If you play monk today is either a day of great joy or sorrow. Today 
Wyatt Cheng jumped on the forums to confirm that Exploding Palm is being looked and more than likely tuned down.
We’re looking to make changes to Exploding Palm in the next PTR patch. Of the three (Exploding Palm, Rimeheart and the Furnace) we feel this is the biggest offender. It’s not clear if Rimeheart is as offensive if you’re not able to further transfer the resulting damage onto elite monsters via Exploding Palm.
This all stemmed from a report of players completing a level 100 greater rift. The popular (and t6 viable)build for monks relies heavily on exploding palm and support. The monk of the group will also have Rimeheart equipped apply EP to the target freeze, explode, rinse, repeat. As greater rifts scale Monster health does as well, skills like EP only grow in strength, this in tandem with items like the furnace have you dealing damage not attainable by normal skills. There was some clamor of about these items but seeing greater rifts trivialized already has spurned developers into action.
Monks Exploding what?
The biggest question is what comes next for the monk. The most popular (and viable) build for higher torments relies heavily on being a support character and applying EP while your team-mates drop the hammer. With this incoming change it will leave the Monk without an endgame build and the class that is already lagging well behind it’s peers will be handicapped even further. We can only hope that in evaluating Exploding Palm the devs may give the class the complete overhaul it needs.
The image on the right was a random image Blizzard put up today in recognition of Tim Howard the US goalie playing in the World Cup. It is NOT the new look Exploding Palm.
Hai guys. Let’s take the eleventy billion HP on mobs and then double it, then blame the players for seeking out HP bypass mechanics. Even though that’s the only logical course of action, especially with ya know, a time limit. Monks are left with 0 builds but they’re not Witch Doctors so who cares?
Thought this would have been obvious – that’s why they took out crushing blow after all.
Basically yeah a hole blizzard created. It’s caused a gap in the Monk community with those who refuse to go the zerodps route and with those who sacrifice everything in damage in order to become zdps exploding palm, cyclone strike, rimeheart shattering builds.
You have to think about the design of the monk. Has he always been designed from the ground up to only really exist to apply Exploding Palm? That is monumentally stupid if you think that is what blizzard wants. Nerf EP, buff the monk in other ways so that he can be just as competitive as the other classes WITHOUT EP.
No, his other skills should be legitimate. And if you want a “nerf” nerf health damage asymmetry, so that enemies don’t do so much damage when they explode (and also don’t require a pure dps approach before that).
Stop linking empty wiki pages, please!
I’ve removed the link to the non-existent page Rimheart. The other one, Greater Rift is a page but because media wiki differentiates between lower and upper case the link came up dead because it was done in lower case. Here is the page though.
http://www.diablowiki.net/Greater_Rifts
Blizard are messing up again, seriously, this sounds like a great build, only for it to be destroyed by the dev’s. How can a wizard obtain such powerful dps if they strip out creative monk builds like this? Okay sure, remove the infinites, but please don’t be so god damn heavy with the hammer and redesign other skills to compensate for dps. Dashing strike was nerfed, now this, so I’d really like to see Blizzard play T6 and a level 100 greater rift and see how they fair at it without playing a shit healer/hpshield for other classes.
Just like Nether Tentacles, CritMass, WW/sprint, and FrostNova, EP is to be destroyed as endgame builds based predominantly around character skills are eliminated in favor of endgame builds based on items. How about removing the skills completely and putting everything on items and make sure they drop 0.00001% of the time.
This way we can bot to gear and win and not have to worry about skill and class imbalance. Or Bliiz could give us all standard builds as they are dead set on making us play their game their way.
Glad to see Xanth is back, Podcast time? I need a Flux rant as Westmarch Workshop and Scythe and Shield and others are too fanboy 🙁
I fail to see a problem here guys. There’s no point in a skill that does damage as percentage of monsters hp. Blizzard has already said they are doing a complete overhaul on the Monk so there’s no issue at all here. One should not make conclusions about one single change. Let’s see the final product before judging.
I’m confused – why would an EP Monk have Rimeheart?
With EP the monk can effect Elites with the Rimeheart shatter which is not supposed to happen. EP is great by itself but with a Rimeheart it is amazing.
But EP doesn’t freeze monsters so how’s this working? Is this EP monk counting on others to do the freezing? And if Rimeheart is ever shattering elites that’s just a bug that should be fixed….
I’m sad they missed the oppourtinity to increase difficulty in Rifts with something else than increasing health pools and straight damage.
They could have had per example; level 1 all ennemies gain 5% resistance to the same random element, level 2 they all gain the same affix, even elites and guardians, level 3 health and damage is slightly increased. Then you repeat the process, level 4 5% resist, level 5 another affixe, level 6 dmg and hp, and so on until you can’t finish it in time.
Or maybe, on each level, 1 in every 10 mobs per level gains a random affix, on level 11 they start getting a 2nd affix.
Or add 1 elite group on the first level, then add 2 on the second level for 3 total, then 3 on lvl3 for 6, lvl4 would have 10, then 15, 21, and so on.
There are too much possibilities around this idea, and others, for them to be that lazy.
Great ideas, I wish this implemented instead of just “double it”. Too much work for them though.
why not half the damage of EP and triple the damage of the other dps moves that would help the monk out
Anything that scales w/ the enemies’ HP was going to break the game sooner or later. We told them this when Crushing Blow was still around, and even at the piddly percentages, Furnace will get there when people are cranking up the Rift levels and facing billions and billions of HP. That said, I agree that pure HP is a lame scalar for difficulty. The only way HP makes a fight more interesting instead of just longer is when you give enemies Berserk timers or other skills that work on timing. Like Skeleton magi whose rate of summoning increases after X seconds, or start Sacrificing their summons to do damage after Y seconds.
its a good idea but they have missed a trick and gone the lazy route, truley tho if they wanted to add more difficulty why not swarm us with more enemies or every tenth rift is an all elite rift
I suppose it’s too much to hope for to imagine that they’ve actually mathed it out to see if it’s even *possible* (absent tools like Rimeheart and Furnace) to complete a timed rift with achievable damage values weighed against the HP pools. Forget balancing classes and items, I’m not convinced that they’ve balanced things at the most basic level (i.e., is it possible to attain and apply enough damage to kill Xmobs * Ybillion HP in Z time).
It was a good idea not salvaging some lightning garbage after all!
I’ll be using some crappy lightning sword I didn’t salavage instead of looking for rimeheart, but they will change fist of az’tarrask retroactively, right? (And the crusader shield that removes a drawback that doesn’t exist anymore…)
Because it isn’t exactly a piece of cake finding some items, in order to watching devs fix some glaring design failures that are there since forever become an ok thing.
“It’s not like your secondary res gear + fist of az’tarrask are completely useless… Not completely… I mean, Build of the Week, monkz are fine! They are not making your gear worse, since it is the same gear you had before. And you are even older and wiser now!”
Because I heard they were trying to put the other classes closer to WD – and such task involves billions of damage on at least a couple skills.