New Reaper of Souls and D3 PTR Patch Notes

[AngelicPenguin]

Not with a high end skorn it\'s not. Rend is doing more damage than anything else. The best xp farming (at least that I know of) is all about maxing your crit rend damage.

 

[Warrax]

Infinite WW was boring as **** so that nerf doesn\'t concern me. Rage generation with other rage spenders is fine tho, they aren\'t made to be spammed, people seems to forget that they changed them to hit harder at the cost of being used less frequently.

 

[Mad Mantis]

They killed one build and keep reducing the damage of the other two builds. Pets still aren\'t that good. As compensation we get some slightly buffed basic attacks! It\'s like the Necro all over again.

 

[Mortalo]

W/o perma-stun (or near that level) you could not survive as melee wiz before. Now I feel like a boss!

 

[Mortalo]

On live I had fun with Seismic Slam. Due to lack of play time with Barb, I had planty of fun playing with Weapon Throw and Ancient Spear. I got nerfed across the board.

 

[Weavers]

@weavers ... you must have been playing a monk or a DH too. You obviously don\'t get it; the barb played well ... once you got it to a certain level ... it was an enjoyable experience to WW all the live long day. No many other players could keep up. Wizards and WDs eventually got it going too. But, Barbs pretty much had the balance right from the begining.

So you say that they\'re \'balancing the game\' LOL ... you\'re an idiot. Nerfing one of the characters that actually plays smoothly isn\'t game balance, it\'s vengence.

What they really needed to focus on, was making Monks and DH\'s really bad A$$. period. There\'s no need to Nerf Barbs, Wizards & WDs.

And if they\'re so worried about gear from the past being too powerful ... how about just making a super freaking hard level of the game; a level past torment 6 where event the most geared, OP players can\'t kill anything quickly.

give us back a right to use the mystic for anything, give us open trade, put back attack speed where it was, make CD still spawn on weapons and tell kiss A$$ winers like Weavers to go play spin the bottle with Travis what\'s his face and Xanth.

So your main argument is that Blizzard is out there to lash out a vengeance against the Barbarian playerbase instead of balancing the game? That is very convincing. And what is up with name-calling me and Xanth at the end?

 

[Weavers]

Your delivery of your argument is just ridiculous. You call it a debate and call multiple people names, generalise people and disrespect them. That is not a debate - that is being offensive/rude and saying whatever you want to say however you want to say it, which is shitty attitude.

Your actual argument, hidden behind all the personal attacks, is that you want your hard work to pay off by not nerfing the Barbarian. Are you serious? This isn\'t wow. If you want an mmo experience that preserves one character forever, go play wow. Diablo should really be a game of constant change, challenge and discovery, not \"watch my barb own trash mobs with ww build\" simulator.

In case your argument was resting on the basis of \"they should buff everything rather than nerfing some things\" on the basis of fun, it falls apart because Barbarian has about 25 more skills that what is required to play ww barb. If you enjoyed the concept of ww build, you can keep using it. If you only enjoyed ww build for its efficiency, then you can discover something new.

You talk as if a nerf to ww build completely destroyed the fun factor of playing barbarian - so does that mean every single barb player in the world will uninstall Diablo 3 now? Obviously not, because there are 25 other skills to choose from (and 5 other classes, wow), which means that it is your personal attachment to barb that is causing this frustration, not the balance and design.

 

[AngelicPenguin]

Sure you could. Was it as effective? Nope. Illusionist will get you out of almost anything.

 

[Speedster]

W/o perma-stun (or near that level) you could not survive as melee wiz before. Now I feel like a boss!

I'm really looking forward to this. Wizard was badly broken in D3C. My first steps in RoS are going to be to revisit my p100 wizard and try out the revamped skills.

I finally caved in and have been playing a ww barb, just because it's stupidly overpowered and I needed some easy xp before RoS hits.

 

[Disciple of Erebos]

I've been playing Wizard on PTR (sadly no RoS). I can play Torment III with little problems, and Torment II with no deaths. The play-styles all feel much better now; the Wizard feels like a combo-class now. I'm playing a Lightning Wizard, using the interaction between the lightning runes of Wave of Force and Meteor. Wave of Force makes enemies take 15% more damage from lightning for 4 seconds, and Meteor increases the damage and roots enemies for 5 seconds on a critical hit (my CC is 55%). The extra 15% damage from Wave of Force is really relevant; I wish I could find gear that had more extra lightning damage on it. Sadly, while I've found great gear for Cold damage, I can't get anything with good stuff for lightning. I'd be willing to drop CC, probably down to about 45%, but anything I've found with good lightning damage on it has terrible mainstat/vit. Also, my few relevant legendaries are all lightning-based, so I don't want to change away from that build.

That said, Wizard feels much, much better. In particular, I really want to credit the Shield mechanic as being fantastic: this is the only reason that I can survive in melee/near-melee range in PTR. I really want to get a high-AS build going and make a Spectral Blades-Deflection build, but so far, my AS is too low. Still, the Dominance passive is really great. Now that enemies don't have too much health on Torment difficulties, its actually possible to stack Dominance up to decent levels, and at 10 stacks, it's giving me an extra 25,000 shield for 10 seconds, which allows me to fight packs without much fear of dying.

As for skills to try out, I'd suggest Meteor as being great overall. It's base AP cost was reduced from 50 to 40, so it's much more available now. In addition, with strategies like stacking up RCR or CDR, you can run entire builds on it. As many others have pointed out as well, Arcane Orb-Frozen Orb is now an excellent skill, and should probably be run on any Cold Wizard. Unfortunately, I haven't looked at that many other skills; however, from playing through a new Wizard up to 60, a lot more skills look viable, and a lot of previously-necessary skills are no longer necessary. It felt better than I can say to finally be able to take Diamond Skin off my list and still be viable .