80% LESS damage... GGG world record for hardest nerf?

For the record, the post-nerf video I posted was with the following gear :

Shipyard : 5L in the chest, bow irrelevant - which I wrote as "white bow", which is not factually correct as I was using a 6L casually crafted from white for a bit of chaos res and proj speed.
The 6L there is used for cursing, the 3rd curse being purely defensive. You can get to that clear speed with relatively cheap gear if you compromise a bit on the defenses (skip the third curse, wear a Broken Crown instead of a Vertex, etc ; then you can use a Quill Rain which feels a lot better). In that setup you do feel a very significant slowdown on curse immune or fire resist maps. Isolated rares or blue packs with these mods don't seem to be much of an issue to me.

Courtyard bosses : lvl20 gem in a +3 bow with lvl4 empower (lvl27), which is pretty close to the optimal possible setup ; one would need a 21/20 MA gem to do better. Although there were only 4 supports on MA, so it's technically also a 5L (the 6th had blink arrow in there, which I don't think I used).
The kill is IMO really fast, which is what I was trying to show. I cleared the rest of the map with the same setup as the shipyard, and I could probably have done the bosses in the same way, although that would certainly have taken longer - probably about twice as long, as 1:2 is about the power ratio between a level 20 and level 27 gem.
I tried a fire resist shrine with a lvl26 5L setup (which is a level of investment I consider the build should be able to do that at) and it wasn't super facerolly, Piety needed a few more shots than I expected, but it was workable. Haven't tried a hexproof one but I expect it would be a bit nightmarish.

I'm still trying to come up with adjusted setups for post-nerf. I can't and won't try to assess properly how adequate the nerf value was until I get more mileage on it.

@peppr

I watched you playing around and I'm mostly wondering what you're comparing this build too now? My 78 grind experience is playing a SWT build and CoC build I made for uber atziri. The version you used on the courtyard map would be similar to the CoC build as your gear won't get much better. You have every passive that will give damage, +1 to the gem from corruption is best it will get, my CoC build was similar in strength and price, the clear speed is dramatically different. You'd never be able to keep up with my guy.

If I take it down to the SWT build, which was probably 40-50 ex worth of gear, most likely less if you don't factor the gems which were all corrupted and leveled by me, while I wasn't maxed out perfect I was doing about 50k dps per totem. I would lay a totem and be running to the next pack to put my 2nd totem down, very little outside of uniques even slowed me down.

So when I see your build doing maps my CoC and SWT build is what comes to mind as "balanced" comparisons of high level play.

The 78 you did you weren't in a party, I found the build is almost acceptable solo but once my tornado shot friend comes along I'm just dual cursing shit for him to kill. 3 man party and I might as well not even bother shooting arrows. You also didn't get many stragglers, you got most packs as a whole didn't run into many curse immune/fire res rares that were left on their own. Also no real high life monsters rolled in that map.

Watching that video I don't see it as anywhere near fast. I see it fast for a niche build. Like that would be fast for my shield charger and maybe the ice spear build I made this league, but not for my buddy doing tornado shot.

What is also annoying is your end comment in this post should have been what you said earlier on. You said it was fine minutes after the patch so all you have is people hanging on these words. I mean there was a guy in the patch post linking your response to anyone saying the nerf was too much, as if your word was gospel.

I can say from my time, in about 10 ex of gear it does high level maps slowly and feels like shit in party play. Sure I could invest in better gear but any build that needs a 6l, or difficult to acquire bow...which is 6l, then it's not a build for me. If I want to spend 50-100 ex, it's going to be to farm uber atziri as I know I can put together a few builds that will blow this one out of the water in 78s for around 10 ex.

I said the build was "fine" minutes after the patch, because that was my first reaction : I was expecting it to be completely FUBAR, and it was still clearing at a decent enough speed solo in high maps. That was probably not the appropriate PR thing to say, but why would anyone think I have all the necessary elements to judge if a build is balanced less than an hour after the patch hits... I was just giving a first impression.
Expectations matter, as our polar opposite immediate reactions show.

As for what I'm comparing it to : nothing in particular really. I'm looking at if it works well enough for me to clear high maps at a speed I find acceptable. Solo, because I simply don't party.

Where I'm at currently, I do think that even with adjustments the build is at least a couple of notches behind the major cost-efficient cookie cutters like tornado shot, (still) flameblast, and the like. Which doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable place to be for a quirky build like this. What's so terribly wrong with "fast for a niche build" ? Just because we got to experience utter OPness for a couple of weeks does not mean that MA prolif is entitled to a free lifetime membership to the tier 1 builds club. I don't necessarily consider a build is not worth my time because a few others exist that clear faster for the same budget. Again, expectations.

The deciding factor to me is whether I can find a setup that makes the build work "well enough", while being fun to play and not too restrictive on map mods, for 5-10 ex. That's where the jury is still out.

This is why I threw my SWT build into the mix. Compared to a tier 1 build for similar cost it's not comparable. Compared to a tier 2 build w/ gear about 1/2-1/3rd the price it's not really comparable.

Also because it's a summon, outside of shifting gems, getting corrupted gems, I'm not sure where you could get damage to make up for it. The max damage I'm seeing is you get the curse effective passives you're missing and tree is tapped.

I'll say the clear speed isn't embarrassing but it went from best build in the game to novelty build. Any fun factor will be removed after missing 2-3 ignites in a row and running in circles for almost 10 seconds hoping it doesn't happen again.

Prolif is the imba gem not mirror arrow. Another fail by GGG in "balancing"

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Aim_Deep wrote:

Prolif is the imba gem not mirror arrow. Another fail by GGG in "balancing"

Yeah let's just nerf prolif mid league that sounds like a great idea :^)

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Moosifer wrote:

Pneuma it clears 78s in the same way most ineffective lvl 90 builds with all 20/20 gems do. It's possible but not impressive and has a ton of road blocks. Never mind that 78 clear is in virtually perfect gear and still slow.

It clears awfully fast given how lax the tree and gear requirements are.

You only need minion life +MI for "offensive" points on the tree. The rest can and should be purely defensive. The offensive requirements are gotten en route from a witch start at a 10 point cost.

You only need +skills on gear, nothing else helps (no auras help, no flat damage, no aspd/cspd, projectile speed only helps for targeting purposes, etc.).

The build should be compared to PA trappers (which are +skill and trap/chaos/dot scalars), and it seems to be roughly equivalent in clear speed to that.

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Prolif is and has been the strong part of the equation for a long time. I certainly get the feeling that GGG doesn't cost it correctly. Hopefully it will get a balance rejiggering after the league is over and when we switch to the next big expansion.

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pneuma wrote:

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Moosifer wrote:

Pneuma it clears 78s in the same way most ineffective lvl 90 builds with all 20/20 gems do. It's possible but not impressive and has a ton of road blocks. Never mind that 78 clear is in virtually perfect gear and still slow.

It clears awfully fast given how lax the tree and gear requirements are.

You only need minion life +MI for "offensive" points on the tree. The rest can and should be purely defensive. The offensive requirements are gotten en route from a witch start at a 10 point cost.

You only need +skills on gear, nothing else helps (no auras help, no flat damage, no aspd/cspd, projectile speed only helps for targeting purposes, etc.).

The build should be compared to PA trappers (which are +skill and trap/chaos/dot scalars), and it seems to be roughly equivalent in clear speed to that.

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Prolif is and has been the strong part of the equation for a long time. I certainly get the feeling that GGG doesn't cost it correctly. Hopefully it will get a balance rejiggering after the league is over and when we switch to the next big expansion.

Shouldn't it be compared to SRS, you know another summon build? All you need for that is a +3 staff then the rest of the gear goes defensive. Not sure about peppr, but I have no confidence that any lvl gear I could do uber. Even if atziri could be ignited, the inconsistency of the ignite is hell and the now low initial impact will make the fight take forever with no way to recover ES outside of old CI, don't get hit and vaal discipline.

I find the poison arrow comparison reasonable. Atziri capability is the main difference with that.

Uber is a hell no, of course. Even regular is barely doable in super expensive gear.

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PepprmintButler wrote:

I find the poison arrow comparison reasonable. Atziri capability is the main difference with that.

Uber is a hell no, of course. Even regular is barely doable in super expensive gear.

It's not, poison arrow has a lot more ways to scale damage outside of the simple +level.

Minions are minions = the end of scaling.

Peace,

-Boem-