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

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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agbudar wrote:

the problem at any point with % values is that if you make it too strong its overpowered if you make it too weak its worthless the balance is very hard to find

so here is what i was thinking
give the increase in life from strength and base life gain like this thread suggests
dont make the changes to the life nodes by nerfing them but instead remove a certain number to balance it out

Strongly disagree here, having less mandatory nodes is not as good as making nodes less mandatory.

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agbudar wrote:

armor
ok to start of here is a TRUE story from what happened in france once in storming a castle

5 of the best men where garbed in the most redicilous armors possible they were the only ones capable of wearing this insanely heavy armors combined with all massive shields that they were given

these 5 men single handedly stormed a castle with over 200 archers and around 150 close quarter fighters

they were succesfull in their raid and managed to take the castle they had one person carrying a big pole (your talking near tree size) and with the custom made maces that they used who could interlock into the pole they made a battering ram to take down the gate

2 of them died
1 died because of having hundreds of arrows stuck into his armor (no problem there yet) but then they managed to set him on fire
the other one broke his leg down something out of proportions of normal human ability he took
down a ramp with archers from what i remember
he got roped down by around 20 people he fell down and they took of his helmet and you can imagine what they did to his head.

ok now in PoE even with the best armor out there if your fully equiped even if someone hits you for 10 damage you will still feel 1 damage...

are you seeing my point? that damage should not even be there
so that is my opinion about armor there should be some form of flat damage reduction

On the one hand, this isn't on topic at all; this is not an armour thread.
On the other hand, that is one badass story.
Not a bad post, but it really deserved the "new thread" button; doesn't belong here, despite its awesome.

thnks i loved that story myself when i heard it now back to topic

i respectfully disagree that armor has nothing to do with this thread and here is why
ok here is what currently is happening
life what does it get?
flat increase per level
flat increase from strength
flat increase from gear
flat increase from passive's
and on top of that X% increase from passive nodes

now lets look at armor
armor rating from gear which translates into a X% of damage reduction
an X% increase to armor rating wich sound nice but in reality only add 1 or 2 % to the damage reduction
thats it thats all your getting granted having a cap of 90% means you can ignore a massive amount of damage but even so lets look at the following example

a marauder lvl 80
with str of lets say 400 which is average id say
from just this he gets 61(lvl 1 starting hp) 480 hp from lvling and 200 from str
thats a total of 741 hp and for the mock of this example he only took armor nodes aaaaaaalll armor nodes and has a 90 % physical damage reduction and maxed out resistances for elemental and chaos at 80% with gear he has maybe around 1300-1500 hp
ooooor versus lets say a marauder who took no armor nodes or at least nothing worth so has maybe damage reduction ranging between 30 to 60% mentioning and walks around with the same amount of resistances and has instead has 5 to 6 k do you see whats happening here? even if we take physical damage for damage against either of these builds the hp build is the only one viable for this anyone to take.
in a world where you will get hit with hits over 1 K damage the build with hp will always survive longer
this is what i mean has to change

and the same goes for evasion rating there is a reason why EVERYONE converts it into armor.

since hp is taken for defensive purposes and survival only and its the only thing that works

im not saying it should not work like this but maybe tone it down a litle on the hp and give armor evasion a buff that makes them viable otherwise you are working with a broken game

for armor in my opinion its quite simple there should be some flat damage reduction to damage an ice spear that comes into contact with someone naked will do full damage sure but if someone if clad in the best armor out there sure it should take some of the blow away im not saying % but a flat damage reduction. but tha might be asking for to much

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/173063

That thread is completely related to the current discussion.

OP quoted, so you don't have to jump ship on threads.

Thread: HP Nodes are too powerful, the true reason is?



So yeah, I agree with him, honestly.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bump

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bump

Massive wall of text which does a marvelous job at evading the real issue and will really solve nothing. If anything, your suggestion will make the game too easy since it will be so easy to stack life that you can do that while also increasing your DPS. At least right now you need to make a choice, whether you stack life or stack DPS, your solutions allows you to stack both things and be superman. It is also a Marauder is UP QQ thread in disguise, seeing that you want to buff strength to the point of strength characters(hence the above statement about Marauders) will be OP compared to dexterity and intelligence characters who will receive no such benefit.

The main issue is not with health per se, it's with the terribly state of all the other defensive mechanisms, which forces everyone to stack health if they want to succeed in merciless difficulty, the end game and of course hardcore. Until the other defensive mechanisms are reworked to be made useful, we can't truly say whether health is balanced or not and whether we should make any adjustments to health nodes, starting health, health gain from strength, etc.

Kinda true Owl.

It is true that all the other defense mechanisms need a balance so that they can be on par with HP or at least close enough that we actually have a choice.

However, HP, in and of itself, is relatively OP as is. Soooo many health nodes. Soooo much % increase. This combined with the amount of HP you can get from gear is insane.

That, plus another player's mentioning of how HP is a major part of everything important in defense just adds fuel to the fire of it's OP nature.

This thread in particular is what I'm talking about.

Not only can we stack HP to oblivion, but doing so helps us in ALL other big ways, such as preventing status effects (Burn, Shock, Stun, etc).

Lowering the percentage on HP nodes would help this as it would prevent us from getting obscene amounts of HP.

The reason for the Marauder boost is because they are supposed to be tanks. That's the idea of a starting class. That, by choosing them, you can do something particularly better than any other class in the game. And it's obvious Marauders should be the best possible Tanks/Two Handed (Maul/Hammer) DPS characters. Just like it should be obvious that Witches should have the most potential as Spell users, and Shadows should have the most potential as Dex (no name for it) users.

Now, he mentioned the other base stats. Int and Dex BOTH need to be upgraded too. Especially Dex. But HP directly connects to Str, so that's what was mentioned in the thread since it's a "HP Node" discussion thread.

The general hope of this suggestion is that all classes will be more balanced since Base HP Growth is boosted. So they won't have to worry about HP as much. Meaning they can be whatever they want, rather than being forced to run to all the HP nodes on the skill tree.

It's all a matter of balance between defenses and mitigations.

At the moment, there are 5 different defenses: Armour, Evasion, Energy Shield, Block and Resistances. All work in a different way, but Armor and Resistances are the only two really viable options, apart from stacking a lot of life to just absorb damage. Life also governs how much the various afflictions last, so it's even more important.

To really rebalance the game we need to give something useful to every defense form and also to get away some usefulness from life points.

Evasion rating could become an accuracy-draining stat, reducing the attacker accuracy on a point-by-point basis down to a minimum (let's say 5% + 1% for every 5 levels of the attacker chance to hit). Any excess rating should be converted into a direct damage mitigation percentage, simulating the fact that you manage to not get hit square on.
This defense should be double that strong against physical- and chaos-based melee and projectile attacks.
Evading an attack should never put you on a recovery cooldown.

Energy Shield is good enough as an ablative, regenerating defense, but it should be double that strong against elemental and chaos spell damage (mitigating 2 points of damage per ES point lost). Also, it's regeneration rate should reduce the DoT rate of effects on the character.

Armor should counter just almost everything, not just physical attacks, but always with average efficiency. Its main advantage is that it's always on, it always mitigate damage, and it never goes away or fails. As a plus, 10% of the mitigation percentage should go towards avoiding extra effects like shock, burn, chill, freeze, etc. Armor should be half efficient against DoT damage, but fully efficient against the initial attack damage (like in Poison Arrow).

Block is perfect as a flat chance, with a recovery cooldown after a successful block, but every kind of blocking should have a double chance against specific attack types:
Witch shields should have double rate against spells.
Dual-wielding block should work only against melee physical attacks.
Marauder shields should have double rate against physical and chaos attacks of any kind.
Templar shields should have double rate against elemental attacks of any kind.
Shadow shields already have the damage reflection, so they are ok.
Ranger shields should have double rate against ranged attacks of any kind.
Duelist shields should have double rate against melee attacks of any kind.

Resistances are ok as they are, since they come into play when damage is taken. Maybe some +Physical Resistance node could be added to the tree, much like there is some rare chaos resist, maybe on the marauder/duelist part of the tree.

One final word on the added effects, like burn, shock and chill/freeze. To avoid making life so fundamental to avoid them, let's just base their duration on stats instead: shock duration based on Int (your strong will helps you out of the condition), burn duration based on Dex (rolling and reacting to quench fire), and chill/freeze duration based on Str (you better resist harsh conditions).

What do you think?

We need more posts like yours Sdrumax. Seriously.

I like all your suggestions. Some may need tweaking to work, but overall, great ones.

Now, the only problem, is how much effort in coding would that take to implement?

That's the million dollar question to all suggestions. The original suggestion in this thread would only require altering some very basic things (passive skill node percentages, base life growth, and life based on Str growth).

In other words, they have to do with changing values that are in already made, and tested, formulas.

Most of your suggestions require making new formulas. That means testing them for balance, among other things.

Those are great suggestions for after the current major problems are fixed.

Those being:
Desync
Overpowered HP
Overpowered Range
Underpowered Dexterity (and Intelligence to a lesser extent)

... That's all I can think of, at least.

So, great suggestions, just lots of work to implement. Try to keep it simple, for now.

My suggestions are meant to at least partially solve three out of four of those major problems.

Enhancing the various defenses will take away importance from life points (less need of them for survival or ailments reduction), will give more importance to unused or despised stats (Dex for evasion and accuracy to counter evasion, Int for more ES and spell damage to counter ES), and will flattens down ranged supremacy (since there would be many counters to ranged attacks).

Yes, they would require some work, but every definitive solution to the life points omnipotence will imply a lot of work and rework and not just a bunch of node nerfing. What really surprises me is that no one has pointed out such broken maths during closed beta, when correcting them would have been a way lot easier (a lot less stuff to change).

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OwlRaider wrote:

Massive wall of text which does a marvelous job at evading the real issue and will really solve nothing. If anything, your suggestion will make the game too easy since it will be so easy to stack life that you can do that while also increasing your DPS. At least right now you need to make a choice, whether you stack life or stack DPS, your solutions allows you to stack both things and be superman. It is also a Marauder is UP QQ thread in disguise, seeing that you want to buff strength to the point of strength characters(hence the above statement about Marauders) will be OP compared to dexterity and intelligence characters who will receive no such benefit.

The main issue is not with health per se, it's with the terribly state of all the other defensive mechanisms, which forces everyone to stack health if they want to succeed in merciless difficulty, the end game and of course hardcore. Until the other defensive mechanisms are reworked to be made useful, we can't truly say whether health is balanced or not and whether we should make any adjustments to health nodes, starting health, health gain from strength, etc.

How does halving the effect of life nodes make it so easy to stack life? The whole point of this is to make stacking life less efficient, and my solution couldn't be more direct. Right now, if you make the choice to stack life or stack DPS, and you choose DPS... you've chosen poorly. It's actually not a real choice now, but it would be if life node values were reduced.

Regarding defenses, I've been away from my computer (believe it or not, every single post by me so far this thread has been by cell phone), so I haven't had a chance to do a case study (or maybe studies) on life vs defenses, which I was planning since reading abu's post insisting armour is relevant to the discussion. Although Owl is the only extreme dissenter, many others share his concern regarding the strength of defenses, which I agree are trivialized under the current system. However, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and therefore more than one way to buff defenses, including methods that involve zero direct buffs to defenses. My guuesstimation is that nerfing life nodes alone will be enough to make defenses competitive with lifestacking. You should be seeing the maths on that stuff later, after I spend some quality time with Microsoft Excel.