I want to talk about invincible builds and the problems they cause. But there are other problems that can arise from just regular class abilities. And one of those shining examples is the challenging shout.
So the way those challenging shout works is that it gives you a 40% damage reduction for 8 seconds when you use it has a 25 2nd cooldown, but you can invest more skills into it to get 5% additively stacking extra damage reduction per point. So at level five, this is already 60%, and from that point forward you only need eight more ranks to achieve 100%, assuming that the scaling continues exactly the same way. Now, the way that usually these abilities work is that for damage skills like core skills, you get plus 10% of the base value per rank.
So you see it goes from 70 to 77 and then plus seven again and plus seven and plus seven, et cetera. So this is how it works for damage skills and for utility skills usually and goes to a lower cooldown value. For example, ground Thump has a 16 seconds cooldown, and then the next rank usually gives you -5% on the cooldown so you see here this is -5% 0.8 seconds and again and again and again, and then we have stuff like challenging shouts that for some reason is completely different from anything else. So instead of improving the effectiveness of the skill by 10% of the base with each extra rank it actually scales up way faster than that, and it also doesn't scale down a cool down. So this is kind of like a special case here, and I think this is something that needs to be solved.
So first of all, this is one of the probably very few skills where each additional rank actually becomes worth more and more the more you invest instead of less and less like on those damage skills. So for example adding 7% extra damage to 77% is not as good as adding 7% to 70. And then likewise from going from 84 to 91, it's a smaller increase and then from 91 to 98 it becomes a smaller and smaller increase.
This is a bit different for these coupon skills. Typically they also have this kind of like more return on the investment. But on the other hand, most of these cool-down skills are also situational.
So even if you could, you probably do not want to spam them all the time. So we don't see this kind of like numb locking matter or macro meta that we have seen for example in the Abbott free and where you spam every skill on your bar every time it's ready. So instead it's a lot more situational, a lot more tactical.
And yeah, having a shorter coupon is nice and all but very often not really needed. And the thing is you can actually improve challenging shout in various ways. For example here's 30% extra duration.
So this makes us 8 seconds, 10.4 seconds and then you can have a bit of cooler reduction for example on your items. I don't know exactly how much you're going to be able to stack but let's say somewhere in the range of 20% to 30% if you really invest into it in a late game is probably achievable.
So this would bring this 25 seconds down to 1718, 19 seconds maybe or so. So we're already looking at more than 50% uptime of this damage reduction effect. But that's not all.
There's also, for example, this legendary power here that you can roll. I think this is a utility power so this could potentially even go on an emulate and maybe have a higher maximum reduction. But what you can see here is that you can actually reduce the cooldown by up to 12 seconds when you have a few enemies nearby.
So this will bring that is like it's say 18 2nd screw-down down to six-second screw-down. Well then suddenly it's straightforward to have permanent uptime on this challenging shout. And to top it all off, there are actually various ways to improve the efficiency of this even further, and it's not that hard to actually achieve 100% damage reduction.
So as I mentioned, you need eight more ranks, and this is apparently quite achievable. So you can see here that we have this post from Daniel Briggs, one of the developers, this is on Twitter here. He posted during the beta, and he said that you can get up to plus six to a skill just from the skill aspects that you can roll in your items.
So you have seen, for example, core skills roll on gloves and defensive skills roll on pants I believe, or chest or something. So you need to have one item that has plus six there which you can get later on with higher ranks and then you have the amulet that has a whole skill category. So for example, amulets can have plus free to all defensive skills including the challenging child for example.
And voila, this is already plus nine. And then there is another plus four that you can get from probably some unique item. So it's not even that difficult to achieve this 100% damage reduction here unless there is a cap, which also doesn't even make much sense with the way that the skill scales.
Because if there is actually a cap on the amount of damage reduction that challenge and shao can give you, then you literally cannot get any benefit from ranking the skill higher anymore, which is completely unlike any other skill in the game. So I think the solution is relatively obvious here that challenging shout at the release needs to be redesigned not to allow this 100% damage reduction because we're going to go basically back to the rookie mistakes that we have seen in Diablo 3 for example, or even other games. This is just a recurring theme, I guess, in RPGs or in RPG games in general, that you have certain synergistic pieces that just allow the exterior combo basically where just become invincible and kill everything, so to say.
Especially with Barbarians probably being like the Primary Damage Reduction Support or Primary Support character in groups in general and potentially even the highest DPS on top of that. I think this is definitely something that needs looking into and a solution could be to make the bonus scale in a similar fashion as for example, damage skills. So you get 10% of the base value, but it's like a multiplicative bonus, not an additive bonus so you actually couldn't reach 100%.
So for example, you have the 40% baseline, and then it will go to like 44, and then it will go to 47 and 50 and 52 and a half basically. And it kind of scales up more slowly so that maybe with like a rank 15 challenging shout you're only going to have like, I don't know, 70% damage reduction and not 110%. So something like that.
Or it could also just work a bit more similar to the Debilitating Raw that's the Druid version of the challenging Shout, which in fact has a fixed damage reduction value of 50% and it scales down the cooldown by 5% per point, just like most other utility skills. It's actually kind of hilarious to compare those two skills next to each other. I don't think that the bill telling Roar is really such a bad ability, but compared to challenging shout it is no match basically.
And this is also not really the only skill that has this issue here. There are more, for example, on the Rogue, there's the Dark Shroud. Now it is way harder to actually use Dark Shroud to become invincible.
First of all, it scales more slowly, so it starts out at a 40% damage reduction. If you have five of them, it's five times eight, but then it gets plus 10% per level from the base value so it doesn't scale as fast as challenging shout and this is much harder to achieve. So this would require basically everything stacked up here with not necessarily perfect values, but you need all of the pieces basically given that they don't actually overlap in the slots that you can put them on.
And also it would only apply to a single hit. So rogues can only become invincible to one hit, and then they would lose 20% damage reduction, and they would be still able to get one shot by anything basically if you don't stick other defenses. So this is much harder to do than challenging shout where you have a buff, and it's basically permanently up and you just chilling.
I already put part of this into my feedback with way fewer details. But if you want to go check out my entire feedback video on my document, at least I do have that link in the description. And I think at least those shouts, especially chanting, shout and barb definitely need another look.
Because if this goes live like this, it's going to be messy. In any case, that's the point I wanted to make for this article here. For more info, check U4gm best place to buy Diablo 4 gold.