Demon Hunter - Smoke Screen Nerf - How much willl it hurt

[Tybudd33]

Just recently asked some info on DH's and got some amazing input, but every single response basically swore by Smoke Screen, and all of a sudden Hot Fix notes say

•Demon Hunter
◦Active Skills
■Smoke Screen
■Duration reduced from 2 seconds to 1 second (tooltip will still show 2 seconds)

■Skill Rune - Lingering Fog
■Now increases the duration of Smoke Screen to 1.5 seconds (tooltip will still show 3 seconds)

Completely cutting it in half, so basically u need double the Discipline Resource for 3 secs of SS, does that make Preparation Less effective.

What are you guys thoughts?

[pavl]

Just recently asked some info on DH's and got some amazing input, but every single response basically swore by Smoke Screen, and all of a sudden Hot Fix notes say

•Demon Hunter
◦Active Skills
■Smoke Screen
■Duration reduced from 2 seconds to 1 second (tooltip will still show 2 seconds)

■Skill Rune - Lingering Fog
■Now increases the duration of Smoke Screen to 1.5 seconds (tooltip will still show 3 seconds)

Completely cutting it in half, so basically u need double the Discipline Resource for 3 secs of SS, does that make Preparation Less effective.

What are you guys thoughts?

Demon hunters will now have to move and kite instead of just chaining smokescreen together.
That's about it.

[Aethilus]

It has made my progress through act 2 inferno come to a complete halt. I tried a single champion pack for almost 20 minutes, the pack had molten/mortar/vampiric/fast. I eventually left game because no skill build I tried was making any progress. Next time I decide to play I won't run into that exact champion pack, but I expect that isn't the only pack that will prove impossible. That is especially true once I run into champion packs in the depths and towers of act 3 with the tongues. They already gave me trouble before the nerf in both nightmare and hell, with the nerf they'll 1shot me with an undodgeable attack from range.

[Rife]

Take this with a grain of salt as it's just my opinion at the moment.

SS allowed me to be lazy. I stacked a tonne of damage and neglected health. I kill things before SS ends so I'm literally playing Godmode. It's easy cos I can muck around when clearing trash which is boring/useless anyway.
Yellows/Blues can still be a pain but for the most part just time your SS's correctly and faceroll DPS to victory unless those yellows have the rape-ey kind of aphixes.

With the nerf SS will still be useful and extremely powerful but it won't be everything DH's rely on. It will be used to bridge the gaps and cover your defensive weak points rather than a catch-all Godmode.

I've already got a few new builds to try tonight that work with SS rather than rely entirely on SS.

Gear will be even more important for DH's now than before.

[Unoriginal]

im going to have to rethink my build too then

[TheSerialSniper]

I love how bliz is already doing knee-jerk reactions, this nerf should have come with a buff to make up for it since smokescreen is the only defensive ability dh's have that works currently, any stronger mob where u would need to use it moves to fast to be kited even with caltrops, making caltrops 80% base in trade for this change would work out but that is not how knee-jerk reactions work =/

[Sylla]

SS allowed me to be lazy. I stacked a tonne of damage and neglected health. I kill things before SS ends so I'm literally playing Godmode. It's easy cos I can muck around when clearing trash which is boring/useless anyway.
Yellows/Blues can still be a pain but for the most part just time your SS's correctly and faceroll DPS to victory unless those yellows have the rape-ey kind of aphixes.

I've already got a few new builds to try tonight that work with SS rather than rely entirely on SS.

Gear will be even more important for DH's now than before.

I think you are definitely right about this, but it isn't quite that simple. SS was broken yes, but it was the only thing making us viable for a very specific reason. The damage gap in the later tiers of content is just way too high. Consider that before the SS nerf I ran with about 60k damage and 10k hp. By stacking hp I can fairly easily get to around 50k hp, but at that point my damage goes down to about half of what it is now. And 50k hp isn't even close to enough to survive a hit from any of the big mobs in act 4 inferno, it will let you survive 1 hit from the medium sized mobs but that is really not going to help you in the long run.

Again, I am not disagreeing with the smoke screen nerf since before we could just ignore the damage and cheese our way through it, but now we are left in kind of a stupid situation where our alternative to cheesing costs huge amounts of stats in terms of damage to get enough hp to survive maybe 2 hits if you are lucky. Which I... guess is ok from blizzards point of view since theoretically if you had the absolute perfect set of rare gear with dex vit crit and aspeed on every single piece you might just be able to get away with it.

So basically, just roll with a group after this, SS is still great for juking damage you just cant bullshit your way through everything.

I love how bliz is already doing knee-jerk reactions, this nerf should have come with a buff to make up for it since smokescreen is the only defensive ability dh's have that works currently, any stronger mob where u would need to use it moves to fast to be kited even with caltrops, making caltrops 80% base in trade for this change would work out but that is not how knee-jerk reactions work =/

This was not a knee jerk reaction. SS was completely, totally and unequivocally broken in every way, and made even the hardest content in the game absolutely trivial and soloable. Now, it is merely very very good. I do agree that the balance is a little borked at the moment though, but hey give it time.

[PenguinChan]

Many people will probably still sport smoke screen and preparation because of the get out of jail free card it contains. Literally.

[herpecin]

well if blizz wanted no one to ever be able to do inferno then they got what they wanted.

you cannot get the gear out of act4 hell or act 1 inferno to be able to do act 2 inferno now. its not a question of grinding, they simply dont drop there.

so now the people who rushed to the end, and can farm bosses(which are easy compared to many champ packs, will be able to rake in gold on the AH selling gear to people who didnt rush through(or corpse hop).

i dont mind SS being nerfed, it was broken as all hell( i play a DH in act 3 inferno). i dont mind getting 1 shot by things i should have seen coming. i DO mind, mobs that trun invisible, follow me around while im in SS, dont get hit by my caltrops, and kill me in one hit. if i die i would like there to be a way to avoid it the next time. but when you are sitting at 30k life 55% armor, and 300-400 on all of your res'es, and get over killed by 15-20k by a regular mob that there was no way of avoiding, it just takes the enjoyment and feeling of skill out of it. relying on lucky dodges to get through P2 belial isnt engaging gameplay.

[Begottenson]

Many people will probably still sport smoke screen and preparation because of the get out of jail free card it contains. Literally.

Loving it right now with the rune that has the 30% chance to not trigger a cool down on preparation.

[Rife]

Farming won't be as bad as everyone is making it out to seem.

Farm yellows/blues in Act 1 Inferno to get NVx5 then quest hop to a boss and kill it easily for chance at rares and upgrades. I don't see the problem TBH.

There are plenty of people with the boss quests unlocked on Inferno. Do it once with them grouped to unlock it for yourself and return the favor to your friends.

[Bladeface]

just use shadow power with the gloom rune thats what i do works magic ^_^

[Rife]

just use shadow power with the gloom rune thats what i do works magic ^_^

I was planning on this too. I also want to know how that 65% stacks with Numbing Traps.

I'm also going to try a cheese Shadow Power build with as much life on hit as I can manage combined with dual hizzy's for more crit chance, Night Stalker, Perfectionist, Prep with Battle Scars, Multishot with Suppression Fire and +Disc. There must come a point where DPS becomes fairly irrelevant and you can just tank the damage while regenerating/stealing health back.

I wonder if that point is attainable. And if it is, will Blizzard consider this a viable gearing option or will they nerf it like SS?

[Deleted]

It's not only the cooldown they've nerfed... they've also removed the whole "invisible" aspect, so now you're just invulnerable for 1 second.(completely broken the skill imo).

basically smoke screen was/is needed to survive in anything Hell+, due to the fact that roaming mobs WILL one/two shot you(yes even the little white creeps).
Using pre-patch smoke screen dropped aggro from anything moving towards you, causing it to attack another/it's previous target.
post nerf, currently they still run at you, however this time they carry on aggroing on to you, just you're invulnerable for 1 second. This essentially negates the whole point of the ability as you WILL die the second smoke screen drops.

Hell, I personally wouldnt even mind smoke screen being nerfed like this, as long as they buffed our defenses in some other aspect. Because being invulnerable and still able to attack for 30+ seconds is atrocious, but shit like this SHOULD have been sorted out in the beta.
Typical Blizzard balancing though, always overnerfing without thinking about the consequences and expecting people to just deal with it.

[Tybudd33]

It's not only the cooldown they've nerfed... they've also removed the whole "invisible" aspect, so now you're just invulnerable for 1 second.(completely broken the skill imo).

basically smoke screen was/is needed to survive in anything Hell+, due to the fact that roaming mobs WILL one/two shot you(yes even the little white creeps).
Using pre-patch smoke screen dropped aggro from anything moving towards you, causing it to attack another/it's previous target.
post nerf, currently they still run at you, however this time they carry on aggroing on to you, just you're invulnerable for 1 second. This essentially negates the whole point of the ability as you WILL die the second smoke screen drops.

Hell, I personally wouldnt even mind smoke screen being nerfed like this, as long as they buffed our defenses in some other aspect. Because being invulnerable and still able to attack for 30+ seconds is atrocious, but shit like this SHOULD have been sorted out in the beta.
Typical Blizzard balancing though, always overnerfing without thinking about the consequences and expecting people to just deal with it.

If this is true its a wrap, not dropping the aggro is huge, I hope this is a bug, if not no point in even using it in a build.

[Leeroyjgibbs]

There must come a point where DPS becomes fairly irrelevant and you can just tank the damage while regenerating/stealing health back.?

I read somewhere that life steal loses 80% of its effectiveness in Inferno. Whether or not this is true I have no idea, just passing on what I've read.

[Deleted]

If this is true its a wrap, not dropping the aggro is huge, I hope this is a bug, if not no point in even using it in a build.

I dropped it completely from my multiplayer games after it was nerfed, but thats exactly how its behaving in single player, where i thought id try it when chest/loot farming.(probably to counter this type of behaviour, but still...)

[Gheld]

Many people will probably still sport smoke screen and preparation because of the get out of jail free card it contains. Literally.

I C Wot U did THAR!

But seriously, SS is still over powered because it really messes with the mobs AI.

The fact is when you are the lone man standing and you SS, even after it wears off, mobs will stand there for a couple of seconds like "Re-initializing AI... please wait... OWW NO, OWW SERIOUSLY WAIT!"

Usually end up with a solid 3 or 4 seconds of DPS for each SS.

So I think it'll still be pretty powerful even with the nerf.