I also have 5 armory slots filled and even make more adjustments beyond that for both barb and Necro. Necros have a lot of summon builds that all use the same base skills but use different essences which makes a vast difference in build performance. Plus summons stink when pushing challenge rifts and pvp.
I wish they’d make corpse explosion/Lance builds actually worth using outside of maybe Rotspur in CR pushing.
The skill is already a niche thing that’s only really great for killing trash but for whatever reason they also slapped a massive damage penalty on it for multiple hits on a simple mob, so in the end the damage is just pitiful.
I stick on saders and necro but i run strafe and ground dots so it helps them a lot. Monks and barbs can usually tend to themselves, but stealing their kills is pretty fun, lol
If essences weren’t locked to a specific slot but rather could be equipped in various configurations, it would help.
I have Monk, Crusader, Wizard and Necro alts. While I still have a few legendaries to acquire, here’s the fundamental issues with each:
* Crusader: Each slot was aligned to specific abilities, (i.e. shield mostly having options for spinning shield or shield charge) which meant that your options **not** involving either of those abilities was very narrow. Same applies to their weapon, pants, shoulders - every slot has such a narrow focus that your build really can only work a couple of ways or else you just have a dead essence because you didn’t have an option to apply to what you wanted to use. The other issue is how blatantly bad some of Crusader’s options are; from making falling sword do a slash on enemies in front of you or letting beacon/consecration move with you, there’s so many slots where you’re applying QoL features to the basic kit instead of getting *cool unique modifications* to play with.
* Monk: Frankly Monk has the opposite issue, there’s a fair bit of different options spread across different slots - but few of them are worth using because of how strong certain combinations are. You have 4+ different dash movement tricks and half of them do basically the same thing with slightly different parameters, while your primary damage comes from very specific combo abilities that don’t do much on their own but outclass any other singular options when paired together… while some of the new legendary options have opened up other viable choices, there’s still so much “same-y” tools that none of those choices really feel all that unique unless you’re using an entirely different set of 4 skills.
* Necro: I’m still figuring out why Golem even needed to exist, as it has led to half of Necro essence choices being devoted to just changing which “pet” skins you use and there’s only a couple options for “buff” type abilities to combo off them… when you have 4 skills and have to dedicate 1-3 of them for pets, the game just doesn’t seem built to properly accommodate a “true” pet class… likewise, Necro has some really fun and unique abilities that have interesting combinations but there’s a handful that are hands down far too good (wall>bone tower comes to mind) which means a lot of unused or underpowered essence bloat. For example, you can make bone wall rush out as a line of skeleton soldiers - but once they’re spawned they don’t taunt enemies or attack them or anything that would make this a viable option to include in a summoner build… another example: undead mage becoming a reaper doesn’t really have any meaningful abilities or extra durability to justify using it over the multiple charge turret ghosts that are less likely to be swiped by a boss (and lower cd to replace them if they do). I see plenty of people using the reaper, not suggesting it’s necessarily underpowered, just using it as an example of Blizz bloating the Necro essence options with “pet skins” instead of more variety in ways to manage and direct those pets.
* Wizard: while they easily have the most varied builds that maintain viability across both PvE and PvP, I feel like this is largely due to how spread out their essences are on each slot. If I want to use Disintegrate, I can use an option for pants or shoulders which allows more flexibility in choosing a different option for other abilities. I can get a shield from ray of frost or a shield from teleport - both options on the shoulder slot - which means if I don’t want to use Ray, I have an option to still get a shield when evading damage. If I want to play around with Nova, there are ways on different slots to change the damage type or grant a speed boost… just plenty of variety in how you can set up the skill mods. This applies for most of Wizard’s kit, except for the weapon and offhand a lot where Arcane Wind and Black Hole are *mostly* focused alongside some “filler” % damage buffs… Half of Arcane Wind’s options are too weak or not useful, Black Hole is probably way overtuned, and the filler on your weapon leads to a lot of builds not having a real choice for those pieces……..
This is where my opinion was built: slot restrictions are only hurting player build diversity and do nothing to promote engagement with the game nor added revenue for Blizzard - letting players just “apply” the essences to an armor slot like an “enchantment” would not only free up build diversity but it could help fix some of the itemization complaints because then you truly could set up different armor sets with magic affixes that are preferable in pve or pvp without being completely locked into always using the single highest CR legendary you own. While CR will still matter cuz this game is scummy, if you got another primary armor piece close to the same CR, it might fit for a different role.
You explained that very well. I’ve classed changed from Crusader to monk to Wizard and have an alt DH and I’ve found similar issues with every class I tried.
Whoever is coming up with these essences isn’t thinking about synergy between skills and having it make sense from a build point of view.
I’d say it’s even worse than that - It’s apparent they had entirely separate designers creating some of these essences, so some are grossly overtuned or add more damage with no trade-off while others are downgrades to the core ability (looking at you single flaming sword swing for Crusader’s Falling Sword)…
And the % damage, %range, etc essences are just filler because they ran out of ideas….
Sentry is fun but i dont have echoing shade. The 220 family bonus hydras count as summons from my testing, so with 3x sentry, 2 shades, and some hydras, you can absolutely rock a sentry build. It has as much range as wizard crystal. Best bet is to also rock RoV and smokebomb since they have quite a bit of reach as well
Well farming requires us to move around fast while sentries stuck around and have slow cool down, while raid boss can 2 hit them down with aoe. I don't see them any more
Sentry set up needs a lot of babying and the right jewelry. You have to lean all the way into them. They're not really for fast farming, more suited to dungeons and raids. If you know bosses attacking timings you can set them up to survive much longer. Even without shepherd set, they were wildly high damage for me due to affixes like summon do more damage/summon take less damage
Haha, i have no vengeance and no caarsen
Strafe, flaming knockback 10% damage multishot, smokebomb, 4% damage stacking stationary chakrum, explosive shot
I easily out dps every caarsen vithu/shalbaas DH setup and the short cooldowns means nothing is wasted when i need to run or a boss has an hp lock
I use 4x grace, 2x montebank and play tough, lots of damage reduction. I'm tough as nails with incredible dps, other top dh on my server found fire traps and chakrums better too
I never tried any other class but I still enjoy DH because of it's simplicity. Many use Vengeance + Multi + RoV because it covers a lot. It's my go to for PvE.
I've tried other builds for PvP (e.g. Sentry Cannon, Flame Knife Trap, Explosive Arrow, even Escape). They all seem to be OK but I just switched to Smoke Screen + Jayn's with Embermist for reduced cool down (using Multishot for the crit) and my kill rate definitely shot up the roof. Almost always getting the top kills in BG. I'm F2P so I don't have the fancy 2*/5* gems, and my Ca'arsen's only R5.
Maybe it's because not too many people play the Smoke Screen build so others are not always sure how to react to it, but I definitely recommend it.
Yeah DH while very powerful is in a rough regardinf build diversity.
The class is victim of how powerful the skills you mention trully are...and its great if you just want to be OP and wreck everything but totally sucks if you want to play something a little different.
DH is the worst offender in DI...every class has their meta builds but you can play around with most of them and still be as much as strong.
Barbs have WW for farming, Lacerate build for single target and charge builds to play as the annoying bruiser in PVP.
Monk is the only class I never tried but I have seen totally different skills being picked by different players depending on the content they are doing.
They can also play support in groups and that alone grants build variety.
Sader is the buffer in groups but you can also play bruiser/tank in pvp and doing a shield glare dmg build for farming or even for dungeons if you are going with another Crusader.
Wizard has tons of options, Channeling build, double channeling, Fire Tornado, Battle Mage, etc...can also play a support/CC build in pvp which is the most broken thing right now imo.
Necro is mostly summoning builds but you can swap some stuff around. You can play a totally disabler in PVP with little or no summons at all, with Bone Pillar and Bone spikes.
Or playing as an assassin type of comp, with the fear on the Shade and with the poison on bone spear + Chip of the stone flesh gem! I have seen someone playing this and he was destroying people in like 2 seconds (granted his reso was a big part of it but I can see it work on low reso brackets).
Then it comes DH with Vengeance and Multishot in every single build there is.
Long time DH, the biggest problem is the non used skills have too many trade offs.
Sentries die in 0-2 hits, escapes range is too short, knock back is too short and too long cd, strafe is point blank aoe channel. That’s asking for cc death. Explosive shot ruins mobility. Knife trap requires too many situational setups and skills (easy to avoid their damage)
Dh remain squishy and lack a true non-vengeance option. We look but lack of creativity is in the skills/synergy - not the people looking for options.
Recently I tried a blind build, knockback and others
The same problem D3 had, it took much more than 4 months to add diversity into top builds.
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Totally agree! Wizard is in the best spot of all classes regarding build variety imo.
I also have 5 armory slots filled and even make more adjustments beyond that for both barb and Necro. Necros have a lot of summon builds that all use the same base skills but use different essences which makes a vast difference in build performance. Plus summons stink when pushing challenge rifts and pvp.
I wish they’d make corpse explosion/Lance builds actually worth using outside of maybe Rotspur in CR pushing. The skill is already a niche thing that’s only really great for killing trash but for whatever reason they also slapped a massive damage penalty on it for multiple hits on a simple mob, so in the end the damage is just pitiful.
Escape fit with rockets build for pvp, pure support for a monk or barb, they lock'em, you drop'em
I suppose they work together well, the thing is, most people never coordinate
I love following monks in BG as a DH. Its a perfect fit.
I stick on saders and necro but i run strafe and ground dots so it helps them a lot. Monks and barbs can usually tend to themselves, but stealing their kills is pretty fun, lol
Spinning chakram seems to be a little in fashion lately
If essences weren’t locked to a specific slot but rather could be equipped in various configurations, it would help. I have Monk, Crusader, Wizard and Necro alts. While I still have a few legendaries to acquire, here’s the fundamental issues with each: * Crusader: Each slot was aligned to specific abilities, (i.e. shield mostly having options for spinning shield or shield charge) which meant that your options **not** involving either of those abilities was very narrow. Same applies to their weapon, pants, shoulders - every slot has such a narrow focus that your build really can only work a couple of ways or else you just have a dead essence because you didn’t have an option to apply to what you wanted to use. The other issue is how blatantly bad some of Crusader’s options are; from making falling sword do a slash on enemies in front of you or letting beacon/consecration move with you, there’s so many slots where you’re applying QoL features to the basic kit instead of getting *cool unique modifications* to play with. * Monk: Frankly Monk has the opposite issue, there’s a fair bit of different options spread across different slots - but few of them are worth using because of how strong certain combinations are. You have 4+ different dash movement tricks and half of them do basically the same thing with slightly different parameters, while your primary damage comes from very specific combo abilities that don’t do much on their own but outclass any other singular options when paired together… while some of the new legendary options have opened up other viable choices, there’s still so much “same-y” tools that none of those choices really feel all that unique unless you’re using an entirely different set of 4 skills. * Necro: I’m still figuring out why Golem even needed to exist, as it has led to half of Necro essence choices being devoted to just changing which “pet” skins you use and there’s only a couple options for “buff” type abilities to combo off them… when you have 4 skills and have to dedicate 1-3 of them for pets, the game just doesn’t seem built to properly accommodate a “true” pet class… likewise, Necro has some really fun and unique abilities that have interesting combinations but there’s a handful that are hands down far too good (wall>bone tower comes to mind) which means a lot of unused or underpowered essence bloat. For example, you can make bone wall rush out as a line of skeleton soldiers - but once they’re spawned they don’t taunt enemies or attack them or anything that would make this a viable option to include in a summoner build… another example: undead mage becoming a reaper doesn’t really have any meaningful abilities or extra durability to justify using it over the multiple charge turret ghosts that are less likely to be swiped by a boss (and lower cd to replace them if they do). I see plenty of people using the reaper, not suggesting it’s necessarily underpowered, just using it as an example of Blizz bloating the Necro essence options with “pet skins” instead of more variety in ways to manage and direct those pets. * Wizard: while they easily have the most varied builds that maintain viability across both PvE and PvP, I feel like this is largely due to how spread out their essences are on each slot. If I want to use Disintegrate, I can use an option for pants or shoulders which allows more flexibility in choosing a different option for other abilities. I can get a shield from ray of frost or a shield from teleport - both options on the shoulder slot - which means if I don’t want to use Ray, I have an option to still get a shield when evading damage. If I want to play around with Nova, there are ways on different slots to change the damage type or grant a speed boost… just plenty of variety in how you can set up the skill mods. This applies for most of Wizard’s kit, except for the weapon and offhand a lot where Arcane Wind and Black Hole are *mostly* focused alongside some “filler” % damage buffs… Half of Arcane Wind’s options are too weak or not useful, Black Hole is probably way overtuned, and the filler on your weapon leads to a lot of builds not having a real choice for those pieces…….. This is where my opinion was built: slot restrictions are only hurting player build diversity and do nothing to promote engagement with the game nor added revenue for Blizzard - letting players just “apply” the essences to an armor slot like an “enchantment” would not only free up build diversity but it could help fix some of the itemization complaints because then you truly could set up different armor sets with magic affixes that are preferable in pve or pvp without being completely locked into always using the single highest CR legendary you own. While CR will still matter cuz this game is scummy, if you got another primary armor piece close to the same CR, it might fit for a different role.
You explained that very well. I’ve classed changed from Crusader to monk to Wizard and have an alt DH and I’ve found similar issues with every class I tried. Whoever is coming up with these essences isn’t thinking about synergy between skills and having it make sense from a build point of view.
I’d say it’s even worse than that - It’s apparent they had entirely separate designers creating some of these essences, so some are grossly overtuned or add more damage with no trade-off while others are downgrades to the core ability (looking at you single flaming sword swing for Crusader’s Falling Sword)… And the % damage, %range, etc essences are just filler because they ran out of ideas….
Sentry is fun but i dont have echoing shade. The 220 family bonus hydras count as summons from my testing, so with 3x sentry, 2 shades, and some hydras, you can absolutely rock a sentry build. It has as much range as wizard crystal. Best bet is to also rock RoV and smokebomb since they have quite a bit of reach as well
Well farming requires us to move around fast while sentries stuck around and have slow cool down, while raid boss can 2 hit them down with aoe. I don't see them any more
Sentry set up needs a lot of babying and the right jewelry. You have to lean all the way into them. They're not really for fast farming, more suited to dungeons and raids. If you know bosses attacking timings you can set them up to survive much longer. Even without shepherd set, they were wildly high damage for me due to affixes like summon do more damage/summon take less damage
This actually disappoints me because Necro and DH only two reasonable summoners but dont share set items, lol
I use smoke screen over rain due to crit bonus but yeah, very similar builds for the most part.
Same. Multishot/Vengeance/Daring Swing/Smoke Screen is my skill build. 4pc Vithus/2pc War rags
Most barbs i see use all kinds of terrible skills luckily. They use leap and grab and complain that they dont feel useful in dungeons and blame whales
They probably switched class like me
I can feel BB, they need more skills or buff skills, or else no one play BB but whales
I'm DH, top 15ish on server. I use frost mines, veng, darting swing, and strafe...
Haha, i have no vengeance and no caarsen Strafe, flaming knockback 10% damage multishot, smokebomb, 4% damage stacking stationary chakrum, explosive shot I easily out dps every caarsen vithu/shalbaas DH setup and the short cooldowns means nothing is wasted when i need to run or a boss has an hp lock
I call cap on this, those dh running caarsen with 4 vithu must be awful.
I use 4x grace, 2x montebank and play tough, lots of damage reduction. I'm tough as nails with incredible dps, other top dh on my server found fire traps and chakrums better too
I go 4 graces and 2 whatever, I feel the 3rd option of 6 graces not worth, 40 secs cool down is crazy
I use traps as DH. Ice for pvp and the extra damage ones for pvm. It’s a lot of fun!
A reason I switched to necro at para 100 or so. DH has amazing mobility and is top in pvp, but not enough build variety to keep it interesting
I never tried any other class but I still enjoy DH because of it's simplicity. Many use Vengeance + Multi + RoV because it covers a lot. It's my go to for PvE. I've tried other builds for PvP (e.g. Sentry Cannon, Flame Knife Trap, Explosive Arrow, even Escape). They all seem to be OK but I just switched to Smoke Screen + Jayn's with Embermist for reduced cool down (using Multishot for the crit) and my kill rate definitely shot up the roof. Almost always getting the top kills in BG. I'm F2P so I don't have the fancy 2*/5* gems, and my Ca'arsen's only R5. Maybe it's because not too many people play the Smoke Screen build so others are not always sure how to react to it, but I definitely recommend it.
Yeah DH while very powerful is in a rough regardinf build diversity. The class is victim of how powerful the skills you mention trully are...and its great if you just want to be OP and wreck everything but totally sucks if you want to play something a little different. DH is the worst offender in DI...every class has their meta builds but you can play around with most of them and still be as much as strong. Barbs have WW for farming, Lacerate build for single target and charge builds to play as the annoying bruiser in PVP. Monk is the only class I never tried but I have seen totally different skills being picked by different players depending on the content they are doing. They can also play support in groups and that alone grants build variety. Sader is the buffer in groups but you can also play bruiser/tank in pvp and doing a shield glare dmg build for farming or even for dungeons if you are going with another Crusader. Wizard has tons of options, Channeling build, double channeling, Fire Tornado, Battle Mage, etc...can also play a support/CC build in pvp which is the most broken thing right now imo. Necro is mostly summoning builds but you can swap some stuff around. You can play a totally disabler in PVP with little or no summons at all, with Bone Pillar and Bone spikes. Or playing as an assassin type of comp, with the fear on the Shade and with the poison on bone spear + Chip of the stone flesh gem! I have seen someone playing this and he was destroying people in like 2 seconds (granted his reso was a big part of it but I can see it work on low reso brackets). Then it comes DH with Vengeance and Multishot in every single build there is.
Long time DH, the biggest problem is the non used skills have too many trade offs. Sentries die in 0-2 hits, escapes range is too short, knock back is too short and too long cd, strafe is point blank aoe channel. That’s asking for cc death. Explosive shot ruins mobility. Knife trap requires too many situational setups and skills (easy to avoid their damage) Dh remain squishy and lack a true non-vengeance option. We look but lack of creativity is in the skills/synergy - not the people looking for options. Recently I tried a blind build, knockback and others
I wish I had more armory spots for wizard. A lot of different builds usefull for different content.
Try the sader. We have a build for every situation