At first, I thought the skill/leveling system would be amazing

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Destructodave wrote:

It is you that has no grasp on the "meta-game." You dont even have a freaking character high enough to be found by poestatistics.com.

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MesostelZe wrote:

The fact that Life is King right now is pretty indisputable, however, I'm pretty sure that I disagree that armour and evasion should be anywhere near equivalent to it in terms of survivability.

Why? Well, for Evasion's case, anything which is befitting the name "evasion" is going to mean that some things hit you and some don't. Making Evasion a truly viable substitute for Life then means making sure that none of the enemies in the game hit very hard (though perhaps they hit faster to make up for that a bit). However, not being able to make a mistake and die at a moment's notice makes the entire game less exciting. What would you do with an enemy like Brutus? It seems a bit sad to imagine that slow, "heavy hitting" mobs just couldn't be as effective.

In the case of Armour, the question is a little more subtle, but it basically comes down to the same thing. If Armour provided flat physical damage reduction, then it would be more or less equivalent to Life% in terms of physical damage. However, it doesn't do that. Instead, it does something more interesting, providing almost complete protection against small hits, and almost no protection against large ones. Similarly to Evasion, this makes it a nice ingredient in a survivable character, but not something which everyone has to have. Also similarly to Evasion, it's made more effective by making all the mobs hit faster and lighter, but you'd have to accept that this is a reasonable thing to do. Currently, the damage reduction formula for Armour is a key ingredient in keeping death a possibility at high levels.

Something to consider though: What if Armour worked in a way which was opposite to how it is now, becoming more effective against larger hits (within limits of course), and almost completely ineffective against many small ones? This would certainly make it complement Evasion better, and depending on the precise details of how it was done, might make some characters viable with lower Life but a lot of Armour.

Energy Shield by contrast with the other two defences *is* more or less substitutable for Life when stacked appropriately. This is made up for by giving less access to Life passives for characters that move into the Witch portion of the tree where most of the ES is (and the fact that CI is a tempting option which removes Life altogether).

I disagree about people who think they need to put lots of skill points into elemental resistances in the passive tree. Enough of these seem to show up on gear by the end that such nodes are mostly a temporary convenience to provide a bit more gear flexibility. Since the elemental resists are all suffixes, and the core stats on gear (such as Life!) are mostly prefixes, you won't be giving up much by taking all your resists on gear. You eventually need to cap resists, but the way this has been done is less restrictive than it perhaps appears.

One could suggest that Life nodes be more concentrated in the tree, so that one has more points left for customisation, but the extra points would of course in many cases just lead to more Life nodes being obtained.

What if Life% was not in the tree at all? One can imagine just making it a function of the sum of the base stats or a function of level, so that everyone would end up with a reasonable amount of Life. (This would have to be done very carefully if ES was not to become way too important then.) However, I personally don't know how to feel about an option like that.

Survivability is always going to be important, at least, it really ought to be in a game like this one. It's hard to imagine a system in which Life or something very much like it is not central to producing a survivable character. But do you really want to take away one of the key features deciding which builds are viable like that? We *need* the passive tree to present some challenges, after all. It could be argued that at present though, the beacon Life nodes are shining a little too brightly on the paths which are going to work.

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Deceptionist wrote:

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Destructodave wrote:

It is you that has no grasp on the "meta-game." You dont even have a freaking character high enough to be found by poestatistics.com.

And this is where your ignorance rises from the depths of your darkest channels of denial. I have a very great grasp on this game. I may not have done anything on this game, yet. But I have done some interesting things on other games, like perhaps, break some of them because I spent 2 weeks coming up with the right class, the right build, and the right ideas. It was smaller than this one, but it still was skill and challenge nontheless. I even killed the corrupted game masters in PvP. This game has only been played by me for a bit more than a week and I haven't been spending nearly as much time as I did on that other game. I've been researching, and spending a lot of my days working on my music, too.

You also seem to forget that knowledge, information and data doesn't rest only inside me. So my personal experiences really only serves as a personal defense in the end. What really matters is how I can see you've stated X, but then look at these players around you that do things that contradict X. That is how logic works. People make a claim, I contradict it or others contradict it, then it's no longer a validated claim.

End of story. Your complaints are thin and vacuous. You pay more attention talking about yourself and making stupid assertions to write anything sensible.

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Charan wrote:

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MesostelZe wrote:

Snip

Extremely good post. Life is king...and we need a bloody revolution.

I disagree with making life standard across the board.

I think the defense types and their respective relationship to life should be reviewed. Will continue this post in a bit.

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timed wrote:

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zachpnnc wrote:

because dying is such a real possibility of course all of the HC builds are going to stack as much life as possible.

They should at least make all the other defensive stats like armor and evasion not totally worthless.

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Destructodave wrote:

It offered more freedom to traverse the tree and pick up more diverse nodes; not simply grab all these hp nodes, grab all those, grab those, get that keystone voila character!

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timed wrote:

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zachpnnc wrote:

because dying is such a real possibility of course all of the HC builds are going to stack as much life as possible.

They should at least make all the other defensive stats like armor and evasion not totally worthless.

Or just remove life completely from the tree, and rebalance the game around that.

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Deceptionist wrote:

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Destructodave wrote:

It offered more freedom to traverse the tree and pick up more diverse nodes; not simply grab all these hp nodes, grab all those, grab those, get that keystone voila character!

This is why I'm saying you're incorrect.

You make the claim that HP rules over HC. Go talk to people who have beaten this obstacle without gutting their character. You are wrong. (here's the part that explains why:) There are people. I don't remember their names, but I hear about them. I don't think people make people up. People succeed in things that others don't, and more accurately, it's a smaller scale versus a large scale of persons, at that.

I wish you could understand where I'm coming from and that I'm not a troll, but I really think you're a hopeless man. You are too insistent on false data and false knowledge based on personal experiences, as if you didn't make any errors and conflictions for yourself.

If you don't want to take your own humilty at heart, then this isn't going to progress any further. It's always going to be your ego speaking, and me constantly trying to talk to you - with no success. Your ego usurped your dignity and you don't seem to acknowledge this. You are poisoned with self-interest, and this is why you cannot see the universal truth that I do. You only see what you want to see. That's the problem.

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Destructodave wrote:

Yep that settles it. You are just a troll.