability to go low-life without actually having a downside (shavs). It would be a very shortsighted move to take away low-life melee's only benefit because of one OP as fuck item.

Kinetic blast I'm on the fence about. When it's backed by big damage it can blow up rooms like crazy. Big dmg is hard to get and costly. Single target it's quite frankly horrible, like, worse than arc. It sometimes seems to do literally nothing. No one ever talks about its mana cost, which is *massive*. Perhaps the kneejerk brigade will nerf it back to being more horrible, watch everyone go back to power siphon linked with chain (I could replace this with TS and split arrow btw) and ponder whether there might have been a better way. I hope not.

My major problem with the whole post is the assumptions such as 'cyclone used more often, nerf back to normal melee level!' (wait, doesn't normal melee suck according to pretty much every post made around here?...). That and the general trend towards nerfing everything (and requesting nerfs to everything) to the point it will *only* be good with a 6l rather than being able to do quite well on a 4 link and be quite awesome on a 6l. 6-link is, after all, according to Chris at least, what everyone should aspire for rather than require?

I'd encourage everyone to look a little closer into skills and play with them before making blanket statements about 'OPieOP'. You played with a party and every melee guy was cyclone. Perhaps most other melee skills suck rather than cyclone way OP.

I get the sense you're trying to make a list of 'on-trend' complaints with a few of yours added in, without perhaps having done the due diligence.

*Removed

There is no feedback here.

Clickbait troll clickbait trolled the community into providing feedback on their behalf.

Shame on you.

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CanHasPants wrote:

There is no feedback here.

Clickbait troll clickbait trolled the community into providing feedback on their behalf.

Shame on you.

+1

Peace,

-Boem-

Incinerate: the max DPS on this skill is good, the problem is how quickly you can get there. 4 casts per stack is just too easy to get done too quickly. I'd say make it 5 casts instead of 4 and you'd be in a good spot (although I'd prefer 20 stacks of 15% each, 1 stack per cast, rather than always going by 100% increments). Nothing else about the skill needs to change.

Flameblast's core problem is its initial AoE is too large. "Dabbing" FB easily hits small groups when it should be sniping single targets. It needs a smaller base AoE, but the same ending AoE. Possibly another damage nerf, but the main problem as damage goes is...

Elemental Proliferation: needs a "less Burning Damage" penalty. A significant one.

Romira's Banquet is an abomination which should be removed from the game. Without it, both Discharge and Mjolner do decent, not OP, damage; with the ring in the game, balancing them becomes impossible. No direct changes to Discharge or Mjolner are required.

Other than Tornado Shot, I feel the other skills listed in the OP are fine.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Elemental Proliferation: needs a "less Burning Damage" penalty. A significant one.

I'd start at 70% effectiveness and reevaluate there. Probably not enough, 50% is probably about right, but most AOEs are around 70% so seems like it would be a good spot.

Also the range is just WAY too large at high lvls. I mean lvl 20 is 31 while ice nova is 30.

Melee doesnt need nerfs

Probably something like this for Ele Prolif:

Base radius to 21 for all levels
Bonus per 1% quality: 2% larger proliferation area (29 at q20, 30 at q23)
Glvl1: 50% less Burning Damage, 50% less Chill/Freeze/Shock duration
Glvl21: 30% less Burning Damage, 30% less Chill/Freeze/Shock duration

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vangrandson wrote:

I have never bothered myself with playing a melee character however what i do see in party play is that the only melee skills used are either static strike or cyclon because they are stronger than the rest if the melee skills and therefor they have to be brought in line with the other melee skils.

i dont think this is an informed position to be commenting on nerfing skills from tbh.