Nerfing Life Nodes: A Retrospective

For those of you who aren't aware, I was the guy who came up with the 0.11.0 solution to the "Path of Life Nodes" problem. The original thread detailing the nerfing of life nodes can be found here. So when GGG announced that the nodes were being cut to 6%, the two thoughts going through my head were "what, not 4%?" and, more significantly, "Hell yeah, they took my suggestion!"

However, some time has passed, and for the most part, things aren't really better. There are some who might argue that there was a marginal improvement, but in all seriousness a marginal improvement for a project of that size is still an overwhelming failure, much like a big-budget game that only sells a few thousand copies. It was supposed to have a large, positive impact; it did not.

It's much more fair to say that it failed spectacularly.

The question — which is especially relevant for me since this was my baby, but perhaps generally useful to everyone in a general suggestion-design sense — is: why?

I think I have some answers for that. They are: Over-reaching implementation, flawed alternate mana systems nerfs, and high player expectations.

Cal, I Thought I Told You To Keep That Burried

My suggestion was originally titled "Nerf life nodes... while boosting base life so life itself isn't nerfed." One might notice that monster damage isn't mentioned in the title at all. In fact, this was the coverage that monster damage rebalancing received in the OP of that thread:

"

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.

So naturally, when I saw that monster damage was getting a rebalance in 0.11.0, my first thought was "Wow, I thought they couldn't do that."

On second thought, I still think they couldn't do that.

Original estimates were not wrong; monster damage rebalancing is apparently a very difficult task. So difficult, in fact, that GGG did not do it properly. Sure, it places where it was glaringly obvious, like Kole, they released a patch. But am I convinced that is the only place where there are oversights, such as lightning thorns and Perpetus' Bear Traps. I'm not arguing that these things should be nerfed to obscurity, mind you; I'm just saying they shouldn't be any more lethal post-0.11 than they were pre-0.11.

Worse yet are places where it seems GGG is dedicated to not reducing damage. For example, the reduction in reflected damage from 20% to 18% is a slap in the face to the intent behind this suggestion, saying that yes, we will reduce the damage, but we won't reduce it proportionally to the life node nerf, so you're going to be more dependent on survivability to counteract reflected damage than you were before. With the nerf to Elemental Adaptation and Inner Force, where precisely is that added survivability supposed to come from?

Perhaps the worst part of the damage rebalance involves energy shield. Although life was pretty imbalanced before 0.11, ES was actually extraordinarily well-balanced (I personally had a grudge against Inertial Shield, and Righteous Fire had a troublesome interaction with Shavronne's, but those aren't issues specific to the system itself). Part of the reason I suggested altering base life was precisely so that this delicate balance of ES and damage would not be perturbed. But perturbed it has been, and due to the way Intelligence boosts ES it's not just a simple matter of nerfing ES nodes. In this particular department I feel like we've lost something that we'll never get back; ES balance pre-0.11 was a thing of beauty, forged from late CB controversy regarding Chaos Inoculation, and it seems that just when we had things the way we wanted them, they were taken from us.

So, contrary to my thread's title, life itself was nerfed. And ES, although previously balanced, was buffed.

Malleus Maleficarum

But why seek a damage rebalance at all? Obviously even the shoddy work done thus far represented considerable effort, days of work at the hands of talented people, where base life adjustments would have been considerably easier. What could have been GGG's motivation?

My best guess is that they saw this as a "two birds, one stone" opportunity. The first bird was life nodes; the second bird was Blood Magic. See, if you increase base life while nerfing life nodes, Blood Magic isn't really nerfed; on the other hand, if you nerf life nodes and damage, without nerfing mana costs, Blood Magic is nerfed.

Now don't get me wrong, I do think Blood Magic probably did deserve a nerf. It was very strong indeed. However, there is an important difference between something deserving a nerf, and trying to bite off more than you can chew with an incomplete and incompletely thought-out damage rebalance.

The great irony here is that GGG missed out an opportunity to give Eldritch Battery a much-deserved nerf in the process (the reduction in ES nodes doesn't count, as EB can take unreduced %mana nodes just as easily). See, the other way to nerf Blood Magic is to keep base life the same, and damage the same, but to increase mana costs; you can avoid nerfing mana by buffing base mana simultaneously. By buffing base mana (without buffing ES that is converted to mana) and increasing mana costs (to include reserve costs), they could have done a "two birds, one stone" on both Blood Magic and Eldritch Battery, while sticking to the original base life plan.

Instead, motivated by zeal to fix Blood Magic and life nodes with the same stone, GGG jumped off a cliff from which I am not sure balance will ever recover.

The Meek Shall Not Inherit The Earth

All of these changes were announced in advance in Patch 0.11.0 previews.

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Substantial Rebalance

Several areas of the game have been significantly rebalanced. We've reduced all monster damage and have made corresponding reductions to player Life and Energy Shield passive skills. Physical damage nodes (both general and weapon-specific) have been substantially increased. As a result of these changes, characters rely less on life than they did previously. Defensive options such as armour are substantially stronger now, more than offsetting the lower life totals...

Melee characters gain the most from these changes, but many previously underpowered builds have also improved.

Now, seeing my suggestion previewed, I knew that it wasn't really a melee-centric change. It was a life system change, intended to effect the Lightning Arrow ranger as much as the Ground Slam marauder; actually, it might effect the Lightning Arrow ranger more, as part of the intent was to make glass-cannon builds more viable in general, perhaps even in Hardcore. So seeing that juxtaposition seemed a little odd to me.

Yet the forums came abuzz with hype that the Great Melee Rebalance was finally here. It seems that the melee devotees of this game are always eager for their Messiah to arrive, in major Patch form, to deliver them from evil and vindicate their past suffering. Rampant speculation abounded, feeding the hype. It couldn't be fought with reason.

But what could you expect? "Substantial rebalance." "Melee characters gain the most from these changes." These are hype-creating statements. They had the effect they were designed to have.

Later, on seeing the new passive tree, it was clear that "substantial" was an exaggeration. See, I knew making this change that halving life node values would be a fairly substantial change, and not even an overboard one. 6% vs 8% isn't going to radically alter people's decision-making process on whether to grab additional life nodes or not; you'd still need a rather large incentive to pull them away from the proverbial Path of Life Nodes. So what they were announcing wasn't what I'd call a substantial rebalance, it's what I'd call a mild one.

Assuming, of course, that the monster damage rebalance was painstakingly tailored to match the life node match precisely. Which it wasn't. And probably couldn't have been.

On top of all of that, some very important information was missing. If you're planning a Blood Magic nerf, even if you're being all indirect and sneaky about it, wouldn't it be best to be up-front with the players and tell them about it? For a great many melee players, a significant Blood Magic nerf is a far cry from "melee characters gain the most from these changes."

From what I can tell, what melee got from 0.11 was more physical damage... and that's about it. Meanwhile, the unfulfilled hopes of improvements through the life node changes (which were never intended for them) and the unhappy surprise of a Blood Magic nerf gave a very strong impression that melee benefits the least from 0.11, while ES-based characters, the majority of which are not melee, benefit the most.

Taking it Personally

I've spent the last three sections pretty much blasting GGG for decision they've made. However, I really take ownership of this suggestion. I didn't see anyone make it before me, and I championed it over the course of months. As such, I consider it mine, regardless of who I handed it off to and what they did with it. I gave it my enthusiastic support.

I believe ES was balanced; I supported a suggestion which I believe imbalanced it once implemented. I believe melee needed all the help it could get; I supported a suggestion which I believe weakened it further once implemented. I hyped a suggestion that was supposed to help the game out; that suggestion failed to deliver and let the community down.

So yes, this one strikes pretty close to the chest for me. But I don't think it's enough to make me give up on the vision. I am a little less optimistic about Path of Exile's chances of success, but I don't think I'm quite ready to give up on it yet. The development team still seems very engaged with the community, and if we, as a community, provide it with the right feedback, I still think we can make Path of Exile into the game it is meant to be.

However, this is a failure. It has to be said and it has to be acknowledged, not just by me and by forum-goers but by the developers as well. We need to know — not hope, know — that we're not repeating the mistakes of the D3 community and the D3 development team, who made mistake after mistake and failed to learn from them. We need to know that further problems will be tackled in a way that has more foresight, more wisdom. We have more than enough clever, plenty of innovation; this is about making solid choices given the solutions that are presented before us.

I apologize for my role in the life node nerf. And I hope that you, the players of Path of Exile, can forgive me.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I apologize for my role in the life node nerf. And I hope that you, the players of Path of Exile, can forgive me.

You're delusional

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Pam wrote:

You're delusional

I actually hope you're right.

It would have happened either way.
GGGs primary method of fixing things also happens to be a method that they are not competent at using properly.

"

Pam wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

I apologize for my role in the life node nerf. And I hope that you, the players of Path of Exile, can forgive me.

You're delusional

This.

Seeing your suggestions and the actual implementation of "reduced life node %" (especially with the monster damage reduction), I don't think your proposal has anything to do with the actual result.

I don't blame you for it honestly. The unforseen side-effect of the changes was that it did not alter the perceived life paradigm - partially because of the included reductions in resists and partially because the changes did nothing for melee defenses where physical damage was less of an issue than elemental damage, exacerbated by the changes to max resist values.

On the Armour front, they did an excellent job no doubt and are continuing to do so (vastly greater efficiency per point in armour) and I actually look forward to what the future holds, especially with the changes to Shield Charge which makes me consider Evasion. I am however, not too sure with regards to elemental damage, spell damage, the combination of both and their ability to shotgun people.

At high level play, Life is still mandatory because you have to deal with random affixes like +100% elemental damage for which you have no reasonable defense against. For physical damage you have Granite Flasks and Endurance Charges. For elemental damage? You need to carry 3 different flasks.

What we ended up with was reasonable - we reduced the power creep. We did not however change the status quo much.

Scrotie, I always read your posts with pleasure, although I usually disagree with you. But this time, I almost fully agree (especially that before patch I bitched to my friends, that this all mes could be replaced by simply changing armor formula).

I only disagree with those:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Now don't get me wrong, I do think Blood Magic probably did deserve a nerf.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

The great irony here is that GGG missed out an opportunity to give Eldritch Battery a much-deserved nerf

As I don't see any reason for such nerf, both mechanisms IMO have proper drawbacks and the only reasons they are so popular are tremendous mana management problems, especially in some classes (eg. my ranger was so mana starved that at some points of leveling I was fighting for no more 15 second per minute...). So for me, if you want to see less users of BM or EB, greatly improve mana management, I would gladly replace those with something more useful.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

I apologize for my role in the life node nerf. And I hope that you, the players of Path of Exile, can forgive me.

Don't flog yourself mate.It's beta,I'm sure there's going to be more rough patches before anything gets better.

Maybe GGG should have just messed with the armor formula or made heavy armor stats huge with a whopping strength requirement on it.I dunno.

I got no idea where the games going mechanics wise since before end of CB.I have to trust GGG on their decisions.

There feels like way too much reliance on gear (gear check),including flasks and in some cases especially flasks and the passive tree is taking a hit for it.

Making the damage nodes better didn't relate to better survivability for melee,it's even more important now,for my melee build at least,that I rally to invest in even more defensives and even better gear,gear that I'm probably not going to have unless I start trading.

Anyway,since the last dualist tree change and this patch,I've lost all interest in dualist builds until further changes.

I argued halfway against you, Scrotie, saying GGG should nerf life nodes + rebalance monster damage (what GGG did), but I'm not going to be an egotist and take credit for GGG's decision-making process. It was widely agreed upon that Life was too essential to builds- to the point of ridicule on various gaming blogs & comics not even devoted to POE- and there are not a whole lot of ways that issue can be addressed without either weakening life nodes or weakening monster damage. Having the same idea the developers had does not grant ownership over the idea.

Anyway I disagree that it's a failure in the first place. GGG's patching policy is not to wait until everything's perfect before releasing something. When have they ever released a patch that fixed an issue perfectly? They get it close, let players have some fun with the changes (or not), then continue fine-tuning from there. For an alternative style in patching there is Blizzard which spaces major patches several months apart, but when they come out they are done and do not need revisiting.

GGG just spends a couple weeks, lets us see what they've been up to, and outsources the fine-tuning of balance matters to the community. For the record, I vastly prefer GGG's style of patches. I accept that we can't have patches release this rapidly and also have patches that are perfect every time. I actually think it's fun to have minor imbalances in the game for a while that come and go with the wind. If everything was perfect every time we actually wouldn't get to experience that and I think it would be a great loss.

Here's how I evaluate the patch:
Was it a step forward? Yes. Was it a big step forward? No. Does it make future steps forward easier? Yes. That's all a patch really needs to do when we get them every couple of weeks.

So now spike damage is a problem. Easy enough- GGG just examines creatures that do more than 50% greater damage than the norm, more than 500 base damage, etc., and keep going down the path they're already on. The next patch will be easier because they got most of the work done already. It's not rebalancing the whole game anymore, it's just fine-tuning one problem now. Simpler.

However, I'm not sure that's what they want to do though. The overall game difficulty is remarkably similar considering how many things changed. To change that many balance knobs and have so little change cannot be coincidence. That's intentional. This patch was one step in a process. Step 1 was to move the baseline to something more pliable. Step 2 is to fix any problems created by step 1. Step 3 is to change the way the game plays. The value in separating these into separate patches is that it makes it easier to identify why something broke whenever it breaks (eg. spike damage is more dependent on the baseline of life than is regular damage). This is useful because balance is not a final destination, it is a process. The more we learn about the workings of this great machine, the more we are able to bend it to our will. But if we can't ever break anything, we won't learn much.

To me, the patch was a success.