@Qarl - Clarifying GGG's balancing goals

"

piperazinedream wrote:

"

heyyous wrote:

#1 Do you feel that 4 links are a basic amount and should be easy to attain.

#2 Do you realize that players are stacking high amounts of life or energy shield because regen is a more sound defense then actual defense.

#3 Why is energy shield able to be used as life. Life on armor can hit 109 where as energy shield on an armor can hit 900+. Why would you think that making these two comparable could ever be balanced? Casters need high energy shield to withstand large damage when it is unavoidable, Melee uses Armor and leech to mitigate damage. Also, there isn't an aura that increases your maximum life like discipline therefore mana users have an easier time stacking es, Not to mention 10% more es from 100 int nodes where as 100 str is equal to 200 life is it? Why would you cross two things that are completely different together, It's like breeding an elephant with a trout.(Elephants are tanky, Trouts are fast and obviously there are big size differences.)

#4 why isn't there a + based armor aura, I'm tired of taking iron reflexes because I need the additional armor from grace, That additional armor is needed and welcomed please do not "nerf" this.

In closing I would like to tell you that I do not believe a middle ground can ever be compromised between two very different things like armor and evasion or life and energy shield. They are unique and need to be equally good but different. I'm tired of reading about nerfs I really thought GGG was better then this, Your game is balanced your rng is not. Decent items are very hard to come by and we use little things like iron reflexes and grace to make up for the fact that we cannot find a chest piece with high armor, life, good resist. chaos resist.


I also want to make sure you understand that only totem builds and summoners can afford to stack iir and iiq. The rest of us are trying to survive and get enough damage to be able to kill things without getting bored from it.

Sounds like you've never played an energy shield based character if you can't see it is very different from life (yes of course there is some similarity but a char with mitigation and life is completely different then a char with no mitigation and ES). If anything change vaal pact to make it so you cannot regen ES, because Vaal Pact + Ghost Reaver is the only thing that might be considered OP IMO.

ES and Life are very similar. That is an issue for another place, but essentially they have the same play style due to the GR. They didn't sued to though

"

Real_Wolf wrote:

"

piperazinedream wrote:

"

heyyous wrote:

#1 Do you feel that 4 links are a basic amount and should be easy to attain.

#2 Do you realize that players are stacking high amounts of life or energy shield because regen is a more sound defense then actual defense.

#3 Why is energy shield able to be used as life. Life on armor can hit 109 where as energy shield on an armor can hit 900+. Why would you think that making these two comparable could ever be balanced? Casters need high energy shield to withstand large damage when it is unavoidable, Melee uses Armor and leech to mitigate damage. Also, there isn't an aura that increases your maximum life like discipline therefore mana users have an easier time stacking es, Not to mention 10% more es from 100 int nodes where as 100 str is equal to 200 life is it? Why would you cross two things that are completely different together, It's like breeding an elephant with a trout.(Elephants are tanky, Trouts are fast and obviously there are big size differences.)

#4 why isn't there a + based armor aura, I'm tired of taking iron reflexes because I need the additional armor from grace, That additional armor is needed and welcomed please do not "nerf" this.

In closing I would like to tell you that I do not believe a middle ground can ever be compromised between two very different things like armor and evasion or life and energy shield. They are unique and need to be equally good but different. I'm tired of reading about nerfs I really thought GGG was better then this, Your game is balanced your rng is not. Decent items are very hard to come by and we use little things like iron reflexes and grace to make up for the fact that we cannot find a chest piece with high armor, life, good resist. chaos resist.


I also want to make sure you understand that only totem builds and summoners can afford to stack iir and iiq. The rest of us are trying to survive and get enough damage to be able to kill things without getting bored from it.

Sounds like you've never played an energy shield based character if you can't see it is very different from life (yes of course there is some similarity but a char with mitigation and life is completely different then a char with no mitigation and ES). If anything change vaal pact to make it so you cannot regen ES, because Vaal Pact + Ghost Reaver is the only thing that might be considered OP IMO.

ES and Life are very similar. That is an issue for another place, but essentially they have the same play style due to the GR. They didn't sued to though

ES and life are not similar. Roll an ES character and let me know how you enjoy status affects. Ghost reaver only works with life leach gem for spells, can't get any leech from gear and must use a link on your main skill. If you want to claim ghost reaver was OP for melee who did not need life leech gem, maybe you might have some ground to stand on, but it would still be a hard claim, due to status affects and the vast area of the tree you would have to cover to take CI, GR, VP, IR, and Unwaivering Stance (otherwise have fun being permastunned or frozen until dead). Life also has life regen, and since life can roll on any piece of armor... its not useless for life builds like it is CI, which for the latter I have to use an eternal orb to make sure if I exalt life on to an item it doesn't stick. Both have strengths and weaknesses true, but life has way more strengths and less weaknesses given equal values, that's why ES users always had more ES then life had life. All this is also disregarding the mitigation that a life character has also (in comparison so to an ES based character).

Life and ES (with CI) are similar in practice. What most people is missing with this issue is that is way easier to use a handful of unique's with CI than with a life based character (starting with, most uniques lack life rolls which you are starving for). How is this? The big elephant in the room everybody is ignoring: chaos resistance. They screwed the ES / Life situation when they decided to add negative chaos resists and pumped chaos dmg mobs in the game. You can completely ignore one type of damage with CI, making it easier to stack elemental resistances, something you CAN'T do with life. This allows for usage of more uniques to counter these 'dangerous' status ailments, to the point you will be able to be made immune to these (again, a luxury most life users won't have).

Couple that with how hard is (more after 1.11) to build a good life pool right now, all for a negligible improvement of secondary mitigation/EHP defences which wasn't really needed to start with, as the biggest dangers will still be spells from certain bosses with various affixes or very hard hits from other bosses (armour pretty much useless).

To add to the offence is you can stack way more ES (I'm talking order of magnitude here) than life with the same passive investment than life users; if ES users are not doing that is because they stack damage, but you can reach 12k ES > easily with passive investment + proper gear; the same can be said for other forms of mitigation (evasion or armour), if you are not using them is because you DON'T want, is also way easier for most ES chars to scale them properly (both because node efficiency and usually having larger mana pools to properly use auras). It's your fault if you are failing to do it.

The current meta situation is one that ends up with a shit load of spellcasters (usually ES based) dominating, which are already stronger than physical melee chars (usually life based) stacking damage passives which life based characters have NOT the luxury to do (neither is as easy cause reflect, an other advantage of ES as taking Vaal Pact has no downsides for ES). The convenience of ES/INT nodes is also way higher than most life clusters (improved a bit with recent ranger changes though), not having to spend so many points travelling around the tree to get the life nodes you are starving for so much.

In the current situation, in endgame with proper investment, ES >>> Life . (Yes, I've both ES and life characters.) To make a comparable character you have a limiting expensive unique (Kaom's chest), which is completely stupid.

can't wait for the responses

There will be no answers because it seems that don't even know, feels like GGG is split between "it's our baby we do what we want" and "I need money to feed and make the baby grow"

So many problems are on the table since OB launch and no improvment, new uniques which breaks the game even more arn't improvment.

They say "no wipe" but they invalidate some builds with their updates (often you have a respec, cool, and what about the gear you farmed for so long ?)

They say "ninja power, so thrilling gameplay" now you have party systems with kicks !

etc etc

What about lags/desynch which kills HC char ? what about useless ACU, mana vs blood magic, etc etc but hey there is promotion a new cosmetic items

Life and Es can work the exact same way with ghost reaver and zealot's oath. The very sad difference between an es character who does this and a life character who travels the passive tree is this, The es character gets a % increase to their es from the base int nodes and can still get ES from their gear. The life character is stuck with low life until he gets what he needs and can finally start stacking life nodes.

As Ci you must get unwavering stance and you can get iron reflexes for grace to get armor. Once you have Iron Reflexes you can start stacking Energy shield and Armor nodes and increase your life and armor at the same time. If you are doing melee Ci you now have the Auxium belt to become frozen and chilled less while gaining more energy shield and elemental damage not to mention if you are a power charge user you can get like 7% leech from the belt alone... There is still shock to worry about and I don't know what they typically do about that. If you are a caster you can use dream fragments to get a lot more mana,mana regen and be immune being frozen.

There is a lot of required items to do Es well and I do not feel ES is in a bad place, I feel like the life system is inadequate. Strength nodes should increase your life more then they do to at least make up some for when we have to get base dext and int nodes. That's fine though because at least while we are stacking strength nodes our life goes up and we become a little bit stronger.

All these nerfs just ruins peoples work arounds to making the game easier for them, On top of that you guys are making weaker builds even weaker. You will not balance the game tweaking things the way you are because you are making everything weaker instead of what is strong.

My simple fix to life versus Es is to make strength nodes increase our life more then they do now. I understand the evasion change and it's fine for me, I'm not based on dext though.

I also feel gear needs some kind of fixed modifier like how chromatics relate to certain types of armor. Life users cannot use armor without life, That could be weighted onto armor so that we can find some more armor that at least will help us live. You still have to worry about getting chaos resistance, the other resistances and armor right?

See when you guys introduced chaos resistance onto gear I thought that it was going to be fairly easy to build a nice character but it would be hard to deal with chaos damage or get gear with %chaos resistance. Then you guys went the nerf chaos damage route even though the problem was that we couldn't find it on gear. So another example were you are making changes that do not fix the problem but rather throw the game out of whack even more.

In the games current state it is hard to get armor and resist at the same time, You are stuck using gear with low armor just to get capped resist. It is especially hard for builds using a 2h. Chaos resist is the token "man I wish I could have that but its to expensive" modifier of this game. If you have enough currency to get good armor resist and life on your gear you still will have a hard to finding good stuff with chaos resist on it.

Diminishing drop rates are killing everyone who cannot afford to stack iir/iiq. I have tried farming in areas that I am around 5-8 levels above the zone in order to find gear to continue progressing but it just doesn't happen. My guy requires gear with dext and int on it to be able to use certain gems currently, I can't drop that stuff and use all iiq/iir items.

So once again the game is balanced the items are just to hard to attain. I don't mean godly items like it should be I mean items that allow progression.

First of all it's worth noting that I have nothing to do with GGG but some of these have answers that are already around.

When considering the balance of the game do you mainly focus on SC or HC, how much do races affect the balance & does PVP have any effect whatsoever on the current balance? Is the game balanced around playing solo or coop? If both how do go about balancing that? When it comes to life pools & defenses can you please let us know what you consider balanced & in-keeping with GGG's vision? Which area of the game are you most concerned about balancing 'correctly', start, mid-game, merciless or maps?

I imagine they are trying to keep it all in balance rather than focusing purely on one aspect. SC & HC are already the same in difficulty, co-operative play scales off solo play to the number of people in the party (except status ailments & stun use original health). The required amount of EHP scales throughout the game with the required EHP of maps largly dependent on what mods you roll and decide to keep.

Are armour & evasion supposed to viable means of defense? Will you ever return to underused gems to rebalance them?

A problem exists when the vast majority of a player base picks one gameplay mechanic over another (or alternatively ignores a certain mechanic). Armour, Evasion & Energy Shield are all supposed to be viable means of defence but for a while now pure Evasion has consistently been used to a much lesser extent. For a few patches HP/Armour was in vogue so HP nodes were reduced in effectiveness, in this latest patch we have seen ES/CI reduced and Evasion increased in effectiveness - all in the hopes of having a more equal proportion of players pick each of three defense types.

This argument applies to most aspects of balancing including Skill Gems and Passives. The problems with these is that with such a large number already existing it becomes almost impossible to have it perfectly balanced. Mechanics which see a lot of use tend to be more powerful than the lesser used ones as the player base will always seek, and usually get to, the most optimal strategy (usually maximising DPS whilst still surviving). In the mean time GGG will continue to do some combination of 'buffing' the under utilised nodes and 'nerfing' the over ultilised nodes.

Do you intend for melee & ranged classes to be equally viable or is it granted that there will always be a difference in ability?

Ranged and melee builds are fundamentally different so I would always expect a difference in ability. A better question might be simply "At what point would you consider ranged and melee builds to be equally viable?" Chances are as long as a significant proportion of the player base isn't ignoring one then they could be classed as roughly equally viable and left alone. Certainly the recent changes to melee damage & introduction of various melee orientated gems has helped increase the proportion of users using melee builds.

What builds are you balancing the game around? What gear are those builds wearing?

You assume here they balance the game on specific builds/gear as opposed to balancing passives/gear based on levels of usage amongst the player base.

Are you currently trying to balance the game around rare items with ilvl ranges or do you expect players to be using X amount of uniques?

From reading previous dev posts I don't believe the game is balanced around players having X uniques equipped. Uniques are supposed to be special cases and used to enable specific builds. I would imagine that the best possible equipment available at each stage of the game is considered when balancing content but similarly the affixes to have available at each level/item is also determined by the current content. At each stage of balancing there are several factors at play.

When it comes to Uniques are you taking the line of "add it & see what happens" or do you actually think about how they will affect the game beforehand?

From previous dev posts I've read they do discuss and think about items before they are introduced to the game. Although it is interesting here that Chris himself posted his personal opinion regarding the Lioneye's bow being too powerful without a drawback bearing in mind that all uniques are supposed to have some trade-off. This does not preclude them from making mistakes and not taking into consideration a use for a unique they did not originally envisage - bear in mind here the player base is much bigger than the dev team and will find a way to abuse something even if it is even remotely possible.

Can you elaborate on the extent that you have affected drop rates to account for player to player trading?

I can't quite phrase this correctly but for some reason I believe this to be a silly question. They don't really need to care what the drop rate of an item is as they don't care too much about the relative price of an item in-game. Prices in-game are set to the demand of the player base and automatically adjusts itself. When people complain Exalted Orbs are so expensive it's because that's just how useful they can be compared to other currency.

Are players supposed to feel powerful @ endgame (lvl80+) or are they still supposed to be posed with a challenge from mobs?

This is pretty subjective depending on what gear/build you are using regardless of what the intention of GGG is. I do not believe if you have a bad build and/or bad gear you will (or should for that matter) feel powerful. Whether or not GGG want this to be the case is admittedly another matter. Some people want to face roll content and never face penalties, other people enjoy challenging content but prefer a softer penalty to XP, others like the unforgiving aspect of Hardcore where you lose the character from the league. I would guess the trick for GGG is for the game to reach a Pareto optimal state (good luck with that!). Unfortunately whatever they decide to do some people are going to be unhappy - I, along with pretty much everyone else, just hope it does not include myself.

==================================================

Now for the questions I actually find interesting:

Do you have a vision of how POE will be balanced or are you winging it?

What makes a balanced build?

What AI changes to do you make to balance the game?

I have a trapped question - are there any plans to buff trap-based builds? I know those nodes near the shadow start area aren't for nothing. :P

"

Budget_player_cadet wrote:

I have a trapped question - are there any plans to buff trap-based builds? I know those nodes near the shadow start area aren't for nothing. :P

This. I have a quality freeze mine. I want to have a reason to use it. It sounds like a cool (pun intended) idea, but has little to no use beyond against one off bosses like Brutus/Kole. And even then, I don't think it would be very effective. I haven't tried it much though, so I am possibly wrong.

Melee seems to be inferior to range in every aspect of the game, with the new reflect rules and arrowdodging bow users get an even bigger advantage.

Why don`t you just introduce something similar to "hitting a monster with a melee gem & a melee weapon reduces melee damage taken by 20% for 2-3 seconds?
(just in general not as a node, maybe just as a weapon bonus to all melee weapons)

Or maybe buff base life per level of all classes + half the effectiveness of lifeleech gems for spells/range attacks.