Please consider this alternate nerf to Frost Wall

because kinetic blast is just broken powerful. there is nothing wrong with power siphon. but when you compare it other option (kb) it is just weaker

people accept gains easily. but will reject any idea of a loss. kb should have never been released with the power it has. but it had. and now players expect nothing less than this absurd level of power.

noone would have complained if kb got released initialy with 50% damage it has right now. NOBODY! and we wouldnt have these unreasonable complains steaming solely from one skill being just twice as good as other options.

"

BundesHeinz wrote:

I've never played a Wander and am just thinking of trying that out sometime, soI really don't have clue. But, reading this, I wondered: why isnt Power Siphon a good single target?
Doesn't it have a lot of dmg effectinveness and a built in cull?

It's fine, but it suffers from the same problems as 4L Barrage and Frenzy setups:

PS+3*DPS-supports is only ~20% more efficient at single target than your KB+GMP+Pierce+3*DPS-supports, which makes it hard to justify its inclusion at the loss of a 4L.

Of course you can swap KB+GMP for PS+[some DPS support] when taking on bosses, but the entire point of this thread is that this is a crude way of solving single target and wanders shouldn't be forced into that.

Unlike Barrage, for which GMP functions as a positive damage multiplier, you also cannot incorporate PS into your 6L setup to effectively gain 2x5L. Assuming that GGG doesn't make Frost Wall non-piercable or releases a new wander skill in the short term, this has been the best single target fix I've been able to come up with. It grants at-the-ready single target damage, and preparing for the really tough bossfights is then minimized to a single gem swap of KB -> DPS support (ICD, most likely).

---

Alright, we've now established that neither Barrage, Frenzy, nor Power Siphon are worth it in a 4L. Who's going to propose Elemental Hit and exhaust the list of options?

[edit]

@Sid, come on man. Why do you keep insisting that KB is broken powerful when we're talking about single-target options and we've all accepted and moved on from the stupidly broken KB+FW interaction?

I haven't yet seen KB against (harder) Bosses without the FW mechanic. but if it really is that lackluster, I actually think your proposed Idea of making FW unpierceable is a pretty good one.
It seems intuitive and provides a neat skill-interaction.

Balance-wise, as I said, I've pretty much got no idea...

"

BundesHeinz wrote:

I haven't yet seen KB against (harder) Bosses without the FW mechanic. but if it really is that lackluster, I actually think your proposed Idea of making FW unpierceable is a pretty good one.
It seems intuitive and provides a neat skill-interaction.

Balance-wise, as I said, I've pretty much got no idea...

KB against harder bosses, assuming no environmental walls, is fucking atrocious. Like, really bad.

With environmental walls / non-piercable FW, the damage is roughly equivalent to a 6L Barrage setup, assuming that around 30% of the explosions happen on the boss.

because the issue is relative power. power siphon is a very good skill same as frenzy and barrage. and noone would have claimed otherwise before kb release. but kb got released doing absurd damage just because.

if kb had half of current damage output your question wouldnt be justified. it is all relative and what makes a difference is where we set the 'norm'. for me power siphon is the norm. the expected power level. comparable to other skills accross varoius playstyles etc

for you kb is the norm and you want other skills to match it.

in short: tour question hinges on expected power level. i call current kb performance and clear speed absurd and will defend this opinion. kb spoiled players and set the benchmark waaaay to high.

so for me the single target options are ok. but eclipsed by OPasF.. KB (and im not even talking about frost wall abuse scenario).

"

sidtherat wrote:

because the issue is relative power. power siphon is a very good skill same as frenzy and barrage. and noone would have claimed otherwise before kb release. but kb got released doing absurd damage just because.

if kb had half of current damage output your question wouldnt be justified. it is all relative and what makes a difference is where we set the 'norm'. for me power siphon is the norm. the expected power level. comparable to other skills accross varoius playstyles etc

for you kb is the norm and you want other skills to match it.

in short: tour question hinges on expected power level. i call current kb performance and clear speed absurd and will defend this opinion. kb spoiled players and set the benchmark waaaay to high.

so for me the single target options are ok. but eclipsed by OPasF.. KB (and im not even talking about frost wall abuse scenario).

We may have a misunderstanding here. I'm saying that 4L single target options aren't worth it because they don't significantly outperform KB at single-target. I don't say that to imply that KB is good enough and hence 4L options aren't needed.

I say that because KB is really, really fucking bad at single target.

Yes, if you halve KB's damage effectiveness, the relative power of those 4L options will increase. However, they would still not be significantly better than something that's horrible. Ergo, their inclusion as a 4L would still not be worth it, and you're still forced to swap into a separate 6L to do the rough bossfights.

KB's powerlevel has nothing to do with this discussion.

Perhaps I should elaborate. This problem is systemic to wanders and would hold regardless of whether my main 6L is KB+Pierce or PS+Chain.

The problem that wanders have is that they have no way to scale their single-target damage outside of stacking support gems. All wander skills, when applied to a single target, are vanilla attack skills with ~150% dmg effectiveness.

Now, we cannot use DoT effects on bosses. Our initial hit damage isn't high enough to make Bleed worthwhile, even if you can apply bleed (no Puncture) and you're using a mirror wand for the phys damage. Wanders inherently rely on ele scaling for their damage, so Poison also doesn't work. Even with ele scaling, Ignite would require way too much investment to scale to useful levels, and that's if we could even get the initial fire damage high enough.

In comparison, both Bleed and Poison are options for 1H melee builds, which grants those builds an option to have effective 4L single target. Furthermore, these latter builds have access to a much wider range of skills, some of which are actually purposefully designed as single-target options.


Both bows and 2H melee weapons have access to a second 6L, which makes it much easier to get a useful single-target skill. They also get specific active skills for that.

Spellcasters have access to both a second 6L (on staves), and, they too, have skills that are specifically designed for single-target.


... Which leaves us with wanders. They don't get a second 6L, they don't get to scale damage through DoT, and they don't get specifically designed skills. The consequence is that they just cannot scale their single-target damage to useful levels within the link constraints that they have. This is regardless of what your main AoE skill is; wanders cannot get single-target to work on a 4L.

You may argue that we do get insane map-clear, which is true, and that you think that we therefore shouldn't be able to do bosses very well. If you think that this should be the fundamental limitation of wanders, fine. I don't agree with it, but that's an opinion you can have. Go make a thread about it.

The problem, however, is that we do actually have perfectly fine single-target, it just requires us to sidestep the link-limitation by keeping that skill on swap in our inventory. To me this feels crude, and I want to see these single-target skills actually incorporated into builds, rather than into inventories. That's all I'm arguing for.

1h melee characters are in the same position then as your wanders.
And you know, unlike you they have a shitty time clearing maps usually as well.

Don't see why you can't scale poison on a wander with added chaos + wand and projectile nodes since they aren't physical damage specific.

In fact, I would argue it is easier to scale poison on a wander than it is on a 1h melee character because of the double dipping nodes & massive base crit of wands.


Also GGG is perfectly fine with gem swapping as far as I know, how is it any different than me changing my flasks when going against Atziri or some bosses?

"

Mannoth wrote:

1h melee characters are in the same position then as your wanders.

Well, except they get purposefully designed skills and typically have more physical oriented weapons. Sticking to the Bleed/Poison scenario, Puncture/Viper Strike turn 4L's into effective 5L compared to wanders, since they don't need to link a poison support (bleed is even more difficult, we can't get that through gems).

"

Mannoth wrote:

And you know, unlike you they have a shitty time clearing maps usually as well.

I was afraid someone would bring that up.

This is a slight digression, but... That difference is a fundamental problem between melee and ranged and cannot be fixed. If GGG were to release a melee skill tonight that reads: "Instantly kill the target on hit, and instantly kill all other enemies on screen. You are immune to all damage for 10 seconds"... Then I would still play ranged over melee, because (a) "Instantly kill everything" and "immunity to damage" are functionally equivalent to, respectively, "300k+ ranged DPS" and properly build defenses at range, and (b) that skill still requires you to walk to the fucking target, which inherently slows you down.

Now, can we just please drop that comparison?

"

Mannoth wrote:

Don't see why you can't scale poison on a wander with added chaos + wand and projectile nodes since they aren't physical damage specific.

In fact, I would argue it is easier to scale poison on a wander than it is on a 1h melee character because of the double dipping nodes & massive base crit of wands.

Wanders don't actually scale that much %projectile damage, most of it is %ele, %wand, and %spell damage (for CoE users). So, not much double dipping. I will admit that I haven't rigorously tested Barrage+ACD+Poison+X, but my intuition is that it's not going to be good enough at the very high end.

"

Mannoth wrote:

Also GGG is perfectly fine with gem swapping as far as I know, how is it any different than me changing my flasks when going against Atziri or some bosses?

Sure, I guess an argument could be made for tweaking gear for some specific bossfights like Uber Atziri or the like. I'm talking about having to swap every other map. If you feel that's fine, then let's just agree to disagree.


[edit]
Did some quick testing with that suggested Poison setup. The damage output isn't significantly different from a 4L pure-DPS Barrage setup, so no, still not worth it in a 4L.

There was this video of a low life BM wander annihilating uber atziri in seconds with power siphon, and this was pre-ascendancy in patch 2.0 (which was a very difficult time for uber runs due to leech changes and only a few builds could actually even finish a uber run).

Now I don't know what kind of gear he was using because he didn't reveal his build or gear in fear of getting nerfed, but it was not in standard so it couldn't have been mirrored stuff.

I'll try to dig up the video and link it here. It might not seem a big deal now due to bladefall miners and other builds destroying uber, but it was very impressive back then. He wasn't using frost wall or anything.

Anyway, the point of me ranting about this is that wanders scale to extreme dps with good endgame gear and that frost wall glitch was a bit too much.