Harbinger wonkiness

[toftdal]

So, been testing out Harbinger and I'm probably missing something, but is there a reason the vamp regen with the Mortality Hex isn't made like the ranger blood thirst?

As is, it will not stack with e.g. a lesser nine lives stealer or dusk - instead it will use one of them (at least on the PGCC), seemingly at random. Also, the vanilla vamp regen is limited to once per flurry instead of one each attack.

When you curse your weapon, the bonusses do not dissappear when you drop it to the ground - making it hard to get rid of the bonusses when leveling up to a new and better tier. It's more an annoyance than anything particularly problematic.

[Dreams]

I’ve asked this in the past and was told the entire class is very carefully balanced. The numbers are too high for it to work every hit, so it uses the vanilla vamp regen instead of the scripted one for rangers. Totally agree with your feedback, Harbinger has a lot of annoying oversights that never got fixed

[silverpheonix]

I’ve asked this in the past and was told the entire class is very carefully balanced.

Who told you that? Harb is one of the most overtuned classes right now. You get a saveless, instant-action "I win" button against nearly any summon, including Epic Summons, at level six.

[toftdal]

Also, there is something weird going on with the CD of Dark Claim - I get a message that I have gotten a use back, immediately as I Dark Claim a creature - once I've killed that creature, it still takes somewhere between 3-6 seconds before I can re-apply to the next (I get no feedback message) - which usually means, I'll use up the other ability of it (the one that applies a visual-but-not-actual slow effect to the creature) in the process.

(I am playing the Crimson Countess path if that matters).

[AstralUniverse]

Also, there is something weird going on with the CD of Dark Claim - I get a message that I have gotten a use back, immediately as I Dark Claim a creature - once I've killed that creature, it still takes somewhere between 3-6 seconds before I can re-apply to the next (I get no feedback message) - which usually means, I'll use up the other ability of it (the one that applies a visual-but-not-actual slow effect to the creature) in the process.

(I am playing the Crimson Countess path if that matters).

If it's what I think it is, it happens when the mob you killed, specifically it's corpse, doesnt despawn normally after 6 seconds. Some 'special' mobs who leave corpses until server reset. I noticed that my claim's cd doesnt reset when the corpse doesnt despawn, and then I need to wait the full cooldown.

About vamp.
Back when Ranger was given this custom made on-hit property, it was an entirely different set of devs, using entirely different design tools pre-EE, having entirely different design philosophies, but most importantly, they were working on Ranger, not Harbinger. They wanted ranger's vamp to proc every hit because they were pushing for dual-wield builds and wanted to reward dw ranger more than none-dw rangers in that regard. It doesnt really mean that this old on-hit property has to be used from then on whenever you want to add vamping mechanic to a class/weapon. Vanilla vamp's value for harbinger or any other class can be increased or decreased until balance is found, and since you cannot stack it with vamp on weapons, it is simply more 'controlled' balance-wise.

Also, Harbinger is S-tier across multiple builds, dare I say borderline overpowered even.