D2R Ladder Season 1 is in its fourth month, and if Blizzard lives up to its promise, that means a new 2.5 Patch featuring Ladder Season 2 content will be scheduled in August. So it's time to take a look at what changes are likely to appear in the new season, especially those skill changes that have a huge impact on gameplay.
1. Druid Skill: Spirit of the Barbs
Oak Sage is such a powerful skill at level six, a ton of plus life, heart of wolverine, attack rating and damage, really good for shape shifters, but this reflection of damage you can see here - level 25 reflects, 509 damage that is so useless. We don't really think anybody ever uses this skill and it's such a cool looking one so it's such a shame. But it is a good way to sort of balance between Oak Sage and Hearth Wolverine, would be adding additional life mana and defense for every skill point that you invest now. Obviously you would have to have it to be tuned down a little bit to maybe half the life value of oak sage, so you kind of have the choice. Let's say you're playing as a windridge you want a very high life ball or do you maybe want a large life wool and a large mana pool but not quite as much as what oaksage would provide you so it gives you kind of a little bit of play there. Plus life, mana and defense would make spirit of the barbs useful instead of useless.
2. Druid Skill: Volcano
From patch 2.3 to patch 2.4, the fire druid took many steps forward, increasing the fall rate and the radius of armageddon and removing the global cooldown associated between all the different fire skills was a fantastic change, and also molten boulder is great now increasing the velocity and the rate that you can cast it is all great positive changes for the fire drift. But genuinely this build still struggles against firemen monsters because most of your physical damage is coming from multi-boulder, volcano, and armageddon. Armageddon is sporadic ultim boulder is decent does knock back and good damage, but volcano is kind of the big lackluster skill for the fire dirt and that's large because of two flaws with the skill, if you don't have enough
D2R Items in hands.
The first is the next hit delay that is associated with the skill so any damage from the center volcano or any of the magma that's flying off a volcano has a 1.5 second next hit delay tied to it, so if you're hit with another source of damage in that 1.5 seconds the monster will not take any damage. So when you're dealing with large groups of firemen monsters, it would be nice if we could cast a few more volcanoes to get some more physical damage going with molten boulder, and then remove that stupid next-hit delay or severely reduce it, so that they can actually take multiple hits of the physical damage portion of the volcano, and we can actually do some substantial damage to those firemen monsters.
Nothing major needs to be changed here, and just starting with removing the next hit delay or reducing it and dropping the cooldown maybe a two-second casting delay would be a big improvement for the fire druid.
3. Barbarian Skill: Grim Ward
There's only one skill that we would like to see adjusted for Barbarian and that is Grim Ward. Despite melee being at a disadvantage, the Barbarian's skills, for the most part, are in a pretty good place, they're all useful and they serve a purpose, largely the specialization of the combat skill trees throw has been improved leap attack and has a little bit AOE. Grim Ward actually is a very cool skill increasing the amount of damage taken and slowing down monsters, you can actually get a pretty high percent damage value or additional damage value taken to monsters using this skill. But the two things that are really holding it back.
The first one is the flea, it's not necessarily like a breaking issue but it kind of annoying when you are trying to whirlwind and drop down Grim Ward, then monsters start fleeing, so if they just removed that, it would make it a more powerful and useful skill.
The second small tweak that we would like to see is the ability to make Grim Ward from demons as well as the undead, like if you are running through the cast sanctuary, there's tons of undead monsters but it won't allow you to use Grim Ward on those types of enemies, it'd be very cool if similar to how they tweaked fist of the heavens to damage like the undead and demons, it would be really neat if we could use grim ward on the undead and demons.
Two small tweaks we think would make reward a lot more viable and more useful for the barbarian.
