Just read manifesto.
Glorious changes that were much needed. I think a lot of you think that everyone runs with 6 links. 95% of people run with 5links. The 1% is actually the most hit by those changes not the lower ones.
Back in the early days you built for 5L and 6L was a luxury. But these days anyone can get a 6L and there are all kinds of ways from prophecies to beastcrafting to benchcrafting to divination cards to spamming chance orbs on simple robes in hopes of obtaining a tabula rasa to double corrupting sacrificial garbs in hopes of a shadowstitch.
1. Mana cost went through the roof which means you can't just stack zylion of damage via links because you either will have to let go defense or you will have no mana for that zylion damage.
Back in the closed beta days mana costs and multipliers were far higher too. It never stopped anyone from making high damage monster builds. You mostly ran a clarity aura and some mana regen. If Clarity cost you too much mana, you made it reserve life instead.
These days it's completely lazy shit and all you need is mana leech on attacks and any attack skill will never worry about mana issues again.
For spell builds the laziest way if you need big mana is to get es leech on spells and run eldritch battery doing a life build.
Another fucking lazy solution is to just run an enduring mana flask, but this will actually cost you a flask slot.
Another lazy solution is to just do your spellcasting build, but make it a spell totem build, which will usually boost your DPS nicely while making mana costs a non-issue. For bonus points the Soul Mantle robe (a must have for spell totem builds) gives you the extra spell totem support gem link so you can still get your 6L on with a spell totem on top.
Then there is just doing a blood magic build with the blood magic support gem and using good old life leech and life regen, and that support now gives bonus damage as a neat perk. But wait, you say, a blood magic support costs you damage compared to another support! It doesn't. Any blood magic support build will reserve the shit out of his entire mana pool for even more damage, something you can only afford because you aren't casting with your mana pool. And then there's vaguely more esoteric shit like 6Ling The Covenant and using that to get free blood magic (don't even pay 2x health cost, but no bonus damage) with your skill and lvl15 added chaos damage on top of your 6L.
Comedian style is to get 41% reduced mana cost off of your tree, equip Honourhome to bring yourself up to 60% reduced mana cost, then socket 8 jewels to reduce mana costs by 5% each, and have all your abilities cost 0 mana. You don't really contemplate this shit though unless you are reserving both life and mana to the fullest and using ES as your defense.
Then there is using Lavianga's Spirit or Vaal Clarity so you don't pay any mana costs at all while your pool is nuked, but that's a tad unusual.
And I forgot to mention but Hierophant pays 50% of mana cost without trying and Elementalist regens an extra 1% of max mana pool through Mastermind of Discord.
And then there's going back to Blade Vortex so you don't need to chain cast to do your damage.
And of course minion builds usually don't really care about this either.
Anyway, tons of ways to resolve this, many of them being pretty effortless.
2. Flasks got nuked. This was what 1% played. 95% of other people never cared for flasks and never used them like 1% uses them and always found that mechanic shit since they increased monster desnity.
Increasing monster density was GGG's own stupid shit. But flask builds are not going away from this shit, tbh. There are plenty of ways to ensure you get all the flask charges you need to keep going. The most you're going to see suffering is esoteric high flask effect builds and even then there are ways around it. In fact I can see some ways to go even crazier with flasks thanks to the new flasks and orbs.
3. Major damage buffs from supports got nuked hard. With 6 links we are talking about nearly 60% damage reduction for 5 links it is about 40%.
Sure, but base damage and damage multipliers got raised massively, and there are builds that use unusual supports to do massive damage which have been largely untouched. With the right build, your damage has gone up, not down.
Aside from that when you are doing builds that do over 50 million DPS, going down to say 30 million DPS is functionally meaningless. It still dies in one second. It's the builds that did 700k DPS and now find themselves doing 400k that will suffer.
4. They reduced a lot of sources of move speed. They changed few key items as well nuked from orbit increased movement speed mod on flasks from 20-30% to 6-8%. So that hits hard zoomers and their piano turbo
Nuking the movespeed mod is a pity. What happened is that the movespeed mod came first, the movespeed flask came second, then the superspeed flask was developed, but no one really needed that shit. Controlling movespeed is a good precondition to making positioning matter more, but then you need to control movement skills and monster speed too. That's not really happening here, so it's mostly lazy shit. You can still zoom around maps no problem though. Raider has the easiest time doing this as she zooms with +50% movespeed from her class. Berserker can similarly zoom with over 50 movespeed from rage, not factoring berserk.
Anyway, if movespeed is an issue, I anticipate we'll see a lot more melee builds with massive attack speed flying around maps with Leap Slam again.
5. Curse/elemental aflictions imminities got butchered. 1% main defense was always curse resists and elemental afliction resists now they have to actually hit flaks correctly and curse flasks don't give curse immunities.
No they don't. The new orbs let you automatically trigger flasks when you get the condition in question, and there are easily plenty of solutions to getting stunned and frozen. Lack of curse immunities will actually be a bit of a hindering factor, at least until people just use stunts to completely ignore curse effect and start pulling shit like Self-Flagellation builds or "Low Life" Coward's Legacy builds.
What that means is that those 1% ters you talk about that "won't feel it only 99% will" actually got hit hard.
1% are the ones that used the most effective combinations of supports which means they are the most affected by damage nerfs
1% are the ones who played flasks piano the most and got huge buffs due to that. They are the one hit the most by it.
1% are the ones stacked move speed the most for that zoom zoom, with flasks nerfs turbo is reduced a lot
1% are the ones who got imminities for everything, now they won't and will have to deal with what 95% of people deal.
Yes 1% are still 1% who will still be at the top but the gap between 1% and 99% of rest got much much much narrower. On other hand 1% won't be able to just one shot everything and have constantly up megadefences normal people won't be able to even think up.
But a lot of the opposite is happening, dude. When the best supports get nerfed, the best players will stop using them and switch to other supports and tactics that aren't as penalized. When the best flask tricks get nerfed, they will resort to other flask tricks. When movespeed gets wrecked, they will use other ways to get their movespeed fix or zoom around maps with movement abilities. Theoretical damage maybe goes down, but bosses still drop instantly. Meanwhile the average player isn't that clever and his damage and movement goes down in a much realer sense.
Megadefenses are pretty much unaffected by the current set of changes also.
