The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Harmful Content
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I plan on replying to the OP later when I don't have to deal with the nightmare that is trying to format on my mobile. Until then...
" I like the direction GGG is taking right now--nerf everything a little bit at a time and restore some of the balance lost with the transition to OB. I'm hoping they've learned from that train wreck, and continue to take their time eliminating problems a few at a time, rather than the sweeping untested changes that resulted in, imo, one of the worst patch iterations I've seen yet. This means that, I sincerely hope they delay release until they've successfully balanced the game, and October looks to be far too soon to me. Rushing release for schedules sake is what I expect from so called triple-A publishers and their endless stream of investor-friendly garbage, not a consummately dedicated and passionate indie team. To me, it'd mean the death of a legend in the indie revolution. A bit impassioned, I'll grant you, but that's my mind on the matter :) 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 Jul 19, 2013, 11:20:43 AM
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" So much this. Ppl expect changes in a beta they do not like them in a release. |
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" Damn straight, After all this is a game about having options not being tied down to one specific build. Here are some ideas that would help straighten out the cause of certain skills performing better then other. Lightning arrow: Make the additional hits deal something like 60% less damage. Thank of melee splash here, We have one main target and then we are happy to be damaging all other enemies. Everyone and their brother uses lmp with LA so it makes it like hitting 3 main monsters + splash damage. Currently the only other way for bow skills to effectively hit other targets like lightning arrow does is to use pierce. I have no problem with this and not only do I love that it is different from just spraying but you have to work for it. Pierce needs to have a damage modifier on it. I also think we would probably need an elemental pierce and a physical pierce to keep the damage scaling from being out of whack. Spork: The fork gems needs a modifier on it like "original projectiles deal 100% damage, projectiles created by fork deal 50% less" (I am no wordsmith) Something like this would allow the gem to do what it is meant to do but rather then multiplying the skill by 200% damage? lets see 3 original projectiles turn into 6 more, so yes 200% additional damage from the extra sparks.(once fork is level 16 the gem no longer causes you to deal less damage, from there it it is additional damage) 50% less from the additional 6 would still be 100% more damage from the additional projectiles not to mention the original projectiles would do max damage so the total change even with such a huge number as 50% off the forked projectiles is 66% less damage total, So the numbers need to be tweaked some(or maybe not) but I think there is a problem when one gem causes you to deal 200% additional damage. Perhaps you could actually raise the damage on the gem so this skill is capable of being good without fork? just food for thought. Burning arrow my not be bad if combined with elemental proliferation now that I think about it, You will not have to use the ignite gem but it only gains 30% damage from physical and it increases physical damage so you would be forced to use blackgleam. ah but then explosive arrow deals 785 damage at level 20. So lets say you have a bow that deals 300 damage as physical alone and you deal 80% of physical as fire(50%blackgleam 30% skill) so 240 fire damage without % increase. Any additional elemental damage you add would also increase explosive arrow so the only reason to use this skill would be because you want 20% physical damage left over. So I guess if you want to create a ranger who can tank with life leech on gear and deals burning damage you could use this skill. Alternatively you could just forget about the physical damage use a quil rain and end up dealing way more burning damage, Not to mention quality on explosive arrow gives you ignite chance so you don't even need that gem with it. I have done my best to explain how the additional effects a skill creates throws the entire balance of a support gem out of whack and how certain skills are left in the dust because another skill does something similar but better. Truthfully I doubt you can balance skill gems without creating a direct change per skill. Once you tweak base numbers on the support gem it makes the weaker skills weaker as well. Effectively you are not balancing the skills because you are changing levels that effect everything basically. You are turning the main volume nob down just because one thing is too loud. |
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i do not agree with u :(. You want them to nerf dual totem.
-1 IGN : Sir_Big
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I agree with almost every point in the OP. It is nicely written and concise in addition to that so well done.
OP is credit to team! The dev team would do well to heed your advice, it is all very reasonable and all the changes with the exception of the uniques and ghost reaver changes could be done in a very non game breaking way. Most of the things focused on are the fixable problems, an admirable way of doing it and something I should probably do more often. |
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" Sorry to just snip this one line, but I see this a lot and had to respond. This puzzles me, why people say this. PoE is actually far from an accidental grindfest or an intentional grindfest. If GGG wanted to make this a grindfest, making everything buyable was not the way to go. In fact, there are gates in place, in this game, that no amount of grinding will unlock. This game is a path-of-least-resistance, buy-your-ready-made-god, sit-in-trade, anything-but-grind...fest. It's a red flag to RMT, but not to counter grind, more to counter clever-shopping/need-to-scam and give instant-gratification-shopping. Shopping is the new hardcore, apparently. Casually casual. Last edited by TheAnuhart#4741 on Jul 19, 2013, 12:02:25 PM
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" Damn straight, I could effectively rmt what took me a month to gather in 5 minutes so long as there is enough in my bank account. I am cheap though and do not want to spend money on pixels, I'd rather not play the game all together. This isn't the days of d2 were there was nothing else to play and we had bots making cheap prices on the rmt sites which made it easy to pay to win. We experienced the ease of an auction house in d2 and up until the ability to use cash things were going good... I've said it before and I will say it again, If you have created build diversity properly items will sell. The market is supply and demand, So long as you do not keep creating OP uniques we are stuck to play with rng to create good items. Creating good uniques like you guys have been takes the rng out of the game and creates more supply then demand. Do you really think you can compare the drop rate of one item to the drop rate to the chance of getting 6 good modifiers on gears? Perhaps they should just start creating 1 stat uniques, One unique modifier to make your character more interesting... Complex situations call for complex solutions, Perhaps this is the reason why Blizzard striped down D3 and only release updates once every 300 years. |
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You seem to be making some baseless assumptions about GGG's development process.
" There are a lot of no brainer decisions that are dependent upon the build you're planning to make, and there always will be. Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're trying to say, but taken at face value it seems like you're looking for a pipe dream. " Inefficient =/= not viable. There is more to this game than min-maxing, if you have a massive boner for min-maxing then you should know by now that every single game in the history of the universe has obvious, no-brainer decisions for min-maxing. " What reactionary changes? The nerf to CI? The Kripp Kole nerf? The nerf to CI was a band-aid, making radical changes to a fundamental keystone for many builds have to be tested because that's what good game developers do. A slap on the wrist nerf is always preliminary, even if nothing changes for several months.
Unique balance
" there's that self-stroking I mentioned prior.
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".
Compared with a high-end rare chest, for kaom's you're trading off resists, armor, and sockets for about 10x more of a life roll, and then you're forced into 2h if you want a 6-link. The trade off for kaom's is enough, it's extremely expensive beyond the chest piece itself as it warps the entirety of your gear to make up for it. I believe that if players are willing to make that much of an investment into using something then they should absolutely get an immense amount of power for it. It was stupid that Kaom's was excluded from the new leagues while shit like Shavronne's and Lioneye's got in, both of which have absolutely no downside.
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.
Yeah, fuck this bow.
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.
Agreed here as well.
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.
I like uniques with downsides, so you can probably guess that I agree with this, Auxium, and Rainbowstride in that they need to be changed.
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.
I think thunderfist is fine as is, it's very strong, but there are many builds that would have no use for it, with most rare gloves filling that role.
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".
Yes, I'm getting tired of life being the only HP getting penalized in many things(like vaal pact).
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.
Nothing worse than a shitty unique drop, agreed here as well.
Skill/support 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.
I'm pretty sure this is already lined up for the nerfing block.
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.
I could have sworn this skill was fine, it just sucked early on so you had to build for something else and then swap to it after like level 70 or something. Now it's obviously a bit OP.
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.
Arc sucks. The innate shock chance suggests that it's supposed to be good for and used with shock stacking, but spork does that 1000x better while also being better at single target and AoE than arc. They need to change the chain mechanic to deal less damage per bounce rather than flat out less damage. Makes sense logically too, a projectile would be pretty weak after bouncing off of several things.
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.
Yeah, a frostburn mechanic would be awesome and arctic breath would definitely be the skill to have it built into. They could also make a frostburn support gem, enemies take cold damage over time while chilled/frozen, that shit was awesome in TQ.
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.
Agreed here, I tried making trap+ice nova work but it was too hard. Need a 5-link at the very least to make it work well and still it doesn't compare to other 5-link builds. I'd suggest having a high crit chance with the trap, since that would fit with the trap nature, them being surprising and all. Then you could stack crit multiplier and lob out some deadly ice explosions.
Keystone/tree balance
" For many common and fotm builds yes, they are very strong, my potcg build does not use any keystones. Though I do agree with the sentiment that some keystones probably need a bit of shuffling balance-wise.
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.
Now that it has been nerfed, I agree that it should be removed. While it has always remained too powerful, I don't believe that having it absolutely hamper the usefulness of dex as a stat was the way to go. Having it in the dex side of the tree and gaining no benefit from dex makes it so it exclusively benefits people who are just passing by. It's like giving resolute technique the drawback of str no longer giving melee physical damage, guarantee you that people would just give up on every melee build that isn't crit dagger and certain niche builds at that point.
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.
As I've already ranted on alpha, melee attacks ever missing a hit makes no sense at all, unless my templar has arthritis in his wrist or some shit. Melee shouldn't have a chance to hit that takes accuracy rating into account, it should always hit unless it's blocked or evaded. Instead, change accuracy rating for melee to lessen the chance an enemy can evade or block a melee attack. Keep it as is for ranged attacks. Change resolute technique to enemies can never evade or block attacks and no crits. It'll be a powerful PvP keystone and for niche melee glass cannon builds that simply cannot afford to miss an attack under any circumstance, aka what I believe it should have been for in the first place.
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.
Gotta remember the context that this keystone was added in: It was when CI was changed to something like 50% chaos resistance and had chaos damage apply to ES instead of life, while still reducing max life to 1. I believe this was at the very beginning of OB, It was to counter things like viper strike and burn damage making it a total fuckhole for CI builds. CI players cried hard enough and CI got buffed to be OP as shit again, and Shavronne's was added to take up the chaos damage goes to ES mechanic. And Zealot's Oath stayed as is. Who would have thunk that ES getting nerfed/buffed and then flat out buffed would have led to it getting out of hand again?
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.
Yeah no downside, I'm assuming that GGG knows that eventually they'll be adding a downside, they just haven't gotten around to putting it in yet, because it pretty much always happens eventually.
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.
Yeah I've bitched about this exact thing before.
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.
Balancing CI has become such a total shitfest that I imagine all GGG really wants to do with it at this point is remove it entirely, I actually believe Chris said something about not liking CI and wishing it wasn't popular so it'd be easier to just cut it off like a nasty tumor sticking out of the pale skinny face of the witch.
'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. I agree here, I love Adder's Touch as a notable and I would not mind seeing more like it.
'Clever Humbug'
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.
Yeah that would be the standard HC melee build for bad players, but experienced players can easily deviate from that. And that's nothing what most standard/anarchy melee builds would look like unless the player really likes to bore the shit out of themselves.
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.
I agree here but I disagree with the reverse point blank suggestion, things like ice spear do not hurt solely ranged players. I've said this on alpha before, but it's a mechanic that forces melee to focus the back line rather than choosing to pick off the front line. Similar to necromancers except maybe 1/100th of obnoxious as fuck.
Problematic mechanics
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.
Disagree, I don't think strength should give armor. Having big muscles doesn't turn your skin into steel. It makes sense for int because magic, and for dexterity because moving out of the way of an attack requires... dexterity. Str giving armor doesn't make any sense.
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.
I've already made this exact suggestion, so we're on the same page here. Sometimes I wonder if PoE is actually a totem defense game in disguise, and not an ARPG.
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.
Shotgunning needs to be affected by the same mechanic that chain SHOULD be affected by, getting hit by the same projectile(s) from a single cast should deal less damage per extra hit. This will significantly neuter the efficiency of shotgunning without requiring a bunch of balance passing like touching up the skills that were only good because of it.
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.
It was like this in D2 and I liked D2. I don't have a problem with certain builds being better for MFing than others.
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.
I am now strongly in favor of keeping prebuffing as is after Akira's death.
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.
Having to create characters to farm quest rewards is a choice, you can trade since they are rather cheap due to being quest rewards or if you insist on playing that one specific character then tighten your belt because you're in for a grinding. I love drop-only gems, but I think it should stick to certain kinds of gems rather than gems that are pretty damn necessary in many cases. Like multistrike, multistrike is damn good for melee and should not be drop only. The vast majority of builds can live without temporal chains and chain, so they can stay drop only no problem. Also support gems like item rarity and item quantity should be drop only, and they should be white gems. Although it's probably way too damn late for that change. Last edited by Septile#3881 on Jul 19, 2013, 1:24:26 PM
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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".
Personally I don’t think that’s a good downside. Seems so arbitrary and it doesn’t make sense that you’re wearing armor but not gaining armor. The real problem is the over tuned damage that leads to need for Kaom’s. Fix that and we can safely remove this unique.
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.
The issue is accuracy in the game needs tweaking. Once accuracy is in a better place, then revisiting the unique might not be needed. Until then, there will be a risk of a nerf/buff cycle.
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.
Your suggestion doesn’t fix the problem that this unique is required for all end game low life builds. I rather fix this unique via passive tree. Currently you take the CI nodes and that’s it. I suggest we replace the back nodes with 3 paths. First one will remove the chaos immunity but adds a chaos shield so chaos damage cannot pierce ES. Another one that adds ES regen nodes but chaos does half damage. Lastly an ES buff path. Taking either will invalidate the rest. I don’t mind have very strong unique as long as there good alternatives to them.
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.
I can’t say as my time with these uniques are limited
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".
I rather they remove this item completely and add immunity to stun to rares taking 2 prefix slot and 1 suffix slot.
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.
Once again, not enough experience to comment. But I bet you’re right
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.
Would it not make more sense for GGG to add a comparative skill for other weapons? I really hate nerfs unless it’s REALLY needed.
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.
I agree.
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.
There’s a suggestion in the feedback thread that is really good. Full DE for the first 3 targets then a random chances to hit more targets with a reduce DE per target. For example: +1 Target/DE 80/75, 70/60, 60/50, 50/25, etc. Numbers pulled from mid-air of course but the idea is solid.
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.
Not a bad idea, but I rather it shoots out in a cone shape from your character and remove the projectileness of this spell. Make it the have a long cast time (taking a breath!) and high damage, sort of an anti-thorn.
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.
I disagree, as I hate nerfs once again. Change the start to %60 but each level adds more WED but decreases attack speed and physical damage. I like to have more interesting choices when leveling gems. Clarity is an example of that, albeit a weak one.
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.
Definitely. Surprised it wasn’t done already. I’m done for now as works calls. Last edited by Hereafter#1131 on Jul 19, 2013, 1:30:39 PM
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I agree with a lot, but I certainly don't agree with your view on cleave.
For dualwielders there are two options currently: cleave and dualstrike-meleesplash-multistrike. Giving cleave "50% less damage" would leave the latter as the only viable option. You need to remember that 2-hand weapons have higher base damage than 1-hand weapons and can be 6-linked unlike 1-hand weapons. Your cleave remedy sucks. Cleave is at a good position where it is right now. (Physical cleave that is, ele cleave sucks). This message was delivered by GGG defence force.
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