GGG, pure strenght character is awesome!! Lets talk how to do that for other two stats.

Hi,

I have been in this beta for about 6 months. I have tried all kinds of characters in this time. Except pure Strength.
But I have been playing one this last 2 days. And GGG your pure Strength warrior is awesome.

Ok, let me get to the point of this thread. I want to talk about characters that are pure archetypes of one Stat and how that can and could be accomplished. For that I will separate it into 3 section: Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence.


1. Strength

What is a pure strength character? A newbie might look at classes and say "Well, the Marauder". And I though so when I first looked at him 6 months ago. Life, defenses and weapon specializations, well that is The Strong Warrior.
Wrong!!

What makes him the Strength Archetype is being able to pump only Strength and do good, or better DO GREAT. And be fun for a player.

How do you accomplish that for Strength?
Well it takes two steps, each eliminating one of the other two stats.
1) Resolute Technique: Well nothing new here, people have been taking this one from the moment it has arrived. You give up on Dexterity and Accuracy and always hit. Since now you don't need dexterity for accuracy and since armor profits 0 from dexterity you stop using it and you stop needing it. You effectively eliminated Dexterity from your character.
2) Blood Magic: I don't like the name for this Keystone. Something like Body Fuel or Berserker Power would be more fitting. This removes mana and lets you use Life for Skills. Since Intelligence is used for Mana and Energy Shield and you don't use neither now you effectively eliminated Intelligence from your character.

Now you get to focus on Strength. If fuels your Life, your Skills, your Damage and your Defenses. You are now a ultimate Strength Archetype. You are a pure warrior. You focus solely on Strength skills. You do most damage and can take most punishment. When you play this character with your big weapon, with 5 red flasks in your belt and Bashing or Ground Slamming (or Sweeping) enemies left and right or Leaping into their midst to War Cry a moment later (Endurance Cry) you feel like you are playing a ultimate monster of melee death!! You feel like Conan x5!!

Now, can we recreate similar feeling for other two classes?! The one where you feel like you are the master of your Stat and can do stuff nobody else can?


2. Dexterity

Dexterity gives Accuracy and Evasion. It also fuels Fast attack, archery or duel weapon skills.

But how to accomplish Pure Dex? You don't. Not currently. There is no Keystone that replaces Intelligence or Strength.

What about Acrobatics? Yes, it removes Strength subskill of armor by giving additional dodge chance against attacks. Does it replace Life or Bonus Damage somehow? No it doesn't!

What about Iron Reflexes? Again it does a good job of taking pure Dex and giving you an equal or better Armor then a strength character. Does it replace Life or Melee Damage somehow? No it doesn't.

Iron Grip? Nope. It is even worse, it forces you to take Strength to get bonus damage, a totally opposite then Pure Dex Character.

What can Dex char do to replace Int? Nothing, as taking Blood Magic makes him dependent on Strength.

My suggestions:
I am only one man so I encourage others to leave suggestions for GGG how to implement pure Dex characters.

Agility/Dexterity archetypes in fantasy are usually fast attacking, light armored warriors or archers. Often they are Rogue like characters that strike vital spots (critical hits). So my suggestions would roll around these.
Unfortunately since Dexterity does not have its own Pool (life, mana) it is harder to do this with just 2 keystones).

1) Keystone that halves normal damage (and/or Strength no longer gives bonus to melee/ranged damage in case Iron Grip is taken) but lets Dexterity also give critical strike chance. 1 Dexterity = +1% additive critical chance. So a 300 Dex Char will have +300% critical strike chance which in combination with already existing high crit weapons like daggers and already existing passives for critical chance makes him sure to crit often. Of course when you do critical that half damage to normal attacks does not apply. You do full damage + critical bonus. In addition to this GGG can roll out different skills and supports that give special effects when critical hit happens like enemy gets slowed down or loses health per second and so on.

2) A change to Iron Reflexes. In addition to giving Armor instead of Evasion it also removes bonus to life from Strength but lets Dexterity be used as kind of Defensive Roll. When your character would be reduced to 0 life you get temporary HP equal to 1 life/2 Dexterity + Life% bonuses that. This temporary life would stay for x seconds (something low is better) and could not be used again for x seconds while on cooldown. While active it would be first line of defense against any other incoming damage in a similar way Energy Shield is. Life flasks would always first heal your real Life before healing your temporary Life.

3)How to eliminate Intelligence? What does Dex need with Intelligence? Mana? Yes. Energy Shield? Pure Dex NO.
So how to eliminate mana? Most Dex characters don't take extra mana passives, at best they get reduced mana cost. So lets use that and make it a step further.
A keystone that removes bonus to mana and energy shield from Intelligence but reduces mana costs for skills as well as reservations costs by half. It could also possibly halve +mana bonuses from magical equipment.


Also some of my ideas could be done through new skills, especially defensive ones. Also to keep in line with speed, movement I propose a Green Skill that lets you tumble through enemies and damage everyone in the path. Something similar to D2 Whirlwind but longer with a smaller AoE while passing through enemies. It would work with one handed and dual wielding.

Well this is all ideas I got for Dexterity. Other options would be a bit more complicated and would need to change the current system too much (things like having another pool, or making Frenzy charges part of all Dex builds and use those to power skills instead of mana or just create a totally new counter that works a kind of a pool for skills; or making Dex masters of elemental attacks with weapons and combining that with a much more noticeable attack speed bonus while reducing their Physical damage output a lot)



3. Intelligence

Ok, lets look at current options.

Chaos Inoculation? Almost perfect. It almost eliminates Strength from the field except for two problems.
1) It still counts your life before the keystone to determine special elemental effects, something that Blood Magic does not do (use Mana for anything). My suggestion would be to use Mana to calculate this stuff.
2) It does not let players use the flask mods that give more mana but do damage to life like it does with Blood Magic and other way around mods for flasks. I would suggest to make this damage done Chaos Damage so Chaos Inoculation characters can use this flasks as good as Blood Magic characters. Other way would be to reduce this from Energy Shield and not life if the game detects the user having Chaos Inoculation keystone.

Other then this Chaos Inoculation lets Pure Intelligence eliminate Strength from their characters.

Now all is left on how to eliminate Dexterity. For that we need to look why would pure Int spellcaster go for Dex. Evasion is not it as with Chaos Inoculation you want more ES and you want to avoid mixed equipment. Accuracy is surely not it :)

So what is left are Green support gems. For a long time things like Pierce, Multiple Projectiles and Mana Leech have been popular with witches.
What do Pierce and Multiple Projectiles have in common? They work with projectile spells.

1) So lets make a Keystone that gives Projectile spells +2 projectiles while making non-projectile AoE spells 50% weaker?! Also makes projectile spells not work with both multiple projectile supports.

2) And a Mana Leech Keystone that removes mana regeneration but gives a 1% mana leech per 100 (or 50) Intelligence to all spells and makes all other mana leech supports or item mods not work with your character?

I got many more crazy ideas but just like Dex ones these would be too hard to implement at this stage of development.

Some skill ideas would be to make spells that do damage based on current mana, so higher you can keep you mana pool higher the damage. Things like keystone that turns your ES to mana would be useful then.
Also would suggest a defensive skill that completely absorbs a certain amount of attacks similar to Stoneskin from D&D but it only activates once ES is down.

I got another suggestion for Dexterity:

- a keystone that uses Dexterity instead of Intelligence for calculating Mana but instead of giving 1 mana for each 2 Intelligence you get 1 for each 3 Dexterity. And when you have this keystone your Blue Mana Pool turns Green and your blue flasks turn Green :)

I'm not GGG, but quite good feedback.

I've been successful with PA ranger and STR MARA, and STR MARA was by far is the 'safest' bet, but both require specialized keystones and skills as you mentioned.

Just a harmless bump so someone from GGG can see this :)

This is good feedback. I hope the folks at GGG seriously consider these ideas and try to expand on them. I feel like the pure Dex builds need the most attention right now because the keystones on that side of the forest aren't as good at specializing in Dex as you mentioned. The other stats are still heavily relied upon, or you need some really nice items to compensate.

Firstly, there are a lot of really good ideas in here but I have some complaints about the INT tree suggestions. The main issue is obviously the need to spec into some DEX for the green support gems. A character that wants to spec into PURE INT whatever the cost should be fine with sacrificing something like the multiple projectiles gem.

Adding the + projectiles keystone in the tree just for the sake of a pure INT build just seems a bit off to me, especially if it's the way you wrote it. Specifically the problem is with it's minus percentage to AOE damage. It's less of a "Hey! Pure INT with Multiple Projectiles!" and more of a "You are now purely a projectile/summoning spec class." The only reasons I could see something like this being implemented would be if there was a counter keystone that buffed AoE and nerfed projectile dmg. Again not for the sake of a pure INT build, but overall diversity.

Also, I think removing ALL mana regeneration on your "Mana Leech" keystone is a bit harsh (and could force someone to portal back to town if they had 0 mana -_-), maybe -%50/%75 regeneration?

I think a lot of your "craving" for pure archetype builds stem from the fact that the Marauder is just so damn good with pure Strength -_-. Trying to balance the other archetypes around a class that is broken (in my opinion) just seems like a terrible idea to me. A pure ANYTHING build should always have it's shorcomings, and right now that's not the case for a Str Marauder (albeit, Conan x5 is nothing to squawk at ^_^).

Personally I think the gigantic skill tree and diversity of possible builds/hybrids is one of the biggest selling points of this game, and don't want to see classes so generalized.

Well I've ranted long enough... just wanted to throw my two cents in.

I would suggest giving the Dexterity stat an attack speed / cast speed increase, perhaps instead of accuracy.

"

OPman wrote:

Firstly, there are a lot of really good ideas in here but I have some complaints about the INT tree suggestions. The main issue is obviously the need to spec into some DEX for the green support gems. A character that wants to spec into PURE INT whatever the cost should be fine with sacrificing something like the multiple projectiles gem.

Adding the + projectiles keystone in the tree just for the sake of a pure INT build just seems a bit off to me, especially if it's the way you wrote it. Specifically the problem is with it's minus percentage to AOE damage. It's less of a "Hey! Pure INT with Multiple Projectiles!" and more of a "You are now purely a projectile/summoning spec class." The only reasons I could see something like this being implemented would be if there was a counter keystone that buffed AoE and nerfed projectile dmg. Again not for the sake of a pure INT build, but overall diversity.

Also, I think removing ALL mana regeneration on your "Mana Leech" keystone is a bit harsh (and could force someone to portal back to town if they had 0 mana -_-), maybe -%50/%75 regeneration?

I think a lot of your "craving" for pure archetype builds stem from the fact that the Marauder is just so damn good with pure Strength -_-. Trying to balance the other archetypes around a class that is broken (in my opinion) just seems like a terrible idea to me. A pure ANYTHING build should always have it's shorcomings, and right now that's not the case for a Str Marauder (albeit, Conan x5 is nothing to squawk at ^_^).

Personally I think the gigantic skill tree and diversity of possible builds/hybrids is one of the biggest selling points of this game, and don't want to see classes so generalized.

Well I've ranted long enough... just wanted to throw my two cents in.

Yes, these are good points. Lets me start from the bottom of your post as that is connected with what you said at the top.

I don't agree that Pure Strength is OP. It is fun, it as it should be. Making it less "OP" will not make other pure Stat builds more fun, it will only make pure Strength less FUN.

Ok, now I can comment on other stuff in your post. You said why should not a pure Int have a real sacrifice. Well pure Strength does not have one (except %reserved auras), why should pure Int? More specifically pure Strength get from Dex what it needs (100% hit chance) by sacrificing what it needs less (critical chance).

So Int should be the same. It should be able to kick out Dex by getting something that it needs from that part while losing something as well. What pure Int needs are those 3/4 support skills (maybe more in the future). For going all out AoE you don't need to take this Keystone then. AoE builds don't depend on Green gems as much (except maybe Mana Leech).

Also going into details of my suggestions is kind of pointless as it is just theorycrafting. We cannot get exact details on changes until someone actually changes them and tries them ingame. The point of my suggestions is the idea itself, the fine detail can only be done by GGG.

And let me state again, builds should not have shortcoming, but other builds should be as good.

My next step of suggestions would be to propose Pure Str/Dex builds and so on. Some way to make that perfect Str/Dex warrior with proper keystones or skills where Str and Dex work together and not one or another.

Witches and rangers top the HC ladder now. Only one mara in top ten. Nuff said.

Who decides to powerlevel has nothing to do with the passive capabilities or their effectiveness, and the ratio of classes simply means a variety of builds are capable of leveling up.