U57 Preview 2: Imbue Overhaul

[Stradivarius]

@Lynnabel

My barb on live is actually doing a bit more damage than on Lam. Perhaps a bit more dice possibly in regular frenzy (and not all in death frenzy). Thank you. Love all the other stuff (especially inquisitive).

[jskinner937]

I do not know what happened between u56 and the u57 preview, but clearly feedback was recognized.

Even though not everything made it in preview 2, I just wanted to say thank you for listening and this is a move in a positive direction.

[vyvy3369]

The law/chaos stuff is interesting, lets get into it.

Chaos one is pretty easy for us to math out - the 2d20 chaos damage scaling with melee power (and 1d20 bane damage, also scaling) is pretty unlikely to be less DPS than 2% doublestrike or doubleshot. Well, I suppose if you were capped on Doublestrike, then yes, the feat will do nothing for you, so if that's the case then yes you're losing that DPS.

The law one is more complex at first blush but in practice it does end up being a buff. Given that the 12d6 Law damage is staying right where it was before in Divine Crusader (and from my understanding, players tended to take this feat specifically for that synergy) then you are in fact not losing any DPS since the proc is the same as before. You will gain some PRR and MRR though which is fun.

I bring all this up because our intention was absolutely not to make these feats (or by proxy Fighters) worse in any way. So if there's anything you can think of that could make things more equitable let me know.

Giving Kensei an imbue seems like a good way to do it. 4 of their 6 cores deal with making their chosen weapon group more powerful, it seems very appropriate for them to be able to imbue their weapons.

[Monkey_Archer]

Giving Kensei an imbue seems like a good way to do it. 4 of their 6 cores deal with making their chosen weapon group more powerful, it seems very appropriate for them to be able to imbue their weapons.

A seeker imbue would be fun. 2 seeker per imbue dice would be weaker than a d6 on hit, but scale better with Deadly Strike, etc..

[Nothingtoseehere]

Warlock:

• (Enlightened Spirit Tier 4) 1d6 Light, Light spell power (ALSO APPLIES TO ELDRITCH BLASTS, no other toggle does this)
• (Enlightened Spirit Core 5) +3 bonus dice while in Celestial Spirit form

The bonus dice for Enlightened Spirit requiring the use of Celestial Spirit remains a glaring issue from preview 1 for 2 major reasons.
1. Celestial Spirit is a Major form, which clashes even on a pure Warlock if you went Abyss Warlock, outright excluding some Warlocks from ever being allowed to use this ability.
2. Even if not playing an Abyss Warlock, Celestial Spirit still contains Featherfall, making it an undesirable stance to toggle on in almost all circumstances (and yes I know I can block to cancel Featherfall. That is not a useful solution in any way, shape or form.)

Simply making the bonus dice passive adresses the concerns regarding the Imbue overhaul, if not the underpinning issues with Celestial Spirit. It is a 31 ap investment and at elast 18 Warlock levels. putting it in a stance with a debuff and mutually exclusiveness with another cornerstone Warlock stance is just salt on the wound.

Please change this.

[Baahb3]

Testing Greater Bloodsong from Tiefling Scoundrel on test kobolds does not show any sonic damage to target between 75% and 25%. Once you get lower than 25%, sonic damage starts showing up.

If I train just Bloodsong, I get sonic damage at 75%. If I then train Improved Bloodsong, sonic damage goes away until I get below 50%. Then when training Greater Bloodsong, again sonic damage goes away until I get below 25%.

It does not work this way on live. You do 1d4 at 75%, then 1d4+1d6 at 50% and then 1d4+1d6+1d8 at 25%.

@Lynnabel, can you clarify how this is going to work with the Imbue changes. Are we only going to get damage at the lowest % based on trained Bloodsong enhancements?

I would bug report this but the in game Help screen is blank for me and no in the dark clicking gets me anywhere.

[songswrath]

The law/chaos stuff is interesting, lets get into it.

Chaos one is pretty easy for us to math out - the 2d20 chaos damage scaling with melee power (and 1d20 bane damage, also scaling) is pretty unlikely to be less DPS than 2% doublestrike or doubleshot. Well, I suppose if you were capped on Doublestrike, then yes, the feat will do nothing for you, so if that's the case then yes you're losing that DPS.

The law one is more complex at first blush but in practice it does end up being a buff. Given that the 12d6 Law damage is staying right where it was before in Divine Crusader (and from my understanding, players tended to take this feat specifically for that synergy) then you are in fact not losing any DPS since the proc is the same as before. You will gain some PRR and MRR though which is fun.

I bring all this up because our intention was absolutely not to make these feats (or by proxy Fighters) worse in any way. So if there's anything you can think of that could make things more equitable let me know.

not exactly true here. as it stands right now. if you do a pally kotc or sf this is a huge nerf .leave them alone there enough melee nerfs in this update. dont kill the major dps part of DC e.d.

[Komradkillingmachine]

Questions about "Hunt or be Hunted" dice augments. Are all 3 types have been converted to generic imbue dice and therefore not stacking? If they're all the same now (after conversion) they should at least stack in inventory and in the augment bags.

[Bagel99]

Hey Lyn, real fast since i noticed some folks above wanting some love for AA CC and utility toggles. Why not allow one of them to be applied with normal shots but cause a -20% Damage penalty similar to IPS ? OR simply allow imbue dice to apply to the DC of things like Para Arrows as a T5 ? I think that would be a nice way to allow in some extra DC potential!

On a side note, i miss old old old Melfs Acid Arrow imbue for AA which applied stacking copies of the spell. Is there any way to get this into the game again somehow? Maybe a Filigree set in the future that applied some acid damage over time on crit? I know burning arrows does something similar at the top of AA but its not the same

Love the updates and i think fighter should have some type of Imbue still, i know Second wind will help survivability but it would be cool if Fighters imbue wasn't like a normal guaranteed one but similar to Barbarians FB core that has a % chance to deal a good chunk of scaling damage, why not allow fighters a toggle that on Vorpal or a random 5%-10% chance to deal 1d20 Damage per imbue dice scaling with Melee power on a 3 second cooldown ?

[Kielbasa]

The law/chaos stuff is interesting, lets get into it.

Chaos one is pretty easy for us to math out - the 2d20 chaos damage scaling with melee power (and 1d20 bane damage, also scaling) is pretty unlikely to be less DPS than 2% doublestrike or doubleshot. Well, I suppose if you were capped on Doublestrike, then yes, the feat will do nothing for you, so if that's the case then yes you're losing that DPS.

The law one is more complex at first blush but in practice it does end up being a buff. Given that the 12d6 Law damage is staying right where it was before in Divine Crusader (and from my understanding, players tended to take this feat specifically for that synergy) then you are in fact not losing any DPS since the proc is the same as before. You will gain some PRR and MRR though which is fun.

I bring all this up because our intention was absolutely not to make these feats (or by proxy Fighters) worse in any way. So if there's anything you can think of that could make things more equitable let me know.

Fighters have a quasi imbue already with spiritual bond the second core in kensei through meditative focus and its +1 enhancement bonus per stack of meditative focus. Just scale it creatively with imbue dice. For example every imbue dice the fighter has will grant them +1 to hit +2 damage +2 melee power or ranged power depending on their weapon focus. Maybe double their effective imbue dice when at max stacks of meditative focus to incentivize the people who keep keep their dps uptime high.

[Talnar00]

not exactly true here. as it stands right now. if you do a pally kotc or sf this is a huge nerf .leave them alone there enough melee nerfs in this update. dont kill the major dps part of DC e.d.

How is this a huge nerf for KotC? They lose a single die from their cores, but get 2 back at 28 with embodiment of law, and 1 back at 30 if going arborea. They still get the scaling 12d6 if they go T5 Divine Crusader and have taken embodiment of law as a feat.

[SWCarter]

1. Celestial Spirit is a Major form, which clashes even on a pure Warlock if you went Abyss Warlock, outright excluding some Warlocks from ever being allowed to use this ability.

+1 to this. Please make sure that going the Abyss route does not carry even more detriments than it does today due to the inability to use the Celestial Spirit toggle. In fact, can we just get rid of Celestial Spirit as a toggle entirely, and just build its bonuses into the core?

[Xezom]

Hey Lyn, real fast since i noticed some folks above wanting some love for AA CC and utility toggles. Why not allow one of them to be applied with normal shots but cause a -20% Damage penalty similar to IPS ? OR simply allow imbue dice to apply to the DC of things like Para Arrows as a T5 ? I think that would be a nice way to allow in some extra DC potential!

On a side note, i miss old old old Melfs Acid Arrow imbue for AA which applied stacking copies of the spell. Is there any way to get this into the game again somehow? Maybe a Filigree set in the future that applied some acid damage over time on crit? I know burning arrows does something similar at the top of AA but its not the same

It was suggested in Preview one to add 1 DC to the CC Imbues per imbue dice. I think that might be a bit much considering the number of dice you can get, but even at 50% (1 dc per 2 imbue dice) that'd be a nice benefit. Rangers can't take Epic spell focus, which I know is only 1 DC, but every point counts so having the imbues add to DC for CC archers would definitely help late and higher difficulty.

I really like this AA idea. I'd be happy to give up 20% damage for the ability to use BOTH an Elemental Imbue and a Utility Imbue. Still keeps with the switching toggle nature of the AA as well, which is to switch your toggle/Imbue based on what you are facing. You'd just simply drop your CC imbue against single target bosses to not suffer the 20% penalty since most aren't effected by them anyway. I would love to see some bows introduced that support AA theme better. The Elemental Bow of Elements (Air) is fairly close since it can support the electric AA (Although that's not used a ton). I'd love more bows like Tortured Livewood Bow, but with enough oomph to make them useful late game. A Wisdom scaling enchantment bow would knock it out of the park.

[Sqrlmonger]

How is this a huge nerf for KotC? They lose a single die from their cores, but get 2 back at 28 with embodiment of law, and 1 back at 30 if going arborea. They still get the scaling 12d6 if they go T5 Divine Crusader and have taken embodiment of law as a feat.

KoTC doesn't grant Embodiment of Law or Arborea.

So KoTC doesn't "get" anything by giving up what it used to have to other feats, a particular build that takes those feats might, but KoTC is still worse for the exchange.

Small adjustments like this don't make a big difference on their own, but over time they can create build paths that are objectively the best and reduce build diversity rather than increasing it.

[peng]

As it is, not all builds have access to, or can easily fit, an imbue. I'd recommend having the law/chaos feats add an imbue (1d6 or 1d8 law/chaos damage, scaling with melee/ranged power, no matter your alignment) along with the extra dice if your alignment matches. Or maybe a feat that gives a 1d6 imbue that scales with the highest of melee/ranged/half spellpower. That way any build has access to an imbue, but most builds won't have to spend a feat on it.

[Firebreed]

Just wanted to voice that I like this build's implementation of the Chaos/Law feats.

[Mindos]

The law/chaos stuff is interesting, lets get into it.

Chaos one is pretty easy for us to math out - the 2d20 chaos damage scaling with melee power (and 1d20 bane damage, also scaling) is pretty unlikely to be less DPS than 2% doublestrike or doubleshot. Well, I suppose if you were capped on Doublestrike, then yes, the feat will do nothing for you, so if that's the case then yes you're losing that DPS

Maybe bring back the chaos/bane damage, but much smaller, on crit/vorpal maybe, does 1d5 chaos, 1d2 bane, scaling etc. Score two vorpals in a row, do X damage, etc. IDK Or on vorpal, get random duration 3-20 seconds chaos/bane buff, 1d7 something something scales with blah blah.

Thematic ish. Random ish. Does "some" damage but not "too much". Can't really be counted on, but is still there. Now you can keep the 2 percent double/ss and there's something for those capped on doublestrike.

And if anyone complains it's not enough or not dependable enough or not enough to rely on, then I would ask them: "Why are you taking a Chaotic thing and wanting rock solid stuff?"

[Shedrakzo]

It looks like the majority of the changes in this preview are bug fixes from the initial implementation.

Is there still a chance that the Tiefling Bloodhunt /Iconic Bloodsong can be changed or at least modified? As they both stand, the only class that would benefit using either imbue is Fighter that doesn’t innately gain an imbue.

Can we please change it so that the scaling progression changes so that at the first rank you get all versions of the effect: 1d4 at 75%, 1d6 at 50%, 1d8 at 25%, etc. And that the subsequent ranks at level 7 and 16 grant +1 imbue dice.

This still doesn’t make either imbue very attractive, but it at least gives tieflings a bit of a value that was lost when they went from spell critical chance to fire critical damage.

It also means we’ll have two races that directly gain access to Imbue Dice bonuses with Drow and Tieflings. Elf, Wood Elf, and Half-Elf will then be additional options via the Elven Arcane Archer.

More importantly, this means that the Scoundrel gets a more reinforced identity as the bard iconic in the sense that it gains additional imbue dice for either Warchanter or Swashbuckler.

The other point of concern for me is “(Enlightened Spirit Core 5) +3 bonus dice while in Celestial Spirit form” I hate feeling like we’re beating on a dead horse every time Enlightened Spirit gets touched, but what about Abyssal Warlocks playing auralocks? Would this be able to be changed to just being a +3 dice bonus tied to the level 18 core? We already divorced the competence HP bonus from Celestial Spirit and tied it to the capstone. Please give our poor Abyssal Warlock friends another consideration.

[Artrea]

Is there any way to give pets an imbue?
Greater elemental weapon buff I guess from an Artificer?
I was hoping Shared Mantle would do something like this.
Not a complaint, but just a fun concept for my Druid

[draven1]

Imbues using spell power have significant advantage over imbues using melee/range power.

Because spell power can reach 1200~1600 range, but, melee/range power can't.
Spell power have 3x~4x more than melee/range power.