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

The issue is how one must go out of his way to grab life everywhere.

So I think that:
- Base life should be increased
- Life % nodes should become stronger, but alot scarcer and spread about the Passive Tree
- Life regen % nodes should become scarcer and spread about the Passive Tree
- A way to cause a portion of the damage reduction from Armor or chance to evade from Evasion to apply to elemental damage needs to be available as well.
Phase Acrobatics and Acrobatics aren't what I'm talking about, as they provide a flat chance.
There needs to be a scaling chance that allows Armor and Evasion to gain a little value against Elemental.

Logically speaking, even if you don't evade that fireball, you might evade enough of it to slightly mitigate the damage.

This has a few results:
- CI builds will not be so vulnerable to ailments due to higher (even if slightly) base health
- Life builds will not have to waste so many nodes on life, becoming a little stronger, but not much
- Even if health retains the same value, or even more, having life nodes scarcer and spread throughout the tree will nevertheless allow players to grab more non-life nodes than now.
- More variety of builds becomes viable

the classical rpg defensive strategy in general splits into three categories.

category 1: high life, low armor.
optimal defense against - slow attacks with high damage. (Bosses)

category 2: low life, high armor.
optimal defense against - fast attacks with low damage. (Mobs)

category 3: medium life, medium armor.
optimal defense against - fast attacks with high damage. (Bosses + Mobs)


to achieve this balance GGG needs to play around a little bit more with the Integers in their code.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

...and so, a great victory was won over Path of Life Nodes.

Really looking forward to seeing how this plays out!

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Evil4Zerggin wrote:

I wonder if the root of the problem may be the way elemental resistance works:

Elemental resistance is a percentage reduction. This leads to hyperbolic growth in durability against elemental attacks--strongly accelerating returns. For example, at 0% resistance, a 5% improvement in resistance would increase your elemental durability by a factor of 1.053. At 70% resistance, that same 5% improvement in resistance translates to a factor of 1.2--nearly four times as effective. Every percentage of elemental resistance is worth more than the last.

With these accelerating returns, elemental resistance is an all-or-nothing deal in terms of the optimal strategy. Either you cap it out, or you invest as little in it as possible. If you're willing to invest one point in it, you're willing to invest the next, and the next, until it's capped out.

Now let's look at it from the monster side. John Q Fire Cultist is either going to be facing the player with no elemental resistance or capped elemental resistance. If he's weak enough to give the no elemental resistance guy a chance, then he won't be able to even singe the eyebrows of the capped elemental resistance guy. If he's strong enough to give the capped elemental resistance guy a challenge, he'll one-shot the no elemental resistance guy. Path of Exile wants to give a challenge, so they've picked the latter route.

But now they're painting themselves into a corner. By balancing elemental damage against capped elemental resistance, they've made it all but mandatory. And once a player reaches the elemental resistance cap, there's no way to improve elemental durability further through elemental resistance. The player needs some sort of improving elemental durability against the increasingly difficult enemies. And health is literally the only game in town at this point. So I'm not convinced that nerfing health nodes alone will help things much.

This is honestly why I like the diminishing returns system for armor and elemental resistance (among other things) that WoW adopted fully by Burning Crusade and that D3 used right out the door (though not with crit chance and attack speed, sigh.)

It essentially uses two sliding scales while avoiding the pitfalls of hard % caps, and the need to either hard-prevent those caps from being exceeded, or, if they can be, by introducing an otherwise unnecessary stat that counters them.

The gist is this: the stat in question is integer-based (the "stat rating," to use common parlance.) Resistance example: At any given level, x stat provides y defense against foes of the same level. That effective % increases towards lower level enemies, and decreases towards higher level enemies.
When you gain a level, that same integer value is worth slightly less raw %. So, you ideally want to keep increasing that value to stay ahead of the decline in its value, but you never run into a hard cap that devalues what you have or deters you from stat-stacking. It's possible to even add a soft cap: say, once effective "resistance rating" provides 75% against foes of your level, if you keep stacking it beyond that, each point has less value than those that took you to 75%; at least, until you level up, and the rating-% ratio lowers.

This can be applied to any stat where a hard % cap is reachable and thus weighs too heavily on character design: armor, evasion, resistance, critical chance, etc. This is also how D3 rightly (among the things it does wrong) hit upon a steady way to increase the need for resistances without doing the old school -% penalty per difficulty nerf; the stat just needs to be continually raised to stay relevant, and monster difficulty can be raised smoothly across difficulty-level gaps without needing a resistance nerf.

This would also mitigate somewhat the incredibly wonky way POE's armor works.

If I really thought this should be implemented (which I do) I think that passive nodes should provide flat percentages so they don't devalue, but gear should provide integer ratings.

finally they rebalanced life nodes but i feel like they also need to increase the base life so that stats like +life become less of a must and also this could nerf kaoms heart enough to be op as it currently is

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Incompetent wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

...and so, a great victory was won over Path of Life Nodes.

Really looking forward to seeing how this plays out!

-> path of es nodes

not such a victory screech.. they didnt buff base life.

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VictorDoom wrote:

not such a victory screech.. they didnt buff base life.

They reduced monster damage, which is even better unless you're a heavy Blood Magic user.

I was kinda hoping they'd go further, though. At the end of the day, the rebalance was fairly mild.

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Incompetent wrote:

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VictorDoom wrote:

not such a victory screech.. they didnt buff base life.

They reduced monster damage, which is even better unless you're a heavy Blood Magic user.

I was kinda hoping they'd go further, though. At the end of the day, the rebalance was fairly mild.

I'm sure the exact ratio of monster nerf to life node nerf is more meaningful, but at a glance, lowering monster damage and player life at the same time doesn't really do anything.