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

The "CI node in a weird location" would be solved if the average non-notable non-keystone node was more worthwhile and if the same "vanilla" nodes were balanced w.r.t. each other. Comparing a life node to an evasion node is night and day; same with comparing offensive nodes to defensive nodes in general.

You could spend 20 points going to US, or you could stay near CI and get 20 nodes worth of value. Ideally these two options should both be somewhat strong. I feel like they already mostly are, and the US option is favored in places where Chayula doesn't exist.

The tree also has hardly any non-US/non-life forms of stun mitigation. Currently only Heart of Oak and the 8% stun avoid nodes.

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

Shav has 1 res. It's a chest. Funny you don't see Bringer as equally OP. It's probably because you use one ;)

At least it has one, and chaos dmg cannot bypass ES. I have -60% chaos res. Unless, I have a lot of HP, I am dead man if I am not careful.

Shav has -60% chaos also. If you have 5K life and shav user has 5K Es, you have equal chance to die from chaos.

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pneuma wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

I don't understand your problem with rainbowstride. There are tons of rare boots that are actually a lot better, sans the spell block chance.

Bringer of Rain + Facebreaker is just as OP as half the things on your list. "No chest armor," please, it's a 7 link chest you wear on your head with over double the maximum life roll any other chest can roll. It's far more like not wearing a helmet than not wearing a chest.

Voltaxic Rift + Thunderfist = far more OP than Shav can ever be. Watch a totem user take on a map piety. Then watch a voltaxic rift + thunderfist simply offscreen her.

Oh, and I don't think any of these should be nerfed, I think there should be rewarding items that are insane hard to get. Game would be boring with "perfect" balance and there wouldn't be much point to working on "a build."

Edit: And dear god, making life leech not work with spells? You want ONLY totem spell builds from now on?

Rainbowstrides are on the list because their general power is better than all but the top rare boots. "Sans the spell block chance" is like saying Kaom's isn't OP "sans the +life".

When I made this list, BoR was barely being used. Both BoR and Facebreakers are strong, but there are better helms than BoR in the general case. I also don't see a big problem with at least some melee builds doing good damage, when none were comparable to all ranged builds before.

When I made this list, Voltaxic Rift didn't exist.

If you are making a "don't nerf anything" plea, please refer to Chris' quote in the OP. I also don't desire perfect balance, I desire "closer to perfect" balance more than "farther from perfect" balance.

And as for your edit, GR and totems did not exist in CB. The playstyle still worked just fine. The change is to GR, not to life leech. Please read more carefully in the future.

"there are better helms than BoR, but the 25% of block chance on rainbowstride is comparable to kaoms."

Here is a better set of boots for a life user than rainbowstride.


Since you have played thousands of hours, and "There are better helms than BoR in the general case," please, show me one.

Finally, Your Original Post was last edited less than a week ago. It states this very clearly in your post. Please pay more attention to details in the future.

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

Unwavering Stance is a great keystone.

It's really not.

The game has a built-in method for naturally obtaining stun immunity (or at least near-immunity) — reduce the damage of each hit to below 12.5% of maximum health. This makes stun immunity the natural province of armour, which is as it should be.

Unwavering Stance is not a very good keystone for armour users. Sure, the drawback might be minimal, but the advantage is too, only helping against extremely large hits like Kole, as armour-stackers do not naturally have big problems with stuns. Some people take it anyway, but it doesn't do much for them; they should invest their passive points elsewhere.

Due to it's drawback, it's not a very good keystone for evasion users, either.

Thus Unwavering Stance is pretty much exclusively a splash for ES builds.

I should had clarified about "great" as in being balanced. It is not the most sought out keystone, but it does have its moment.


Most would take it because of the rhoas, they are pretty much stun charges. The way they can stun is detrimental to a good amount of builds entering Merciless. Even I found the rhoas annoying entering Merciless as a life melee char.

I don't have a lot of desync myself (not relying on wifi is key), so I almost never get hit by rhoas, and when I do I pretty much accept that I suck. However, your lag experience may vary, and I can understand why people would be big on preventing auto-stuns like rhoas.

I guess US isn't imbalanced; even though I wouldn't take it unless I was going ES, it costs a lot of nodes for the benefit it provides, so it's not like it's OP or anything. Due to its high point cost, it's not always taken and you can actually do just about as well with the closer nodes. However, it still just strikes me as... wrong. I'd rather see US changed into something which benefits armour far more than ES.

reboticon, please respond to the points that I addressed directly instead of throwing more straw. Or admit you were wrong about all that other stuff, of course. You're comparing es to life and conflating "Facebreakers" with "all melee builds", both of which are incorrect. If you're going to nitpick, at least be thorough.

You're right that I was hyperbolic about Rainbowstride's spell block. I meant it in a "you're ignoring a major piece of the item" way, not a "this is a direct comparison" way. You opted to take the interpretation that helped your argumentation.

I updated the main post to add that the aura exploit was fixed in 0.11.4. I stated as much a few pages ago. If you read this thread, you would already know this. There are enough threads on these forums where only the first and last page are read; this is not one of them.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I'd rather see US changed into something which benefits armour far more than ES.

Given that ES has 50% stun avoidance by default, it stands to gain less from US than an armoured(,life) character does.

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

I can probably reach 4k life, if I get 200%+ increased life, almost all of my jewels have 50+ life, and having almost a max life roll with Lioneye's Remorse.

With 196% increased life from tree and having at least 70 HP on everything sans sword, my templar have 4,6K life as TBoR user. But having more would be exponentially harder and probably not worth it.

IMO, and I wrote it both as TBoR user on main melee char and eva/Acrobatics/Ondar's Guile user on recently levelled melee ranger, killing IR would kill TBoR on high level maps unless tree and evasion would be seriously reworked to make ar/eva hybrid viable.

And, let say, my melee ranger have 10K eva, 30% dodge, 20% spell dodge, Ondar's Guile, 54% block, 27% spell block, 75% res all and still have a much more harder life on lowbies than my 17K ar, 64% block, 81% res all templar. With both having Blind on main attack plus Tempest Shield.

Incidentally, my templar uses RT and mentioned ranger is accuracy/crit character. Yes, it's nice to crit, but to make it comparable with RT one have to have put much more passives into acc/dex/crit nodes. It quite hard for templars/marauders to do so without sacrificing survivability.

US? To be honest I don't see a reason to take this keystone unless you are a CI. I have 8 characters, 6 life, 1 low life, 1 CI. None of my life characters uses US and I'm not going to use it. But I like Heart of the Oak and to have >2,5-3K life :)


TL:DR I hope that IR are here to stay it for longer, because if GGG remove it without serious reworking of tree/items it will screw many builds. Now IMO there are more important problems GGG should focus on, namely desync.

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

Really tough to get life when you rely on Facebreaker, Meginord's Girdle, and have the build around Blood Dance as well.

And this is IMO more serious problem, than those IR/US reconsiderations. Why it is so hard to build viable life based character without near-to-perfect life roll on virtually everything?

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pneuma wrote:

reboticon, please respond to the points that I addressed directly instead of throwing more straw. Or admit you were wrong about all that other stuff, of course. You're comparing es to life and conflating "Facebreakers" with "all melee builds", both of which are incorrect. If you're going to nitpick, at least be thorough.

You're right that I was hyperbolic about Rainbowstride's spell block. I meant it in a "you're ignoring a major piece of the item" way, not a "this is a direct comparison" way. You opted to take the interpretation that helped your argumentation.

Fair enough, My point is that BoR is Best In Slot for Facebreaker builds. There is no denying that. Anyone who has played it will attest to that. Just look at the prices of BoR vs. Lioneye Glare. BoR is same cost as 5L Lioneye glare in Anarchy. BoR is MORE than 5L Lioneye Glare in Onslaught. You simply can not say that BoR is not equally as "overpowered" (and I dislike the term) as some of the other items you mentioned.

As stated, you edited your post a week ago, which gives the impression that your list is up to date. Leaving BoR off of the list is a serious oversight. Yes, it has slight drawbacks, but as you can not evade reflect on Lioneye glare, it also has a slight drawback.

I personally enjoy all of the items on your list balanced as they are, but if you are going to point out ones you think need rebalanced, I'm not going to let the other ones that are equally as powerful slide.

Even in onslaught, you can equip Facebreaker, Meginord, 2 crap rings with at least 6 physical, a neck with at least 8, and crest of perandus, and you can cruise all the way to level 60 without a care in the world. I've leveled all my onslaught characters this way.

Furthermore, you can get 40K frenzy DPS with Bringer of Rain. Without. A. Weapon. Every other melee build has to grind like crazy to either find or be able to afford a weapon. With BoR, you just need it, face breakers, and a handful of gems.

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pneuma wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I'd rather see US changed into something which benefits armour far more than ES.

Given that ES has 50% stun avoidance by default, it stands to gain less from US than an armoured(,life) character does.

This also confuses me. If this is the case, why on earth would chayula be on your list?

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

Really tough to get life when you rely on Facebreaker, Meginord's Girdle, and have the build around Blood Dance as well. Tried to find other rings that has max 70+ life, with dual res, and almost max phy dmg rolls......the prices of those jewels are even more expensive then my entire build itself. Not worth it.

Those boots give you up to 7% life regen. Assuming at least 3% in your tree, that is 10% life regen. 400hp/sec is no laughing matter and is actually faster than almost any ES build if you factor in cooldown. For res, it is very feasible to run purity.