The Shard of Hate is one of Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls’ high level legendary items. It’s a powerful sword that procs a triple set of elemental damage abilities, and it’s regarded as the game’s most powerful weapon, at least for some character classes such as the Barbarian.
It’s also getting nerfed, because it’s not meant to be as powerful as it is. Blizzard explains why in a forum post on the Battle.net forums.
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.
A further list of hotfixes can be found here.
