D2R Ladder Season 2 Amazon Skills Changes | Lightning Bolt, Plague Javelin, Valkyrie, etc

D2R Ladder Season 2 Amazon Skills Changes | Lightning Bolt, Plague Javelin, Valkyrie, etc

7/28/2022 11:44:09 AM

Walking into the first ladder season of Diablo 2 Resurrected, we were hit with patch 2.4 which brought a massive amount of changes to building potential for building diversity as well as generally changing how synergies and different skills that were underused ended up being used in that patch.

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We Need These Skill Changes in Diablo 2 Resurrected

With Ladder Season 1 theoretically coming to a close in August, we should start looking at what's coming up in Patch 2.5! With patch 2.4 there were a lot of significant changes, so let's check it.

Lightning Bolt

Starting off with Lightning Bolt, this skill tosses a lightning bolt makes sense right, it only takes a percentage of your overall weapon damage, it converts all of your physical damage to lightning damage, and then on top of that adds additional lightning damage, and the major problem with Lightning Bolt is that in almost all instances, Lightning Fury is strictly better to use unless you're in a particular scenario.

Plague Javelin

While Plague Javelin had its poison length reduced, meaning that it didn't continue to absurdly scale with skill level, how long the poison would be dealt over, for whatever reason poison Javelin still deals its damage over a massive length of time, and while this isn't necessarily some kind of game-breaking or completely useless skill type, the length of the poison means that the average damage that you're doing is so small in comparison to plague javelin that while you can arguably increase your DPS by hitting more monsters while playing Javelins on cooldown, the damage from poison Devlin is just so pitiful that in most circumstances it's kind of useless to use.

Valkyrie

Valkyrie is a really interesting skill and we'd argue it's one of the hallmarks of the identity of the amazon herself, but with the way that the synergies work for it and also the overall AI of the valkyrie while it looks like something that you could build as a primary skill, not only can you not actually do that successfully, but even if you were to fully invest all the points into it, you would end up getting a summon that is just a much worse version of an act ii mercenary with almost no benefits to speak of, so just to give you an idea with the six synergies that valkyrie has and the skill itself that means that you would need 140 points to fully empower a valkyrie summon, now if you're not aware you don't have 140 skill points even at level 99 and doing this would mean that you literally had nothing else to use to put into a single additional skill, so your Amazon would literally just be sitting behind a valkyrie, if the valkyrie was incredibly powerful that wouldn't be a problem, but not only is she generally weak, but her ai decision making and her overall attack speed and movement speed makes her nearly useless, other than proactively summoning as a meat shield while you are playing throughout the game, we sometimes only put a point into valkyrie so that my peace runeword will stop summoning valkyries that die within a second, because if you don't actually have points in this skill if you summon a valkyrie from peace runeworld she dies immediately, so the first idea that we have for valkyrie is that similar to an iron golem, she shouldn't despawn when summoned, and you would actually be able to specifically target a spear type weapon to summon her from, now so that she doesn't lose all of her functionality if you don't target an D2R item on the ground you would just be able to summon her like normal, but for people who don't know the valkyrie actually equips a set of gear that draws from a magic and rare pool of D2R items that can roll with a lot of different affixes, you have no way of controlling or seeing the gear that a valkyrie is wearing, with this idea you'd be able to specifically target a spear item and the valkyrie would equip that as their weapon, and then after that she would continue to equip rare gear in the rest of her slots for people who wanted to really invest in the valkyrie at the very least giving her 20 skill points and 20 skill points into decoy so that she has the most life possible as well as bumping up her resistances, you'd be able to give her a very strong weapon, so as long as you keep the valkyrie alive, you might be able to select for specific attack modifiers on the weapon or different stats to be able to increase the overall damage that she could output, and then another idea that was proposed was the idea of actually changing her synergies so that instead of working with penetrate, critical strike, and dodge or any of those skills, you would instead synergize with fend impale in jab and then she would use those skills to attack as well, then the valkyrie could just be used as a chump tank for any build that's looking to get a little bit of additional survivability, melee spear and javelin zones could generate another serious source of overall damage output to help bump up their viability as well.

Fire/Magic/Cold Arrow

The first thing to note in the bow in crossbow skills are the first three starter skills for each tree, namely fire arrow, magic arrow, and cold arrow, each one of these skills will convert your physical damage over to the element of the skill, fire arrow, and cold arrow will actually add attack rating and additional elemental damage, whereas magic arrow will add attack rating and physical damage which would then be converted, the problem with these three skills other than magic arrow having the slight additional bonus of not using arrows and bolts, you never use these skills later on, we think one way that you could actually manage to have these skills be relevant even in the later game is if they fully converted all physical damage over to the element, in this way you could build a fully competent physical damage build and with only a hundred points between cold arrow and its synergy, fire arrow and its synergy and then magic arrow, you can have a tri-elemental build that is able to rely on physical damage and when necessary swap over to a different element and continue to put out a high amount of damage, but have that versatility, in being able to handle just about any immune in the game.

Ice Arrow

Ice arrow seems like it's bringing something more to the table than the cold arrow is and is somehow a step between this and Freezing Arrow, the way that it works currently is the exact same way as Freezing Arrow except Freezing Arrow explodes on impact and deals damage in an AOE, once you have access to freezing arrow, there is literally no reason to be using ice arrow, right now if they were to change it so that ice arrow actually carried more coal damage than freezing arrow, but continued to only be applicable to single targets, it's something that you could legitimately swap to for single targets in boss kill speed over freezing arrow, but each one of these two attacks would still have its overall identity and its different use cases, whereas right now, you would not use Freezing Arrow because the damage output from ice arrow will never compare to Freezing Arrow even against single targets.

Exploding Arrow

While this one isn't a direct change to exploding arrow itself, it's more so a change to how easy it is to get into Exploding Arrow in the early late game, Exploding Arrow is arguably one of the best starter skills, because of how much damage you can get out just from having a three-socketed hunter's bow with a couple rubies in it, considering this will explode on impact and you don't need to hit that being said in the later game getting into a really powerful exploding arrow build, actually, takes an incredible amount of gear for it to be anywhere near as competitive as Freezing Aarrow, and the major reason for this is that the Amazon set, the M'avina's set has both flat cold damage on it which will actually add to the explosion of freezing arrow and it carries plus percentile, cold damage when you wear the entire set add on to that that it's just a really good set for a boazon if you are specifically specked into freezing arrow, basically means that the benefits that you get from it are in no way parodied if you're using exploding arrow or immolation arrow, so if M'avina's set also said a plus flat fire damage be able to add onto the explosion from Exploding Arrow, as well as plus two fire skill damage, so while we'd argue that exploding out could see some buffs and feel better, honestly the end game version of a fire boson is actually very strong, and we think being able to get into an early endgame viable fire build is the easiest way to fix exploding arrow, and by extension immolation era.