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

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

If CI were not in the game the list sure would have looked a lot different. My guess GGG is following the money. The community seems to submit a preponderance of CI enablers/boosters, to a degree no other Keystone or Notable node experience.

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obliviousz wrote:

Compared to the best ES Belt:

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obliviousz wrote:

With the best ES rare chest you get 2x more ES than using Shavronne's.

The difference in supply between those is so vastly different and the upsides are small enough by comparison that I can comfortably say both Auxium and Shavronne's put comparable rares out of business, especially in the latter case since it's build-enabling and should not be compared to a pure ES chest.

You're also downplaying the strength of chill/freeze on Auxium and chaos->es on Shavronne's. Those are powerful enough affixes that they could have nothing else on them and the item would still be used.

Thunderfist is easily bested defensively by pretty much any rare with a resist and life. Gloves are a partially offensive, partially defensive slot. It should be compared to other offensive glove choices, and it shuts those out handily.

At least the three mentioned above can be bested at least in some fashion by rares, unlike Soul Taker, Kaom's, and Lioneye's Glare.

As for Kaom's, this quote:

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obliviousz wrote:

Because someone with 5k HP and 20k armour is much stronger than someone with 8k hp and zero armour.

Is not entirely true, nor does Kaom's only allow up to 8k life. Not only would Kaom's still allow for non-armor defenses, but having a large pool allows people to be more creative with things like Blood Magic, Righteous Fire, and it still serves the primary purpose of life which is to absorb a big hit or two without dying. In short, it's a fine suggestion.

If you're not going to read the OP, please do not respond.

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TremorAcePV wrote:

Wasn't that supposed to be something that having multiple custom leagues allowed? Experimentation?

Experimenting with new content, not with balancing old content aside from disallowing Kaom's, onyxes (Chayula/Astramentis), and prismatics (Lori's/Thief's).

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Ozgwald wrote:

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.

Can you be more specific? I try to think of the content in this game not as a jumble of numbers (though that does become required at the end of balancing, and many things I listed here are only unbalanced due to their numbers) but as concepts. The concept of something like Iron Reflexes is a problem before numbers enter the equation.

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Ozgwald wrote:

I can redirect your cleave discussion i.e. by just naming two things: elemental damage scaling, while dual wielding and concentrated effect.

I fail to see how either of those are specific to cleave. Elemental damage scaling is something that affects all attacking builds and the gap between elemental and physical has been shrinking. Concentrated Effect affects ground slam as much as Cleave as much as any other aoe skill. The problem with Cleave is and continues to be the fact that it has an effective 140% damage effectiveness, twice that of every other melee aoe skill. Its overblown damage is the only thing keeping melee dual wield even relevant right now.

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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.

This is an exceptionally awesome feedback thread. I would really like to pick out one little bit I disagreed with (since that's how my personality works), but I can't. It is all really good.

The most important thing about this game, and the thing that sets it apart from all other similar games, is build diversity. Maintaining and increasing customisability, and the viability of different nodes, builds and items, should be the main design focus. (Note, you don't have to make the builds overpowered, underpowered is fine, as long as they're still viable. Changes should be focused on increasing options.)

I especially agree with all of your points which talk about 'getting around' downsides of uniques and Keystones. Main examples I particularly agree with:
- The downside of Eye of Chayula is supposed to be that it reduces your survivability in exchange for making you immune to stuns. There's no reason that CI builds should be able to avoid this downside.
- The downside of Vaal Pact is supposed to be that you can only heal through leeching. There's no reason that ES builds should be able to avoid this downside.
- The downside of RF is supposed to be that you take massive damage compared to your overall Health Pool. There's no reason you should be able to stack ES to avoid this. Making RF do damage equal to your max HP or max ES would allow for more, interesting builds, while keeping the trade-off of 'massive power for huge self damage'.

I also totally agree that spells should not be able to shotgun. This one change would do more for build diversity than any other IMO.

I just want to add two points of my own:

1) Life Gain on hit should apply to spells (now that it scales with damage effectiveness). Spells already get life leech, so this wouldn't be OP, it would just provide an alternative. There's no reason to keep LGoH 'attacks only' now that it scales with damage effectiveness (so you can't abuse it with Firestorm or Incinerate etc).

2) This is the most important point, so I'll bold it:

Changing Dex is also essential to make more builds viable. Currently, way over half of the builds that people play have no use for dex at all other than to meet item/gem requirements. Consider that unless you use evasion, then anyone who uses one of the following:
RoA, RT, Lioneye's, Spells
has no use for dex. So basically: most marauders, most templars, almost all witches, a lot of shadows, a lot of duelists, and most high-level rangers (!!!) have no use for dex.

Note, that you can change dex without buffing it for the people who can use it.
For example, to make it useful for armour users, you could change IR so that (instead of changing all evasion to armour) it reads;
'the bonus evasion from dex now applies to armour instead'.
(So basically it's the complement to Iron Grip.)

Overall, I think that's some amazing feedback; I strongly agree with the overall tone of the OP, and most of the points. I don't believe that two-handed melee with Kaom's is insanely overpowered; it's more accurate to say that two-handed melee without Kaom's is insanely underpowered, and that the nature of Kaom's drawback makes it almost exclusively a two-handed melee item. This is still a very bad thing, because an entire build category is balanced assuming a very high-value unique... but your proposed solution doesn't really tackle the correct problem. I still believe a more proper and elegant fix would be to limit the Life Leech support gem to physical attack damage only. The core of the problem isn't CI, it's leeching spells. Although I agree that RT and IR are extremely strongly linked together, I feel like you're blaming RT and IR's faults here, and that you had the better solution earlier: remove IR from the game entirely.

Since I have enjoyed Cleave so much in races, I've been working on an optimized Cleave Duelist, and eventually I get to my first Reflects Damage rare monsters... and since I've taken RT and hate moving slow, I have a good deal of evasion. With the new damage refactor, I was hitting myself with reflections every attack, and now I'm planning to take IR while I wasn't planning it before before the problem gets out of hand.

The point of that story is: As long as reflected damage is in the game, RT does an efficient job of making evasion on self moot, so the real problem there is the ability to convert all that evasion into something useful. Take that away, and RT has a nice hidden "Acrobatics effect," meaning the Grace you might use before does nothing for you. And that's the drawback you're looking for. Just wanted to say that I totally support adding "Your Energy Shield does not regenerate" to Vaal Pact (same downside as Shavronne's ring). It would still be pretty good in some Ghost Reaver builds, but at least it would have a downside for ES which they'd have to think about prior to commitment (just like life builds taking VP). Out of a post of great ideas, I believe this one is the greatest. I actually disagree strongly with this; I'm fine with seeing Strength give +life, and enjoy the fact that Armour cannot be increased by attributes. I also disagree with the concept that evasion requires a larger life buffer than armour does; I don't live in one-shot-dead land, because your character dies regardless of defense chosen in those situations anyway, and the entropy system ensures that attacks that kill you in 4 hits or less aren't actually spiky. I think that the problem is that Dexterity's bonuses for attribute stacking are too weak, not that Strength's are too strong. If you would have said "Losing a totem should hurt, and/or losing a totem should happen more often," I'd agree completely. Specifically with the latter. I don't think there's any need to make totems intrinsically blood-linked, but there is a need to both have totems be far less tanky on your behalf, and give totems a realistic chance of quickly offing themselves on reflected damage. Agree with the problem. My suggestion is simple: make skill gems available for purchase from Nessa, Yeena and Clarissa, the same way flasks are (limited supply, occasional chance at purchasing quality).

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pneuma wrote:

Experimenting with new content, not with balancing old content aside from disallowing Kaom's, onyxes (Chayula/Astramentis), and prismatics (Lori's/Thief's).

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Ozgwald wrote:

I can redirect your cleave discussion i.e. by just naming two things: elemental damage scaling, while dual wielding and concentrated effect.

I fail to see how either of those are specific to cleave. Elemental damage scaling is something that affects all attacking builds and the gap between elemental and physical has been shrinking. Concentrated Effect affects ground slam as much as Cleave as much as any other aoe skill. The problem with Cleave is and continues to be the fact that it has an effective 140% damage effectiveness, twice that of every other melee aoe skill. Its overblown damage is the only thing keeping melee dual wield even relevant right now.

And what would be the problem with testing out new possible balance changes in a new league? Such as having Kaom's make your armor 0 but only if it's in this league?

Just a thought.

As for Ozgwald's comment about elemental damage, I don't think you see the ultimate problem with Cleave + Elemental damage.

Long explanation for why Elemental Damage is overpowered with Cleave:


TL;DR explanation:

Basically, it's all about stacking multipliers. Cleave gives a x2 multiplier as it applies elemental damage to each weapon individually from other gear. This multiplied by the fact that there is 3 types of elemental damage and you can have all 3 on one piece of gear which is multiplied by the % elemental damage mod and passives as well as the Added Elemental Damage support gem makes it absurdly overpowered DPS-wise.

That's not touching Resist reducing curses, or concentrated effect.

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chris wrote:

The "nerfs" in this patch are in response to the rest of the rebalance and so that many builds are simultaneously viable. You can't complain that there are only seven good builds and then complain when we balancing the power level :P

Please note that the argument of "just buff the other skills, never nerf anything" has this cycle:
a) Buff bad skills: now everything is easy.
b) Game is now too easy: give monsters more life.
c) Values would now have all crept up: scale them all down slightly.

After those steps, it's exactly the same as just tweaking the abusive skills in the first place.

Except that the OP builds are still dying and people are only striving for these builds because anything weaker then "barely strong enough" has a shelf life expectancy of level 60. Not to mention these builds require a lot of good gear which requires a lot of time so every damn time something people rely on is nerfed it's like adding a flame to an ant hill.

I hadn't thought of your idea for strength to give armor instead of life and it is a good idea and sort of makes me think "duh" now that it is in the open. Armor does in fact mitigate damage and it can't abuse life regen(Which is the whole reason they wanted life nerfed in the first place)
This idea would also help strength users who need other modifiers on gear like damage or chaos resistance still have a chance to withstand physical damage.

Truthfully the lack of physical resistance is the only thing that is getting me killed. If you want max resist and rely on gear to gain enough dext or int to use certain gems you have to worry about armor mods last or you can't even run the build.

I completely agree with your stance on unique items and keystones. It's like they feel because we have these as options they create balance, Well they do but they take the balance off of rare items and force users into getting keystones to coupe with certain mechanics. I came into this game with the impression that your build was open to the imagination and that unique items spiced up the mix of things. Well if unique items are the spice then I must say the game is like unflavored french fries and the unique items/keystones are equivalent of dumping a bottle of ketchup on them.

The keystones basically eliminate one very challenging aspect of the game, It takes multiple keystones to even near a level of which you can start gearing towards.

No resolute technique? You need accuracy.

No Iron Reflexes? You need a lot more armor

No Unwavering stance? You need to stack a ton of life and hope you don't get stunlock desync'd

No Eldritch Battery? You need mana nodes.

No CI? You need chaos resistance.

So what do you do? You stack as many of these damn things as you can. Avoid eldritch battery and you now have a character that, cannot be stunned, is immune to chaos damage, doesn't need accuracy and can get armor from an aura. How could 6 modifiers on armor even compete?

So then you figure out which unique will create enough power so that you can focus your tree on all that damn traversing, We saw kripp do it successfully using the searing touch, Hey that's cool theres nothing wrong with characters being unique in a certain way and I am all for it. Thankfully this staff has the downside of having no shield and that spell even though very powerful requires a lot of mobs to be effective(very dangerous stuff) So do I feel he broke the game with that build? Nope he even died on it if I read correctly. OP builds do not die, They crush all without hesitation and have no weaknesses, It is like a giant with a huge and very fast weapon.

Kind of like spell totems and totems in general for that matter. I'm willing to bet 99% of players have had to rely on a totem to even stay alive let alone kill things. i mean honestly, this build is a no brainer because you are stuck using totems in hard situations anyways, Why not just take out the guess work and use them all the time...

I feel like I'm watching my kid get addicted to drugs and no matter how hard I try to convince them there is another way they just keep doing the drugs. Everything I have just written out and even your OP has been said countless times, It's like our opinions are inferior and they will just keep making us miserable.

I wish I hadn't played in closed beta because I could have stopped playing this game along time ago, In closed beta I had no problems making 2h builds,Ek, Spork minion user. Lightning arrow. My first witch casted spark and used a spark totem while relying on summons to keep the pressure off of her. She was great up to fellshrine merciless but her summons could not survive in maps and that made the build perfectly balanced. I did EK using blood magic passive with the chain gem and ran iron reflexes with evasion gear and grace for armor. He was very tanky and could kill large packs with no problems but the downside to chain is that it actually has to chain... Things were fun back then and the game wasn't hard because we could avoid hard areas. Act 1 farm the ledge act 2 fellshrine. Now farming the ledge does not yield upgrades to progress and I haven't even gotten into act 2 merci yet because of it so I can't tell you about that. I digress because I am wondering into grounds you stated you do not wish to discuss but I do feel they are crucial to the success of builds. You cannot say a build is too weak until you have him geared out...

I read your whole post and I hope they value your opinion more then others because I swear others and myself have been posting this exact stuff since open beta hit and it is just getting worse.

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TremorAcePV wrote:

As for Ozgwald's comment about elemental damage, I don't think you see the ultimate problem with Cleave + Elemental damage.

If I have a ring that gives 1-25 Fire, 5-34 Cold, and 1-63 Lightning damage, all of that damage is multiplied by 2 because it applies to each weapon individually.

No, it's multiplied by 1.4 because it applies to each weapon individually, but cleave has 70% damage effectiveness when dual-weilding.

I assume you didn't read the part of the OP where he suggests changing the damage effectiveness to 50%, which would completely counteract this 'applies twice' bonus you think is the problem, or to 60% so it's not as pronounced.

All the other multipliers you talked about are available for any other skill too.

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TremorAcePV wrote:

all of that damage is multiplied by 2 because it applies to each weapon individually.

This would be exactly why I said Cleave does twice as much damage as it should.

Cleave while dual-wielding has 140% Damage Effectiveness (70%*2). I did not include the paltry 40% reduced (additive) physical damage since it barely matters in the final calculation.

Compare with Ground Slam at 70% DE.

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Scrotie responses, in order:

• I've always seen Kaom's as best for archers who are going to use a 2h weapon anyway. It's okay for casters, but they have to eat the cost of a staff over a wand+shield. A high life RF or BM build can only exist if there is something like Kaom's to enable a large pool.
• For GR, leeching spells is the problem. Since the keystone was created solely to make claw CI melee viable, returning it to its conceptual origins would be a good first start and re-evaluation.
• If something is balanced with the existence of reflect, then it is unbalanced. Reflect makes up 10% or less of the mobs in the game; it's not okay to allow people to roll through 90% with the downside that you have to pay attention to 10%. By comparison, most underpowered builds are afraid of 100% of mobs. If reflect is what scares your build the most, congratulations, your build is strong as fuck. RT falls into the category, but more to the point it throws away too much of the game.
• It's not entirely true that evasion needs more life than armor, but it's definitely false that armor needs more life than evasion. The latter is what we currently have due to the alignment of strength with life and also requirements for armor and Determination. I believe changing strength to %armor and raising base life values is worth testing at the very least.
• Totems being blood linked is the only thing that makes totem casters fear death. Otherwise it's totem spam all day every day and get ready to log off if something shows up on your screen. Totems push the range imbalance that currently exists in the game to the maximum.

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heyyous wrote:

I read your whole post and I hope they value your opinion more then others because I swear others and myself have been posting this exact stuff since open beta hit and it is just getting worse.

The ideas are not 100% all my own. This is a summary of both my own feelings and experience and the thousands of posts and countless hours I've spent on the forum, esp. while moderating. Like papercut said on the first page, these are fairly common complaints that come up often. They're not being addressed. They need to be addressed.

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pneuma wrote:

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TremorAcePV wrote:

all of that damage is multiplied by 2 because it applies to each weapon individually.

This would be exactly why I said Cleave does twice as much damage as it should.

Cleave while dual-wielding has 140% Damage Effectiveness (70%*2). I did not include the paltry 40% reduced (additive) physical damage since it barely matters in the final calculation.

Compare with Ground Slam at 70% DE.

Yes, and that 140% damage effectiveness is further multiplied by there being 3 types of elemental damage mods, along with the various ways you can multiply it accordingly.

That makes it very hard for Physical damage to keep up with. Not to mention the resistance vs armor part for what defends against each type of damage.

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heyyous wrote:

I read your whole post and I hope they value your opinion more then others because I swear others and myself have been posting this exact stuff since open beta hit and it is just getting worse.

The ideas are not 100% all my own. This is a summary of both my own feelings and experience and the thousands of posts and countless hours I've spent on the forum, esp. while moderating. Like papercut said on the first page, these are fairly common complaints that come up often. They're not being addressed. They need to be addressed.[/quote]

Yes I agree and if I see the word nerf one more time I am going to freak out. I'm using a 2h build at merciless ledge and endurance charges are pretty much the whole reason the guy is still alive. I have 5 charges which is 20% damage reduction and it gets me up to capped res as well.

I keep reading melee is too weak or discharge is over powered and I'm just thinking what the hell? You are telling me you had enough currency to max out a melee guy and discharge at the same time?

Melee is only weak when you do not have armor,leech,regen or damage. I'm running 7% life leech on gear and 4% mana on gear and am able to spam glacial hammer - elemental proliferation - multistrike. I'm level 58 still using vaals baptism and I can kill just fine... I'm going to need a 5 or 6 link for maps for cold penetration and increased elemental damage to be effective but I am willing to bet he can handle blue maps until he is geared. That's all I ask for, The ability to find items and progress my build.

I'm going to go write some guides because there is a large detachment in this community.