[2021] I'm worried how builds are getting slashed, rather than being balanced

The issue wasn’t so much with the core power of Wandering Spirits. It was strong, but not necessarily over the top. However it did have several issues that prompted us to rework it.

1. The number of spirits it kept up on average caused a lot of visual noise, especially in multiplayer, and especially with the spirits all casting Spectral Putrescence. This was particularly concerning in a class that also had other visually noisy options that could be used at the same time, such as large numbers of minions. We have to take edge cases like that into consideration, even if they’re not necessarily popular.

2. Because it could keep generating spirits constantly if used whenever it came off cooldown, it was often best to use it just press the button whenever it came off cooldown, or auto cast it. We prefer active abilities that go on the ability bar to either have an active component where there’s some decision making that goes into when or where to use it. Otherwise it may as well be a passive skill. This doesn’t mean we want the active component to always be something that you use frequently (e.g. it’s ok if skeletons rarely need to be re-summoned), but we don’t want it to be something where it’s best to just auto cast it a fixed interval, regardless of the situation.

3. The power of the Spectral Putrescence nodes warped both the power of the skill and the power of Poison Lich in general (alongside Spirit Plague’s stacking buffs). This meant we couldn’t buff other underpowered poison Lich skills and options without making the build as a whole overpowered.

Because of these reasons we wanted to shift power away from the average number of spirits, the uptime of the skill, and the Spectral Putrescence node, and move it into the damage of the individual spirits. As it turns out, we didn’t increase the power of the individual spirits enough and as a consequence, the long cooldown and the random nature of the skill can make it feel very underwhelming. It’s definitely not at the power level we’re aiming for right now and there will be more buffs for it, either in subsequent hotfixes or in 0.8.4, or both.

It certainly never had infinite stacking for me, DID I miss something?

The infinite stacking for damage over time Lich builds came from the Pestilence node on the Spirit Plague tree. This was originally intended to give a global stacking buff of 15% increased damage over time when you cast Spirit Plague, but due to a miscommunication ended up applying whenever Spirit Plague was applied to a new enemy, which could happen very frequently as Spirit Plague spread on death. The increased damage led to Spirit Plague killing more quickly causing it to spread more quickly and give you stacks of the buff more quickly. This all resulted in some people gain astronomical amounts of increased damage over time.

To resolve this issue, we put a cap on the buff and reduced the amount of damage over time it gave. Unfortunately that change has had a knock on effect on the power of a lot of other damage over time Lich skills, including the new Wandering Spirits, which were otherwise pretty weak. Some of those were buffed in 0.8.3’s hotfixes, but are probably still not up to the correct power level. We want these skills to be good in their own right rather than their power depending on something like the Pestilence buff.

Really, we just like to be aware of where the game is headed during development, and completely slaughtering builds out of viability

When an individual skill or build is a long way above the right power level, it can be very difficult to know whether it’s power needs to come down by 40% or 70%, and if we pick the wrong one two things can happen

1. It can still be OP and go on to dominate the meta of another patch cycle, continuing to crowd out other options and give the wrong impression of how easy or difficult content is.
2. It can end up underpowered or even non-viable.

When we do pick the wrong one, we try to make corrections to it, but both can still cause people to feel bad after the initial patch, because we’ve either had to make multiple nerfs in a row, or their build that used to be really strong has ended up underpowered. The best approach of course is to try to avoid builds ending up crazily overpowered in the first place, but with so many interconnecting possibilities it can be challenging to achieve this consistently.

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