More concrete information has been released on the DiabloFans website containing not just some of the upcoming changes to the legacy legendary sets but some new features that will be released in Asia (at first), the Cursed Realms, side quests, etc. What I want to focus on in this blog is the information regarding the updates to items based on some of the hints from the data mining.

I already went over some of the changes concerning the upcoming sets for patch 2.2. For this blog, I want to start by looking at the updated older sets and then delving into some of the possibly updated non-set legendaries. First let’s look at the updated older sets and items that be used to work with the new sets:

Roland’s Legacy

• 2 set – Every use of Shield Bash/Sweep Attack reduces the cooldowns of your Laws and Defensive Skills by 1 second
• 4 set – Increase the damage of Shield Bash/Sweep Attack by 500%

There’s no mention if the 6 set bonus will change. Currently, the 6 set bonus increases your attack speed by 20% for 3 seconds and stacks up to 5 times using the aforementioned Shield Bash/Sweep Attack skills. My guess is that the 6 set bonus will remain the same and that the changes will address two major issues with the Roland’s Legacy set: 1) Improving the defensive aspects of the set; 2) scaling up the damage to be more competitive.

In examining the Crusader section, there is an item called “P2_ItemPassive_Unique_042” where “When your Shield Bash hits 3 or less enemies, its damage is increased by [VALUE]% and 50% of its Wrath Cost is refunded.” Another major issue with the Roland’s Legacy build is that the Wrath Cost can be quite high, which forces people to use a generator like Punishment in conjunction with the updated Angelic Hair Braid. But even with such an item, it’s simply not enough (Sweep Attack I hear faces similar issues). This unique item looks to resolve part of the equation through introducing an item for Shield Bash to help Wrath starvation issues.

Raiment of a Thousand Storms

• 2 set – Your Spirit Generators have 25% increased attack speed and 500% increased damage
• 4 set – Increases the weapon damage of Dashing Strike to 5000%
• 6 set – Dashing Strike spends 50 Spirit, but refunds a Charge when it does

In it’s current form, Raiment of a Thousand Storms pretty much is useless for higher Greater Rifts. In some ways, it’s similar to the Raekor build in that you’re acting as a ping pong ball. Unlike Raekors though, you do not gain all the runes for Dashing Strike nor are there many items to really boost up what Dashing Strike can do, except for the Jawbreaker fist weapon. Even with Jawbreaker, you end up becoming heavily limited in how many times you can dash across the screen. So in a way like the Raekor build, you end up losing out on single target attacks. At the same time, you gain no stun attacks and pretty much are forced to take the Quicksilver rune to maximize how many times you can dash around.

This new version rewards using a combination of Spirit Generators and converts Dashing Strike into a spirit spender upon usage. One of the great things about this change is that you no longer need to depend on Jawbreaker to make this build work. Instead, you can focus exclusively any elemental type of damage and use any form of a weapon. Of course, the bigger issue that will result is making sure that you can maintain a high amount of spirit, but that will certainly be easier than either hunting for a Jawbreaker or figuring out some way to get a ridiculous amount of CDR to make the older build work.

Guardian’s Jeopardy

• 2 set – +250 vitality/regenerate 8000 life per second (up from 2000)

I’m not certain why this set was updated. Perhaps, the thought process might be making this craftable set a little more usable for a defensive play style early on. The biggest positives for this set are the fact that two of the three pieces uses a bracers and belt slot. So you can easily gain the 3 set bonus and use that along with another major set.

Zunimassa’s Haunt

• 6 set – Enemies hit by your Mana spenders take 100% more damage from your pets for 4 seconds

I’m not sure if they’ll modify the other set bonuses for this set or if this will be on top of the existing set bonuses. Right now, the current appeal of the Zunimassa set is having a permanent Fetish Army. However, Pet Doctors still are pretty weak versus Rift Guardians or in situations where their fetishes from Fetish Sycophants are destroyed. In addition, most Pet Doctors who want to push hard end up discarding the Zunimassa set once they find a Starmetal Kukri (and a few other key items). Unfortunately, the sheer rarity of a Starmetal Kukri, even a poorly rolled one, is so terrible that it leaves Pet Doctors little choices if they want to push hard.

The new set looks to alter the play style somewhat. Most pet doctors go with Plague of Toads/Addling Toads or Rain of Toads (unless they go Carnevil where they employ Poison Dart). Here, the pet doctor might use Piranhado as the spender. But with Piranhado on an 8 second cooldown and the effect lasting 4 seconds, some pet doctors might opt for a less intensive spender (or perhaps even using something like the Wormwood which auto cast Locust Swarm on enemies).

If we delve a little deeper into the article, we can see that another item called P2_ItemPassive_Unique_035 will “Summon a Fetish Sycophant when you hit with a Mana spender.” Again, this might be a non-set item used to make the build more powerful. And from the text, we can infer that again we are being encouraged to use some form of a mana spender. That could mean anything like Acid Cloud, Zombie Bears or Piranhado still. Deeper still, we can see Fetish Sycophants buffed with a 15% chance to summon a Fetish (up from 10%). So bottom line is that we should be able to have far more uptime on our fetishes, even if we get one shot.

Inna’s Mantra

• 2 set – Increase the passive effect of your Mystic Ally and the base passive effect of your Mantra by 100%
• 6 set – Mystic Ally casts Cyclone Strike, Exploding Palm, Lashing Tail Kick, Seven-Sided Strike and Wave of Light when you do

Again the question to ask is if we’ll see any changes to the current 3 and 4 set bonuses. My guess is that the 4 set bonus will stay, but I don’t know about the 3 set bonus. I feel that the 3 set bonus is actually quite good in allowing you to regenerate spirit and reduce the cost of Sweeping Wind. The nice thing about that bonus is that it can come in really handy when used alongside a set such as Sunwuko.

The way the set looks though is that besides enhancing your Mantras, your Mystic Ally will behave similarly to the Demon Hunter’s Maurader 4 set bonus in utilizing a few key spenders. Considering that Mystic Ally now is one of the favorite abilities to use with the Sunwuko set for the spirit regeneration, the increased effect will make the Sunwuko combination even stronger. The Crudest Boots will probably end up becoming a very popular item to use with the 6 set bonus.

One thing that I’m wondering about is if the 4 set bonus will stay and work with the 2 set bonus. In short, not only would you get access to all base Mantra effects, but you will have them boosted by 100%. In that scenario, Monks will become an awesome party buff/support type.

Tal Rasha’s Elements

• 2 set – Damaging enemies with Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning will cause a Meteor of the same damage type to fall from the sky. There is an 8 second cooldown for each damage type
• 4 set – Attacks increase your resistance to that damage type by 100% 6 for seconds
• 6 set – Attacks increase your damage by 75% for 3 seconds. Arcane, Cold, Fire and Lightning attacks each add one stack. Adding a stack refreshes the duration.

It looks like Tal Rasha’s almost is getting a complete revamp where the original  4 set bonus will be moved to the 2 set and the damage and defense mechanisms will be buffed. I think Elemental Exposure, the Shard of Hate and the new community designed legendary ring that rotates the elemental damage will be highly sought after for making this build work. I’m not sure how a Wizard will be setting up his generators/spenders. Perhaps, mixing a few up to trigger the Meteor strike faster such as an arcane magic missile being used alongside Explosive Blast and Hydra with the Frost rune.

My only issue with the Meteor though is that it’s both hard to trigger and it lands too slowly to be effective. Unless the set is really designed to promote more of a melee wizard play style (say Spectral Blades, Explosive Blast and Storm Armor), then it’s going to be hard to hit monsters. So we’ll have to revisit this set later to see what will make sense in terms of skills to use once other items are revealed to work alongside this set.

 

Immortal King’s Call

• 2 set –  Call of the Ancients last until they die
• 4 set – Call of the Ancients’ melee attacks also deal 600% weapon damage in a 15 yard radius
• 6 set – Increase the duration of your Wrath of the Berserker by [0.5|1]|4seconds:seconds; every time an Ancient deals damage

Essentially, Immortal King’s Call will be turning Barbarians into a pet build here. So one nice little thing will be allowing Barbarians to use the Enforcer legendary gem. Also, the Ancients pet damage will be doing some nice AoE, possibly making Area Damage worth using for this build.

But one of the cooler parts is essentially doing perma Wrath of the Berserker with the 6 set bonus. Looking under the Barbarian items area, you can see an item called P2_ItemPassive_Unique_032 that where “Wrath of the Berserker gains the effect of every rune.” Again until seeing which slot this item goes, we can assume that at the very least the main usage will be to compliment the set. If it’s an amulet, ring or even bracers, I can definitely see non-Immortal King’s builds using it since Wrath of the Berserker is such an awesome cooldown abiliity (even Raekors).

And since the pets are the ones keeping up Wrath of the Berserker, the set allows a variety of builds to come into play such as plain Whirlwind barbarians, ranged Barbarians using Weapon Throw and Seismic Slam or even enhancing Raekors since Immortal Kings (unless the gear slots are changed) can use belt and weapons slots (you could just add the helmet or chest piece and gain the 4 set bonus on top of the Raekors 5 piece bonus).

Natalya’s Vengeance

• 4 set – The cooldown of Rain of Vengeance is reduced by 2 seconds every time you cast a primary skill and by 3 seconds every time you cast a Hatred spender
• 6 set – Rain of Vengeance deals 800% increased damage

The set bonuses here are interesting in the revamping of how Rain of Vengeance works. My complaint about the original Natalya’s Vengeance set was how Rain of Vengeance’s cooldown would be lowered by 1 second after killing an enemy. The big problem with that was single targets containing large health pools like the Rift Guardian. At 30 seconds, Rain of Vengeance simply is too impractical as anything outside of white mob clean up.

The revamped Rain of Vengeance still seems a bit low in terms of reducing the cooldown. You still need to hit 9 spenders + the original Rain of Vengeance to get the cooldown to make it worth it. You could add more cooldown from items. For instance, there are two notable items labeled ItemPassive_Unique_919_x1 in which “Your skill cooldowns are reduced by [VALUE] seconds” along with ItemPassive_Unique_920_x1 which “Reduce the remaining cooldown of one of your skills by [VALUE] seconds each time you spend resource.” So these items look to work closely with a set like this (especially the second item)

Now, like many legacy sets, one of the chief benefits of using one a few pieces is that you can gain a few additional bonuses. The current Natalya’s set offers increased Discipline for both the 2 and 3 set bonuses as well as a+7% critical hit chance modifier. Those bonuses will be heavily sought after for Demon Hunter who want to use the Unhallowed Essence since that set is all about the damage boost from remaining Discipline. I’m hoping that most of these set bonuses are preserved to a degree (except where a few just were god awful) and that the new bonuses are additional ones to the existing ones.

Other Notable Items

Although most of the items have some generic label, I do want to examine a few of the more interesting bonuses.

• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_025 – “Enemies hit by your Furious Charge take [VALUE]% weapon damage over 3 seconds.” Another item that looks to enhance the Raekor Furious Charge build.
• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_026 – “The first enemy hit by Furious Charge takes [VALUE]% additional damage.” This item looks to solve some of the single target issues Raekor Barbs face.
• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_004 – “Increase the damage of Whirlwind by [VALUE]% weapon damage.” I believe this item is going to be the updated Bul-Kathos’ Wedding Band that Wrath of the Wastes barbarians will want to enhance their Whirlwind damage
• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_015 – “Slow Time gains the effect of every rune.” This is obviously aimed at the Delsere’s Magnum Opus set. But obviously, it’s going to be pretty insane to use as a damage debuff on foes, party buff, CC and spam cast ability
• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_050 – “Your Fire Signature Spells cause up to 3 enemies to explode, dealing [VALUE]% weapon damage as Fire to enemies within 10 yards.” Not sure what this is but this might be a missing item for the Firebird’s Finery set to make it stand out more, even on single target.
• ItemPassive_Unique_541_x1 – “Your Spirit Generators generate [VALUE]% more Spirit.” Not sure how this one will play out. Perhaps, it’ll work with the updated Raiment of a Thousand Storms to encourage monks to use their spirit generators less so that they can use Dashing Strike more frequently.
• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_041 – “Gargantuan instead summons three smaller gargantuans each more powerful than before.” It might be that this could be part of the newer Zunimassa’s Haunt set. If not, it is a very interesting ability on its own, similar to the Tall Man’s Finger (except in reverse).
• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_017 – “Multishot hits enemies below [VALUE]% health twice.” I think this might be the belt I saw on the Demon Hunter used at Blizzcon. It definitely isn’t a set bonus but it might work well with both Unhallowed Essence and Marauders Multishot builds.
• P2_ItemPassive_Unique_038 – “Gain [VALUE] increased damage to a single element for 5 seconds. This effect rotates through the elements available to your class in the following order: Arcane, Cold, Fire, Holy, Lightning, Physical, Poison.” This is the community designed item from Blizzcon. I think they ought to reduce the number of elements that are rotated. It really seems more designed for elemental wizards than other classes. Beyond elemental wizards, I don’t feel it’s practical given how it works.

Beyond those items, there are some new legendary gems and potions mentioned. But I don’t want to go into detail about those. Also, the other items in the Misc section seem a little too generic to be worth mentioning for now.

Overall, the new patch looks to be ramping up nicely. Unfortunately, it looks as though the Helltooth set did not make it into this iteration of revamped sets whereas most of the other sets that were barely viable are starting to come into their own. Other sets like The Shadow’s Mantle are better off as Forgotten Souls unless they’re completely revamped or are made to be used with other sets. However, we’ll have to wait on the verdict for those.

 

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