Nerf life nodes... while boosting base life so life itself isn't nerfed

I already posted these ideas here, but OP is mod and closed his own thread.

Before getting into what I'm suggesting specifically, let's get into why. Why nerf life nodes at all?

When it comes to current passive builds, life is king. Is this because monsters do scary high damage? Partly, but I have it from my sources that rebalancing monster damage is too much for GGG to fix at the moment, so let's suck that up, bury it deep down inside and never talk about it again, Taladega Nights style. Seriously, if you must complain about it, find another thread.

But I digress. Life is king, and a lot of that has to do with passive skill point opportunity cost. An 8% life node is competing with things like:
* 8% physical melee damage with specific weapon type. So you can get 8% to one damage type, when no doubt you've got some elemental tossed in there, or 8% to ALL your life. You're melee, so life is important. Life wins.
* 4% attack speed with a specific weapon type. Okay, so now we're talking about improving all damage. But it's 4% vs 8%. Hard to ignore the bigger number there. Life wins again.
* 10% more armour. This might increase your EHP against some attacks by 5% without charges, maybe even by 9% with a bunch of endurance charges. But that's some attacks, not all, and the scariest are the big hits that melt armour, and you won't get a good percentage there... and that's physical damage only, not elemental or chaos. So life wins again.

The end result is a lot of passive builds, all the good ones really, stack life like nobody's business. This isn't good for build diversity, not one bit. And to fix it, we pretty much need to either
* buff pretty much every passive node that isn't a life node, or
* nerf life nodes.
The second option is a lot easier. But how to do it without nerfing life itself?

Since we can't adjust monster damage (shake and bake!), we need to adjust base life. You know, that value that %life nodes multiply. Up that, nerf life nodes, and the end result is that the life-stacking builds we're familiar with should still work, but new, less tanky, more DPS-focused builds would be more viable, and maybe, just maybe, people wouldn't need to stack life nodes as much.

So what I'm proposing specifically is:
* all % life node values halved. 8% nodes become 4% nodes; 12% becomes 6%. The one odd-valued node, Marauder's 13%, is rounded down to 6%.
* life gained per level doubled to 12, from 6
* base life gains from passives doubled (such as shadow's +20 life node, would become +40)
* life per strength doubled to 1, from 0.5
* starting life reduced to 40 from 50

Let's go over those in order. I've already covered the first point, but the others may confuse at first.

Doubling the life gain per level is the meat and potatoes of the "buff base life" part of my suggestion. For all high-level characters, the bulk of base life is from two places: levels and life affixes on gear, each providing more than 400 base life if optimized. Since gear can't really be changed at this point (no more wipes!), doubling that 420 base life a level 70 gets from levels to 840. Big jump.

The one thing about increasing that base life is that other base life increases have less effect, leading to the next two bullet points. However, it's the second that strikes as controversial. Buffing Strength? Yep. Before, having 400 Strength gave 200 more base life, which makes less impact than you might have thought under the current system (thanks to life affixes on gear you could expect 1000 base life on a level 70 marauder before his Str bonus), but would be an even smaller effect with level-based base life doubled. So yes, I'm suggesting a Strength buff. (Yes, Dex people, I know you're hurting, but don't hate on this suggestion just because it doesn't fix that problem.)

The last change -- reducing starting life -- is a result of the Str buff. All characters start with 14 to 30 Str, so that change means adding 7 to 15 base life to level 1 characters. I don't want to make Normal Hillock too easy, and the 10-point reduction is easily made up by the level gains later.

The one thing that isn't changed is life affixes on equipment. Those stay the same, which means that, by the same logic that not buffing Strength would be a net nerf, the life affixes would receive a stealth-nerf. They'd technically do the same thing, but would have less impact relative to everything else, which got buffed.

Quick low-level example: Let's say you decide to reroll marauder and have two white +30 life coral rings in your stash to help out. You level your marauder to 3 and...
* if you go for two life nodes, you'd have 170 life with my changes, 166 currently. Not a very big difference, a little under 3% more.
* if you go for two melee damage nodes, you'd have 154 life with my changes, 137 currently. That's about 13% more life, so you were penaliized far less for choosing the melee nodes.

Higher level example: marauder, level 48, 60 points spent. You could have this build with 275% additional life currently, which would be 137% under my suggestion; let's say you've had crap luck and don't have any life affixes so gear doesn't add any, and 330 Strength.
* with the crazy life stacking, you would have 503 base life currently, and 1887 life after the life-stacking passives. With my suggestion, you'd have 946 base life, and 2243 life after the life-stacking. Significantly more!
* same situation, but now you've got some life gear, total of 250 added. Currently you'd have 753 base life, increased to 2824 life. With my suggestion, 1196 base life, increased to 2835. That's almost the same... compared to the previous result, you can see life gear will matter less, what was about a 1000-point jump before just became a 600-point jump (for this build).
* same life gear, but now half as many life passives: 137% for current, 69% post-suggestion. 753 current base life increased to 1785; 1196 suggestion base life increased to 2022. Life passives still matter, but they are just a little less mandatory; in a way skipping the life passives nullifies the effect of the life gear, it's just that this matters much more currently than it would post-suggestion.

Okay, examples complete. Thoughts?

i totally agree with you - life nodes are too much of a must at the moment and make most builds very boring since you move from one life node to the other - life nodes should be some kind of optional tankieness that you can choose but that doesnt force you to take them

I had this exact same idea some time ago, but decided to never post it since I thought the community would be against it.

Glad this isn't the case.

Now I'm not sure about the numbers but I fully agree with the concept that life nodes should be nerfed and base life should be buffed.

@Magus_Coldfire: Reread the opening post again. The whole thing. Slowly.

I posted this on that thread, but I'll post it again.

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I really hate how Life has become the undeniably best defense, far surpassing the supposed "defenses." Compared to life, the defense are utterly worthless, simply by the way they work. Life is the ultimate buffer against any damage of any kind, in any shape or form, while every other defense have they own Achilles's Heel (some noticeably bigger than others.) Why bother with them when you can straight up go for life? It's easier to stack both on the tree (gratuitous nodes spread all over the tree) and on gear (on single mod that has a very high range). The fact that armor and evasion are useless against spells makes it doubly worst. It's just so easy to see why Life is the unquestioned king. The king is the one with the power and Life literally has more power than all of the other defenses combined. If we don't change the system from it's very roots, Life will always continue to rule, no matter how hard we try to keep him out.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that by nature, the way Life works makes it far superior to the defenses. The problem isn't really how much life nodes there are, it's that it has become the ONLY useful option. You are forced to take life nodes because of how good it is at doing what it does. What I think needs to change is to fundamental buff the current defenses so they actually do what they're supposed to do. Of course, that can be done in conjunction to your suggestions too.

you talk about build diversity but by just giving more base life and less dependance on the passive tree for life, all build shift to heavy dps because why bother with the life nodes then.

i do however like the idea of more life from str. i am a witch so this woudnt effect me as much, but as melee u need a lot more health than is available currently. this is why half the marauders u see are rocking a bow or wand and the ones with the 2 handers are very likely ls/gs effectively making them a ranged class as well. so i do feel like this aspect would encourage build diversity in wat are supposed to be the melee classes

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Magus_Coldfire wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

@Magus_Coldfire: Reread the opening post again. The whole thing. Slowly.

I missread one point: life gets doubled per level up, not halfed. I agree with the most of your post now, but...

But what about chaos innoculation? It gets nerfed by this suggestion. Now all classes get more life per level without investing in strength, therefore chaos innoculation is not that good anymore, because you will lose a significant higher amount of life by this.

That's the only thing I see right now. So good work with the suggestion!

CI bases stun chance and elemental status duration off of your life as if you had never taken CI. Currently, that means stuns that get past the "as long as you have ES, 50% chance to avoid stuns" rule prettty much always stun, and elemental statuses are pretty much always max duration. After my suggestion... maybe things would be a little better.

Nevertheless, CI really isn't the focus of this suggestion, I'm working with life-based builds here. Fixing CI is its own, far more specialized task.

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tinghshi wrote:

I posted this on that thread, but I'll post it again.

"

I really hate how Life has become the undeniably best defense, far surpassing the supposed "defenses." Compared to life, the defense are utterly worthless, simply by the way they work. Life is the ultimate buffer against any damage of any kind, in any shape or form, while every other defense have they own Achilles's Heel (some noticeably bigger than others.) Why bother with them when you can straight up go for life? It's easier to stack both on the tree (gratuitous nodes spread all over the tree) and on gear (on single mod that has a very high range). The fact that armor and evasion are useless against spells makes it doubly worst. It's just so easy to see why Life is the unquestioned king. The king is the one with the power and Life literally has more power than all of the other defenses combined. If we don't change the system from it's very roots, Life will always continue to rule, no matter how hard we try to keep him out.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that by nature, the way Life works makes it far superior to the defenses. The problem isn't really how much life nodes there are, it's that it has become the ONLY useful option. You are forced to take life nodes because of how good it is at doing what it does. What I think needs to change is to fundamental buff the current defenses so they actually do what they're supposed to do. Of course, that can be done in conjunction to your suggestions too.

My suggestion is sweeping enough without endevouring to rewrite the armour and evasion formulas. All I can say here is that, while maybe 8% of OP defense stat > 10% normal defense stat, maybe 4% OP defense stat <= 10% normal defense stat. If so, people would actually start taking those nodes again.