[Munderbunny]

Originally Posted by RDespair

I find it amusing that you're complaining that Ice Shards is too powerful and yet you're a Brigand. Rogue has Throwing Knives which is similar to Ice Shard except it:

1-doesn't have instant recharge speed (although it is fairly quick to recharge)
2-has a drastically lower energy cost
3-requires fewer skill points to max
4-is considered a weapon and so can be drastically improved by anything that adds flat damage to your weapons (aside from stuff that's in your hands) or other effects.

I think throwing knives are awesome, but the energy cost isn't really a benefit to it since it's in the rogue mastery. When I first made my brigand, I couldn't keep envenom weapon, call of the hunt, and blade honing on at the same time because then my total energy was like 50 or something ridiculous.

Seriously, get a relic and rings that add some flat damage (preferrably piercing since Flurry of Knives gives a big +% Piercing Damage bonus), max out Art of the Hunt, Exploit Weakness, Anatomy, Blade Honing, and the Envenom Line and you've got a skill that's cheap, has low recharge, does fantastic damage (remember at max+4 level, it shoots 9 blades each of which can hit the same target if you're close enough), and can even add status effects (like the Envenom Weapon line or various effects you get from your equipment). And if you manage to get -100% Recharge equipment & +Casting Speed Equipment, then Throwing Knives is substantially better than Ice Shards ever will be.

So, I think equipment balance is almost a separate topic. Clearly the developers considered equipment a part of the balancing, but they also obviously considered recharge time a part of skill balance. By even allowing recharge rate to go to zero, any effect that balancing factor could have is entirely negated. I'm also not entirely convinced that the developers gave a ton of thought to the stuff they made. I gave up on my basher diviner because it was a class that seemed almost entirely ignored by the designers. Or, even worse, how poorly considered the brigand is. I mean, for example, I found this axe, The Brigand's Axe. Now, hunting doesn't do **** for axes, it's all spears and bows, and rogues can't even use blade honing on it because it's not a qualifying weapon, and the weapon itself doesn't have anything to do with poison and bleeding. So, how is it a brigand's weapon? Or, even better, I found a spear the other day, The Hunter's Spear (not actually sure what it was called), and it did some bleeding damage and it gave a bonus to some hunting skill, but here's the best part, it's biggest boost was to projectile speed! A hunting spear that boosts projectile speed for any projectile except a ******* arrow?

So, anyway, back to the subject, I certainly agree that throwing knives with zero recharge would be insane--just about any direct-damaging dealing spell becomes ridiculous, and that's why I don't think it should be possible. My problem with ice shards in particular is that it starts with no recharge rate. I did the math the other day, if I made a stormcaller around ice shard, by level 27, the character could put out 5890 damage per second with zero equipment on. I don't know about you, but I'm usually near the end of Act 2 in NORMAL when I hit level 27. Just...just imagine it...it's horrifying.

Anyway, although I agree that Ice Shards is a powerful skill, I don't think it needs to be nerfed. The problem with your little 2-party group isn't that Ice Shards is too powerful, it's that trying to kill with slow DoT effects when you've got a big damage dealer as your partner means that you're not working together as a team. If I had a big damage dealer as my partner, I'd either go a support route (weaken enemies and strengthen my partner), a tanking route (distract the enemies and protect my partner while she kills them), or do the same thing as her and go with another big damage dealer build.

Man this cracked me up. So, when I made the brigand character, I expected her Stormstrocity to be the big cannon, and I figured I could use all my nifty crowd control stuff to help her out. It's great in theory, but in practice it doesn't work. Confusing and slowing enemies is pointless as they're dead the moment we see them. Ensnaring them, or weakening them also pointless, because they're dead the moment we see them. Seriously, even though all the enemies are suppossedly scaled up in difficulty with 2 people, I could literally just follow 1 screen behind her and never see a living monster. The only time monsters don't instantly die are boss fights (though hero bosses can usually manage to get 1-2 steps closer to other enemies before they die), and even those are over within 10 seconds. It's funny, because boss fights are great when the boss is attacking me, and she's shooting at it from far away, but as soon as I run and heal, the boss turns to fight her and makes the fatal mistake of getting closer to her, which just increases the number of shards that hit him.

Here's how bad it was, even SHE got bored. Couple days ago, we tried this extra-monsters mod, so we could fight twice as many monsters. And we played it for a few hours like that. I actually got kill stuff for a while! And she actually almost died once, when we had to fight 3 manticores at the same time. The problem was that it lagged us out like crazy, caused all sorts of weird graphical glitches, and often spawned ghost monsters. Really all the mod did was make us level up twice as fast; having 2x too-weak monsters doesn't mean anything with AoE damage. It only got challenging during the boss fights, but not enough. So, I made my own difficulty yesterday, where I scaled up all the monster's damage as if there were 6 people in our party, instead of 2, and I gave them all 200% more health. It felt a little too arbitrary for us at first, so I set it so that we gain 25% more experience--makes it feels somewhat worth all the extra work (funny what a psychological difference that made). We played it for hours yesterday, and we never had more fun. We even both died to a hero boss, and another time when we got swarmed in a camp. It's like the first time we've died when it wasn't just because we stopped paying attention to our health bar, or accidentally hit that quickbar switch.

EDIT: And though I agree that poison could use some boosting, making Envenom Weapon an aura that affects allies would make it way too powerful, if only for the fact that you could have Nightshade & Mandrake enhanced summons.

I fully agree for the exact same reasons. And, the amount of base damage that poison does is really high after the dev's upped it (kind of a clumsy non-solution to the problem, imho) and it would entirely ruin Normal difficulty, even Epic, really.