The Hammerzon Rework was a failure

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Zaraki
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Damage:

Stationary “channeling” skills while bosses blink away from your finite radius.

It was cool to see a unique cursor location-based proc added to HOZ but it’s extremely clunky and I feel as though it’s heavily effected by an almost permanent desynchronization (or lag time from one cast to the next). I figure this skill was added to compensate for (stationary channeling skill with finite radius) but it’s just bad and unreliable. Additionally, it’s lightning damage…. Why, why are you trying to force hybridization upon an already struggling physical spec?

The measly -20% enemy lightning resistance from the conduit skill (also a laugh) does little to make the literal hammerzon capstone ability anything more than eye candy. What’s more is that you don’t even benefit from investing skill points into HOZ cuz the additive lightning dmg is minuscule and the mana cost becomes prohibitive. (Again, why hybridization?)

Power Shift is equally clunky and, frankly, just weird (especially the name?). It seems like it was supposed to be a passive that got changed to a skill last minute. I was honestly dumbfounded when I realized it wasn’t a modifier for HOZ itself but a replacement for “single target”. Except it sucks in single target because your enemy just walks or blinks away from the low attack radius almost instantly so your damage is terrible overall. Hell, I’d prefer to have Magnetism back at this point.

Additionally, the damage ticks don’t seem to match the sprites/number of hammers and it’s kind of just awkward all around.

Hammer of Zerae’s damage is mediocre at best and falls off after duncraig. Suffers from similar but less severe issues as power shift except it does a third of the damage (in theory, give or take multihit as enemies move through HOZ radius.)

Survivability:

Stationary “channeling” target.

While the increased block rate/max block middle row capstone is beneficial, it falls off heavily in endgame where the majority of rips occur from taking spell/elemental damage of some variety. We can’t block spells. We don’t have a “prismatic cloak” damage reduction. Amazons, in general, have zero avoidance (primarily due to stupid D2 engine dodge-lock for amazons, but shouldn’t this be compensated for?) The build has literally zero magic damage mitigation. (same with passive tree, but that deserves its own post).

For whatever reason, it’s forced to share a very limited tree with Lightning-Zon. To put it into words, the HOZ tree is a tiny tree-sprout hidden beneath The Lightning tree’s shadow, desperately growing towards the warm glow of the MXL dev team in the hopes it might one day grow into a functional build.

You’ll often hear people complain about “melee builds” suffering from constant boss teleport procs that stunt their damage but Hammerzon is the absolute tip of the proverbial spear.

In CLOD, one of the reasons hammerdin was so strong was 1) it did huge damage, 2) it was very tanky, and 3) Most bosses/Enemies brainlessly stayed in range of your damage.

Hammerzon shares none of these luxuries. It’s only tanky when surrounded by large packs of weak enemies you can leach from and suffers heavily against single target bosses (especially those who deal significant spell damage), even with maxxed res. Its damage is awful for aforementioned reasons It’s almost impossible to maintain consistent dps on bosses.

The build’s core design simply isn’t equipped for the dynamic and punishing boss mechanics of MXL.

Hammerzon needs a target-locked single target skill for bossing (plz delete power-shift from existence) and it needs some form of spell damage mitigation (in addition to sustain) to bring it back into the fold.
heamn
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Not just Bossing/teleport proc, another common issue for melee build is ranged monster AI that keeps running away when you try to close in,

Hammer Of Zarae/Power Shift especially suffers on this, as they have a delay to get the hammers swirling landing on targets,
monsters often time already ran out of range.
Bojac
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I agree, considering how its sharing the tree with stormzon which is miles ahead of hammerzon, playing this feels like you're gimping yourself for no reason.
BoneZone
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Agree what is said above. May I add she is still super clunky.
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Zaraki
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heamn wrote:Not just Bossing/teleport proc, another common issue for melee build is ranged monster AI that keeps running away when you try to close in,

Hammer Of Zarae/Power Shift especially suffers on this, as they have a delay to get the hammers swirling landing on targets,
monsters often time already ran out of range.


100%. Melee mastery was a step in the right direction since melee have to “stand in the shit” and take the most punishment but specs that fall under “melee mastery” should not trigger teleport mechanics on bosses.

If this somehow opens up certain bosses to cheesing, it would benefit the mod more to simply patch those specs rather than gimping melee builds as a whole.

But yeah, this post is mainly targeted at hammerzon.
Skeletonman
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Huge agree. For a reworked spec I don't think I've seen anyone playing it this season.
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Zaraki
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Skeletonman wrote:Huge agree. For a reworked spec I don't think I've seen anyone playing it this season.


The rework just buffed lightzon and swapped magnetism for a gimmick. Did nothing to address the many, many, deficiencies of the HOZ tree (sustain/spell dmg mitigation/sustained and single target damage)

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