Final 0.9.3 Patch Notes

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Mark_GGG wrote:

There are only three minion support gems - Life, Damage and Movement speed. Increased Duration applies to any skill with a duration (currently the only minion skill with a duration is Dominating Blow).

Of the other three, we don't want to combine them, because that reduces player choice and build diversity. We want people to chose which gem or combination of gems they specifically want to use on each type of minion, and by keeping things separate, we create more meaningful choices.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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DarPhoenix wrote:

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Changed the gem-support system so that only Support Gems in the same physical group as a Skill Gem connect to it. If you have two groups with the same skill, you get two bindable skills. This is done so that supports can be made more impactful and so that players can have multiple variations of the same skill in their build.

This is a huge disappointment for me. Its cheap way out of uber-skill problem. Instead I would prefer if you'd take the long way and balance uber-skills with high mana cost, so that uber-skills builds are still possible, but require careful planning and items with specific mods.

Another way to balance is to make multiple skills work together, increase synergy between them, so that players are encouraged to use multiple skills, instead of one uber-skill with multiple supports.

Make it hard to achieve, but don't take away multiple supports. These builds will be very viable and fun in high lvl team vs team PVP matches, where different focused builds will work together as a team. By doing this you severely limit character differentiation especially in high lvls.

I disagree. First off, support gems HAVE been costed to make uberskills less attractive, and rebalanced to match so each individual support has more effect.
What this change gives us, at the cost of limiting to a max of 5 supports per skill, which is skill a lot, is a huge increase, not decrease, in build diversity. It lets a player use two copies of a skill and support them differently into different skills - If I really like Poison Arrow, I can now have a faster attacks / multiple projectiles / pierce version for killing lots of weak monsters, a knockback / increased damage version for bosses, and a version with elemental damage to get around highly physically resistant monsters. Or any combination thereof, while keeping them different skills.
It's potentially possible to build a character around only one skill, and have access to several practically different skills by supporting it differently, if a player wants. Or you can still combine different sets of skills like before, and the only thing you've lost out on is the abilty to link more than 5 supports to a single skill gem, which under the new balance would be prohibitively expensive anyway.

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DarPhoenix wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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DarPhoenix wrote:

This is a huge disappointment for me. Its cheap way out of uber-skill problem. Instead I would prefer if you'd take the long way and balance uber-skills with high mana cost, so that uber-skills builds are still possible, but require careful planning and items with specific mods.

Another way to balance is to make multiple skills work together, increase synergy between them, so that players are encouraged to use multiple skills, instead of one uber-skill with multiple supports.

Make it hard to achieve, but don't take away multiple supports. These builds will be very viable and fun in high lvl team vs team PVP matches, where different focused builds will work together as a team. By doing this you severely limit character differentiation especially in high lvls.

I disagree. First off, support gems HAVE been costed to make uberskills less attractive, and rebalanced to match so each individual support has more effect.
What this change gives us, at the cost of limiting to a max of 5 supports per skill, which is skill a lot, is a huge increase, not decrease, in build diversity. It lets a player use two copies of a skill and support them differently into different skills - If I really like Poison Arrow, I can now have a faster attacks / multiple projectiles / pierce version for killing lots of weak monsters, a knockback / increased damage version for bosses, and a version with elemental damage to get around highly physically resistant monsters. Or any combination thereof, while keeping them different skills.
It's potentially possible to build a character around only one skill, and have access to several practically different skills by supporting it differently, if a player wants. Or you can still combine different sets of skills like before, and the only thing you've lost out on is the abilty to link more than 5 supports to a single skill gem, which under the new balance would be prohibitively expensive anyway.

While I agree that having same skill copies for different situations is a good addition for the game. Still disabling supports through multiple copies is taking away options from players. I just though of a support gem that might solve the problem.

Lets call it SKILL LINK gem. It would be a non attribute support gem (e.g. town portal gem) and you would need at least two of them. Basically two gems placed in different items would link those items slots so that copied active skill's support gems effects are stacked.

This would be a high lvl gem as the benefits would kick in just when you got two 4 slot-all-linked items. Out of those 8 slots 2 would be taken by SKILL LINK gems, another 2 by copied active skill and that would leave 4 slots for support gems (instead of 3 if using just 1 item), which would all be applied to the same copied active skill.

That way more than 5 support gems linking would still be possible, but very difficult and costly to achieve.

Small mana reduction % could be a secondary effect for the gem, that would improve while leveling.

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Chris wrote:

I've updated the initial post with a minor modification to the patch notes (which is mentioned at the bottom of the post).