The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Harmful Content
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FOREWORD:
I originally made this thread on July 18th of last year (2013). After reading some excellent feedback by moozooh, I felt compelled to do a retrospective on these issues after a year of changes. Some of these problems were definitely addressed, and a few others have shown up in their place. The conversation continues from here: July 3rd 2014 Retrospective ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This thread is about the design and balance of in-game content. I'm going to refrain from talking about improvements needed in desync and graphics optimization, player-to-player trading, the UI, the highs and lows of RNG, and community changes. Please do not discuss problems outside the scope of this thread here, but do feel free to bring up any content issues that I may have missed. An on-topic thread is a healthy thread. --- I've been playing for over a year and a half and have made more builds than I can count. I've spent many thousands of hours playing this game and exploring all the corners of the game as they've been introduced. In general, I am a person who believes that there should not be any "no-brainer" decisions in a game like this, and that cutting out the no-brainer decisions as they spring up is as important as introducing new content in the first place. Character creation is as much a creative exercise as it is execution and reacting to the things you learn as you play. This outlet for creativity is the biggest draw for me personally and I imagine for others as well. The greatest problem that I see right now is a post by Qarl claiming that the game's design process is such that decisions matter, then looking at the current state of the game where there are too many decisions either made for you or with obviously inefficient decisions propped up next to the strong ones. The only thing missing is a flashing marquee "YOU WIN!!" graphic for picking the correct choices and avoiding the incorrect ones. Worst of all is that I'm seeing reactionary changes more commonly and what I consider core problems are either not being addressed or not even acknowledged as problematic. This is a sign that the big picture has been lost. It also means that the game is either balanced so that win button builds are challenged and all others are non-viable or everyone is viable and the win button builds are pure faceroll. I need to make it clear that I do not want or expect every possible idea to be viable. I accept the strength of synergistic skill/passive combinations and that not everyone will be able to clear Merciless on their first time through the game with their "bow/mace/icenova/zombie low-life Eldritch Battery" build. What I do want to see is that the gulf between various builds is reduced over time, not widened over time. Below will be a short summary of the win buttons and no-brainer content in this game, a short bit on what makes them no-brainers, and my personal suggestions on how to fix them with the least changes possible. To any incoming comments of "why nerf when you can buff?" I refer to Chris' stance on this issue: " --- Let's get right into it, separated by topic and with a few words before each and roughly ordered by severity within:
Unique balance
Whatever feelings exist for not wanting to scorn diamond/eternal supporters need to be quashed. Paying to design an item overpowered by design should be a mark of shame, not something that every donator should strive for. These have been getting worse recently which says that more overhead and checking is required before uniques go into the game.
A process must be decided on and stuck to in order to start removing the unbalanced uniques from the game, be it a downtime + database cleaning or simply discontinuing them. Legacy item issues harm new players to the game, so please keep that in mind when flippantly accepting legacy into the game.
Kaom's Heart
Missing sockets is not a downside to 2h builds. Kaom's allows for too much non-life defenses in addition to the life. A "high life" build is still worthwhile due to the existence of Blood Magic, RF, and other forms of voluntary life loss. Something needs to be given up in exchange for this blessing of max life, and I would suggest "player has zero armor".
Lioneye's Glare
Outclasses every other bow in the game except for Quill Rain and/or fast +3 bows on EA builds (read: "bow casting builds"). Needs much less damage, and is still interesting due to autohit.
Shavronne's Wrappings
Makes all non-Shavs low life infinitely less strong. As a build enabler, it should not also be on an extremely high base armor. Its synergy with RF (3x spell damage multiplier alongside PA) is simply too much to balance against. Needs "cannot be used with ZO" or "cannot regenerate ES" more generally or RF needs "does X% more damage while you have energy shield" such that RF cannot be kept up without effort. It should still be possible to fight your way through the burn with flasks and other skills, and your reward should be the gigantic damage multiplier.
Soul Taker
Outclasses every other 1h physical cleave weapon. For a game "that will always have mana usage be a calculated choice", this invalidates that entirely. No downsides and the base weapon is far too strong. I have no clue what happened here.
Auxium
Yet another no downside, overpowered unique. All but removes two of the scariest things (chill/freeze) to lowlife/CI builds. Overshadows every rare belt and asks nothing in return. I also have no clue what happened here.
Rainbowstride
There are no tradeoffs here. This is a win button. The mana is unnecessary. Adding Elemental Equilibrium to these would be an interesting change and would fit the flavor of the item.
Thunderfist
One too many upsides, even with the downside of no defenses on the glove slot. The shock duration is interesting or the flat lightning is interesting or the added lightning support gem is interesting. I would scuttle the 1-100 flat lightning damage of these options to focus on the "shocking" aspect of the gloves and let rare gloves with higher aspd and flat damage compete.
Eye of Chayula
No downsides to the one build that needs stun immunity the most: CI. This is the nearest in this "list of badness" to be acceptably balanced. It doesn't need much, just a little change like 30% reduced ES. The theme of this item should be "less es/life, immune to stuns" not "immune to stuns, only use this if you're CI".
Hyrri's Ire
Needs a big buff. With much more flat cold damage (40-60 instead of 13-24) and a helping of life (~+70) it would go from useless to interesting. Of all the underpowered uniques, this is the only one I'm going to mention since it's high level and worse than every comparable rare.
Skill/support balance
This section has the least and least grievous problems. I'm not sure who all I should be thanking for that, but keep up the good work on skill/support design and balance.
Cleave
I've said many, many times that it does twice as much damage as it should. 50% less damage while dual wielding would bring it in line with the other melee aoe skills. 40% less damage while dual wielding lets it favor dual wielding and not be too far out of balance. Until this is done, there is no point to using non-Cleave aoe attacks while melee dual wielding, which in turn restricts melee dual wield to axes and swords.
Discharge
This skill was just overtuned. The buff was too massive and the damage needs to come down a bit. It was barely usable (but still usable) at pre-patch values with half the base damage and half the base crit chance. 2/3rds of the current damage and leaving the crit chance as is should put it in the right place.
Arc
3 targets at 50% DE with no natural way to increase the AoE halts this skill from ever being used as a main skill. It should get some kind of AoE increase, either by levels or by allowing for 3 hits at 100% DE making added cold/light/chaos much more useful on it and allowing Chain to be used to increase the AoE without obliterating the damage.
Arctic Breath
The cold patches are not enough to make this skill stand out from its cousin, Ice Spear. Needs something interesting added to the skill, possibly a cold DoT while standing in its ice patches.
WED support gem
This gives too much damage and at too high a cost. 170MCM for 70% more damage is absurd. 130MCM for 30% more damage would keep it competitive with other possible attacking support gems.
Trap support gem
Unlike its cousin, the remote mine, traps offer very little benefit. Being able to ignore cast speed is a strength and being able to push point-blank-aoe attacks out to distance is a strength (Ice Nova + Trap, for example), but neither is good enough to deal with the cooldown of traps nor the wasted support gem slot.
Keystone/tree balance
In general, I would like to say that keystone are no longer optional. For a time, keystones were something a build would get one or maybe two of, and it would be a special build. Currently these are what determine the shape of every build's tree. Make of that what you will.
Iron Reflexes
It is good that it was nerfed. Now just remove it. Converting a dextrous defender to full armor is neither desired nor needed, and now the node doesn't even exist for that. It's for high strength, heavy armor characters to squeeze even more armor out of the cracks and get something for nothing. It's existence also makes it impossible to separate armor from evasion, to balance Grace and Determination together, and to balance evasion and armor values on gear.
Ghost Reaver
Needs to be changed to melee damage only. Leeching with long range spells and attacks is not needed for energy shield and it's too much power with no downside for CI users (who weren't using the life anyway). ES values should be buffed in compensation.
Resolute Technique
With IR removing all need for dex defensively and RT removing all need for dex offensively, this duofecta cuts the game in twain. The downside of never critting is not nearly strong enough to make up for being able to ignore accuracy, especially when players need both accuracy and crit to make crit work. Melee base crit could come up across the board to make this less desirable, and a crit effect added to non-elemental hits would likewise make "never critting" a more serious downside.
Zealot's Oath
Life IR, this ties life and es too closely together and makes them inseparable. If its purpose is to make life/es viable, then it should have something that benefits both and not either individually. I don't know what the thought process was behind adding this so I don't know where to begin. Getting some insight into its origins would be a first step. Since this is now tied to Shavronne's Wrappings, consider the two in one balancing attempt.
Ondar's Guile
The true evasion supernode. Needs to be made like Acrobatics: actual tradeoff required. More damage taken at point blank range would be an interesting start, though I'm unsure of Ondar's theme, so a more suitable downside may present itself.
Vaal Pact
Again, no downside for CI builds. At first glance being in the strength section of the center of the tree and being surrounded by life nodes you'd be enticed to think that it's a life gain on hit keystone but you'd be completely wrong. It needs some kind of downside for CI builds, such as disabling ES recharge as well as life regeneration and life flask usage. The theme is "you're only healing when you're attacking", and that theme is being violated.
Chaos Inoculation (progression)
The only problem I see here is that you are nearly required to respec into CI in the mid/late game if you're going into CI at all. If there were more flat ES values on the board and near CI, and if CI were a gradual change by spreading out the conversion over several points, then it would be possible to go into CI during normal gameplay without requiring respec points.
'Clever Notables'
Adder's Touch is a "clever notable". These aren't required to force tradeoffs and allow interesting and new game mechanics to shine through. Comparing Adder's Touch to, say, "Cleaving" (30 ipd with axes) is night and day. Notables on the outer section of the tree should be stronger in general (though not overbearingly so) to draw people out of their starting areas and they should be increasingly niche to start breaking up the midgame tree monotony.
For a few examples of things that could be done, converting Templar's Phalanx cluster to a dedicated "spell block and shield" cluster, Duelist's Cleaving to an increased aoe (with melee splash) and axes cluster, and Shadow's "Arm Wrestling" to a disarming (one-handed attacks small chance to debuff enemy with enfeeble) cluster would all be simple and very interesting changes. Going around the tree and improving the lackluster notables (or adding notables to clusters without) and having each cluster do something other than make a number bigger should be the goal. Any time you see two identical trees only using different skills, something has gone horribly wrong. That every "standard life" melee tree ends up looking like this with only a few points of variance (mostly deciding between 1h+shield or 2h) is a bug, not a feature.
Enemy design
I'll keep this short. There need to be more enemies that scare ranged users. They either need attacks that are stronger at range in a reverse Point Blank way (Ice Spear is a prime example) or they need to only use their strongest skills at range and those skills need to only hit at range (Perpetus's bear traps is a decent example). Until ranged is as scared of the average mob composition as melee is, there will never be a balance between ranged and melee and "choosing melee" will always be the wrong choice.
Problematic mechanics
Some of these are known bugs. A timeline on their triage and eventual fix would be highly concerting. Some are intended, and some are even considered "core" in the ARPG world. These should be seen as ultimately the biggest problems the game will see, and many other design decisions hang from these nails.
Strength's defensive aspect
Strength needs to give %armor just like Dex gives %evasion and Int gives %es. Life is not a "strength" problem, it's an "everyone" problem. Worse yet, evasion builds need the largest life buffer, not armor. This idea has already been peered into by realizing that the dex corner of the tree needs the most life nodes. There is no reason to continue to peer at the problem from a distance without moving toward a solution. I would expect to see this counteracted by increasing character base life and taking a look at enemy spike damage.
Offensive Totems
As time goes on, more and more people are getting wise to what an insane tradeoff offensive totems provide. A double totem setup does more damage than hard-casting the spell or ranged attack yourself as well as giving the character the enviable defense of never having to see an enemy on his screen as well as removing mana concerns as well as removing damage reflection concerns. If offensive totems are to be kept, the totems themselves need to be tied with blood to the caster. Losing a totem should hurt, and losing a totem should happen more often. Having to recast 0.5s of a totem is not a sufficient downside and neither is the inability to leech when given this pile of upsides.
Spell shotgunning
Needs to go away entirely. Gives aoe and damage to spells, and makes it too hard to balance melee defenses against multiprojectile caster enemies. Spells that require MP support gems to be viable (looking at you Freezing Pulse) should be buffed in compensation. By comparison, LMP/GMP for attacking builds is a clear and sensible tradeoff.
Magic Find affixes
It does far too much and in too high of quantities. Only the builds that can afford to run suboptimal gear get to benefit from this entire aspect of the game. If every MF affix was replaced with "kills X% more mobs", it would be obvious how strong these affixes are. Removing them from weapons and body armor and the tree was a good start. Don't stop there. I refer to the 90 page "remove MF" thread in Beta General Discussion for further reading.
Map affixes
These continue to be unbalanced, and tie in with the problem of MF affixes. Maze and Larger Area are too strong as affixes and don't pose interesting challenges to the player. They should be removed. The rest aren't nearly so bad, and a few months of beta testing without Labyrinthine/Massive should show which are too weak or too strong for their benefit.
Covenant/Malachi Simula, Alpha's Howl, and prebuffing
Absolutely needs to be fixed. This has been giving people twice+ as many auras as their cost would prescribe. It is exceedingly difficult to balance aura usage while these prebuffing bugs exist.
Partially fixed in 0.11.4
Quest gem rewards
"Early game guidance is good; late game guidance is bad" should be the mantra here. Having to create characters to farm quest reward gems for your actual characters is horrible. Drop-only gems and supports are horrible. I see many solutions here, but the easiest would be to continually widen the quest reward list as the difficulties increase.
Last edited by pneuma#0134 on Jul 4, 2014, 2:52:47 PM
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This is the most comprehensive and insightful Beta Feedback post I have seen since Open Beta started. Thank you for your time and dedication, pneuma!
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Awesome thread Pneuma, I've read half of it so far.
Gotta say, that Arctic Breath comment was something I liked. I realllly want to make an all Cold damage Witch but I don't want to use Spell Shotgunning, Ice Spear, or Freezing Pulse. My options beyond that are veeeery limited. |
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Holy crap. Thank you so much.
Your list also include many pet peeves of mine such as Cleave non-sense dual wield damage and Strength giving life... to name a few. Nice explanation on IR. Keep on rocking, you made my day. |
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Good consolidation thread of the more important issues the game is facing but I can't help to think that most of these issues have been in the game a while, they have been talked about ad nauseam in the forum & yet never seem to actually get addressed when a balance patches come along, the reason for my other post was to get some clarification on where the game is going because it seemed like GGG weren't addressing these issues with their patches but also digging deeper holes on top.
Treat the cause not the symptom. |
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" I agree partially. I honestly don't expect GGG to get the balance right on their first attempt at anything, and I don't think anyone else should either. If there is such a design principle that cannot create broken things, then it's not interesting enough to allow for emergent activity and new mechanics. What I do want to see is progress toward fixing the things that are unbalanced. This includes listening to the posts made on the forums ad nauseum and not being afraid to make changes in the game. If there is one thing crippling GGG above all else, it's being terrified to make changes. They've adopted this stance since they started accepting closed beta donations and it has absolutely smothered progress in this game. |
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I stopped reading when you say that Auxium has no downsides, but then you say that Thunderfist has downsides due to no defensive stats.
Auxium: +(9-20) to maximum Energy Shield (20-30)% increased Elemental Damage with Weapons +(45-55) to maximum Mana +(60-70) to maximum Energy Shield Chill and Freeze duration on you is based on 65% of Energy Shield 1% of Physical Attack Damage Leeched as Mana per Power Charge Compared to the best ES Belt: +20 to maximum Energy Shield +36% increased Elemental Damage with Weapons +47 to maximum Energy Shield +400 Armor (3 out of these 4) +45% Fire Resistance +45% Lightning Resistance +45% Cold Resistance -20% Flask Charges Used Comparison: ES: 90 vs 67 - Auxium wins by 23ES WED: 30 vs 36 - Auxium loses by 6% WED Mana : No doubt that 55 mana is better than 0 mana, thats 5% of what this item strenght Chill and Freeze duration on you is based on 65% of Energy Shield : This is where this item is strong, but to win this you lose 45% AR and I think it is a fair tradeoff. 1% of Physical Attack Damage Leeched as Mana per Power Charge : Probably affects 2% of the current builds. I've never used Kaom's Heart, but your suggestion that Kaom's heart users have zero armour is ridiculous. Because someone with 5k HP and 20k armour is much stronger than someone with 8k hp and zero armour. Eye of Chayula makes you stun immune, nothing else. It doesn't give you Spell Damage, Cast Speed, damage modifiers, energy shield, energy shield %, resists, IIQ, IIR, so yes, there are a lot of downsides. I am a Shavronne's Wrappings user and also a low-life RF. I understand the only way to go low-life RF build is using Shavronne's, and that is where the problem. The only way you can go low-life is if you have this, CI should be split into 2 different nodes, one would make chaos damage not bypass energy shield and lower your chaos resist by x%, other would make you immune to chaos damage and your maximum hp is 1. The problem isn't on Shavronne's, the problem is that the only option you have to go low life build is by using Shavronne's. Using Shavronne's also punishes you defensively because you cant get high ES with it. With the best ES rare chest you get 2x more ES than using Shavronne's. Standard IGN : ObIivious
Anarchy IGN : SuckySuckyBoomBoom , Sunfreakz |
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" Wasn't that supposed to be something that having multiple custom leagues allowed? Experimentation? Seriously. Give us a league like Anarchy/Onslaught to test out completely new mechanics. If people like it, they'll stay and if they don't, they won't play the league and stick to what they've already been playing. Of course this should likely only happen every 3-4 months so some progress can be made by players in leagues, but this is the equivalent of a ladder reset. I think it'd be welcomed, honestly. I'd love to see many of your considerations in the OP come up in such a league. Particularly the Strength giving %armor thing. Last edited by TremorAcePV#7356 on Jul 18, 2013, 3:46:15 PM
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still reading but i needed to thank the OP for the time it took to post this.
/thumbs up ~SotW HC Guild~
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I read so many bad stuff there is too much of it... cleave and other skills, some of the passive suggestions. Too much to comment on, but general there is 1 flow throughout the entire feedback you gave.
Many of these are experienced based and commented and reflected in the niche they are used in, but many of your suggestions are not strong or balanced using different build or play strategies. Suddenly it works into one direction and the build becomes popular, but instead of penalizing because that 1 direction works out you should wonder why it does not work both left and right side, without being OP such that there is choice. In the end you will always have niches and things popping up, if you aim for a complex core with multitudes of game mechanics than the more likely these will be created. I sincerely hope GGG doesn't consider or spend their time in this post too much, since it is full of bad suggestions in my opinion. I am not trying to be offensive, but unless you approach balance from a design philosophy instead of what you did now; "it is too strong because of x, while it might be weak due to y," this does not bring balance at all. The latter process is the WoW mentality and brings forth frustration and will only aid in alienating your player base. I can redirect your cleave discussion i.e. by just naming two things: elemental damage scaling, while dual wielding and concentrated effect. Now the discussion takes more depth, but though you add new layers and give it a more in depth look you still are not at the core and design philosophy. You need to answer questions such as: what do you want to do with this, where will it fit and how will it fit? The more rotten the core the worst it is to build on. If you got the time and effort than start thinking about the core deisgn choices made all the way from how much dex, str and int there is in the tree, the lay-out. How much bonus these give, accuracy, crit, always hit... How much life, mana and evasion per character level and so on. It will help if GGG like in Qarls posts is open on their design philosophy, goals etc. etc. or there is no discussion or feedback possible from the player base. To give an example this post is similar to the act 3 feedback from players and GGG deciding to use player feedback to make design choices, which for new character has now created a very stale act3 merciless experience. Compared to CB you now often have no progression or get stuck and not just at merciless (this due to loot changes). If GGG would collect data and design progress based on date such as: how much time spend at lvl x, how much time spend at zone x... etc. etc, with this data they could make intelligent design decisions and achieve specific goals, rather than taking the long process of listening to the player base, which at that time had almost no representation of new players coming into the game. I hope I got my point across, I love you dedication, but a lot of your suggestions, actually most of them are very bad. |
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