Beta Observation: Weapons master + Mighty weapon = Overpowered der

[snurrfint]

So, I recently got into the beta and wanted to investigate one of the machanics, fury generation, in the beta a little closer. First I just wanted to try out the rune effect for bash, the one that increases the generation by 6 fury/attack to 12 fury in total. My fury generation of course got increased a lot and I felt that my fury bulb got filled a lot faster. This felt like a good and balanced effect in many ways.

However, then when I got to lvl 13, I noticed that one of the effects for the Weapons Master passive was a +3 fury per hit for mighty weapons. Awesome, I thought, and immediatly noticed a 15 fury per attack for my bash. Compared to the 5 fury/attack from cleave this was a huge difference.

After I played a while with that passive, I wanted to try if the effeckt (+3 fury/hit) also worked for fury spenders and other abilities like ground-stomp, and was surprised that it actually did work. The cost of Hammer of the Ancients got decreased by 3 for every enemy that I struck. If you do the math, you will come to the conclution that HotA actually generates fury if it hits for more than 7 enemies with this passive.

But it wasn't until I tried Ground Stomp things got a little bit out of hands I think. I rallied a bunch of enemies toghether to a huge pack of monsters and popped Ground Stomp with an empty fury bulb and witnessed an increase of 81 fury. 81! :O ...

22 enemies * 3 fury/attack + 15 for GS = 81!

This example is of course a little extreme, but often enough when I played normally I could get up to 50 fury per stomp, and most of the time 30-40 fury. When pared with Leap Attack I could easely fill my fury bulb with just 1 cast of each skill and maybe 1 hit with bash. Ppl with beta access can easily try this out by themself, and I encourage you to do so.

To demonstrat how ridiculous the fury generation could get at lvl 60 I created this build with the skill calculator.

http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#bVXdPS!YWX!ZcZZcZ

My question is: Will this get nerfed? Otherwize I think this could be my first char for release.

Cheers!

[reflexii]

Totally agreed, +3 fury per attack from Weapons Master is totally ridiculous as it is now. I'm predicting it changing from 3 -> 1 or possibly making it a chance to regenerate 3-5 fury with small percentage of attacks.

[snurrfint]

Totally agreed, +3 fury per attack from Weapons Master is totally ridiculous as it is now. I'm predicting it changing from 3 -> 1 or possibly making it a chance to regenerate 3-5 fury with small percentage of attacks.


yes, or even more simple. 3 fury per attack instead of per hit. That would make it very useful but not insanly good as it is rigth now.

[reflexii]

I think it would still make it TOO useful to not have on any build. Dunno, time will tell.

[galzohar]

My bet: It'll be per attack and not per hit in the end of the day...

[Jaago]

Barbarian has a lot of way too good fury generation options. Another good example is Overpower with Momentum rune effect, it's probably the worst of all. Into the fray rune on Battle rage could end up sick as well. It's no wonder that everybody and their mother is thinking about sustained WotB builds with these numbers flying around.

Wizard and Witch Doctor have had their resource generation nerfed just recently, so I guess it's just a matter of time before the axe hits here.

[snurrfint]

Barbarian has a lot of way too good fury generation options. Another good example is Overpower with Momentum rune effect, it's probably the worst of all. Into the fray rune on Battle rage could end up sick as well. It's no wonder that everybody and their mother is thinking about sustained WotB builds with these numbers flying around.

Wizard and Witch Doctor have had their resource generation nerfed just recently, so I guess it's just a matter of time before the axe hits here.

yeah, wow. Momentum is just sick. Hitting 5 enemies will generate 15 * 5 = 75 fury with weapons master.

I guess with all these options, Blizzard wants us to generate a huge amount of fury one way or another. Maybe its not overpowered? I think it maybe just feels that way when compared with vanilla bash where you need 15 attacks to generate 90 fury.

[Crane]

I really hope that it stays on hit because I want to use it on whirlwind but I can't see them nerfing it on every AoE skill other than whirlwind :-(

[snurrfint]

I really hope that it stays on hit because I want to use it on whirlwind but I can't see them nerfing it on every AoE skill other than whirlwind :-(

There is a possibility that they might nerf it to 1 fury per hit, or like reflexii suggested, a chance to generate 3 fury/hit. I really hope it stays too, but I feel that 3 fury per hit is a little over the top.

[galzohar]

I think the big dispersion between AOE and single target is what's truly flawed here. Making it per attack rather than per hit is where they need to start. Same thing goes for stuff that proc on crits - If crits are per target rather than per attack, than anything that procs "per crit" gets either extremely overpowered for AOE abilities or extremely weak for single target abilities.

It is already going to be hard for them to balance the single target abilities with AOE abilities. They shouldn't create even more mechanics that favor AOE.

[Elfik]

I think the big dispersion between AOE and single target is what's truly flawed here. Making it per attack rather than per hit is where they need to start. Same thing goes for stuff that proc on crits - If crits are per target rather than per attack, than anything that procs "per crit" gets either extremely overpowered for AOE abilities or extremely weak for single target abilities.

It is already going to be hard for them to balance the single target abilities with AOE abilities. They shouldn't create even more mechanics that favor AOE.

Yeah I agree with this. One solution is to make it balanced for the aoe attacks, and useless for the single target attacks. But that needlessly limits the choices/power of players who want to use single target abilities, and want to boost their fury generation while doing it. In view of player choice it would be better to make it per attacks. But even then, wouldn't that favour faster attacks over slower ones? That's not a huge problem gear-wise as the ability only works for mighty weapons (which I think are all 2-handed?), but skillwise, it would favour frenzy, or any skills that buff attack speed. I think that's just one of the issues that comes with developing a complicated resource like fury, though.

[galzohar]

Faster attacks also drain fury faster by using more, weaker attacks with fury spenders. So it wouldn't directly favor fast weapons.

Frenzy would gain more, yeah. They could either normalize it or just leave it at that because the difference won't be big enough. As long as frenzy is the "single target lots of fury generator", and cleave is the "aoe damage generator", and as long as they find a fitting role for bash, then I don't see a problem with frenzy gaining a bit more extra fury with this passive.

Also, IIRC there are 1-handed mighty weapons too.

[Elfik]

If mighty weapons are available in the 1-handed variety, I would guess those would be preferred if using weapons mastery. Since fury is generated no matter what skill is used, I would think faster weapons would still be an advantage overall. I'd prefer if weapons mastery made the change to per attack, which favours frenzy over cleave, and cleave still keeps its role of being an aoe fury generator, but that still leaves bash as a problem skill. I'd also prefer if weapons mastery only generated fury on fury generating attacks, which reduces the need for faster attack speed.

[galzohar]

You are forgetting faster weapons do lower damage per attack and thus spend fury less efficiently, so it doesn't help that they generate fury faster in the general sense. Of course there are other factors that can affect whether faster/slower weapons are better (like passive regen or utility/cooldown-based fury spenders/generators), but those factors matter even without the passive.

[Elfik]

Ah yeah, you're right. For some reason I thought faster weapons would be slightly better with weapons mastery. But I guess in reality they are, when using things like threatening shout, battle rage, or any fury spender that doesn't deal any damage. But weapons mastery has nothing to do with an advantage over slow weapons, I just did a sample calculation to check. I jumped to a wrong conclusion there.

[Siege Valgore]

yes, or even more simple. 3 fury per attack instead of per hit. That would make it very useful but not insanly good as it is rigth now.

Err you mean 3 per hit, not attack..right?

[primEvil]

maybe mighty weapons have a built in higher-fury cost and this passive skill is merely cancelling it out? We don't know enough about mighty weapons to assume that this skill will make them OP.

[reflexii]

Why wouldn't we know stuff about mighty weapons? There are plenty of those in beta. That just isn't the case that they would use more fury than something else.

[ElementEight]

Wow, what a silly oversight. I thought they'd cap it to one monster, not to one per instance of damage. What an insane decision.

[HardRock]

I thought the previous 1 Fury per hit was already really good. 3 per hit is insane.

[Musashi]

I'm happy to report that with my build focused around Unforgiving Passive (My main beef with Barbs is the fury degrading). Since I'll be using mainly fury generators it really doesn't matter ...except for WOTB, which is in my build and would make all that fury generating an issue. It is a high end rune that extends the duration, so since we haven't seen high end content, all that extension might be necessary to make that skill worth the end game positioning it has.

[Thyiad]

Can people just report adspam and not quote/reply to it please. It makes for more to clean up.

As an aside, we have 'delete and ban as spammer' option. If you respond, you might get caught in that because I will have to delete your quotes/responses too.

Any queries, send me a PM.

Thanks.