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

SoujiroSeta, you just give another hand for changing damage/hitpoints of mobs, which i already mentioned. Our dear mod wants to prevent that, because "it is too much to work on" (even if it is not).

I have an idea, and would like to hear some feedback if anyone is interested.

How about making survivability that isn't achieved through life strong, but more challenging to use? Might sound weird but hear me out.

Say that one way of making your character survive in PoE is by stacking life%. Lower the amounts in the life nodes (from 8% to 6% perhaps) a bit to make them a bit weaker though, make life as a defensive mechanism just a little bit weaker.

Then, give evasion and armor (and perhaps even ES) some active or in general just skillbased component. Make it so that when a lot of attention is put into surviving with these mechanics (a lot of resources, global cooldowns or just player attention in general) they become stronger than life. This means that stacking life% gives you a build that allows you to relax a bit more when it comes to surviving, while stacking armor/evasion/ES makes you just as strong, but a bit more difficult to handle.

So how could these defenses look like? For example, some common skillgems that uses the armor/evasion/ES to temporarily boost their effectiveness. A "stand ground" type of ability for example, that could for example lower your dmg and movementspeed by 50% but increase your armor by 500% for 3 secs. Add a 10 sec cooldown to this ability. This way, if you play your cards right, you could really be effective while stacking armor, as long as you time your "stand ground" skill.

Evasion could for example work similarly, but for the sake of variety it could also work in a very different manner. Say that you can activate an ability that gives your character 3 evasion charges, with a long duration. Then, each time you evade, these charges are spent.

The ideas are a bit rough, but I think the basic idea has potential: Make life the easy way, but not the most effective way to survive. Make other methods of survival more difficult to manage, but just as potent.

Each time you fail your evade, you evade anyway, but spend your charge* Fixed.
Yes, it could do. But it requires new gems to be created and balanced, one for each combination of defence. It is even more work than changing mobs life and damage by hand.

Because what we need are invulnerable Frenzy rangers.

Wait, no. We don't.

Do not worry, I agreed with the conceptual idea, not this particular one.

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Freezerg wrote:

Each time you fail your evade, you evade anyway, but spend your charge* Fixed.
Yes, it could do. But it requires new gems to be created and balanced, one for each combination of defence. It is even more work than changing mobs life and damage by hand.

Indeed, thank you for that fix.
Regarding your second point:
They have stated however that one of their planned courses of action is to create new skill gems. Not just a few, but many new skills. I heard something about weekly skills even (maybe I heard that wrong). It will be difficult to create just new attacks all the time, and to spend some time to create some active defensive skills (with effectiveness scaling on your non-life defensive stats) would hopefully help the game more than a few more attacks.

And to ScrotieMcB: Maybe the evasion charges are a bad idea. It was just a quick concept I came up with. Personally I think my Stand Ground idea was a bit better, but even so the main concept was still just defensive skill gems with effectiveness scaling from defensive stats that isn't life. Exactly how those skill gems should look like is something that is very open for debate :D

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Freezerg wrote:

SoujiroSeta, you just give another hand for changing damage/hitpoints of mobs, which i already mentioned. Our dear mod wants to prevent that, because "it is too much to work on" (even if it is not).

I read your suggestion.

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Freezerg wrote:

As i like the meaning and what you want to achieve from your first post, your damn comparing life to a king is annoying to the insane level. Drop that off. It makes me think you are not being serious, and trolling with everybody.

Why Life is ruling? Because mobs deal shit huge damage. AND they are mostly squishy. Damage is like money. Produce too many (on mobs) and their worth (for us) will be nonexistant. We will try hard to fix the economy(take life to counter damage).
Reducing mob damage and boosting their hp will force us to change our builds from life dependent to damage dependent. This is simple like a stone.

So how to easily fix the game? Take away minion damage. Add huge chunks of hitpoints to them (or take away our own damage). Give minions skills and utility they can use to kill us. Brutus hook on basic rare mob? Why not. It is rare. Uniques should have their own skills. Or use our skills, even. Let them surprise us.

Mine is similar but differnt. Also, i don't talk about monster HP at all. Only their dmg.

There are only certain mobs that will need to be addressed different. Ones that use skills like shield charge (rhoas, charging guards), arc (mages and curtain like things), and maybe 1 i'm missing. Everything else would simply get a dmg reduction across the board depending on rarity. All whites would have their dmg reduced by 35%, crit chance increased, crit multiplier increased. Done, blues and rares will follow.

No hp change to monsters at all.

Crit multiplier and chance would be changed across the board depending on rarity as well. Life nodes in certain parts of tree nerfed/buffed. That's it. Monsteer hp stays the same.

This is very doable and can be tested now, atleast i'd imagine.

Anyway i'm off to bed.

The objective of this discussion is reduce the reliance of life node while minimize the changes to the existing system. And my suggestion that does not even need to change the layout of the passive skill tree:

i) Reduce the effectiveness of life node by half.

ii) 1 Str give 1 HP, while 1 Dex and Int gives 0.5HP respectively - With this, the Dex and Int will help Dex and Int characters to accumulate some HP when parsing over them. And these extra HP would help them survive the blow if the evasion and energy shield didn't cut it.

iii) Reduce the effectiveness curve for armor and evasion rating thus make armor and evasion better.

Still, Your workaround Horp can help on the short run, not on the long run. Damage/health of mobs and characters would still be broken.

SoujiroSeta, changing the Damage comes along with changing the Life. If you move mob damage back, their life would seem insufficient for damage we're dealing (game would be easy), and vice versa, and same rule apply to us.

sohchai just gives another, and i think it is the best to serve our purposes right now, idea. Change curve of armor/evade to fix the insane damage. It would be manipulating to the whole equation (in opposition to manipulating flat values in case of damage/life ratio), but it is the easiest thing possible to do.

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Freezerg wrote:

Still, Your workaround Horp can help on the short run, not on the long run. Damage/health of mobs and characters would still be broken.

SoujiroSeta, changing the Damage comes along with changing the Life. If you move mob damage back, their life would seem insufficient for damage we're dealing (game would be easy), and vice versa, and same rule apply to us.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how my proposition wouldn't work in the long run.
A high life% character would handle a normal fight by taking some hits, dealing some damage and sometimes do kiting.

An active defense type of character would never expose themselves to direct damage without having their defenses up. Of course, the difficulty of maintaining these defenses would of course have to be balanced.

I see the problem now as; we have 4 defensive stats to stack. One of them is better than the other, with no real drawbacks. Of course you stack the best one. Adding the element of skill and attention requirement could be that factor that could make stacking the other stats worth it.