The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Harmful Content

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pneuma wrote:

Two things.

First, melee elemental damage is a part of melee damage. I did not say melee physical damage. It would not decimate ranged attackers if ES values were increased alongside this change, which is what would be required for this change to work at all.

Secondly, the current argument of balancing CI and life is backwards. Wanting both to arrive at the same value with the only difference being a red bulb or a blue bulb is not a meaningful player choice. In the past, eshield was different than life. Without GR or ZO and with much higher eshield values, you were required to kite with eshield and rely on its quick recharge out of combat -- in short, to play to its strengths.

The farther we go down this road of turning eshield into life the less interesting eshield becomes as a defense. It does not help that equipmentless armor and evasion popped up alongside this devolution of eshield to cement the red bulb or blue bulb "choice".
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Sorry, my mistake. Long night, so I misread, probably because the ongoing debate has been revolving around GR to be changed to Melee phys only. My apologies.

I'd like to actually for GGG to poll from the Close Beta community about this issue, because many of us Open Beta players, haven't ever experienced a world without Ghost Reaver and probably we are scared of this change.

There could be still some other choice in form in leech nerfs to spell/ranged dmg for CI, but on the top of my head I can't think what and how.

I actually have come to a realization that this could be a good change, and it has to happen now before the game is released. GGG, please implement this, at least try this for a certain time. You can always change it back if you don't like how it is afterwards :)

PS. Choosing between life and ES HAD meaningful choices, until the unqiues which negate the CI downsides began rolling in.

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pneuma wrote:

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

About half of those points could have been summarized "Balance team is spending too much effort ensuring viability of Chaos Innoculation."

CI is an interesting and good idea. It has gone through many transitions throughout the life of this game, but nearly all of them are numbers problems, not a problem with the actual concept.

I wasn't saying CI was a bad idea. Just pointing out that the workload is disproportionate.

Lets say 20% of their balance problems are with CI. In that case, it merits 20% of their time spent working on balance. However, if they are spending that much time on one skill, then they are misallocating resources unless about 20% of the player base uses it. Any one keystone used by 20% of the playerbase is probably overpowered and a potential nerf target.

The point is CI is draining resources from everything else. It would be one thing if CI balance affected the rest of the game. But CI is a bubble. It is balanced completely separate from everything else. Work spent on CI benefits only CI and nothing else. This is the problem with giving it so much attention.

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

About half of those points could have been summarized "Balance team is spending too much effort ensuring viability of Chaos Innoculation."

CI is an interesting and good idea. It has gone through many transitions throughout the life of this game, but nearly all of them are numbers problems, not a problem with the actual concept.

I wasn't saying CI was a bad idea. Just pointing out that the workload is disproportionate.

Lets say 20% of their balance problems are with CI. In that case, it merits 20% of their time spent working on balance. However, if they are spending that much time on one skill, then they are misallocating resources unless about 20% of the player base uses it. Any one keystone used by 20% of the playerbase is probably overpowered and a potential nerf target.

The point is CI is draining resources from everything else. It would be one thing if CI balance affected the rest of the game. But CI is a bubble. It is balanced completely separate from everything else. Work spent on CI benefits only CI and nothing else. This is the problem with giving it so much attention.

Despite that, I fill find CI worth saving. It allows for "on full life" mods to be used as carrots and BM as a big stick (on the opposite side of the tree), which breaks up the monotony.

I think it's time to acknowledge that the experiment of turning eshield into life by giving it the things that life can easily do (continuously regen, leech, and absorb chaos damage) was a failed one; ultimately putting two previously different defenses in direct competition with each other over the same role.

EDIT: puting -> putting

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tmaciak wrote:

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dudiobugtron wrote:

If you don't want to play in Onslaught, then fine, but stop complaining about the economy.

The economy is not what I consider playing aRPG game, because, as strange as it can seems, not everybody wants to play trade simulator.

There is too much Patch of Merchants here already...

I agree! My point wasn't that people weren't allowed to complain abut the existence of an economy (I personally complain about this myself!). It was that you shouldn't complain about not being able to sell low-level levelling gear if you're playing in standard.

If what you want out of the game includes selling low-level levelling gear once you're finished using it, to raise money for new gear, then consider not playing on Standard.

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pneuma wrote:

I think it's time to acknowledge that the experiment of turning eshield into life by giving it the things that life can easily do (continuously regen, leech, and absorb chaos damage) was a failed one; ultimately puting two previously different defenses in direct competition with each other over the same role.

That's pretty much the only issue if you ask me. You need a lot of es if you don't have regen or leech.

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pneuma wrote:

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.


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.


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.

Agree 100% on these

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pneuma wrote:

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.

Removing completely, maybe not, but reducing amounts from items by 50% and doubling base mf would reduce the gap in between of well geared and mf builds, without making mf useless. Currently if you don't have mf or you only have a little, your wealth is going to dive over time if you decide to climb maps, which is the real game IMO. At 72+ maps if not sooner, especially if you don't have party to play with.

@OP: That was a great read. I agree with many of your points and am particularly concerned about the addition of more and more uniques which are best-in-slot, because unlike skills and monsters, items are difficult to change once they're in the game.

My guess is that future leagues will, similar to Anarchy/Onslaught, have to remove some of the most ridiculous uniques in order to provide a balanced game. Default league will then become a kind of trashbin league where all the mistakes of the past will end up as other leagues close.

By the way, a small suggestion: your post would have been much more readable if everything wasn't wrapped in spoilers within spoilers. I had to click so many times and I'm suffering from enough CTS from playing PoE in the first place ;-)

Well written OP. I agree.

Good read,thanks pneuma.

Can't argue any of your points.

I have a few comments with some of the things you mentioned.

For Koam's Heart: Having to use a 2H is a drawback, you miss out on the great defensive benefits that shields provide, or the innate dual wield bonus of dual wielding. Koam's Heart probably does need a change, but look at the 4 month leagues, without Koam's Heart, ES is 99.9% of the time the better option to go. Koam's Heart should not be changd/nerfed until after Life/ES is nerfed, because Koam's Heart is pretty much the only thing keeping ES and Life even remotely comparable. This is a bandaid solution, of course, but you shouldn't tear off a bandaid when you still have use for it.

For Shavronne's Wrappings: Not sure those options are the best way to balance the item. Maybe make it so you take a bit more Chaos damage, maybe a 20% more multiplier or something like that.

For Auxium: This item is overrated, in my opinion. It is a great belt, of course, but I do think there are plenty of rares that can be better in a lot of scenarios.

For Eye of Chayula: Meh. This item has drawbacks, which is you are forced to use up your neck slot for an amulet which pretty much only gives stun immunity. Life doesn't need stun immunity as much, since stun calculations are based on life. Only vs. chargers does it really matter. I don't think this item needs changes, to be honest.

For Cleave: Needs a bit more downsides for dual wielding, I agree. However, what other options do dual wielders have? Most melee abilities only focus on the main hand for damage calculations.

For Discharge: I don't think this ability is that strong. It has great offense, sure, but it is extremely vulnerable to reflect, even with Vaal's Pact. Also, it is very gear dependent, requiring very strong rares, and a couple of pretty pricey uniques to be able to run effectively.

For WED: 70% more elemental damage, not just 70% more damage in general. Considering how much physical damage was buffed, I don't think that such a strong support for elemental damage is such a bad idea. Mana cost is a bit high though, lowering it down to 50% would be nice.

For Iron Reflex: I don't get what you are saying. Hybrid armor/evasion gear are already connected. Evasion and Armor can still be balanced individually. I like this node, it is really clever, pretty much unique to this game. The problem is still that Armor is better than evasion, which makes this node a problem. Making evasion better would make this node more balanced.

For Resolute Technique: I agree, but another big problem with getting crit on melee builds is that there are so few nodes that aren't dagger specific that give crit to melee weapons along with other stats.

For Vaal's Pact: I agree, again. However, it needs to be changed so it is not only less desirable to CI, but more desirable to life at the same time. Not sure how to make that happen, maybe just cutting the regain in half instead of removing it completely. Or another possible change is to increase the amount healed by a %, maybe 10% more life gained from leech. Or make it so you leech mana instantly as well. Who knows.

For Strength giving life: Why compare Strength to Dexterity? Why not compare it to Intelligence, which gives ES? I think this mechanic is fine.

For Magic Find: I never bother with the stuff on gear since I'd much rather have stats that keep me from dying, but what I do presume is that this stat has heavily diminishing returns. I doubt that 200% more item quality means you get 3 times the amount of rares/uniques.