Development Manifesto: Energy Shield and Life

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HedgeMoney wrote:

As someone who has played since the early days of closed beta (you know, back when 10k anything, including dps was pretty fking good), here's my thoughts:

Spoiler

How about instead of nerfing ES to the ground for the Average players, and only slightly, and I mean SLIGHTLY nerfing them for the top 10 players/streamers, since obviously they will feel it 100 times less than the other 99% of players.

Nerf Vaal pact for ES. Just do it. That is only only way to do it. Or take it away entirely. Or change its mechanics. That is the root of the problem.

Its never been how High ES goes, because lets face it, except for Elemental damage, 12k es (which is probably the most ES 99% of players can get, including having shitty dps), will still get you one shot, while a 9k life build with 15k armour or 15k ev will survive.

You guys are trying to counter balance against Vaal Pact, instead of trying to fix it.

Seriously. If you want people to go Life more, just buff life. Nerfing ES isn't going to take way ES's advantage. Its not going to make life any more appealing.

And lets say you nerf both ES and Vaal Pact for both life and ES builds. Well, you guys are incorrigible for making the remaining 80% of players unable to do clear content at a reasonable speed (lets say 30 minutes for a t14 map.

Nerf Vaal Pact.

I'll say it again.

Nerf Vaal Pact.

tl;dr The problem has never been how high ES could get. It has always, always been Vaal Pact.

^^^^^^^ THIS x 1000000000000000000000000

The fact that you can have energy recharge AND instant leech is too over powered. IT trivializes endgame content and makes lab traps laughable. you dont need pots all you do is blow through, wait recharge, repeat. It takes NO skill. I've played ES toons before they're BORING. Lets facetank shaper... take uber atziri flameblast to the face...

Guaranteed GGG designed this content for you to NOT be able to do that.

Keep up the great work!!

I really don't get it!
If ES pool is to big which trivialized some encounters then CUT IT! Which GGG does!

But what difference in INSTANT LEECH between Life and ES builds (After GGG cuts ES amount)?!
If Life based player with its high effective health pool can withstand 1 hit, it will almost instantly recovers all life back thanks to leech, THE SAME WAY AS ES based players.

So in future perspective GGG will REMOVE Vaal Pact at ALL with the same explanation as now for Vaal Pact regarding ES ???

If Vaal Pact trivialized damage mitigation, it doesn't matter it is Life or ES builds!
So:
LEAVE Vaal Pact as it IS, OR REMOVE AT ALL!

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CBEToffOP wrote:

I really don't get it!
If ES pool is to big which trivialized some encounters then CUT IT! Which GGG does!

But what difference in INSTANT LEECH between Life and ES builds (After GGG cuts ES amount)?!
If Life based player with its high effective health pool can withstand 1 hit, it will almost instantly recovers all life back thanks to leech, THE SAME WAY AS ES based players.

So in future perspective GGG will REMOVE Vaal Pact at ALL with the same explanation as now for Vaal Pact regarding ES ???

If Vaal Pact trivialized damage mitigation, it doesn't matter it is Life or ES builds!
So:
LEAVE Vaal Pact as it IS, OR REMOVE AT ALL!

i wont comment about agree or not with your opinion,
i just wanna add something for reminder..

ES build does not take vaal pact penalty if player didnt take ZO.. they can relies on recharge, while life build would rely on flask or insane DPS as regen are stopped..

my standing here is i object if vaal pact leave as it is.. this keystone obviously need some kind of drawback for ES user, which it's up to GGG what does it do.. maybe keystone placing so harder to reach for ES builds.. or anything else that seems balanced to do.. but i wont say ggg did the right thing for nerf totally shutdown instant leech for ES builds out there..
it just seems way too harsh..

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CBEToffOP wrote:

It is laughable!

INSTANT LEECH and ES!
The problem was too BIG ES POOL with high-tier items!

Now when ES will be nerfed:
1) BASE ES on all items and skill.
2) NO "MORE" node in tree behind CI.
3) Lower % nodes.

With this all balances, ES will be closer to Life+Armor/Evasion.
SO I DON'T SEE WHY ES build CAN'T INSTANT LEECH BUT LIFE CAN!

If life based player won't die from one-shoot with instant leech he will restore all life, the same as for ES!

For GGG:
If you want remove Vaal Pact, REMOVE IT FOR ALL, NOT ONLY ES!

ALSO I WANT TO REMIND YOU ALL: MIND OVER MATTER!
YOU ALL FORGETTING THIS TYPE OF MITIGATION MECHANISM, WHICH IS ONLY FOR LIFE BASED!

for this, i need to remind you about cons of MoM..
1. you need mana to be your health buffer, thus you may not be able to reserve a lot percentage of mana, which equal less aura/buff.
2. you also need gear for mana regeneration, which may takes mod and ended up limiting what kind of gear you gonna use.. and while yes mana regen mod item are cheap, it consume a suffix mod which may be better goes for resistance or other stuff..
3. if u take big hit, you may ended up in no mana situation, which is a huge drawback at sticky situation, like
"I'm low health, flask up, gonna use movement skill to escape" >> "Oh Shit, out of mana, cant get out" >> death
4. for some players that relies too much at MoM as primary damage mitigation, it may force the player to grabbing maximum mana/mana regen nodes

First of all I have to say: the ES + VaalPact 'thing' deserves a nerf.
(I even have myself 2 Chars with that build combination - anyhow...)

But I dont understand why GGG obviously doesnt have the following facts
in mind:
1.) ES-Chars have to deal with stun AND freeze. And using a Chayula_Amu
gives U nothing but the stun prevention. Mentioning that not
everyone is healthy enough to wear skyforth boots.
2.) ES-Charsdo need a bigger health-pool, because they are extremely
vulnerable to phys.-damage.

so ggg has deleted over 150 pages of posts on this thread lol.

For an average player these changes are draconian and over zealous.
Making a game concept on rare 5% people who are able to achieve those huge amounts of ES and not with very high time investment is little bit to much.

Learning curve for this game is insane,truly insane ,with all that sufix ,prefix ,rng crafting rng in everything,what skill actually do and what they do not, beginner players are pretty much lost.

It requires significant time investment to reach 8k ES, i don't even want to imagine what did those people do to get 20K ES.


AS someone said in example with MoM mitigation, life builds need a lot more investment in equipment to achieve same results that Es build can ,due to simple fact that ES gives immunity to chaos dmg,and Vaal pact has no draw back, and this is making it easier to focus on equipment you need.
I understand this, but still 33% nerf is bit to much. Just change Vaal pact to affect ES recharge and nerf ES on equipment for 10% max.
Or have the higher value ES having penalty on some other resistance/armor...

Give life based builds cluster like "unnatural calm" and values of nods comparable as in witch and Templar start area( most life nods are 4% so make them 5 or 6%), chaos resistance cluster in south side, and you will see a lot more life based builds,thus expanding player base.

P.S
You should have devoted your time in making good auction house for example. Need to port for every single thing is just annoying.

Path of ES recharge now boys

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deda1234 wrote:

For an average player these changes are draconian and over zealous.
Making a game concept on rare 5% people who are able to achieve those huge amounts of ES and not with very high time investment is little bit to much.

Learning curve for this game is insane,truly insane ,with all that sufix ,prefix ,rng crafting rng in everything,what skill actually do and what they do not, beginner players are pretty much lost.

It requires significant time investment to reach 8k ES, i don't even want to imagine what did those people do to get 20K ES.


AS someone said in example with MoM mitigation, life builds need a lot more investment in equipment to achieve same results that Es build can ,due to simple fact that ES gives immunity to chaos dmg,and Vaal pact has no draw back, and this is making it easier to focus on equipment you need.
I understand this, but still 33% nerf is bit to much. Just change Vaal pact to affect ES recharge and nerf ES on equipment for 10% max.
Or have the higher value ES having penalty on some other resistance/armor...

Give life based builds cluster like "unnatural calm" and values of nods comparable as in witch and Templar start area( most life nods are 4% so make them 5 or 6%), chaos resistance cluster in south side, and you will see a lot more life based builds,thus expanding player base.

P.S
You should have devoted your time in making good auction house for example. Need to port for every single thing is just annoying.

ES does not give players Chaos immunity. CI does. What about low life chars? struggling to hit 8kes?
There are still people out there that does not use CI. It kinda felt like the nerf is targeted towards those 124812093812903 Es builds with close to 0 damage output.

Vaalpact for life only is just plain unfair tbh, my 6K life char can face tank shaper anyday, and feels way tankier than my 11.5k ES ci toon. The only problem it faces are volatiles. Fix that crap! and even so, i leveled to 99 with it before i switched to low life.

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Abetow2531 wrote:

Not enough Hard core players to support the game financially. Most people have jobs and cannot spend 14 hours a day playing a game in their parents basement. Sounds like your out of touch with reality.

This.

It seems like this nerf is because some people play a broken class like Guardian when combined with playing 24/7 and/or RMT they get insane stats.

However, those that usually play a limited amount of hours per week, don't spend real money on third parties for PoE items, and don't play a broken class won't be breaking 25k ES.

Those that don't use PoE trade much or at all and don't bother to enter an economy manipulated by bots/hackers and try to solo will have difficulty breaking 10k ES and this nerf is going to kill so many builds for so many players. Don't get me wrong, the fact that gear is tradeable is a great thing when playing with friends and one of the advantages of PoE over other games where everything is pretty much bound and you can't lend things to your friend nor your alt so you can't try out items, I'm just saying that probability tables shouldn't be based on a very small minority.

Personally, I think that for some classes that high damage + high leech or regen + high life or ES is OP, but nerfing ES will still leave high damage + high leech or regen + high life as being OP.

I left PoE a while ago because I felt a strong sense of discrimination against players that don't play 24/7 nor spend real money on gear (if you look at some build threads you can see people who just start one day, buy gear, and get from level 1 to end game in less than a day) and being forced to play limited duration leagues to get gear is not fun. Usually when a gaming company tries to force players to stay on, via either some daily quest system or event, it means that the game has stopped being fun and that they need to keep the players playing somehow. Legacy league broke down that barrier, which was a great thing, and has the potential to allow anyone to get anything (which is how standard should be) and in addition allowed you to choose which mechanics you enjoy from the game (for example, I like the ambush, tempest, and anarchy systems, this is from a fun perspective, not from an optimal playing perspective which would be things like beyond, onslaught, breach).

Similarly, build diversity is a good thing and is one of the fun components of this game.

A huge rare item nerf is going to create tons of legacy items which will discriminate against new players.

It's okay with ES pools being larger. The main problems are the huge leech and regeneration so those should be addressed instead with respect to ES. With experience from other games, diminishing returns seems to be a pretty good solution for these types of cases where scaling becomes an issue. A penalty when leeching or regenerating to ES can easily balance things. There are also some really OP items that enable abuse, such as Vinktar flask, which I think should be updated globally and not create more super broken legacies which break the game.

In general, I think GGG should try to not completely break the game (which is proven through gaming history to lose customers) but balance it piece by piece.

Instead of all these changes, for example they mentioned disciple gem being broken, if they first try increasing its reservation cost by 5-10% globally without legacy item creation. If it isn't enough can then increase further.

Anyways, I hope the item system is not going to be nerfed to a point where gamers will no longer care about the new content any more such as the new acts and story. I am really looking forward to it.

Usually, nerfing things is a negative thing. GGG should try improving things instead. For example, if life is not strong enough, then increase the amount of life that rares can roll. ES can roll +20% on rings, why not life as well? If people aren't using enough rare strength or dexterity gear, don't kill ES to force people to use them, buff them to make them worth using. Do something that would make your customers happy, that way they will be more willing to spend money on your game.

Hope GGG delivers a great product in the end. PoE, especially with the current legacy league, has been able to fill a void that has existed since Diablo 2 and the original Flagship Mythos died.