Actually it’s a bug fix, but those of you who’ve been enjoying the unintended godliness of this item may be saddened by this news:
Quote from Nevalistis
As with other recent hotfixes, we’ve got one coming up shortly that we wanted to give the community a heads up about, this time regarding the legendary Shard of Hate. We’ve been closely observing our internal reports as well as player feedback on the Shard of Hate and the general consensus is that this item feels wildly out of line compared to other items. After digging in behind the scenes, we discovered a couple of bugs with this item that we believe is the ultimate culprit.
First, the internal cooldown of this item’s power was being reset each time a dual-wielding character attacked with a weapon in their other hand. This meant the effect was occurring twice as often for dual-wielding characters, and with particular skills such as Whirlwind or Tempest Rush that also carry attack speed multipliers, this effect was even more frequent.
Secondly, the proc rate of the item was ignoring the proc scalar of the skill it was used with, which in simple terms caused Shard of Hate’s affix to apply every time a skill was used. Combined with the above issue, this resulted in this Legendary vastly over performing, and even more so with particular builds.
The hotfixes we’re applying correct both of these unintended behaviors and have been added to our 2.0.4 Hotfixes thread. As with all major changes, we hope to provide insight as to why we felt these changes were necessary as well as give context to the decisions we ultimately make. (Source)
It’s no wonder players were claiming being able to jump up a Torment level or two once they’d gotten this to drop.
asdf1 says
and why is it that Blizzard do not find it ridiculous regarding the fact that barbs require a weapon as overpowered as SOH in order to even compete with wizards?
Craig says
I don’t think Blizz is too concerned with class balance at the moment. When they decide to fix PvP, then perhaps we’ll see more parity between the classes.
Although, I do suspect Wizards may see some smoothing out in the next patch. They are vastly overpowered right now.