4646

I typically have a skill/spell of some sort on LMB that just moves if I’m not clicking on a target enemy. Throwing a trap, cyclone, etc, work great. Then I just move around and press Shift whenever I want to engage the skill. Frees up the four action slots for whatever my other skill rotation is.

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In case any of you don’t know, they have made some of this easier:

  1. You can click on one of your skills and toggle the icon there to make it always use/cast without moving if you want. Saves hitting Shift all the time for skills where you always want to stay in place.
  2. They added an extra skill bar which is revealed when you hold down a modifier key. This helps because you can place rarely-triggered skills like auras, golems, or long-lasting buffs off on that bar if you want and that leaves your main bar with more space.
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Balance changes overview.

All I have to saw is wtf are they thinking with the physical damage changes - adding more mechanics on damage calculation that also gets partially bypassed by yet another investment line.

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That’s a lot of nerfing, seems to me. There’s a few power increases in there, but a whole lot of it is making things harder. Which isn’t a bad thing necessarily, as the power increases over the last year or so have been substantial, but it does surprise me a bit. I’m a little concerned about the various low-level changes, which seem entirely focused on making the leveling process harder. This game is hard enough for new folks to get into, with all the complexity; doesn’t seem like a great idea to be raising the barrier to entry.

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Metamorph league starts in, uh, hey, only 8 hours from now (so around 3 PM EST on December 13). It releases in conjunction with the Conquerors of the Atlas content drop.

Here’s a short video by ZiggyD about the league mechanics:

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What does he mean by each “zone”? He says we should make a metamorph for each zone. Does he mean Act? So one metamorph for Act 1? Or does he mean each area? If the latter, then that’s a hell of a lot of metamorphs.

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I’m guessing he means each area you go into, not each Act. So yeah, you could be making a lot of metamorphs if you so choose.

4653

Yeah, that seems to be the approach for league mechanics. One in every zone during the league, scaling back to more normal levels when they incorporate the mechanic into the base game.

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So what’s everyone playing this league? Are zombies still worth it after the nerfs? I was thinking of trying that because it’s generally low budget and easy to get going.

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I was definitely on board for trying a zombie build if that is still strong. If it’s weak again, then probably an archer? The trailer for Conquerers shows a lot of new stuff added for archers.

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My 2 go-to builds are generally:

  • necromancers with lots of minions
  • very tanky builds that don’t need a lot of fancy reflexes

However, I do like to look around for ideas whenever a new league starts. Here are 5 suggestions from LiftingNerdBro:

the two that appeal to me in his video are the Arc Witch (since I always play pet builds… maybe this would be a good change of pace - plus they buffed Arc so it might be overpowered!) and the Necromancer who uses spellcasting skeletons. Because that looks pretty awesome. So I’ll probably do one of those.

But what I typically do is pick a build, play it to around level 30, and then I start getting the “grass is greener” syndrome and think “maybe this other build will be cool” so I switch to build #2 and play that for the rest of the league.

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I’m planning to start w/ Zombies again to see how hard the nerf bat hit. From the notes, it sounds like it hit the scaling at the middle of the power curve, but not too badly on the overall strength of the build. The removal of the life multiplier on Raise Zombie has me a little worried, though. The one weak spot of the build was already bosses who could nuke the minion army, as resummoning during a fight is a very slow process.

Caster skellies could be fun. That just sounds hilarious, if nothing else.

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I think it will be a cheap holy flame totem build for me. Storm burst trickster looks fun, but squishy.

4659

I figure, why not do a summoner again as league starter? If the nerfs hit it too hard at high end, at least I’ll have currency by the time I figure out what I really want to be playing.

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I’ll be mad if I missed my one chance to play a powerful summoner in this game.

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Skeletons didn’t get nerfed at all except by Necro getting a minor minion speed nerf.

Spectre gem’s nerf only brought you down to 3 of them instead of 4 before very high levels, still quite good. Whether they’ll be strong depends on how the enemy rebalance touches specific types of spectres. I bet there will be new options for decent spectres to use now.

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I wanted to play Cremation since I never finish end game and that’s probably my favorite skill visually. Then I just added a bunch of minions and planned a weird hybrid Necromancer tree and am hoping it will work out.

If it doesn’t it should be easy enough to adjust the tree to proper minions.

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Yeah, the spectre nerf is a good example of the mid-level smoothing. Getting a level 25 gem isn’t that rough on the high end. +2 from helm, +2 from ascendancy, so just need to come up w/ the currency for a lvl21 gem (or vaal/temple one up).

I liked running spectres of the apes that give frenzy and power charges. Combined with Feeding Frenzy, made my zombies look like something out of World War Z. Definitely not the slow zombies.

edit: I suspect this will make it more important to run Raise Zombies in a 6-link to get the Empower4 going. I never bothered this last time around, as I was chewing through everything plenty fast already.

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Oh, there’s a late spectre nerf recently added: Unending Hunger now grants 20 seconds of Soul Eater to your Spectre on kill (from 30 seconds).

I’ll probably still want to play them later in the league.

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Here’s more builds from another youtuber, one I’ve never heard of before: Esoro

He’s promoting 3 builds of his and the video is excellent. I’m now sorely tempted to play the Storm Burst trickster, even though I usually hate channeling skills. But that looks pretty good (but then so does the Lacerate build).