Nerfing Life Nodes: A Retrospective
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The problem isn't nerfing hp nodes, the problem is the hp nodes themselves. Same goes for es nodes.
Let's only look at hp for simplicity's sake: Let's say 20% of players have +200% increased hp, 20% have +150% and so on, until we have the final 20% with 0% increased hp. How do you balance the monster damage now? do you balance it around the bottom 50%? You design monsters to deal damage that'll be bearable for those with +40% increased life, easy with +100% and hard for +0% life. What about those with more than +100%? The game will be way too easy for them. So you'll balance the game for the top 50%, because otherwise you'll have 50% of the people running around being unkillable, facetanking the hardest content without problems. So now the game will be balanced around having +160% increased hp. what'll then happen to the bottom 50%? Their hp, especially the bottom 40%'s hp, is now so low, the game has become unplayable for them. You're now effectively forcing everyone to get at least +100% increased hp to be able to play the game. Do notice, that this is still about hp alone. When you add other things, armor, evasion, resists and es on top of hp, you'll get a situation exponentially more difficult to balance. Do you balance the game around having 50% evasion and +100% increased hp? or do you balance it around having 10k armor, +80% increased hp and 30% evasion? but what about high burst damage? and then you got huge amounts of es, essentially hp, making people immortal to burst, how do you balance that? It is impossible to balance it with this many contributing factors to survival, no matter how you tweak the numbers on the nodes themselves, you're still going to either break the game for some or you're going to just keep up the illusion of freedom for others. The only way true freedom can be achieved in PoE, is if everyone gets the necessities in a set value by default, and all they can pick are the bonuses which will allow for customization. for example, you get to choose either 2% increased life or es per level. The damage passives will of course be nerfed accordingly. Now you'll free up so many skill points and people are no longer forced to take certain nodes to be able to play this game. Last edited by Idioticus#7813 on Jun 25, 2013, 10:31:48 AM
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The only factor for difficulty in this game is the damage you take, so they make the monsters do a lot of damage.
If a ranged character is able to kill them without getting hit the challenge is gone. I don't see melee ever being as good as ranged without some drastic changes. Is there a way to make melee characters take less damage that ranged couldn't use? With the way the passive tree works, I don't think so. I'd guess the only way would be to put defensive bonuses on melee skills, like +100% armor for 1 second after using or something like that, but that would be kind of lame. Closest comparison would be the barbarian's concentrate skill in D2. At the end of the day I still think totems or anything else that you can infinitely summon to not get hit negates any form of defense requirement. Get rid of totems and summons. Good day. Last edited by Rowsol#3517 on Jun 25, 2013, 9:44:26 PM
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Scrotie, while your posts are generally well written and thoughtful you need a summary section for those of us with lesser attention spans.
I think it would be incredibly egotistical to think you had any real part in affecting ggg's balance changes in .11. though the end analysis is mostly correct. As it stands, life is more important than ever and as a result so is koams and while monster damage has been reduced - reflect and thorns are now more dangerous than ever. I wonder if there is any other way to impose challenge other than 1 shot deaths or self gimping through reflect mechanics. IGN: Arlianth
Check out my LA build: 1782214 |
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so many text for a suggestion that could be written as:
reduction = armour / (armour + 9*damage) instead of the current formular according to the machanics thread: reduction = armour / (armour + 12*damage) the difference is 25% of 12 is 3 so i lowered this number by 3 and get the same result as nerfing life nodes by 25% (from 8 to 6) and adjusting the damage which was i bet huge work and blood magic and life regen would not be negativley influenced. the problem is and always was the spike damage and the turn armor into shit factor Last edited by zzang#1847 on Jun 25, 2013, 6:55:21 PM
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" I fully agree with this breakdown^ However I do not think the patch was 'a complete failure' as OP seems to believe. It was a test, hopefully we (and them) learned something from it. An overhyped test at that, but still, the real problem with it is the hype and overly high expectations it created. And I do not believe that neither the OP nor many that supported the solution are to 'blame', neither does GGG. We're going through phases, that we might or might not agree on, that can lead the game to better or worse state. The main thing is learning from them. As in life, there is no real failure if you learn from the consequences. |
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I said it before; I'll say it again. It would have been better just to nerf mob damage.
If they felt the need to indirectly nerf BM, they could have given the keystone a native MCM. |
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" Most players have 240-340 increased hp by 'late-game' and monster damage is scaled by area level to affect that. Players with 20-100 are typically still pre-map and monster damage there is balanced accordingly. If there are players with 20-100 increased life doing high level maps then they are arguably too glass of a build to complain about monster damage scaling. Did i completely miss your point? IGN: Arlianth Check out my LA build: 1782214 Last edited by Nephalim#2731 on Jun 25, 2013, 7:32:57 PM
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The greatest asset of 0.11 was setting the stage for easier rebalancing in the future. This wasnt a nerf to life, or a nerf to monster damage. This was a nerf to power creep. Simply put, while the patch may have had similarities to your feedback, it had nothing to do with you ;)
The game becomes unsustainable with big numbers due to the incredible amount of multiplicative bonuses available to all things. Paralelling Idioticus's sentiment, how do you find a proper balance when multiplying various degrees of big numbers results in a range of 100 to 100,000? Bringing the extremes closer together is essential to finding a sustainable balance for the future, which is something 0.11 began to do. They didn't get everything right in the first iteration of this new direction, but I actually appreciate that. Incremental changes over time, which give time to illuminate the highs and lows of those changes, are much more welcome than the train wreck that was 0.10. Devolving Wilds Land “T, Sacrifice Devolving Wilds: Search your library for a basic land card and reveal it. Then shuffle your library.” Last edited by CanHasPants#3515 on Jun 25, 2013, 7:44:14 PM
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"This isn't just Nephalim, all sorts expressed this general opinion. There's a common misconception here that I'm assuming that I was the driving force behind this change. I'm not assuming that; however, I am not assuming that my fervent support went unnoticed by GGG, either. I do not know. In any case, an attempt was made on my part; if the attempt was the extent to which I had a role, than the attempt is the role to which I refer. "Although I won't argue the first two points, it definitely does not make future steps forward easier. You can say this is still beta until you're blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that the world is watching, and the playerbase is only going to have the patience to go through this so many times. While I understand your point about the error of being too conservative about patch releases, there is such a thing as being too liberal with them as well, releasing things that are insufficiently polished and giving off an excessively unprofessional appearance. Although I don't think 0.11.0 was deal-breakingly bad in that direction, it was definitely a risk in that direction. A better patch philosophy lies somewhere between those two extremes. @Idioticus: If you are referring to a perfect balance, then yes, it is impossible. However, perfect balances are boring, thus are horrible game design, thus are a non-issue. What you want to do instead is encourage variety. That means the 20% with 200% increased life should be punished for being too one-track-mind with their builds; any stat pursued with single-track devotion should lead to diminishing returns that make that build undesirable. This was the problem with Path of Life Nodes, especially in Hardcore where there was no breakpoint where the best defense was a good offense. This can be done either by nerfing the overused nodes, or by buffing underused nodes (particularly offensive ones). Outside of the passive tree, monster damage and base life are only tangentially relevant to this balance, but are likely to be effected through side effects, which were not fully and appropriately considered in my original suggestion; not enough thought was put into the side effects of such passive tree surgery. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Jun 25, 2013, 7:53:04 PM
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I was also disappointed by how little life nodes were reduced by. They are slightly weaker now, but not enough that people could make any serious reduction in the number of life nodes they took without losing survivability. ES is a different story - it is now a bit cheaper to get enough ES nodes for survival on a high-Int CI build, and investing in them doesn't feel so bad anyway because you are often taking hybrid nodes, so you get mitigation for your trouble as well.
I think the devs could still make the following simple change and have a significant impact: increase life per level-up, say from +6 to +10 (or more if they're feeling adventurous: maybe have it ramp up, so higher levels give more life per level). This would simultaneously buff life relative to ES and reduce the importance of flat life bonuses on gear, especially the notorious Kaom's Heart. It wouldn't do anything about life nodes directly, but it would reduce the amount of life nodes that are 'necessary' for survival, especially on a character with suboptimal gear (in the current metagame, 'suboptimal' means 'doesn't have a near-perfect bonus to max life in almost every slot'). They could increase mana per level too, while they're at it: this would make 'conventional' mana builds more competitive with Blood Magic and Eldritch Battery, and also reduce the mana woes of players who don't have perfect gear. Last edited by Incompetent#3573 on Jun 25, 2013, 11:39:19 PM
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