Buff for Damage on Legendary Sources and Mojos

Hey everyone!

First off, apologies for the delay on this follow-up and thank you very much for your patience. We've looked into your reports with QA and the dev thoroughly and here's what happened:

The issue is actually two-fold:

• Issue #1: Pre-patch 2.0.4, crafted Legendary Sources and Mojos had, on average, approximately 6% more damage than dropped Legendary Sources and Mojos.
• Issue #2: Legendary Sources and Mojos (both crafted and dropped) are not currently being appropriately up-ranked to have more powerful base damage than Rare Sources and Mojos.

The first issue was resolved in patch 2.0.4. For reference, in patch 2.0.4, we implemented a bug fix to address an issue with crafted Legendary Crusader shields rolling with the wrong Block value. It turns out that the same bug that was causing crafted Legendary Crusader Shields to roll with Block values that were too low was also causing crafted Legendary Sources and Mojos to roll with Damage values that were too high. As a result, we when we fixed the issue with crafted Crusader shields we also fixed the issue with crafted Mojos and Sources. This fix had the secondary effect of reducing the maximum +Damage value on many existing crafted Sources and Mojos, bringing them in line with dropped Sources and Mojos.

While crafted Legendary Sources and Mojos are now using the correct values (both newly rolled and existing), this particular fix came a little sooner than we anticipated which means we didn't get to post about it advance. We sincerely apologize for not providing messaging ahead of time on this topic as well as for any inconvenience or negative effect that lack of messaging may have had on your gameplay experience. This applies especially to anyone who had an existing item affected by the fix itself.

In the near future, we'd like to address the second issue, which is that Legendary Sources and Mojos (both dropped and crafted) are not being appropriately up-ranked to have more powerful base Damage than Rare ones. Since any change made to address this issue would affect client-side data, it's not something we can hotfix; BUT, we are looking to implement a fix in an upcoming patch. We're still working out the specific details (including an ETA), but suffice to say that crafted/dropped Legendary Sources and Mojos should be more powerful than they were even prior to patch 2.0.4 once issue #2 is resolved.

Alright, folks. Here's the follow up:

• Blade of Prophecy currently only procs two extra explosions of Condemn, regardless of how many targets are Condemned while the weapon is equipped.
• This is intended functionality of the weapon, and has been since it was implemented. (This is really what I wanted to confirm.)
• No changes have been made to Blade of Prophecy since RoS shipped, and no known bugs are currently active with the weapon.

Just as an FYI, I've already passed along the feedback regarding BoP's tooltip and the relevant secondary affix being somewhat misleading/confusing. :)

When I passed along the feedback from earlier posts in this thread to the dev team, they'd agreed with the posts that the description is confusing and not really representative of the behavior of the proc, so it's something they'd like to fix and just make much more clear to players. Since it's a text change (and therefore hitting client side data), it's not something we can hotfix, but we are looking to tackle with a future patch.

Happy to pass on the feedback, but pretty sure Nevalistis already beat me to it. I know she documented quite a bit of feedback from the discussion she was keeping an eye on here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/12506571517?page=9#178



Note that the tuning pass she's referencing refers to the reevaluation we always do after a game is launched (or a big patch has been released). We do a tuning pass before we ship and then after; this post-ship pass is to account for the wider net of data we get once the game has been played by a larger audience of players.

Some of these tests can be misleading in that they often create an environment attempting to compare each skill point-for-point when not all skills are designed to perform equally under the same circumstances.

Using Whirlwind as your exclusive damage dealer on Ghom is going to have lower performance when compared to something like Ancient Spear because it's designed to hit multiple targets. Whirlwind is the type of skill that performs exponentially better the more targets it's able to hit, and less well on single targets. Ancient Spear, on the other hand, is tuned the other way around (better at single target, less than ideal at multi-target) as it's (generally) a single-target skill.

Damage is not the only factor of a skill that's weighed when we're considering balance. The proc coefficient, the average number of targets a skill usually hits, the amount of player skill involved to capitalize on an ability's powers, and whether or not that skill provides any additional utility bonuses are some of the other parts of that equation. While some of that is quantifiable data, other details are a bit harder to measure in raw numbers. That's part of what makes the act of balancing so tricky.

We want to make sure each skill is serving its design intent and feels good when utilized in those environments. Single-target skills will generally excel the most when you're fighting bosses, when AoE skills will feel more powerful among packs of beasties. We think that Whirlwind, when used in the latter situation, feels pretty good right now, and even more so when geared up with items that synergize well with its strengths.

We're keeping an ever-vigilant eye on player feedback and our own data, and as these concerns pop up, those of us on the Community team will continue to do our best to let you know what the thoughts are behind these design decisions. :)

This is actually a topic I've been meaning to post on for a while, but hadn't found a good opportunity yet. Now's as good a time as any, I suppose!

When we did a pass on elemental damage types across skills during the Closed Beta for Reaper of Souls, the Barbarian class was one that received the most revision. While we arrived at a place much closer to where we were aiming, we think there's room for some additional adjustments. I don't have details on exact changes to share at this time, but it's likely you'll see some skills, and not just for the Barbarian, shift around their elemental type in a future patch.