This little rant will be focused on the ever-so-existent mechanic of Overpower and why it sucks. If you don’t know what it is, it’s those blue numbers you occasionally see pop up. It’s kind of like a crit, but not really.
So what does it do? Let me sum up the in-game description
Using a skill has a 3% chance to deal Overpower damage. It doesn’t work with passives, DoTs and Channels.
The damage scales with your current HP and Fortify.
There is no way to increase the 3% chance, however, there are certain skills (will get to that soon) that guarantee Overpower hit under certain conditions.
So this might lead you to think it’s sort of like a conditional crit. And in theory, you’d be right and this would be a great thing. But in practice, not so much.
Let’s look at what classes have what skill to actually trigger Overpower and how:
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Rogue and Sorcerer have grand total of 0 skills to trigger Overpower. Now this actually makes sense. They are also the two classes that don’t share the Fortify mechanic. And not all builds need to be available to all classes. They have their own things. So This is fine
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Barbarian has 1 skill. And it is an upgrade to your basic attack. So that makes it rather not useful in the late game. By all means try some Overpower/Crit/AS basic attack build, tell me if it works.
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Druids get 2 whole skills. One for staying in your Wearbear form and one for staying at high HP. The HP one only works with Pulverise, but the other one is general. It’s not bad and it works, but I don’t think it’s quite enough to make a build around it
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Necromancer gets 3 great skills for Blood build and 2 more skills that revolve around Overpower, which also happen to be decent. Necro also has the best Paragon bonuses to Overpower damage. Hence I think Blood Necro is the only build that can functionally implement this mechanic.
I think this “conditional crit” is a great idea. But in its current state, it’s just a 3% crit for the vast majority of players. A waste of a mechanic.
I’d love to see more skills that guarantee Overpower to bring the other two classes that use to at least blood Necro level. It’s bonkers that Barbarian, a class that should be all about overpowering your enemies, can’t reliably use Overpower.
And when that happens, the 3% chance should get removed. We don’t need a different kind of rng Crit, we already have one.
Oh and did I mention Overpower damage can Crit for nonsensically high numbers? And while yes, big numbers make my brain do the happy noises, I don’t think it is particularly healthy from a mechanical standpoint.
3 Likes
I agree. It is an intriguing way of scaling damage with hp and fortify, just not viable at all.
Having an entire separate proc chance for it is fine and all, but 3% is just not. Also all these damage stats multiplying on top of each other is ridiculous.
I’m amazed at the rate they’re pushing nerfs without actually addressing the root of the issue; at this point I kind of gave up already.
The very limited choices in the skill tree are basically not even choices - you either pick the meta with the most broken multipliers and a good base or you’re basically accepting you’ll be handicapping yourself. Even worse, they’re trying to “balance” around these broken multipliers and interactions between skills, items and paragon - let’s be real, it isn’t going to happen.
2 Likes
I was thinking the same a few days back when i was playing with my druid since i have a lot of fortify which is one key element for overpower and druids get a lot of willpower i thought i could focus on that but no, why? because of the flat 3% chance, there are some key passives that makes them guaranteed on time or some other requirements and i dont know if items and paragons makes it better but feels too unreliable compared to normal criticals or vulnerability damage, which is the other side of the coin, vulnerability is kind of mandatory? Im not a fan tbh
I would rather the good old crit chance and crit damage and ele damage, instead of these damage when CC, slowed, distant, close, while sleeping etc
imo overpower should be like knockback… nd should be applied like knockback… it should make everything overpowered vulnable, maybe throw in some weakened effect status like slow once vuln wears off… so say vuln for 2-3 seconds, slow for 2-3 seconds… target is knocked down… unable to fight back… 2-3 seconds, then get’s up.
As it currently stands, it’s just a blue number that appears every so often.
I think Overpowered is fine, just that bLizard need to realise and design it as “extra burst damage”. Currently the problem with moves like puiverize is that it does literally close to nothing without Overpowered and without items. Hence the result leads to over reliance on the mechanic.
Overpowered should be an extra burst mechanic and it fine the way it is. But the base skill needs to feel decent enough to be used.
My best suggestion would be to actually make it additive damage to your final damage, and have the uptime raised - maybe lucky hit since lucky hit does precisely nothing without certain gear rolls or even perma and have it conditioned by being fortified.
No need for it to be another crazy multiplier.
I totally agree with you, more options would be nice.
I think the other aspects of it are fine and its actually designed well if people read the description again and think about it, it’s purpose and who / what builds it would be for are pretty clear to me.
I agree too.
Overpower has nice damages, but it’s so rare it becomes SO frustrating. When I tried necro blood surge it was literraly HELL, because I’ve had to spam 5 times my skill until it trigger the overpower damage… EACH time.
I’m now on the barbarian charge, and if I knew it was focused on the overpower system, I would have never picked it…
Ha I miss my sorcerer lightning ball or my druid trample slide… with them at least, damages are way more stable.
The core of the game is a dud. They have no clue what they’re doing, if it’s not obvious by now - and everything they’re adding on top is just more of the same hamster wheel.
I for one will give it until I see the itemization re-work. With that it will become clear if they’re even trying.
D4 is a game of many small bins. I didn’t expect my sorceress to see much of this, but I was wrong. Overpower does proc from enchanted Fireball. And my sorceress does sport a heap of willpower. Is it useful? Not really. Is it fun?
… watches the explosion front swirl across the screen as waves of spiders explode…
Yes. Oh and get some poison resistance 