Diablo 4: Blizzard nerfs one of the best builds with Season 5

earthpressnews

With Season 5, Blizzard is working on Diablo 4’s classes and handing out tons of buffs and some nerfs. The weakenings affect barbarians, among others, but they are not impressed. One of their strongest builds is even getting stronger – despite the heavy nerf.

This is the nerf:

  • Season 5 is currently on the PTR and with it a number of changes, including the recipes for hardening items. You can find the complete patch notes for the PTR here.
  • Here, for example, the tempering recipe for Bash, the most important stat for Bash Barbarians – one of the best builds in the tier list of Season 4 – has been affected.
  • Instead of a maximum of +105% additional damage, only +20% is possible with Season 5. Nevertheless, the build is becoming even stronger, as two experts explain.

    • Here you can find all information about the release and contents of Season 5.

    Why is the build even stronger now? Wudijo and Rob are among the greatest experts in Diablo, Rob in particular is one of the best barbarians in the world. Both have tested the new “Bash Barb” on the PTR.

    Their conclusion is that the build is now even stronger than before. During testing, Rob shows that he hits the training dummy alone for several billion times, and that with every attack. Out of hundreds of millions, there is hardly a single hit (via YouTube). He says:

    Bash-Barb lives, guys. We had a huge nerf in Season 5, the damage was divided by 5. But there is a new setup and it hits for billions upon billions and that is with direct damage. No bleeding, even more than [vor Season 5] I think.

    Rob

    Some of the new, unique items from Season 5 are responsible for the unexpected buff:

  • The sword “Shard of Verathiel” increases the damage of basic abilities by 100-300%, but adds a resource cost of 25 to your primary resource.
  • The Crown of Lucion helmet reduces resource costs by 75%. Whenever you spend resources, your damage increases by 5-25%, but resource costs also increase by 25%, up to 5 times.
  • The amulet “Locran’s Talisman” increases the critical hit chance for each available primary resource by 0.1-0.5% and each resource point above 100 gives additional critical hit damage.

    • Combined with the Uber-Unique Ring of Starless Skies, which further reduces your resource costs, you still get a net increase in rage and can bash endlessly with increasing damage.

    After Season 5 comes the first expansion of Diablo 4, Vessel of Hatred:

    Trailer for Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred gives insight into the story of the expansion

    More videos

    Autoplay

    “Every build with basic attacks becomes stronger”

    Wudijo calculates in more detail how this combination can be so strong despite some cuts. Although you are missing the famous Shako, the new crown provides an enormous damage boost. In the end, it comes to about 150% of the damage that you could achieve with the ideal build before Season 5 (via YouTube).

    According to Wudijo, the Bash Barbarian is not even the build that benefits the most from this. The Flay build is much stronger and other classes have even more advantages through the combination of the new items.

    The expert explains that druids or sorceresses with basic spells and at least the Shard of Verathiel can do much more damage. Fireball, for example, is a skill that is predestined for this:

    Many other builds will also utilize the Verathiel Shard. There will be many base skill builds that will suddenly become much stronger because they are not affected by the Bash nerf. […] Heartseeker Hunter, Stormclaw Druid, Fireball Wizard – basically anyone who uses a build with basic attacks will become stronger and even stronger than the Bash Barb.

    Wudjo

    Season 5 is currently still in the test phase and Blizzard will probably implement a lot of feedback before the release in August. So whether it will remain a buff and how much the other classes will benefit remains to be seen. At the moment it doesn’t look as if all classes can keep up with barbarians: Blizzard is buffing all classes in Diablo 4 with Season 5, but one is even weaker: “40% less damage”

    mmod-game