Life is King...and we need a bloody revolution.

I recently read this gem of a post in another thread, a thread otherwise rife with contention and petty verbal spats. I strongly recommend reading it before proceeding, and sincerely thank MesostelZe for inspiring this post. I only hope that which I submit is worthy of its inspiration.

In the linked post, removal of life% from the Skilldrasil is suggested, instead proposing that it becoming tied to base character level progression, much as it was in other ARPGs. I broadly disagree with this stance -- the homogenisation would further highlight the so-called 'illusion of diversity' that the current Skilldrasil presents.

That illusion is based on the tenable statement, 'Life is King'. Without life, we die. Whether you define it as health or energy shield, life is the most important factor in an ARPG where grouping and solo play should have equal viability. What should not be quite so important is the focus on life over all the other types of character improvement, such as defence type, damage, utility, etc.

If Life is King, then every other character enhancement are its subjects. And right now, he is not being a good king and respecting his subjects at all. He is demanding all the attention, first and foremost, and I think it's time for a bloody revolution.

But if life is the only thing keeping us from being dead, how can we depose it? How dare we?

Simple: by putting the crown on a concept that is Life and more.

Let's call this new King 'Survival'. Let him be more than his predecessor 'Life' but at the same time let him respect the legacy. Let him remember how important it is that 'Life' and 'Defence' work together, and let him understand that if they do, the other subjects such as Damage and Support will get their fair share of attention too.

This is where it gets less simple. I'm going to start the conversation, but that's all. Hence this being a thread and not some private rant into the void.

I personally think that 'Survival' involves strengthening the ties between the defence types and their respective relationship to Life.

If we can blend life with defence types then I think it'd be possible to reduce the overall amount of life nodes on the Skilldrasil, if not remove them altogether. I recall when there were far fewer life nodes, and we all complained about not having enough life. So GGG threw a bunch of life nodes around the place, which at first seemed grand but now are compulsory. Not fun. GGG turned us into Life junkies and in moments of lucidity, I almost hate them for it.

Okay, getting past that. Defence types and their relationship with life. The overall goal is to encourage people to boost their defence types via the Skilldrasil without fearing neglecting the all-important increase of life. Life being the ultimate sine qua non.

Evasion faces spiking. Not always, and if you're well built, not often thanks to the crit re-roll. A dev has told me flat out that you need decent-to-high life to make evasion work. This means sacrificing actual evasion nodes to get life nodes. My heart sank when I heard that, but I tried it. I relied only on the evasion my leather gave me, focusing instead on life, and then block chance in conjunction with A/PA/AD. It worked. Really well. I busted through all the walls I'd faced before and was farming Merc Fellshrine in no time.

Evasion's relationship with life is in bulk. You need a high amount of base life to make it work. Thus I think if we could blend base life% increase with evasion nodes (instead of energy shield, which is what we're seeing right now, especially in the Shadow's corner), there'd be a lot more attraction to increase evasion via the Skilldrasil. It wouldn't be quite so risky.

Evasion is tied directly to dexterity, but the bonus from dexterity is really unimpressive. Gaining dexterity incidentally really doesn't increase evasion's efficacy. This is why overall life gain in conjunction with evasion% nodes would be important.

Proposal 1: Add x% life to all evasion% nodes, where accumulations of x would result in an overall equivalent total life% to what is currently considered acceptable (in my experience, 150-170%) ; Convert all '+life%' nodes in the evasion/dexterity area to necessary clusters to buff neglected/underpowered aspects of dexterity play.

I know a lot less about armour. I know it's a flat damage reduction. When I tested Iron Reflexes briefly, I noticed I was obviously getting hit a lot more *and* suffering more status effects. Obviously armour is tied to strength, which gives more life as well. Thus I would reduce the overall amount of life nodes tied to armour nodes but increase the passive regen.

As opposed to dexterity, strength, being armour 'incidental' attribute, does give life. And it can add up. This is why I'd propose less base life% add per armour node but more regen. In the end, an armour user and an evasion user needs bulk life equally -- but the armour user gets more through the 'pathway' nodes and Strength notables. Perhaps we could really reduce the life% tied to armour and just give it much higher strength -- thereby increasing base life and base melee damage.

As I said, I'm less savvy with armour so I'm happy to let armour users nut out what would be required there. Here's a start:

Proposal 2: add a mixture of life% and regen to all armour gaining nodes, with some nodes gaining life% and some passive life regen, to a total result of, again, what would be considered effective life% and regen for an armour user; convert all life nodes in the strength area to melee-based nodes.

Sidenote: do we need some consideration as regards the fact that often getting hit results in status effects? Or is it not a problem for a true armour user?

Finally, energy shield. The quandary with energy shield is that unlike armour and evasion, it is its own form of life. Tying raw life% to ES nodes makes no sense given the likelihood of CI; tying life regen to ES forces the person to head towards Zealot's Oath.

Energy shield% needs to be higher per node. Now that CI no longer gives any energy shield, people are very reluctant to touch it. Maybe not much, maybe a lot.

Chaos damage is still meant to be the 'weak point' of Energy shield, and naturally Chaos Inoculation is the plug for that, which I think is nifty given the 1 hp drawback.

The second 'weak point' that I have read regarding Energy Shield is stunning. And chance to be stunned is tied to base life, last I checked. So would including a very small chance to avoid being stunned in each energy shield node be worth considering?

Again, I submit to superior experience here but do believe that Energy Shield and Life still interact -- else CI become compulsory again.

Well, here's an idea: what if the energy shield nodes closer to CI gave an increased amount of energy shield (higher than 8% at any rate), and all the others around the place gave a mixture of lower ES% and life? That life could be base life rather than % to represent the reduced importance of life when you're also using energy shield.

Proposal 3: increase the energy shield gain on nodes near Chaos Inoculation; give Energy Shield Gain to life nodes in the intelligence area; give life gain to energy shield nodes; change life gain in the intelligence area to base life rather than a percentage.

The only remaining thought I have is regarding hybrids. Would these changes somehow overpower a hybrid?

Nothing in this post is rhetorical.

I open the floor to the revolution. Let Life no longer be King.

The King is Dead; Long Live the King.

Interesting suggestions. I mused over the proposition to include %life as a possible (albeit rarer) roll on gear but quickly dismissed the notion as it would do little to the current issue.

Then I mused on the thought of adjusting how evasion fundamentally functions. In its current incarnation it exists as a hit or miss thing. Perhaps introducing the concept of glancing blows such that a roll can be /full hit-/glancing blow/-/miss/ would lower the reliance of evasion on life because the spikes are now more controlled.

I'll give the matter some more thought before addressing armour.

I'm gonna restate a suggestion I made awhile back that I would like to see a Life value soft cap based on character level that diminishes how much extra life you gain if you go above certain thresholds, to make it impractical to stack so much life quickly and instead need to spread it out long term. This way if you truly want to super stack life, you can but it will be much smaller gains for your excess.

And then all three non-life types of durability to become better like you suggest to compensate.

I must note that this thread cannot be about rewriting the defence types. We've had lots of those. oh so many. I am sure that where the defence types sit now is where they're going to stay. We cannot ask GGG to fundamentally change core mechanics.

This is all about tweaking the Skilldrasil, which they can and must do.

My apologies for the misunderstanding then. I would like to touch on regen though; Giving regen to nodes lends more favour to Blood Magic based builds -- I would perhaps, in lieu of adding them to secondary defensive nodes, introduce them as separate clusters requiring investment into; perhaps in the form of +integer, +integer, +.x% thus making them an investment over something given.

Obviously it can not overshadow Troll's Blood and Golem's Blood nor can the percentages be too high nor can they be too easy to access near Zealot's Oath. Life regen, to me, is not a necessity (and thus shouldn't be freely given) by default. You either invest into it or you make do without it.

If we can only adjust passive tree, then I don't think anything can be done to truly stop people from picking up life nodes exclusively as long as it's the strongest form of durability for travelling through hardcore. I think at least if you lower the total number either by reducing them and compensating the values or combining them with other nodes like suggested, then at least they would need to spend their passive points on other types of nodes which would result in overall stronger builds.

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

If we can only adjust passive tree, then I don't think anything can be done to truly stop people from picking up life nodes exclusively as long as it's the strongest form of durability for travelling through hardcore. I think at least if you lower the total number either by reducing them and compensating the values or combining them with other nodes like suggested, then at least they would need to spend their passive points on other types of nodes which would result in overall stronger builds.

But that's precisely what I'm proposing. Remove the supremacy of life nodes by giving life options to defence nodes. Make life a part of the overall survival experience, not the only part.

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Lyralei wrote:

My apologies for the misunderstanding then. I would like to touch on regen though; Giving regen to nodes lends more favour to Blood Magic based builds -- I would perhaps, in lieu of adding them to secondary defensive nodes, introduce them as separate clusters requiring investment into; perhaps in the form of +integer, +integer, +.x% thus making them an investment over something given.

Obviously it can not overshadow Troll's Blood and Golem's Blood nor can the percentages be too high nor can they be too easy to access near Zealot's Oath. Life regen, to me, is not a necessity (and thus shouldn't be freely given) by default. You either invest into it or you make do without it.

You make a good point here. So how would the south-west of the Skilldrasil look to you if we had to remove the basic 'life% nodes'? What would we do to compensate?

I would actually keep a few of those nodes, perhaps elongate them to make them a bigger investment ala (5-5-5-5-8) rathern than the current values of (8-8-12) because they (still) fit into the whole theme of Blood Magic but now require a much larger investment to make them worthwhile. Can even lower the % values and tack on int. regen to make them seem appealing with the right investment into it.

We obviously remove some of the smaller clusters since they're being shifted to secondary defences and replace them with integer regeneration nodes perhaps? I'll think about that more.

Addendum: Rather than eliminate the two 12% nodes next to Bloodless, we could even alter these nodes to benefit melee attackers -- Take 3% less damage from x sources. /or / % Increased Life Leech rate. You would want to interest people in alternative means of surviving.

The latter makes more sense since its directly opposite Blood Drinker plus it would be a good time to introduce passives not seen before on the tree (and to indirectly benefit the duelist more since he needs a wee bit of love).

Thank you for posting this well thought out post. It took me a bit to read, but was well worth reading. I agree with you whole heartily and the life nodes are more or less mandatory to get anywhere in the game. With my first ranger I neglected to take life early on and all was well until the second half of act two. The game jumped from being no challenge to impossible to play unless I was playing with someone who could take the damage for me.

When I started this game, I assumed that armor and evasion would do what you would expect it to do. I stacked evasion like no other thinking I would have better survivability, but in reality it helped me none. That was very disappointing. Now that I am in act three with the character I have "fixed" the build by going after life. I have used all the life nodes in the dexterity area, this helped and now getting even further I see that I will have to travel across the tree picking up useless stats doing so to pick up some more life.

I feel restricted and limited to what I can do on my build because of this limiting factor. GGG needs to re-think the whole concept of Armor, Health gain, and Evasion.

Thank you for taking the time to bring this problem to light and express the feelings of many other players by explaining the problem at hand with great detail and proposing ideas to fix the problems.